History Headscratchers / TheLegendOfZeldaMajorasMask

** Tatl was almost assuredly putting up a front to mask her sadness at seeing Link go. And the mask salesman was just gently reminding link of what he'd been doing before getting dragged into Termina. At no point did he say anything like "What the heck are you still doing here? Your work is done here, so you can go ahead and leave now."

** The long and short of it is, we don't know what happens to Romani, because the game doesn't tell us. At the very least, they seem to have done a clean sweep of her memory, and she does show signs of recovery as the remaining time goes on. What makes it difficult to tell, though, is that the three-day cycle means there isn't enough time to tell whether there's any lasting damage to her.

[[folder:Keeping the monsters out of town]]
* The Clock Town guards tell you that it's dangerous outside the town walls, but if Termina Field is so full of monsters, why is there only one guard at each gate, and better yet, why are they all facing toward Clock Tower instead of preventing the monsters from entering? It makes it seem more like the townspeople are actually being held captive than like the guards are trying to protect the town.
** The monsters don't enter the town, and never seem to show any inclination to do so. People are foolish enough to venture outside. They're not being held captive, they're being kept from wandering out and getting killed.
** In addition, it's not even all townspeople who are being kept within the walls; the guards only forbid ''children'' from leaving through the gates, since they don't know any better and aren't able to defend themselves. It's shown at several points that adults (Darmani, Mikau, Sakon, the postman) are free to leave town without being stopped.
[[/folder]]

*** Though she could still have botched the reservation due to being distracted with worry about where Kafei has gone. Waiting until the Postman shows up just gives her more to occupy her mi d with, on top of the trouble she already has remembering faces.

** Obviously, [[SkewedPriorities he was busy making sure children don't leave town unless they have swords]].
** When you speak to the owner of the Bomb Shop about the theft, he reveals that North Clock Town has a reputation for being an unsafe area. Presumably, having a really disinterested or corrupt gate guard stationed there is a part of that. (Also, to the above, a young child being allowed out where he'll be killed by monsters is much more serious than an old lady's luggage being stolen. Even the most corrupt guards may not want the death of a child on their hands, you know.)

* In ''Majora's Mask'', the bell in South Clock Town can be heard from as remote a place as the Great Bay Temple. Given how loud this must be, why is it that everyone in Clock Town still has functioning eardrums?

* Why does the Kokiri Soerd look different than it did in ''Ocarina of Time''?

** When you speak to the owner of the Bomb Shop about the theft, he reveals that North Clock Town has a reputation for being an unsafe area. Presumably, having a really disinterested or corrupt gate guard stationed there is a part of that. (Also, to the above, a young child being allowed out where he'll be killed by monsters is much more serious than an old lady's luggage being stolen. Even the most corrupt police officers can have standards, you know.)

** The [[RealityScrew Reality Screw]] aspect of the Stone Tower Temple is kind of the whole shtick—so much of it doesn't make sense that you sort of get the idea it's not supposed to. It has elements of [[EldritchLocation Eldritch Location]] at times, very much on purpose.

** Also, the swordsmith mentions in passing that a sword enhanced with gold dust is rumored to transcend time. Given the fact that it does must mean the rumor is true.

[[folder:Leaving Clock Town]]

[[folder:Getting back]]

[[folder:New Wave Bossa Nova]]

[[folder:Kafei's healing]]

[[folder:Goron Link]]

[[folder:Guards are useless]]

[[folder:Repeating]]

[[folder:Don Gero's mask]]

[[folder:Romani after aliens]]

* One thing that struck me as odd was that Tatl had apparently been tagging along with the Skull Kid since she met him, yet whenever you come across someone who he's cursed or pranked in some way, like Kafei or the Deku Butler's son, she acts as though she doesn't recognize them when she logically would've been there as they were cursed.

