Majora's Mask Never Tells You What Majora Is

"You've met with a terrible fate, haven't you?" Majora's Mask names its villain, lets it speak a few lines, and never says what it is, who made it, or who the "ancient tribe" were. So what is Majora? We go through everything the game itself says about the mask, in the order you meet it (and where the Japanese script says something colder than the English), then where the fans' answers came from, then everything I could find that the people who made it have said. Then what I think it is. Gameplay recorded by World of Longplays (longplays.org), played by Spazbo4:    • Nintendo 64 Longplay [078] The Legend of Z...   More of Majora's Mask, from the Stone Tower to the Fierce Deity:    • Majora's Mask Theories Explained in 13 Min...   CHAPTERS 0:00 A terrible fate 0:59 The theft 2:20 The legend 4:31 The puppet 6:07 The child in the moon 8:30 The answers fans gave 10:55 What Nintendo has said 13:19 What I think 15:09 Your turn, and credits MAIN SOURCES The game's English and Japanese text side by side, translated by jacensolo06 (Zelda Legends forum, October 2008): http://forums.legendsalliance.com/top... Nintendo Japan's own story page for the 2000 game: https://www.nintendo.co.jp/n01/n64/so... Eiji Aonuma at E3, 13 May 2000 (archived transcription): https://web.archive.org/web/202303312... Aonuma on the name, Nintendo Dream, March 2015 (Nintendo Everything): https://nintendoeverything.com/aonuma... Takaya Imamura to VGC, July 2023: https://www.videogameschronicle.com/f... Imamura's post of April 2024 (Automaton): https://automaton-media.com/en/news/w... The Miiverse event with the Happy Mask Salesman, 13 March 2015: https://nintendobserver.com/2015/03/m... Nintendo's old zelda.com encyclopedia (archived, 2005): https://web.archive.org/web/200503130... Hyrule Historia, p. 112 (GlitterBerri): http://www.glitterberri.com/hyrule-hi... Iwata Asks: Majora's Mask 3D, 2015: https://iwataasks.nintendo.com/interv... The Smash Bros. trophies (SmashWiki): https://ssbwiki.com/Majora%27s_Mask Zelda Wiki's first write-up, 24 June 2005: https://zeldawiki.wiki/index.php?titl... The named-being theory, Zelda Wiki, 5 January 2007: https://zeldawiki.wiki/index.php?titl... The Twili theory, Zelda Wiki, 10 July 2007: https://zeldawiki.wiki/index.php?titl... Game Informer, 31 October 2013: https://gameinformer.com/b/features/a... "He was lonely": the pathos of Skull Kid, Aaron Suduiko, 15 January 2015: https://withaterriblefate.com/2015/01... Razanak's video, 2016:    • Majora's True Identity? - Zelda Theory   Zeldom's video, 2020:    • Origins of Majora and the Fierce Deity (Ze...   WHAT THIS VIDEO DOES NOT CLAIM What Majora is. No developer I could find has said, and the last chapter is my reading, marked as one. The game's lines are quoted from a fan's side-by-side transcript of the English and Japanese text and from the recording itself; what the Japanese says is that fan's translation (jacensolo06, 2008), with the caveats the translator gave. "The oldest write-up I could put a date on" and the dates of the theories come from Zelda Wiki's page histories: older forum posts exist that I could not search. Hyrule Historia is quoted from GlitterBerri's translation and the English edition as Zelda Wiki reproduces it. The children's face in the remake was found in its files, as Zelda Wiki reports; Nintendo has not commented. View counts were read on 11 October 2026. FOOTAGE AND IMAGES Gameplay of the 2000 game is from World of Longplays' Nintendo 64 longplay, played by Spazbo4, used with the credit its site asks for (https://longplays.org):    • Nintendo 64 Longplay [078] The Legend of Z...   (the copy used is the one World of Longplays keeps at the Internet Archive: https://archive.org/details/N64_Longp.... A few clips of the 2000 game and of the 2015 remake are Nintendo's own, from its trailers. The clips are silent except for eight short stretches where the game itself is heard, from the same recording. World of Longplays' permission: https://longplays.org/infusions/faq/f... Music and narration are generated. Napkin Lore is not affiliated with, or endorsed by, Nintendo or World of Longplays.