A lesson learned: How Link conquered his grief in Majora’s Mask

Before he began his quest to save Hyrule, Link’s life was already full of hardships. The nightmares, the ridicule, and the sense of detachment from his community made every day a depressing affair. So, when someone finally came into his life, someone who cared for him completely and stayed by his side throughout his harrowing saga, Link was understandably thrilled. After that someone abruptly left without saying a word, how could anyone fault Link for his dogged pursuit of such a beloved and invaluable friend?

Navi the fairy was Link’s first true friend. Sure, he was friends with certain Kokiri, such as the compassionate Saria, but the Kokiri could sense that Link was different and separate from them, and this prevented any true connections. Navi was different. Though she at first thought Link was lazy, she quickly bonded with the boy and showed no signs of discrimination toward him. She was his fairy partner, and she could see Link’s true and valiant nature. That was good enough for her. Navi would not leave his side, at least for the time.

But time was the problem, because everything that has a beginning must also have an end. Link didn’t understand this, which is why his heart broke when Navi left his side after he returned the Master Sword to its pedestal. He must have spent days trying to rationalize why she left. Was she in trouble? Was he meant to follow her? Or is he fated to always be alone?

Link could not accept the loss of Navi, and foolishly ventured out on his own to find her.

Hurting himself to heal himself

With this full context of Link’s plight, it’s easy to understand how he could have ended up so far from home at the start of Majora’s Mask. We never learned why his search led him to become lost in that particular forest, but destiny decided to make those woods the setting for Link’s fateful encounter with the fairies Tatl and Tael and their friend the Skull Kid. The encounter went poorly for the boy without a fairy, who lost his ocarina and horse and was turned into a Deku Scrub. Now trapped in both the foreign land of Termina and an even more foreign body, Link needed to find a way to reclaim what he had lost by saving a land cursed with its own afflictions and griefs.

It was time for him to be a hero again, which was something he could never ignore the call to do, even when distraught over the loss of Navi. The drive to help was a core element of Link’s being. He was unable to turn away from those in need. His noble personality helped save Termina, but it also indirectly helped him save himself. Link’s a person of few words, but he is a watcher and a listener and a doer, and the tales of woe that he heard while in the alternate dimension helped him learn a valuable lesson about dealing with grief.

Sadly, Link’s descent into grief was mostly self-inflicted. He felt the sorrow of his loss, but he would become stubborn when faced with the idea that he may need to accept the pain. He became desperate to avoid this truth, which led him to leave Hyrule in search of Navi. The sorrow, stubbornness, and desperation created a vicious cycle, one that he was unaware he was in. It was only by seeing others with similar plights and helping those people get through them that Link learned how to heal.

Feeling joy from healing their sorrows

Sadness. It’s such a common word, one we hear all too often. Everyone’s sad about something, but we can become absorbed into our own grief and to the point that we fail to see it in each other. This self-absorbed attitude often lasts until we are faced with the option to either remain self-focused and ignore what is happening around us or mature and help someone through theirs. The latter is what Link did, again and again, while in Termina.

Link first saw someone else’s sorrow in the face of a tree. As Link made his way to Clock Town’s magical entrance, he came wooden face to wooden face with a small tree. This tree, though lifeless, had an expression, one that carried the emotions no one would ever want to experience in their lifetime. This still and silent victim set a standard for Link, that he would be encountering those whose lives were consumed by some form of grief.

Fated meetings with victims followed like a steady stream, a stream that Link needed to swim up-current and through every region in Termina. The plights of Great Fairies were repeated echoes of someone who sought help from anyone who would listen. These fairies, once pillars of order and justice, were reduced to fragile and helpless beings. The Great Fairies, broken from singular, mighty beings into numerous parodies of themselves, could only suffer while they waited to be the ones that received help rather than being the ones to provide it.