[[folder:Leaving Termina]]

[[folder:Kafei's mask]]

[[folder:Guards and the field]]
* One thing that's been bugging me ever since I played the game for the first time is the guards in Clock Town. They keep telling you that it's dangerous outside, but if Termina Field is so dangerous and full of monsters, why is there only one guard at each gate, and better yet, why are they all facing toward Clock Tower instead of preventing the monsters from entering? It makes it seem more like the townspeople are actually being held captive than like the guards are trying to protect the town.

*** Alternatively, Link had a new hilt fashioned once he knew he wasn't going to stay with the Kokiri, refashioning the weapon to be more robust or heavier to better fit his increasing strength (the MM hilt looks like it's solid metal versus the original wood). Or, as a sadder explanation, he had the hilt refashioned because seeeing the older design was painful to him (both as a reminder of what he had given up (seeing the sword took him back to the Forest, reminded him of Saria, etc), and as a reminder of what he had done (the guard resembled the Master Sword, and made him think of seeing friends die, of facing such darkness as Ganon, etc))

[[folder:Blast Mask inventional wisdom]]

** This troper assumed it was made as a carnival side show attraction, kind of like sword swallowing or eating fire. If you know what you're doing, you're safe, but it's not something to try at home.

[[folder:Fix up Inn]]
* Okay, so it's shown that Stock Pot Inn could really do with a good fixing up...so why doesn't Anju use the 100 rupees in the staff room to do just that? Surely it'd be enough to fix up the Knife Chamber and get an exterminator for the bugs in the kitchen?

* If the transformation masks carry the souls of dead people, who the hell did Majora kill to make the Fierce Deity's Mask?

[[folder:Romani protecting herself]]
* Why doesn't Romani protect herself? She's got tons of arrows, and the ghosts seem to go down in one hit.

** The Razor Sword is just an extension to the starting sword that is not designed to handle much physical trauma. The Gilded Sword is a new forge entirely.
** Think of it as similar to how adding Carbon to Iron creates Steel. The Gold Dust reacts with the metal in the sword, which strengthens the bonds between the molecules, making it sharper, and never dulling; and the reason that it doesn't revert to the Kokiri Sword is because its chemical structure has been altered, and the Razor Sword was just a resharpening of the Kokiri Sword.
** Also, it's an [[AcceptableBreaksFromReality Acceptable Break From Reality]]: You have to go to a lot more trouble to get the Gilded Sword than you do to get the Razor Sword (winning a Goron race, which can take several tries vs. just paying 100 rupees and fast-forwarding a day). You'd be pretty pissed if all that effort went away when you traveled back in time.

** It's not that he keeps the arrows themselves, it's that he keeps the ''ability'' to "enchant" the arrows with fire, ice, etc.
** ^This. It's not that you keep the elemental arrows; you keep the ''spell'' that enchants the arrow to be elemental when you fire it.

** It works if the enemies are not plot-relevant. The story wouldn't progress if it worked on every single one.
** Ostensibly, the mask works by making you appear as inconspicuous as a stone. Since a stone running around with a body and legs is about as conspicuous as it gets, it's possible that it has minor magical properties that let it do its job. If this is the case (as is possible with a lot of the masks -- there's no visible reason for the Bunny Hood to make Link run faster, for example), then perhaps stronger enemies are able to see past this magic.
** If you wear the mask to the pirate mini-boss, she says something along the lines of "You can't fool us with that mask!" So either people don't notice you unless they know exactly what they're looking for, or it works like Ari from ''VideoGame/OkageShadowKing'': it makes Link so uninteresting [[WeirdnessCensor normal people just don't see him]].

[[folder:Epona without blowing up rock]]
* How does Epona get to you on Day 1 or Day 2? The rock's still there.

