Part IIAlways Bound to Leave
Prelude
The Ocarina of Time remake is out today. Same warning as Part I, and it matters more now: spoilers for both games. If you’re starting the remake today, maybe save this one for later.
Three days ago, Part I asked what home Link is supposed to go back to. Part II goes back to where he started: the forest, where the Kokiri say a child who leaves the woods will die. Link leaves anyway. What that makes him is the rest of this piece.
Navi... Navi, where art thou? Come hither....
In Ocarina of Time the Gossip Stones have thirty-two rumors, and most of them are jokes. It’s gossip in the literal sense, a stone leaning over to tell you something it heard. The rumors are revealed to Link only when he wears the Mask of Truth, which the Happy Mask Salesman lends him once he’s sold out the shop. “It’s useful, but scary!”
1Game lines in this feature are quoted from the English N64 text of Ocarina of Time (Nintendo, 1998) and Majora’s Mask (2000). In the Ocarina text the three forest rumors are the last of the thirty-two, with one about bug holes between the first two.Three of the thirty-two are about the forest, and in the game’s own text they close the list.1
Gossip Stone, Ocarina of Time“They say that the Kokiri are always followed by small fairies.”
2“Link did not have a guardian fairy for much of his childhood.” The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time Official Player’s Guide (Nintendo Power, 1998), p. 16.The stones leave two kinds of people: Kokiri, who have fairies, and non-fairy folk, who become monsters in the woods. The last stone puts Link with the Kokiri. For most of his childhood he had no fairy, and nobody tells him what he is until he’s seventeen.2
Link Is Non-Fairy Folk
Seven years after he left, Link walks back into the forest grown, with Navi beside him. Mido stops him on the way to the Sacred Forest Meadow and doesn’t know who he is.
Mido, Ocarina of Time“Why is that fairy following you around? You’re not one of us!What are you? Though you wear Kokirish clothing, you can’t fool me!”
Mido grew up with him. If Link has a home anywhere, it’s here, the only one either game ever shows him: a house in Kokiri Forest, a village of children who never grow up, and a sign at the way out.
3Nintendo’s manual: “Each Kokiri has a guardian fairy. They cannot leave the forest or their lives will come to an end.” And: “Each Kokiri had his or her own guardian fairy, except one. His name was Link.” Ocarina of Time instruction manual (Nintendo of America, 1998), pp. 5 and 7–8.As a child, Link is told he isn’t allowed out, and that the Great Deku Tree said a Kokiri who leaves the woods will die. That’s the rule Link grows up under.3
Then the Great Deku Tree tells him to leave. He’s ten. Either the tree just sent a child to die, or Mido’s question is the right one: “What are you?”
After the Forest Temple, the Deku Tree Sprout answers it. He comes up out of the ground, cheerful, to thank Link. Then he explains some things.
He asks whether any of Link’s old friends recognized him. None of them did. The Kokiri never grow up, he explains, and Link was never one of them.
Deku Tree Sprout, Ocarina of Time“You must be wondering why only you have grown up! Well, as you might have already guessed, you are not a Kokiri! You are actually a Hylian! I am happy to finally reveal this secret to you!”
Then the story. A war, before the kingdom was unified. A Hylian mother, running from the fires with a baby, entered the forbidden forest. She was dying. She gave the child to the Deku Tree. She died. The baby was raised as a Kokiri.
4Ten going back, seventeen when the Sprout speaks: “Even as a boy, just ten years old,” and later “a ten-year-old who played the ocarina.” Player’s Guide, pp. 25 and 84.It would be easy to call that a game moving its player along. The Sprout’s next words are “You must save the land of Hyrule!” and there are temples to get to. But the one hearing it is ten. Link slept through the seven years and woke up in a seventeen-year-old’s body.4 His friends don’t know him, the tree that raised him is dead, and a cheerful sprout tells him he was never one of them.
“Bound to leave” isn’t a sentence passed on him. It’s what the word Hylian does. Kokiri is a race and a home in a single word. Hylian is only a race. The Sprout tells Link exactly what he is and gives him nowhere that comes with it. No family, no village, no people who know his face, nothing but a category and an assignment.
And the Gossip Stone outside already has a word for people in that category: non-fairy folk, the ones who become monsters in the woods. The only thing between Link and that word is hovering at his shoulder while the Sprout talks. It’s Navi.
