Hi, I’m Max, I write fantasy, science fiction, and genre stories as well as essays on the craft. Help support my writing by upgrading to a paid subscription, sharing my work, or dropping a tip in my hat over at ko-fi!
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Last Christmas, my lovely wife gifted me the insane Lego Great Deku Tree set. I was beyond surprised and excited. This was a wonder, not simply because of some life-reasons that I won’t get into here, but because it brought back so many memories.
I always asked for Lego for Christmas and my birthday when I was a kid. I’d occasionally get a smaller set or two throughout the year, but those two Holidays in winter – my birthday is on Valentine’s day – were when I received the bulk of building toys.
I felt like I was 10 again. I wore my new Christmas pajamas (a tradition of my mom’s), my wife put on the fire in our living room, and the two of us sat and hung out while Christmas music played and I got to put together a Lego set. The Great Deku set was unique to me, a newer Lego style where its “2-in-1” IE: you get to build either Model-A with most of the parts or Model-B, but there is a point of no return where you have to make a choice between which model you build. This set comes with instructions to build a Deku Tree from Ocarina of Time, or from Breath of the Wild. I reached the point of no return in my build a little while after starting and took a break to mull it over.
I was not someone whose first Zelda game was Ocarina of Time. It was my sixth or seventh Zelda game (4th of the 3d games). My first Zelda game was Link’s Awakening, and my second was Majora’s Mask. The latter of these became the first true video game I loved. Both Majora’s Mask and Ocarina are on the Nintendo 64, and I think some of my love for MM trickled through when faced with the choice between Deku Tree’s to build that after a good long think, I found no other option than to build the classic tree.
It was perfect.
Nearly a year later though, I’m sitting at my work desk, looking over at the construction and wondering to myself: “how hard could it be to swap out the trees?” I distracted myself from getting some work done and looked through the extra bags of pieces I’d received and found myself getting way too excited. It was like I’d received a whole other Lego to build. At 30, it’s not like I play with the figures like I used to. Once they’re built, the fun is kind of over… but here I was, ready to build again.
I trolled through Youtube to find a playlist of music to listen to as I organized pieces and came upon a video with the screenshot you see above. This image is from Majora’s Mask. As the music started and the whooshing sounds of wind and snow that the editor thought to put over the songs hit me, I paused.
This wasn’t my first time building a world within the Legend of Zelda.
I looked at the screenshot and let the soundtrack play and thought about my recent novella The House in the North.
A lot of this novella came directly from a session of Dungeons and Dragons I ran back in 2016. A one-shot style session in a puzzle filled mansion with a spooky theme for my players. When I made the mansion, I ripped a ton of the layout from a dungeon found within The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. When we played, I spooked my players with music from Twilight Princess, Majora’s Mask, and even Super Mario 64.
Looking back at the screenshot as the music played and the Lego sat untouched before me, I thought of all the time I spent growing up, playing in my backyard as a Minnesota winter raged on, pretending I was Link, trudging up the mountainsides of Snowhead in Majora’s Mask. I was fighting White Wolfos and rolling around as a Goron in the snow. I was telling my own stories in that world, making them up as the sun set and the long snowy nights set in.
This world has been in my mind my entire life.
I feel Snowhead when I edit The House in the North. I hear the music of the Lost Woods when I imagine Triph walking among trees in The Flute Thief. Breath of the Wild’s soundtrack played in the background nearly the whole time I drafted my upcoming novel -cover reveal coming January 1st!
There’s not a lot of story within the Legend of Zelda series. The grand sweeping narrative is paper-thin in even the best of the games. Made harder still as Link, the main protagonist, has never spoken a word. But there are hundreds of little stories throughout the series: When Colin stands up to the monsters attacking his friends in Twilight Princess; descending into Hyrule castle beneath the waves, frozen in time in Wind Waker; Leaping into Gerudo Desert with Epona in Ocarina of Time; calming a grieving child in the frozen mountainside in Majora’s Mask.
These are the moments that never left me.
They are the pieces that I find showing up in my stories, almost without even noticing.
It was easier to be more cavalier when I was simply creating a home-brew world for my roommates to play in a DnD session, but even as I worked to be “more original” in my own writing, these pieces of Zelda show up. Even if you can’t see it as you read, know that I felt is as the music played on while I wrote.
Antev of the Shrinking Desert, Antev of Nowhere, has become one of my favorite characters to write recently – as I’m sure you can tell by the number of stories featuring him on this newsletter. He contains inspiration from tons of sources: the hero’s of Red Harvest and the hundreds of westerns based on it’s ideas, Conan the Barbarian and other Sword and Sorcery greats, even Geralt of Rivia in his shorter stories. But one influence didn’t stand out to me until thinking about it now. Antev is my answer to Link. He is not a silent hero of the Zelda games, but he is a hero. He’s a man on a quest, who will stop and help those along his journey, even though it may set back his own quest.
A lot has been said about finding your voice as a writer and where the line is between inspiration and outright theft. When I think of the stories that I am inspired by in my writing, I can name dozens of tales and how they directly pointed me towards many of my own stories. But beneath all those are the stories I was told as a child, those I lived. The Legend of Zelda has been with me longer than Lego has. Longer than the Lord of the Rings, longer than Star Wars, more time than any other story I can say I loved as a child that I still enjoy today as an adult. It’s deep within me, and I think, will always be there.
Looking over from my writing desk, I can see the Deku Tree on the table in the corner.
It’s impossible to see that Lego without wanting to go on an adventure.
I go the best way I can.
I write.
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Love ya!
Max
More essays on Substack:
This post is inspired in more ways than one by the writing of The Video Game Storyteller. His writing on the intersection of video games, stories, and life is always so wonderful. One piece of his that will never leave my mind is:
I enjoyed reading this. I love seeing how the Zelda series left an impression on you and inspires you to write.