** More like RuleOfFunny.
** Maybe the Red Potion has its limits, just like real-life medicine. The two characters who ask for them elsewhere in the game are injured, but able to hang on well enough until someone could bring them a potion -- like how Link can still run around as long as he wants with minimal health so long as he doesn't get hit again. Mikau may well have been going to die very shortly one way or the other, perhaps to the point where a Red Potion wouldn't have done any good.
** In tandem with the above, maybe a Zora's metabolism is sufficiently different from that of a human (or a witch) that a red potion wouldn't be helpful? I mean, this still leaves the question of why Zora Link can drink red potions without a problem, but it's still something to consider.
*** Perhaps the Red Potion works on Zora Link specifically because it's still Link beneath everything, and thus it functions the same regardless. Also explaining why things like Heart Containers still carry across forms

* An old ''Majora's Mask'' playthrough on Youtube that I watched once raised an interesting question, and it stuck in my head ever since. If the Happy Mask Salesman knew the mask was an evil thing used for evil hexing rituals and stuff, why, oh why, in Din's name, would he go after it and pull it out of whatever hellhole he found it in?
** The Happy Mask Salesman closely resembles the Moon Children, so it isn't too much of a stretch to assume that he's descended from the tribe that used the Majora's Mask for whatever it was they were doing. It would also explain why he knows all this stuff in the first place.
** I always assumed that he likes collecting rare and unique masks as well, so that's just an excellent one to add to the collection.
** His dialogue when he talks about how he got it seems to imply that he didn't know just ''how'' powerful it was until he actually had it in his possession.

[[folder:100 strikes]]
* Something that always bugged me is the Razor Sword in-game. I understand the fact that it returns to being the Kokiri sword if you go back in time because it's not temporal proof, so it, of course, goes back to before it was reforged. But what doesn't make sense to me is the 100 strikes rule. Sure, normal wear and tear will remove the edge from any blade without proper care, but just look at the differences between two appearances. The regular Kokiri sword has just one blade, whilst the Razor sword has two: A smaller one that looks like a ninjato, and a second larger one that is reminiscent of a scimitar in that it curves a bit. These two blades are literally separate from each other save for the three metal strips that run across the gap between the two blades. How would normal wear and tear not only be able to reshape the two blades (actually very possible due to breakage), but also push the two back into one blade and then fuse them together? And that's not even starting on the hilt, which could very easily be replaced, easier than the sword.
** Because it's just a graphics cheat and they didn't take the time to make an intermediate 'broken razor sword' model.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Stealing the Sun's Mask]]
* Why did Sakon steal the Sun's Mask from Kafei? I know that masks are SeriousBusiness and all, but are these wedding ceremony masks worth a lot of money? They're homemade masks, right? Personally crafted by the people to be married? There doesn't seem to be any reason why anyone would be willing to pay any substantial sum of money for them. That'd be like if I made a homemade wedding ring and a thief came along and thought "I should steal that, it's probably valuable." An amateur might make that mistake, but Sakon has been doing this for a long time, right? He's even got a hideout and everything. Are we to understand that this experienced thief didn't know the difference between a valuable item worth stealing and a homemade mask? Or did he just take it to be a jackass to a little kid?
** Objects of great sentimental value are priceless to their owners and Kafei comes from money. My headcanon is Sakon figured out that the "kid's" mask was Kafei's (it's a small town and he ''is'' the son of the mayor) and planned on reselling the Sun's Mask back to him. What wasn't part of the plan was the groom supposedly going AWOL before the wedding, leaving him with no mark to pay the ransom.
** Even if his intention wasn't to hold the mask for ransom, it still looks like it might be worth a bit of money, more at the very least than a lot of the other masks Sakon could've come across in Clock Town. Just because it was made for a wedding doesn't make it worthless in any other respect.
** I could be crazy, but that mask looked like it was made of gold, or at least, had a gold varnish. That makes it either crazy valuable or easy to pass off as such, either of which would've resulted in Sakon getting a much heavier wallet.
[[/folder]]

*** I think it's a bit of an anticlimax to have something like [[MysticalPregnancy magical pregnancy]] used as a mean to the relatively mundane end of teaching a song, even a magical song. Granted, if we accept that hypothesis we can speculate that the magical pregnancy would also lead to other, more epic results, but still...
*** Said magic song was necessary to remind Lulu of her role as the protectorate of Great Bay Temple, to cleanse the temple of evil, to restore one of the guardian gods of Termina, to return the ocean her people live in to normal, and indirectly to save the world from complete destruction. That's decidedly not just a simple, mundane end.

