Of the familiar faces in Majora’s Mask, only a handful of them actually are the Ocarina of Time character they look like. Evidently the Skull Kid, his face now hidden, is one of them. Kaepora Gaebora the helpful owl might be another. It makes a sort of sense that these two characters would appear in Termina: a child who plays in the Lost Woods where the portal between worlds is hidden, and an extraplanar being.
Then there’s the Happy Mask Salesman.
The Happy Mask Salesman is not obviously a supernatural force, and he doesn’t seem lost. So what is he doing here? And why does everything about him feel so wrong?
In Ocarina of Time, the Happy Mask Salesman has one, half-hidden trait that distinguishes him from all of the other, more generic shopkeepers: if you return to him without enough rupees to pay him back for the mask you borrowed, his face changes. Specifically, the upper half of his face changes–from a pair of genial, beneficent eyes to a red rictus of fury. The lower half of his face just keeps on smiling. It’s awful. It’s up there with uncanny moments in Undertale and Inscryption, where it somehow feels like a video game might be able to hurt you. Aside from that one trait, he’s a fairly inconsequential presence in Ocarina: just a standard NPC with a memorable character design and one secret horror.
In Majora’s Mask, the developers decided to let the Happy Mask Salesman play his one hit much louder than before. In his Big Scene, when he discovers that you haven’t retrieved his lost mask as he expected, his eyes go red, he holds his head in dismay, he shakes you by the collar. It’s a performance worthy of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
But this still doesn’t quite explain the wrongness of the Happy Mask Salesman in Majora’s Mask. If anything, this scene is a little less unsettling than his appearance in Ocarina, because it’s so much less subtle and it’s on the critical path, rather than being hidden and discoverable by chance. No: the reason he feels so wrong is because he is the only character in the game who can cut. There’s no other way to describe it: during his dialogue sequences, the camera cuts so that he jerks directly from one position to another, like a YouTuber doing a re-take. Is this literally happening in-universe? We can’t know! I suppose it’s possible that some time elapses during these cuts, and the editing is non-diegetic, as nature intended editing to be. But his dialogue seems like a complete, uncut thought, so… perhaps not. The thing that makes the Happy Mask Salesman so strange here is that his editing style challenges the whole notion of whether what we’re seeing is diegetic or not. Like those moments in Undertale and Inscryption, he sits precisely on the line between diegesis and non-diegesis. If he can do this, what’s stopping him from walking out of the screen?
Also, he has a huge pipe organ in one cutscene that’s never visible in the game world. Did he simply pull it into the world through a cut, like some kind of reverse Buster Keaton? I’d say “Happy Mask Salesman for Smash,” but he’s simply too powerful.