The cries of a Goron child, cries that echoed through the halls of Goron City and the ears of its residents, were enough to compel anyone to save the Goron baby from its woes. Throughout the little amount of time his young life had seen, the child had always relied on his father to give him strength and comfort. But his cries were ringing out and remaining unanswered. The abandonment was something he could not comprehend.

Lulu’s silent anguish spoke volumes. Due to the loss of her unhatched young and Mikau, the talented singer was rendered mute. She was made to suffer, but the loss of her voice also meant that she suffered alone. Her life had become her prison.

Time and time again Link came face-to-face with the plights of others.

Pitiful Pamela and her more pitiful father were trapped in an impossible-to-remedy situation. The danger was always haunting and hunting, but her father seemed to have it under control. But he inevitably lost that control, along with his mind and his humanity. Pamela was left to protect him from himself, and she had to do so while keeping him away from others, leaving her no choice but to be alone.

There were more poor souls than these that Link helped, but the point is that he helped them. He helped all of them. He couldn’t always give them back all that they had lost, but he was able to give them what they needed. And these gifts gave the recipients the time required to reflect and determine if they could move past their sufferings, which is all anyone can really do in troubling times. Thankfully, Link was able to witness each one of them find their peace, regardless of any new directions that life was taking them.

Finding the resolve to aid in their resolutions

People react differently when tragedy or misfortunes befall them. Some people break down, some become depressed or angry, and some isolate themselves. Link took to the idea of being a loner during his hardships, probably due to being conditioned for that lifestyle from his time in Kokiri Forest, but it is clear what dark place, both psychologically and literally, this approach helped him reach. And if he couldn’t understand that from the moment that he first stepped foot into Termina, then his meetings with Kafei, Darmani, and Mikau were sure to deliver the message.

Skull Kid had cursed Kafei, a young and respectable man on the cusp of being married, for reasons that probably didn’t amount to more than boredom. He transformed the man into a child, effectively ruining his plans for matrimony. Devastated, Kafei went into hiding before his fiancée, Anju, could discover what happened. Added to this devastation was that his Sun Mask, a ceremonial mask used in Terminian weddings, was stolen by a thief named Sakon. Kafei swore he would not face Anju again until he at least found the mask and reclaimed his dignity.

Kafei’s determination was understandable, but it also explained why Link found him hiding in the storeroom area behind the Curiosity Shop. By the looks of his dingy hiding place, he had been there for a long time. His hope was that Sakon would eventually come to the shop to sell the Sun Mask. But if Sakon did not have the mask with him, Kafei would follow the thief to his hideout and find the mask the hard way.

That’s why, when Link again found Kafei, this time outside Sakon’s hideout, he knew that he needed to help Kafei with the hard way. It was good that Link did, as the traps inside Sakon’s lair would have been impossible for one person to avoid. Kafei was going to rush in and try to do everything himself, just as he had been doing this whole time. It was foolish. He needed Link’s help, and Anju — whom he did finally reunite with after finding the mask — was presumably thankful that he accepted it.

Darmani was no stranger to peril, being the resident hero of the Goron people, but his unrelenting need to single-handedly lift the curse over Snowhead was a product of his stubbornness, and the only thing it resulted in was tragedy. He had been the champion of his people for so long, and it was a responsibility he did not take lightly. Their hope was his will to live. That is why his death was tragic for more reasons than the inherent sadness of the loss of a life.

Yet, Darmani’s spirit endured. His will actually seemed to transcend mortality, but that didn’t mean he was some supernatural wonder. Without a body, all Darmani could do was watch from his resting place as his home was destroyed. He would spend his eternity watching and counting each snowflake that fell to the ground, their soft motions and beautiful designs signals of an endless cycle of death and fear as his people were buried within their own frozen tomb.

The hero needed a hero, and luckily, one came. Link, determined to succeed where the champion of the Gorons had failed, found Darmani’s spirit and offered him peace by way of the “Song of Healing.” Darmani wanted a chance to save his people, he wanted to live again, but that wasn’t going to happen. He had to accept the reality he was dealt, but that didn’t mean he was unable to help the future. The only issue was that Darmani fixated on the future he envisioned. But Link’s healing notes helped him see that though he was not in control, Darmani’s acceptance of peace would help create a future worth having died for.