** Perhaps it's because the Deku Butler's son, if what we see of him through his twisted corpse at the beginning of the game and the statue formed by the Elegy of Emptiness later on is any indication, doesn't really seem to have very many distinguishing traits that set him apart from other members of the Deku tribe, and Link's trademark attributes that remain with him even in his Deku form -- his blond hair, green hat and kilt, and brown gauntlets and boots -- may be enough for the Deku Butler to tell the difference. Compare this with Link's Goron form, which, aside from the green clothes, gauntlets, and boots, still features the necklace that Darmani wears as well as the sideburns that the other Gorons seem to recognize him by, and it may make more sense. Though I'm still not sure about Mikau, because aside from Zora Link's face resembling his, I really don't think the two look very similar at all, but the other Zoras apparently think otherwise, so I guess it works.
** There's also the fact that the Deku Butler never really clarifies that Deku Link ''visually'' reminds him of his son, since you can follow him through the Deku Shrine as a human the entire time and he'll still say the same thing. I'm thinking that Link reminding him of his son was meant as a reminder of how the two used to race each other. It's possible seeing Deku Link may have initially reminded the butler of his son, but since Link didn't actually ''know'' who his son was beforehand and therefore that he was supposed to be impersonating someone, the fact that he acted completely different from the butler's son and went about his normal "hero" business, coupled with the differences between them I listed above, was what tipped the butler off that they were different people. If this was the case, him mentioning his son later on could've just been reflecting on the false hope that his son had finally come home.
** Also as a Zora and a Goron, Link knows he's supposed to be Darmani and Mikau, so he probably goes by their names and consciously tries to act like them. As far as he is aware, he's just 'nameless Deku Scrub #4712', so he doesn't know that the Butler's son was involved in its creation; ergo, he doesn't try and act like him.
** Which is probably just as well, really. Darmani and Mikau were both said to be descended from Goron and Zoran heroes and both were trying to save their respective regions from catastrophe, albeit indirectly in Mikau's case, so neither the Gorons nor the Zoras thought to question it when Link continued doing so in their stead. From what we know about the Deku Butler's son, that being that he used to race his father through the Deku Shrine and gathered Mushrooms for Kotake to use to make potions, nothing really that special or heroic -- he probably didn't have any part to play in the events that had transpired in the swamp and wouldn't have made an attempt at trying to fix them. Thus, even if Link had known who he was and tried to deliberately pose as him to the other Deku, something would have tipped his "father" off when his supposed son decided to travel to Woodfall Temple in order to defeat the monster, save the Deku Princess, and returned the poisoned swamp water to normal.
** Only played the 3DS remake, so I'm not sure if it's in the 64 version, but if you read Mikau's diary/journal, he mentions that this week his lucky colour is green. Perhaps this is why no-one looks twice at Zora Link with his green fin cap and clothes.
** I always thought that they couldn't see the green hat/tunic. The magic of the mask warped their perception so that they think Zora/Goron Link look exactly like what they think Darmani/Mikau do. Even minus the hat, Link looks nothing like them in his Goron/Zora forms. I mean, since you ''can'' transform in front of everyone and literally no one notices, it's not out of the question the masks can do this.
** Mmm...I'm quite sure one of the beaver brothers in Great Bay tells Zora Link that he can't fool them with his green clothes, showing both that they recognize him as Mikau, who had tried and failed to race them earlier to get a bottle, and that they can see the clothes worn by Link. So unless the mask's suggested magic works only on the Gorons and Zoras, which seems strange...
** Perception, perhaps. The Gorons so desperately want to believe that their hero and icon Darmani is back that they'll overlook the sudden addition of attire, perhaps chalking it up to the preternatural cold. The Zora accept that Mikau is a rockstar, and that he may perhaps do things like run off to the town and get a dye job, pick up some new clothes, etc. Imagine it similarly to a modern celebrity doing something garish and outlandish. Generally kinda gets shrugged off.

[[folder:Anju and Kafei living after married]]