Oh, You’re Leaving
5The guide’s telling: “the Tree bestowed upon him a sparkling jewel, the Kokiri’s Emerald, and told him he must leave the forest.” Player’s Guide, p. 32.The Sprout says it when Link is seventeen, but the forest had it settled long before that. The Deku Tree took him in because of where he was going: “a child of destiny, whose fate would affect the entire world.” The first time the game shows the tree, he is already sending for him: “It seems the time has come for the boy without a fairy to begin his journey...” Dying, he sends him out.5
Great Deku Tree, Ocarina of Time“Link... Go now to Hyrule Castle... There, thou will surely meet the Princess of Destiny... Take this stone with you.”
A Kokiri girl asks him outright: “Link, are you going to go away?” He doesn’t answer. Saria is waiting at the bridge.
Saria, Ocarina of Time“Oh, you’re leaving...I knew... that you would leave the forest... someday, Link... Because you are different from me and my friends....But that’s OK, because we’ll be friends forever... won’t we?I want you to have this Ocarina... Please take good care of it.When you play my Ocarina, I hope you will think of me and come back to the forest to visit.”
6The guide’s telling, of Saria at the edge of the forest: “She gave him a musical ocarina and wished him luck. Stepping out from the trees for the first time…” He treasured it “because it would always remind him of his friend,” as the Ocarina of Time in Majora’s Mask is “filled with memories of Princess Zelda.” Player’s Guide, p. 32.Saria has known him his whole life, and she already talks about the forest as somewhere he’d visit.6 She doesn’t ask him to stay. She gives him a way to take her with him. “Won’t we?” is as close as she gets to asking him for anything, and Link says nothing, because Link still never says anything.
He does come back. “Oh, you’re OK? You didn’t leave the forest after all, did you?” one of the kids asks, and another has a message: “Saria said she’s waiting at the usual spot.” She’s in the Sacred Forest Meadow, and the first thing she says is “I’ve been waiting for you, Link!” She teaches him her song and makes him promise:
Part I spent a long time on another goodbye. It’s the same one.
- Saria
“Oh, you’re leaving...”“I want you to have this Ocarina...”“Please don’t forget this song!”
- Zelda
“You are already leaving this land of Hyrule, aren’t you?”“Until that day comes, please... Take this...”“If something should happen to you, remember this song...”
Saria takes two scenes to do it and Zelda takes one. Both already know he’s leaving. Both hand him an ocarina. Both give him a song and ask him to remember it.
7The nearest in Ocarina of Time: Talon’s job offer, “when you grow up,” and a Kokiri child’s “You’re not going to try to leave the forest, are you?!”It isn’t only them. The Great Deku Tree, the Sprout, Zelda above the clouds, the Salesman: they all send him off, and not one of them asks him to stay.7
Mister
8“In that time, old friends had almost forgotten him.” Player’s Guide, p. 14.When Link walks back through Kokiri Forest as an adult, the children talk about him in the third person while he’s standing in front of them.8
Kokiri child, Ocarina of Time“Mister, do you know a boy named Link? He left the forest and never came back...”
That’s the third Gossip Stone, said out loud, to his face.
Mido, who told him “You’re not one of us,” hears him play Saria’s Song and stops cold.
9Once Link played Saria’s Song, Mido “knew he was in the presence of a friend.” Player’s Guide, p. 66.In the forest, the song is how you know who’s a friend.9
10After Saria becomes a Sage, the guide says he “wished for things to be as they had been in childhood, when he and Saria were the same age and in the same world.” Player’s Guide, p. 72.Saria isn’t there to see it. She’s in the Forest Temple, and when Link clears it she wakes as its Sage.10
Back in the village, Mido has a promise to keep to her, and he keeps it with the stranger in front of him.
Link is standing right there. He says nothing.
Someone else in those woods knows what this costs. Sheik teaches Link the song that will bring him back.
Sheik, Ocarina of Time“The flow of time is always cruel... Its speed seems different for each person, but no one can change it...A thing that doesn’t change with time is a memory of younger days...Link... I’ll see you again...”
Sheik is Zelda, seven years older. As a child in Majora’s Mask she tells him the same thing: “a day will come when I shall meet you again.”
The Trip Back
Zelda is also the one who sends him back. At the end of Ocarina of Time, she returns Link to those younger days. The boy who arrives is ten on the outside too, and nobody in that world has heard any of it. The only proof he isn’t Kokiri is his own memory.
Then Navi flies out the window of the Temple of Time and doesn’t come back.
11One of the game’s directors raised this himself. Yoshiaki Koizumi said in 1999 that every human who wanders into the Lost Woods becomes a Stalfos. Then: “Huh? So why doesn’t Link, a human, turn into one? Well, he isn’t a Kokiri either… why would that be?” “Development Staff Q&A,” 64 Dream (Mainichi Communications), April 1999, p. 95. Our translation.Everyone else in his life has watched him go. This time he’s the one standing there, and he does what nobody ever did for him: he goes after her. Months later he rides into the Lost Woods looking for her. A boy who is not Kokiri, raised as one, with no fairy. Non-fairy folk, by the stone’s own wording.11
He comes out the other side as a Deku Scrub.
