I honestly never took it as black face, it always reminded me more of the descriptions that people give of shadow people that are all shadowy except for their glowing eyes.
I do agree black face is terrible but to me as a kid I never thought of the original skull design as Black face more like a very creepy figure who's face was hidden in the shadows and all you saw were creepy red glowing eyes. As a kid the skull kids freaked me out but then I was like aw they just want to play. Well that was child Link but when they start attacking you as adult like that shit scared the fuck out of me lol. The wooden texture just wasn't as creepy reminded me more of a scarecrow
I honestly think they could have gotten away with just changing the lips into a beak and leaving the skin since the lips were the egregious part of the design.
@NayruYT You just admitted “black face” wasn’t the problem. You should chill on seeing racism everywhere you look because just like the comment said, I didn’t think it was racist nor does anyone i know who played it. The character also doesn’t share african culture. Im fact it is more racist to want to remove a black person from a game for being black
Wait, You guys saw it as friggin' black face? I saw it the same way as the dark mage character from the OG final fantasy. That is, As a shadow with two eyes and a beak peaking out from the shadowy face, Gave them more of an underlying sinister look. Like, Yeah, That thing IS a child...But it is very much capable of causing great harm to you if you threaten it.
Twilight Princess was my first Zelda game and even I thought that the Skull Kid design looked strange. The giant grin is unnerving. And the pale skin makes the kid feel too human.
I genuinely hope that they bring Skull Kid (both the character and the race) back into future Zelda games. When I was a kid, they always were my favorite NPC's in OoT and MM. Amazing video.
I was very excited to hear you was remaking this video i think it was a vealy cool idea! I loved this, skull kid is one of my favourite characters and i always love seeing videos about him!
Technically Link's Awakening isn't the only game with a "It was all a dream" story. Phantom Hourglass did the same thing. And both games were caused by magical whales. lol
There's one problem with what you said about the skull kid saying that Link smelt the same as the fairy boy who taught him the song and it's that he didn't say "fairy boy" he said "fairy kid" meaning he was likely talking about Saria and not Link, because they lived together in the same forest so they'd smell the same
I’ve never played a single LOZ game (please don’t judge me) yet Skull Kid has become my absolute favorite LOZ character and a comfort character at that too! His redemption in MM always brings me to tears. This was a great video!
OK, that encyclopedia thing does not make sense because where did Majora come from if Majora wasn’t locked in the stone tower temple which is part of Termina?
If you feel like you've seen this video before, you aren't going crazy, you probably have! This is a "remake" of my very first video, a Hyrule History on Skull Kids. I was unhappy with the quality of the original video and how I handled some of the topics it covered, and I took the opportunity to add about 12 minutes of new content bringing the video from an 18 minute video to a 30 minute one, so I am pretty happy with how this one turned out! Also, thank you to Tyler Townsend and Triforce Trends for providing the quotations, here are their excellent channels. Tyler: ru-vid.com Trends: ru-vid.com/show-UC-rPIJpgj0ZRtDvcbquukuw
I didn’t think that at first, but it actually makes sense, and when I went back and replayed OoT, it turned out Link wasn’t actually the one who taught the song to the skull kid. When you play it for him to get the piece of heart, he says “Hey, you know Saria’s Song!” so he must have already known it.
This is such an amazingly made video! Thank you so much for sharing man! The whole vid is super well researched and structured and your voice is very nice to listen to :)
Great video Nayru! Majora’s Mask will always be my favorite Zelda, and the story of skull kid and how it mirrors Link and Navi’s own friendship will always move me to tears by the end of the game. There is so much depth to the story/stories in that game and it was great hearing your take on it, as well as on skull kid’s other prominent appearance in TP. Thank you for sharing! My own head canon on the TP skull kid and his appearance is that he is likely a ghost/Poe of the MM skull kid (as Link too has taken on a ghastly appearance, albeit to resolve unfinished business and guide the current hero almost as his son), and perhaps skull kid remains so just as those ghosts in MM do, lingering due to unresolved, unhealed regrets. Perhaps skull kid could never forgive himself for his deeds in MM and it lead his ghost to remain haunting the woods until TP Link arrives. What do you think?
Loved the video, thank you! Has anyone else noticed the boy who plays the flute in The legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom? I refer to the young flutist in the band that plays the Epona's theme in every stable, after you complete the quests to find all the members of the band and you bring them to awaken the four fairies with their music. The boy's name is Pyper, and what I personally find so interesting about him is that as he plays his flute while the band performs, he dances exactly the same way the Skull Kid from Ocarina of Time dances. To make it even more interesting, when you first meet Pyper in the game, you find him standing on top of a tree while he plays his flute and dances.
There is a hip hop artist named Gmo skee and he's the reason I'm here. He usually bases his songs off video games, but in a more twisted and violent sort of way. He just dropped a song called "skull kid" and its actually one of his least violent and twisted songs. its one of those life reflection songs.
