Three Days to Deliver, Three Days to Die (Day 2): Majora's Mask part 4

    After an episode in gaining the trust of the children of the town, Link goes to the children's clubhouse and uses the kindly astronomer's telescope to look for the Skull Kid.  The only thing I felt was worth mentioning about that scene was that these children are kinda bigots against Link since he's a tree person (you may call it bigotree if you like).  You see the Skull Kid on top of the clock tower, and then he turns to look at Link.  He turns Link's attention to the sky, and that's when you witness for the first time arguably the most dreadful thing in gaming history.  Fans of this game, if you feel so inclined, you may now go crazy.  Like Bieber Fever crazy, not psychological warfare crazy or prison break crazy and especially not tribal ritual crazy.

Goodnight Moon

    Folks, here's the moon:  unblinking orangish red eyes, nose like an arrow, bared teeth, and leaning closer and closer toward Clock Town.  The only thing I can think to compare this moon to is Mount Doom from the Lord of the Rings.  Throughout the quest of the Fellowship, the fiery blackness can be seen burning with deep ominous echoes on the horizon. It is the consistent reminder that it is the end goal of the quest. On the first day, the moon wasn't immediately shown to you, but on the second day it is far more difficult to miss.  I believe that all of the fear that comes with this dark heavenly body abides in the subtlety.   It falls in complete silence, inching closer and closer with the patience of a shadow, waiting for the moment it will sweep death across the world.  Once you see it the first time, you can never forget it is there.  It doesn't matter where Link goes in this land, the moon is always in the sky, always crawling closer, always inescapable.   As time rushes by until the deadline of your quest, the moon gets closer to the town.  Gamers watch knowing the consequences of  what happens the clock strikes zero, while the rest of the town anticipates a festival of frivolity and entertainment.  They all continue to pretend that nothing bad is happening, weddings are planned, the mail is delivered, dancers dance, jugglers juggle, and the city guards keep to their posts.  The guards will not even let Link leave the town stating it is for his own safety to not be out in the surrounding wilderness.  The moon serves as the symbol of the inevitability of death; it is the memento mori of the masterpiece.  While everyone will turn a blind eye to the grim future, it still doesn't change the future.


   As Link gazes up through the telescope at the moon, a sudden sparkle shows in its eye.  Tearing down through the rain clouds is a blue glistening gem.  The astronomer identifies it as being the most rare and beautiful gem in existence, the moon's tear.  Link is given stone as the astronomer already owns the only other one.  The astronomer mentions that at midnight on the third day, the stairs to the top of the clock tower will open and Link will be able to confront the Skull Kid.

   A crew of workers are building a bridge to the clock tower for the festival, but it looks to be behind schedule.  In the same area is a deku person, a territorial merchant holding on to the kind of flower that Link had hopped around on in the strange cave.  He refuses to move from the flower, because he is looking for a souvenir to take to his wife from the festival.  Link offers the Moon Tear to the man, and as a sign of gratitude, the deku man gives Link the deed to the flower (tree people take stuff a little too seriously sometimes).

   I feel that this tear is too often overlooked.  The fact that the menacing moon could conjure the beautiful tear is the one ray of hope amid the despair, the one drop of mercy in the basin of wrath, the olive branch in the flood.  At the same time, the fact that the moon is so close its tears fall to the world below could also be the sign that only despair may follow and that any chance of salvation is now lost.  I prefer the former interpretation over the latter given that there was another moon tear in the astronomer's observatory.  It would seem to show that in the past the world had been threatened, but it endured and survived.  On this basis, the escape from the jaws of the deathly moon is presented as a possibility.  However, escape from destruction is still not guaranteed.

  What happens next will be left to the next 24 hours.  Until then, good night.  

Three Days to Deliver, Three Days to Die (Day 1): Majora's Mask Part 3

      Link and Tatl walk through the door to find themselves at the foot of a large clock tower in the middle of a town.  Following the adventures in Ocarina of Time, one will notice that a great number of the people walking around this town look perfectly identical to the people seen in Hyrule.  It should be said that the land of Termina, where this game is set, is something of a parallel universe to Hyrule.  The people here are all doppelgangers if you will of their Hyrule counterparts and generally go about their lives in a similar manner.  Seeing the bustle of Clock Town is in many ways similar to that seen in the market surrounding Hyrule castle.  Everything seems normal except for two things.  All the veterans of this game are waving their arms around at this point, but we're gonna wait for the big one until later.

        The first apparent oddity is this. If you look around the town, in sharp contrast to the Hyrule presented in just about the entire series, there is not a single Triforce.  The Triforce is both the royal and religious symbol of Hyrule that symbolizes the three goddesses that created the world: Din, Nayru, and Farore.  After creating Hyrule, they imbued a fraction of their limitless powers into a golden artifact that consists of three triangles, one on the top and two on the bottom.  This symbol is revered by the people of Hyrule as it exemplifies the three virtues of the Hylians:  Power, Wisdom, and Courage.  The lack of this symbol may also say something about how unimportant or ignored the related virtues are among the people of Termina.  Remember I said fear will play an important role in this story, and fear would be the opposite of courage, the quality which Link represents traditionally in the games.  

It's also kinda like a fractal, so it's very easy
to draw on geometry notebooks.

 









    Tatl suggests that Link visit the Great Fairy of North Clock Town.  Even a fairy as unruly as Tatl respects the Great Fairy and believes her to have far greater powers than the Skull Kid.  When Link arrives at the Fountain where the Great Fairy resides, you find the Fairy has been broken into hundreds of these pitiful floating pink things.  The host of pink things claim that its shattering was the work of the Skull Kid and if the one missing piece is returned to the fountain, the Great Fairy will be restored.  It's in this moment that it becomes clear that this land is in great danger of ruin and that no power within it can save it from the evil of the mask.  

    You find the fairy fragment in the laundry pool during the daylight hours (which is a sort of cruel joke given that fairies generally live in pristine fountains). Upon restoring Clock Town's Great Fairy, Link is given the power of magic.  Link of course had magic in the previous game but seems to have relinquished this power at the end of his previous adventure.  While this isn't explicitly stated, it can be interpreted that Link has the distinct power that neither Ganon in the previous game nor Skull Kid in this game has which is the power to let power go.  The drawback is that in his deku form, magic can only be utilized in spitting bubbles.  Again it shows that the creatures of Termina are horribly outmatched.

Day 2 will be explored in the next post.