A Skull Kid knocks him off his horse, takes his ocarina, and curses him. Then he says the word nobody else will.
Skull Kid, Majora’s Mask“Hee, hee! Now, that’s a good look for you!You’ll stay here looking that way forever!”
The Skull Kid runs, and leaves one of his own fairies behind. Tatl turns on the Deku Scrub instead, and it takes her one door to change her tune.
Tatl, Majora’s Mask“Hey, wait for me! Don’t leave me behind!So, um... That stuff back there... I...um...apologize, so... So take me with you!”
Deku Scrub Link takes her.
The Imp
The Skull Kid had been left too.
Majora’s Mask tells his story as a bedtime story. Anju’s grandmother tells it at the Stock Pot Inn, and it’s called The Four Giants. Most of it is about the giants. Then, near the end:
Anju’s grandmother, Majora’s Mask“Now then...There was one who was shocked and saddened by all this. A little imp. The imp was a friend of the giants since before they had created the four worlds.”“Why must you leave?”“Why do you not stay?”
Nobody in either game asks Link that. The one who asks anyone is the imp.
The giants go anyway, each to guard a corner of the world. The imp, neglected, spreads his anger across all four, and the giants threaten to tear him apart. His part of the story ends on one line: He had lost his old friends.
The game says it again, plainly. At a tree on the road to the swamp, Tatl finds a drawing she made with the Skull Kid the day they met:
The story calls him the giants’ “childhood friend,” though he was their friend before there were any worlds to get lost in. He didn’t lose his way. He lost his friends: they were bound to leave, he couldn’t follow them, and he turned into the thing that wrecked a world.
So when he and Link meet in the Lost Woods, it’s two kids left behind by their friends.
At the end of Majora’s Mask, the four giants are standing over Clock Town when the Skull Kid wakes up, and he can’t believe they’re there:
That’s what undoes him. Someone remembered him.
Link had already been told the same thing, on top of the clock tower, in his memory of Zelda.
Zelda, Majora’s Mask“I’ll never forget the days we spent together in Hyrule...”
Link got that on the last night, in time to get his own face back. The Skull Kid got his the next morning, after the moon.
Then, to the boy in front of him:
He remembers. Not the hero, not Hyrule, not seven years. A kid with a fairy, in the woods, who taught him a song.
The song has a name. Back in Ocarina of Time, a Skull Kid sits on a stump in the Lost Woods, and if Link plays Saria’s Song for him:
Skull Kid, Ocarina of Time“You know Saria’s Song! We should be friends! Here, take this!”
12“Recognizing the beautiful strains of Saria’s Song, the Skull Kid decided to befriend Link.” The guide calls him Link’s “hooded friend” and signs off “Anything for a friend!” Player’s Guide, pp. 112 and 119.Saria taught that song only to her friends. Link taught it to a Skull Kid, and the Skull Kid remembered him by it.12
To the Gossip Stones he’s non-fairy folk. To the Sprout he’s a Hylian. To the Skull Kid he’s the fairy kid, and a friend.
The Rest of Us
The Skull Kid isn’t done. He has just asked Link to be his friend, and now he has an idea.
It’s as close as anyone in Majora’s Mask comes to asking Link to stay. The game cuts away before he can answer. The next shot is the Happy Mask Salesman, picking up the mask.
Happy Mask Salesman, Majora’s Mask“Shouldn’t you be returning home as well?”
The Salesman vanishes, and there’s one goodbye left. It comes from Tatl, the fairy who started the game yelling “Don’t leave me behind!”
The rest of us. He saved all of them, the carnival is in the town he saved, and he isn’t going. He gets on Epona. He’s already riding when she calls after him.
Link says nothing. He rides back into the woods.
The credits run. The last thing Majora’s Mask shows is a stump in those woods with a drawing on it. The tree on the road to the swamp has the Skull Kid by himself. The stump has the four giants, the Skull Kid, and beside him, with an arm in the air, Link.
He was always bound to leave. Somebody drew him in anyway.
13In Twilight Princess (2006), the Hero’s Shade who teaches the new Link is the Hero of Time, his ancestor. Hyrule Historia (Nintendo, 2011; in English from Dark Horse, 2013), p. 118.We know what becomes of this Link. Twilight Princess shows him generations later, and Hyrule Historia says he “lamented the fact that he was not remembered as a hero.”13 We know why, too. Zelda sent him back to a Hyrule that never heard any of it, and he left that one too.