I don't know if this is anything, but the Kokiri became the Koroks, right? And Koroks are fairylike wood creatures. What if Koroks are some sort of in-between form of Kokiri and Skull Kids?
I kinda get the feeling their intention was that the giants just represent some friends that skull kid lost at some point and that their in game appearance was just how he envisioned those people
One thing I'll never forget about majora's mask is skull kid putting on majora's mask and slowly loses himself into darkness it's honestly super creepy and sad there's even theories that when he got corrupted he was completely taken over and possibly was forced to make the moon fall towards the earth
Huh. Never thought it looked like black face. Always thought the "lips" were a duck bill, so I thought they looked like ducks. Then when I played MM and saw the beak, it just reinforced my previous take on it and figured this was always how they were meant to look.
I don’t think Majora’s Mask actually happened. But it technically Skull Kid’s manifestations but rather Link’s and Skull Kid is an analog to Link. It all happened in Link’s head as he deals with the trauma of Navi leaving him and no one remembering him at the end of OoT.
Awesome video bro! And did you know as Sonic is a Legend Of Zelda fan Zero/Infinite The Jackal is Basically Sonic's version of Skull Kid/Majora's Mask?
While they probably do have some insensitive driving of non-Japanese races and cultures, if you're referring to things like Jynx, I'm pretty sure that that is a reference to Ganguro culture, specifically the yamamba subset, rather than black people. And while Ganguro literally translates to "black face" it's not related to black people so much as being a counterculture against the image of traditional Japanese beauty that emphasizes extremely pale skin/faces and stoic/graceful mannerisms, essentially making them something like nega-goths.
Here's an article you might enjoy about Jynx's origin, I thought it was a good read m.bulbanews.bulbagarden.net/wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Species:_Jynx Jynx in particular might be a reference to Ganguro (though like the article mentions it isn't a guarantee) but when it comes to characters like Skull Kid or Mr. Popo from Dragon Ball, the argument falls apart because they tend to have a focus on exaggerated features that are more similar to racial characatures of black people than they are to Ganguro. Such as exaggeratedly big lips on pitch black skin. I also think Nintendo's willingness to change it unprovoked is sort of proof that they knew what they were doing, because there wasn't a particularly large group of people hounding them over cultural sensitivity in the year 2000. Thank you for your comment!
What if Skull Kid and Majora did create Termina? Let’s say Skull Kid was in the Lost Woods and was depressed dude to some real world loss and found the mask. From that point created a parallel dimension wherein an entire new timeline was written that totally deviated from the standard timeline and in an instant a new background/history was created for the parallel Termina world involving giants and what not. Helluva REACH though.
Phantom Ganon makes sense. As a phantom you can move between parallels. Termina was created as a parallel universe by an entity that is privy to the parallel. Termina ceases to exist because it is a parallel universe, and Link doesn’t live in the parallel universe. So even tho it ceased to exist, it still exists in the parallel.
I don't think the Hyrule Encyclopedia entry is necessarily incorrect. In the case of the supposed chronological paradox, it is only a paradox if we were to consider Termina a regular place in geographical relation to Hyrule, which it is explicitly said to not be. I've always viewed Termina as a projection of Skull Kid's perspective of the world made manifest by Majora's Mask. Its origin point is the wound in his heart, on which Majora feeds. We are told the genesis of Termina is the Giants, and the Giants left Skull Kid to make Termina, but that is the perspective of its inhabitants. It's not necessarily paradoxical, because it acquires a different meaning if we interpret the Giants metaphorically, like the rest of the world. When you look at how the Giants are depicted, they are heads on legs. The developers even went to the trouble of adding more scribbles of the Giants by Skull Kid in MM3D, and they're always drawn like that. It's a common developmental trait of young children around 4 years old to draw people as heads on legs. I propose that the Giants are Skull Kid's most distant memory, and their actual appearance is as old as he can probably remember depicting them. I'd even wager that replacing them with monsters is just the Skull Kid-Majora's Mask gestalt manifesting its anger and warping them into the negative feelings the Giants elicit, locking their oldest, most naïve appearance away. I don't think it was literally Termina, nor literally Giants. I think it was four friends who left Skull Kid a long time ago, whose real identities we are never made privvy to. The creation of Termina upon donning Majora's Mask creates a history that extends backwards into the past, all for a world that is made of a jumble of memories. I think I wrote a comment somewhere else mentioning that Termina greeting a new day occurs in tandem with the concept of healing that permeates the game. The TLDR is that focusing on Termina disappearing is missing the forest for the trees: what matters is how it disappears. Just as those who are healed, seeing a vision of bliss while leaving their sorrows behind, celebrating Carnival can in fact be simultaneous with vanishing.
