Work of fiction · video game
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
Does a life others have mapped out for you become yours if you accept it?
Version analyzed : The original Nintendo 64 game (1998), whose story the Nintendo 3DS version (2011) retells. Lines are quoted from the 1998 English release.
A boy raised in the forest, the only one without a fairy, learns that a legend awaits him. A princess dreamed of him before they ever met; the forest's guardian has called him. Ocarina of Time tells of a life that others have mapped out, and puts an ocarina in the player's hands. What we did not choose: should we accept it as our life, or try to break free of it?
The problem
The common belief put to the test
A good life is a life one has chosen; and if we could go back to recover what we missed, we would be right to do so.
The problem
We want our life to be our own, and yet being called, having a task that only we can accomplish, gives a life a weight that a mere choice does not. And what we receive this way does not come in pieces: the mission brings losses with it, which we did not choose either. The game ties the two together: everything that happens to its hero, a mission, a role, a place, is given to him by others, and time itself becomes what is at stake.
Being expected gives a life a meaning no choice could give it, but that meaning comes from elsewhere. At the start of the game, Link lives among the Kokiri, a people of forest children who each have a fairy, and he is the only one without one. Then everything comes to him at once: the Great Deku Tree, guardian of the forest, sends him a fairy, Navi, and sees in him a child whose destiny is to lead Hyrule; his friend Saria is glad he is a real Kokiri at last; Princess Zelda tells him she dreamed of a figure coming out of the forest, followed by a fairy, and confides her plan: to get ahead of Ganondorf, a king from the desert who covets the sacred power hidden in the Sacred Realm. Link asks for nothing: he is told who he is and what he must do. The saw wisdom in a considered consent to the order of things: "the fates lead the willing and drag the unwilling," writes , in the line he draws from a hymn by Cleanthes. But a mission never comes alone: it brings losses that were not chosen either, and one will have to decide whether to accept them as part of one's life, or to refuse them.
Hidden so as not to give anything away: Zelda. They will be placed on the map once you show spoilers.Show spoilers to see how the characters change through the story.
- Character, placed by their acts
- Main character
Click a character to see the scenes their position rests on.
And you?
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Ever since you were a child, everyone around you has known what you would become. You have been told so often that you no longer know whether you want it. When the day comes, you accept.
Is this life now yours?
You are the eldest. In your family, the eldest takes over the farm, as your father and grandfather did before you. You have always known it, and you love this land.
If you take it over, is it because that is what you are?
A mistake that was not yours cost you ten years. You are offered the chance to go back to the day everything changed and finally live them; but you would lose what you have built since, people you love, and you alone would remember it.
Do you go back, or stay?
A decision you made long ago went wrong and cost you years.
When you think back on it today, what do you do?
Answer on both axes to appear on the map.
The characters
- Main character
A forest child the legend awaits
What they embody
He never says what he thinks: he accepts every role he is given.
Key action
He leaves the forest with Navi to meet Princess Zelda.
Main positions
- Essence and existenceEssentialism −0.4
- Relation to the pastBalanced 0.0
- Spoiler passage
Saria
Link's childhood friend in the forest
What they embody
Everyone has their own world, and one must accept being parted from it.
Key action
She gives Link the Fairy Ocarina as he leaves the forest.
Main positions
- Essence and existenceEssentialism −0.6
- Relation to the pastAmor fati −0.3
The Great Deku Tree
Guardian of the forest
What they embody
Every being has its destiny, and Link has his.
Key action
He sends Navi to fetch Link and tells him a task awaits him.
Main positions
- Essence and existenceEssentialism −0.7
- Relation to the pastAmor fati −0.3
How the work answers, in its own way
The game does not say whether one should love the life one did not choose, or leave it. It shows a hero who receives everything from others, a mission, a role, a place, in a world where everyone has theirs, and leaves it to the player, who has played that destiny as their own, to judge.
Where the narrative leans, axis by axis
Distinct from what the characters think: where the narrative seems to lean, judging by what it confirms or refutes, what it stages and what it values. This is an inferred, debatable reading, not its authors' opinion. On each axis, the diamond ◆ marks where the narrative appears to lean.
