| Bro, It wasn't the Triforce of Power's corruption that created the Dark world, that was the Triforce as a whole, granting his wish.
Further more, the backstory of the goddesses in OoT matches up more or less perfectly, with the creation story in the LttP manuel, which is more or less stated as fact, so it's validity isn't really in question. Certainly not less reliable than some old comics approved by Nintendo of America that the creators of the series had nothing to do with. Comics that, in fact, contradicted on many points, the two games that were already part of the series. Pretty sure actual content trumps thrid party comics. I liked them too, but they were just place holders filling in the backstory until the actual games got around to it. Now, they did carry more validity than, say, a comic made today, because back then manuels and such were part of the games they belonged to. The written components that surrounded these old games filled roles that cutscenes and flashbacks do in modern gaming. Make no mistake, if you've played the original Zelda without reading through it's maunel and going over the various maps and legends that came with it, you haven't really played the game anymore than if you played a modern Zelda game on a black and white tv, with the sound off, while skipping all the dialog and cutscenes.
But that wasn't the point at all, now was it?
The argument was whether or not Majora's Mask used these same themes that appeared in the comics. The comic's lesson was never that the Triforce of power was innately evil (it makes a point even then that the Triforce is neither good nor evil. That it can be used to bring great prosperity, but that if it's missused it can bring about evil.) That power corrupts, as you've already said, or as the comic put it "Those that wield power without wisdom can never know true courage."
Majora's mask is only similar on a superficial level. Sure there's a corrupting agent, but they're presented differenty. With the Triforce, it was merely a side effect of channeling the power of the gods into mere imperfect beings without the wisdom to use it.
The Mask is something different entirely. It's a malevolent evil spirit that manipulated and feeds off of the darkness it finds within people so that it can grow stronger. It has a darkness to it. It twists a person to suit it's own desires. It took the skullkid, a harmless imp that liked to put equally harmless pranks, and turned them vicious.
At first the Skullkid was convinced that he was still just having fun, but he starts to care less and less about that as the days go on. In a frightfully short amount of time he goes from pulling pranks and giggling like an easily amused child to sowing misery and inflicting pain in whatever way he can. He's cursing and enslaving souls, murdering people, kidnaping children and leaving them to die, and his final goal is the destruction of everything.
But then it's revealed that it wasn't really the Skull kid at all, doing these horrible things. He was just a weakminded puppet that the mask was controlling. He wasn't actually being corrupted himself, so much as the mask was slowly possessing him, tricking him or forcing him to do progressively worse and worse things as it gained power over his mind and body. Finally it discards him when it decides that he has no further use. It should be noted that once he wakes up the skullkid is back to his old self. He hadn't actually been corrupted, just controlled and manipulated.
So when you break them down, they're really not that similar at all.
On the note of originality, neither concepts are new. They're both portrayed rather uniquely, especially for their mediums, but the ideas of power corrupting, and a vulnerable youth being first mislead and then controlled by evil have both been around for centuries.
Still, that doesn't make either bad. They're told and retold so often because they're interesting. |