I didn't mind the so-called "black face" of Skull Kid in OOT. We can't even be sure that's what it's supposed to be. I always thought it's just a shadowy figure and it got a "proper" face in MM because it became a major character. Racism (especially the modern, loose interpretation of it) is often in the eyes of the beholder. I never saw anything racist with Skull Kid, especially as a kid. I didn't even think of black people just because of the color black. The lips looked like a beak to me even back then. At least I interpreted them that way. (Mind you: I disapprove of actual black facing, too.) One could argue one taught me the racism, to think negatively about it. To associate it with black people in the first place. There's always more to the story. Always two sides to the medaillon.
I understand what you are getting at, and I will concede that Japanese racism towards black people in their media often came from ignorance as opposed to any sort of hatred (though it is worth pointing out that Japan still has a problem with idols doing blackface, years after they lost the rights to ignorance as an excuse) But the fact is that whether you find something racist with the skull kid doesn't really matter if many other people do. You have told me you disapprove of real blackface, but if you go to the comments of any old minstrel video on RU-vid, the comments will be full of people talking about how blackface isn't bad and we're all just too sensitive. And yet I don't think you or I would be silly to deny the inherent racism of blackface just because the eyes of a handful of people chose not to behold blackface as racist. Nintendo changed the skin colour and mouthes of the generic Skull Kids in OoT3D as well, so it definitely isn't a case of only Skull Kid changing because of being a main character
It is possible The Giants are part of Skull Kid's delusions. Friends he made up in his Heart to keep from being alone. Imaginary Friends. But those friends didn't match with Reality, and therefore, "left". And Majora's Mask touched that , and using his Dark power, created a material location based on the backstory Skull Kid made up. Fiction to Reality. And then, Skull Kid/Majora Mask draws a person, Link, who lost people to Test his Despair against another person , and "Play a Game." This also means Majora Mask crafted a Backstory for the People of Termina, so they might think they exist for Years, when they actually existed for perhaps five minutes. And about Phantom Ganon, Phantom Ganon is summoned from the Gap between Dimensions, which may be like the place Termina was before it was Termina. So, they could have the manifested sword of a fictional person.
I don't know if most Japanese designers are even aware of "black face" aka minstrel shows or that it's offensive....there is probably some traditional kami with a black face that existed before they even knew people actually come in dark skin colors.
Skull kid original face reminded me of the final fantasy black mages (the hat is similar too). But now that you mention, it does look like an american black face, it would also explain why they change it.
I think that the skull kid blackface controversy is similar to the pokemon jinx one. Jinx was originally inspired by a very strage trend that was in japan at the time of the original pokemon. It was a trend for japanese wemon (and maybe men idk) to dress in very strage contrasting colors and usually they would paint their skin different colors. This was interprited into jinxs design. Unfortunately in the US, the design had eerily simillar charecteristics to black face. Not intentional, just cultures not translating well. The design was later changed to a purple skin tone to avoid further controversy. Skull kids original design shares similarities with many different interpritations of spirits in japan and was likley the inspiration. Kinda like a lost childs spirit wandering the woods type of thing. Its good that they changed it but i heavily doubt that black face was their original intention. Nintendo cares alot about their ips (sometimes too much) they'd do anything and everything to make sure stuff like that stays out of them.
While there is a valid case to be made with Jinx, I think there is very little chance that Skull Kid was in any way an attempt to convey the Ganguro style I agree that Nintendo likely didn't do it out of malice, and I think the prevalence of blackface in Japan (to this day) is more a result of ignorance than racial hatred, (though that becomes harder to excuse the longer we are globalized as a society)
@@NayruYT yeah, i do agree it shouldnt be excused. Even if unintentional👍 Its just good that they always end up stepping back and fixing their mistakes
If I remember correctly, Skull kids are what happens to non fairy folk children who were transformed due to getting lost in the enchanted woods like how adults turn into Stalfos, I don’t think Kokiri are at risk Deku tree or no tree.
How were the creators of this storyline so brilliant? The Zelda story took a dark and mystical turn with Majora's Mask and even packed an emotional punch. It's way better than anything a Hollywood screenwriter has come up with or another video game producer in my opinion. (Except maybe 1 or 2 Christopher Nolan films but this is still more original and intriguing.)
Also at the start of the first cycle Tatl tells Link that she doesn't visit this town much, meaning Termina which means it had to exist before Skullkid got a hold of the mask because she flat out tells us she's visited the town before. I theorize that Ayuma made this stupid brain theory canon later on because he himself has told us how ashamed he is of MM and how much he regrets making it, I think he retconned the og intent because he doesn't like the work and wants to engage with it as little as possible. One thing is for sure, they never intended Termina to be just a glorified dream, at least not when they made the og 64 version.