- Inferred reading on “Essence and existence” (reveals plot turns)
- Inferred reading on “Relation to the past” (reveals plot turns)
What it leaves open
The hero almost never states a conviction: his positions are read in his acts, and the game does not have him say what he thinks of them. The legend's world presupposes prophecy; the game presupposes assigned places more than it defends them.
Other problems in the work
Questions the work raises in passing, over an episode or a subplot: they do not carry the whole work, but they are worth a pause.
Zelda's dream; the Song of Storms
Does knowing the future fix it?
Zelda saw in a dream the one who would come, and her whole plan rests on that vision. If the future can be seen in advance, or close in on itself, is it still open? answered that a knowledge that sees the future does not force it, any more than seeing someone walk makes them walk.
Kokiri Forest
Never growing up
The Kokiri are children who never grow up, and one of them claims that a Kokiri who leaves the forest will die. When Link finally gets his fairy, Saria is glad he is a real Kokiri.
The ocarina's songs
Playing with time
In the game, music is, alongside the sword, the main way to act on time: the Sun's Song turns day into night, the Song of Time opens the temple door, and Zelda's Lullaby is handed down in the royal family like a memory. If a melody can act on time, perhaps it is because it is made of time: it exists only by holding together what has just passed and what is about to come. took the example of reciting a psalm to pose an old riddle: the present has no thickness, and yet we hear a whole phrase in it, because the mind holds memory and expectation there.
The Triforce
Power without the rest
Spoiler passageAfter the game: Hyrule Historia (2011)
What becomes of the world one leaves?
Spoiler passage
The concepts at play
- Alongside the sword, music is the game's main way of acting on time; and a melody is the very example of lived time, which exists only by lasting.
- The game lets the player experience a loop in which what the hero does in the past was already there.
- Willing one's life as it was, losses included: the other possible answer to the ending, one that would need no repair.
- The pole the game leaves empty: in this world of assigned places, no one claims to make themselves, and the one who wants more than his place, Ganondorf, merely takes.
Going further
On Philoscopia
The question the work raises, and what philosophy brings to it: the problems, thought experiments, arguments and thinkers that shed light on it.
The question
Does a life others have mapped out for you become yours if you accept it?
The philosophical problems at stake
- Essence and existenceFinding oneself, or inventing oneself?The injunction "be yourself" is itself divided: is self-realization bringing to light a self already there, or freely inventing one? "Become who you are" tries to hold both at once.
- Relation to the pastIf we could undo itIf an ordeal could be erased, should it be, knowing that it made the person we have become? Is refusing one's past, at bottom, wanting to be someone else?
- Relation to the pastIs the past fixed?What took place can no longer not have taken place; but its meaning depends on what comes after. If the past is still open to interpretation, is loving or refusing it still the same question?
- Relation to the pastWilling the worst tooDoes consenting to one's life as it was mean willing its worst hours too, the loss, the humiliation, the wrong one did, or can one say yes to a life without saying yes to each of its moments?
Thought experiments
Close thinkers
- MovementStoicismConsenting to fate as to one's own will: the wisdom the legend asks of Link.
- PhilosopherSeneca"The fates lead the willing and drag the unwilling": the formula of a life received.
- PhilosopherNietzscheAmor fati and the eternal return: saying yes to all of one's life, instead of repairing it.
- PhilosopherHenri BergsonLived duration, of which melody is the image: the time Link loses without living it.
- PhilosopherAugustineThe recited psalm as a way into time: a present that holds memory and expectation.
- PhilosopherSartreExistence precedes essence: the voice the game does not let us hear.
Readings
- Seneca, , Letter 107 : The formula of the fates that lead the willing, and the art of accepting what happens.
- Nietzsche, , § 341, "The heaviest weight" : The eternal return: would you live your life again, every loss included?
- Augustine, Confessions, Book XI : The recited psalm: how the present holds memory and expectation.
- Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will : Lived duration, set against clock time, with the image of the melody.
Other works
- The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask (video game, 2000) extends : The direct sequel: the same Link, a child again, relives three days in a loop to prevent a catastrophe.
- Groundhog Day (film, 1993) extends : Time that repeats itself, and what one ends up making of it.
- Peter Pan (novel, 1911) contests : The refusal to grow up, presented as a choice, where the Kokiri undergo it and Link has no claim to it.
- Arrival (film, 2016) extends : Knowing one's life in advance, losses included, and choosing it anyway.