The death of Mikau was possibly the most impactful for Link. Here was another young hero, one who ventured to save his people, and again he met a tragic end before doing so. Mikau and Darmani must have made Link reflect about his role as a hero, and they might have reminded him of the consequences of failure. But Mikau added more emotional shock by dying in front of young Hylian.

Link had pulled Mikau from the water, helped him the best he knew how, but Mikau’s injuries were too great. With what remained of his strength, Mikau gave one last performance, both as a way to tell Link his tale and to let all of his distraught emotions out. He had tried to rescue his fellow Zoras and to retrieve his girlfriend’s offspring on his own. He was not prepared for what he would face, including the consequences. With his final note played, Mikau fell.

The masks Link earned from Darmani and Mikau were symbolic of the strength found in allowing others to help him.

Link, standing by the fallen Zora, knew what needed to be done, and again played the “Song of Healing.” Mikau’s spirit was put at ease, and he lent his strength to Link so the boy could succeed where he failed. Mikau failed on his own, but now Link and he would succeed together.

So much pain and sorrow could have been avoided had these brave souls understood that being a hero did not necessarily mean facing all dangers alone. Witnessing it firsthand multiple times though, it was something that Link was slowly beginning to understand himself.

Healing a pain hidden behind a mask

An examination of Link’s growth cannot end without first exploring his counterpart throughout this tale, the Skull Kid. The imp was cursed by the combined torments of the Majora’s Mask and his own feelings of abandonment. He thought that he was alone in the world, and the mask helped him release these feelings by way of being cold and vicious to everyone around him. As previously mentioned, Link suffered the brunt of Skull Kid’s wrath, but this also gave him an early introduction to the pain that the imp had caused to other people. Link found the strange tree that seemed to weep, which at the end of the game was revealed to have been the Deku Butler’s son, and then he met the Happy Mask Salesman, who explained the evil that had been unleashed when the Skull Kidd stole the Majora’s Mask from him. From there, Link began his quest to retrieve the mask for the salesman, and he met numerous people whose lives were adversely affected by Skull Kid’s actions. This Skull Kid was a monster, and he needed to be stopped.

And stop him Link did. The evil within the was destroyed, and Skull Kid had to accept his failure and admit to his wrongdoings. At that point, Link knew exactly what the Skull Kid’s motivations were, and though it made him happy to see the imp be given a second chance at life, he must have also felt uneasy about how things developed. Skull Kid felt a severe sense of loss, and he let his feelings take him down a dark road. If Link had ignored his convictions and avoided helping all of the lives he had, could his grief over the loss of Navi have caused him to turn out a similar way? The thought would have stuck with him, but he could take comfort in the fact that he had grown past such a possibility.

He taught others by learning life’s hard lessons

Link’s growth as both a hero and a man could only be gained through the friendships he forged.

By the end of his quest, Link did not forget Navi, but he was ready to remember her — only remember her. His friend was gone, but now he knew such a pain could be weathered, and that his life did not need to revolve around it. He had escaped his loneliness by finding the joy in living for others. It was a joy he had forgotten, but these new encounters restored his understanding. This realization of Link’s can be summarized by a quote from Paulo Coelho, one that speaks to the Hylian’s growth during his time in Termina: “If you’re brave enough to say goodbye, life will reward you with a new hello.”

Link’s experience in Termina was brutal, but perhaps it was Navi’s last gift to him. Perhaps she led him to a place where he was needed the most. Perhaps she knew he would find peace by helping others. Perhaps she knew Link’s only true way to combat loneliness was by caring about everyone around him. We’ll never know for sure, but perhaps, whenever Navi ended up, she was happy and knew that Link had learned a lesson that made him into an even greater hero than he already was.