While I do not like the beak design of the skull kid, they could have just had a ghost face with just the glowing eyes just like Poes, the Poe collector, or Wizrobes... or they could have had Cheshire-cat-like smile instead of the lip caricature if they wanted to portray the skullkids/stalchildren as hollow versions of the children they once were.
[This explanation of Termina's existence is self contradictory.] Only if you assume that the description is literal: the giants can't be the cause of Skullkid's despair if they only exist after Termina is created by Skullkid's despair (and Majora's mask.) However, if you assume that the giants existed _metaphorically_ as different aspects of Skullkid's psyche, which would mean that Termina is an externalization of Skullkid's heart, then to say that the giants "once lived in harmony in Clock Town" simply means that at one time Skullkid was psychologically healthy, but became hurt and lonely not in Termina but in Hyrule, whereupon he encountered the Happy Mask Salesman and was drawn to Majora, like how the One Ring of Power could tempt people into taking it for themselves. Termina always "existed," just within Skullkid's heart and _Majora's Mask_ is just an extended _Psychonauts_ level where Link performs psychotheraby. The giants leaving is a metaphor for Skullkid's loss of psychological wholeness; disintegration, fragmentation of the personality etc. This is fitting given that the four giants represent the four psychological functions which must be worked upon to regain that wholeness. The idea of the giants leaving in order to "protect Skullkid" is simply the normal transformations of life: even if everything goes your way, you can't feel on top of the world all the time. Just as the body and mind need rest, one's psychology also goes through cycles of fragmentation and re-integration; activity (psychic wholeness) and rest (depression, anxiety, etc.) Mental sickness isn't necessarily a malfunction in the same way that a fever isn't a disease but rather a symptom of disease caused by the body's immune response. so in the same way, when the mind is in turmoil, depression is part of it's natural response. If terrible things happened to you and you did not experience intense sadness or even depression, then there would be something much more seriously wrong with you than lethargy and emotional pain. The phantom Ganon evidence is unconvincing to my mind because it's common for distinct Zelda characters to share the same name. Not only that, but if Termina is a psychological world, then Zubora Gabora are figments of Skullkid's imagination. Who's to say that rather than Ganondorf visiting the smithy in Termina that Skullkid wasn't the one to travel to Zubora Gabora's smithy and the place that appears in his mind isn't just what he remembers of it? if so then Phantom Ganon would never have needed to visit Termina at all. Even if we discount that, _Majora's Mask_ and _Wind Waker_ take place on completely separate branches of the Zelda timeline: if one of them happens, the other doesn't (until you get to BOTW where all of them happened due to a dragon break.) I'm not arguing that this is what really happened. I'm not concerned one way or the other, just what the book is trying to say. It doesn't take a whole lot of effort to work out an interpretation that's internally consistent. The text simply fails to clarify some key details. As for what really did happen, I see no reason to take this as gospel, nor does the source itself insist that anyone does. It's like the Zelda writers said, "We made a game. the lore exists to facilitate those games, so it isn't critical to us for every loose end to be tied up, but many of you would like some commentary to held form their own personal interpretation of the story, so here's a free one." That's what these books are: they're not the Bible, they're biblical commentaries; supplementary texts that help people study the main text and give them the knowledge to decide what it means to them. For example, in the gospel of Mark, Jesus uses a metaphor so pregnant even the disciples have no idea what he's talking about, much to the chagrin of the son of man: he warns against "the leaven of Herod and the Pharisees" and the disciples assume he must be talking about bread. Which is stupid because Herod was a king and the pharisees were rich Jews, neither of whom were likely to be kneading bread in place of their servants. Jesus is referring to their teachings whilst at the same time echoing the tradition of passover wherein the Jews consume only unleavened bread is remembrance of the flight form Egypt: the teachings of Herod and the pharisee's are "puffed up"; leavened, arrogant, whereas the bread of Moses that comes from God is flat, plain, and without artifice. This is something you might not catch as a modern reader of the text but which is presented in a commentary. That last part was something I interpreted myself based on what I'd read about the relevant verses on a biblical reference site. all it said was that the leaven was a metaphor for teachings. -- That took a moment to explain, but you get the idea. The Zelda lore is concerned with what is effective, not what necessarily did or did not happen, leaving the canon flexible and unleavened.
Thanks for mentioning the issue on Black face, I'm a Black Autistic human from the UK, I remember once they showed really old footage on tv of people that where white would and place black makeup on their face, and they talked about how something like this would never be allowed on tv again. It's also the last day of Black History month today. I'm also still trying to build a game.
Dude Japan doesn't have the same views as the west when it comes to " black face" you're going to harsh on them for something they had for an art style that has no relation to what the west sees as black face.
There is a lot of internal dialogue in Japan over blackface and it is to the point where when an idol does blackface, the criticism starts from Japan itself. I admit maybe I'm enacting retroactive judgement on 1998 Japan a bit too harshly, but nowadays they are certainly aware of the issue at the very least.
