Kooloo-Limpah
Detractors of Majora’s Mask have a few good reasons to dislike it, from its meagre dungeon offering, to the time limit keeping the player on a strict schedule, to the fact you had to play the Elegy of Emptiness about 40 more times than was actually enjoyable. While I personally adore Majora’s Mask – so much so that I would even put it above the monolithic Ocarina of Time as my favourite Zelda game of them all – there’s one sin it commits that I’d like to bring to light today.
And that sin is how Majora’s Mask is the genesis of Tingle, who is a rotund, 35-year-old man, who wears a green skintight bodysuit, and screams nonsense magical words at you when you give him money – and believe me, you are always giving him money. For years now I’ve hated with unreasonable passion this little rosy-cheeked bastard, most of my life in fact. But to understand why I hate him so, we need to move into the cel-shaded world of Wind Waker, because while Tingle was certainly a bit odd in Majora’s Mask, he mainly came off an as annoying but inoffensive weirdo. Yet in Wind Waker, he was promoted to something far more sinister.
Upon climbing to the top of the Tower of the Gods, Link is tasked with finding the eight Triforce pieces. To do so, you have to pay 201 Rupees to obtain the In-Credible Chart Tingle sends you through the mail, and notice how he puts it just above the 200 Rupee limit of your starting wallet. Tingle could have made it 300 or 400 Rupees to make it well out of bounds for you and your pitiful default man purse, but no, instead Tingle added that one, single Rupee as a fuck you to the player, showing the evil that lurks behind that innocent smile. Also note that when you first find Tingle in Wind Waker, he’s locked up in jail, and while it turns out Tingle wasn’t the person who stole the Picto Box, he likely would have if given the chance – just saying.
With the In-Credible Chart in hand, you then have to track down eight Triforce Charts, which can be used to find the Triforce pieces. But first, you need to get them deciphered to be able to read them, and that’s when you have to visit the dreaded Tingle Island. Tingle Island contains just one solitary structure, which is a tower that has a giant menacing Tingle head that is eternally rotated by Tingle’s siblings, who may or may not be enslaved to do his outlandish bidding. And when you ask Tingle himself to decipher your Triforce Charts, he responds that he will do it for the princely sum of 398 Rupees…each. And as we know, eight times 398 equals big monies, so it is best to acquire the largest wallet as soon as you can, to make sure you have the big monies to meet Tingle’s demands.
This section is widely regarded as the worst part of Wind Waker, a time-wasting exercise merely there to bump up that playtime, and Tingle is at the centre of it all. I know that the HD version made this excursion less painful to get through, but I highly doubt anyone actually looks forward to this chapter of the game. It was enough for me to forever curse Tingle every time I was reminded of him. The most recent example being the appearance of his costume in Breath of the Wild’s paid DLC, which was akin to renting a nice room in a hotel only to find out in the morning that having a smiley face keyed into my car was part of the package. My anger extended beyond the fact that Tingle was involved with such a wearisome quest, but why did I regard him with such contempt?
As humans, we are naturally conditioned to hate things about others that we also fear could be associated with ourselves, and what I find troubling about Tingle is his lack of self-awareness. Tingle dances and he prances his day away without a single thought of how he is perceived by others, it’s almost like he doesn’t care about being judged for his eccentric ways, and I envy him for that. As I come to the terrifying reality that I’m only a handful of years away from reaching 35 myself, I still feel a twinge of embarrassment when I talk about my love for video games. I have even started to watch anime, a statement that has likely put me on some kind of list somewhere by someone official looking.
As a kid playing Majora’s Mask for the first time, I remembered how I regarded Tingle as some old loser for his juvenile demeanour. I remember thinking about how when I reach 35, I wouldn’t be playing such childish things as video games, I would be doing whatever a child thinks an adult does at that age, which was to watch crime dramas according to my limited understanding. But now, I realise my hatred for Tingle comes from a hatred of being seen as immature. For some reason I feel some sense of shame at the fact that I would rather perform Potemkin Busters in Guilty Gear than watch Inspector Poirot (no offence to anyone who likes that show, it’s just not for me).
If you yourself are a young person (which is anyone in their early twenties and below I’ve been told), then this might come across as the ramblings of some old man about a video game character that hasn’t been relevant for well over a decade. Perhaps you have the same low-key disgust for me that I once felt when I first met Tingle in Majora’s Mask. In essence, I have become your Tingle. But there is a core difference between me and Tingle, which is that he is happy with his weirdness, flaunting it to whoever would dare look upon his spherical figure. In a way, that in itself is a sign of maturity, to accept ones self completely. Tingle even makes a comfortable living drawing maps for travellers in Majora’s Mask, and he makes a killing scamming would-be heroes in Wind Waker by using “magic” to decipher charts.
In the end, it could be said that learning to accept Tingle, is essentially learning to accept that strange and sometimes uncomfortable part of ourselves.
And that my friends…is hot soup.
https://twitter.com/jea_rum/status/1309309470384599042?lang=en
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