Majora’s Memes: It’s Dangerous to Go Alone

Welcome to Majora’s Memes, where we bring you the latest in Zelda-related Internet shenanigans! Last week we announced the start of a new series; a closer look at memes that originate from the Legend of Zelda series. This week we’ll kick it off with the one that started it all. Hit the jump to see!

What else could we do but start with “It’s Dangerous to Go Alone”? It’s among the first pieces of dialogue a player is likely to encounter in The Legend of Zelda, especially if they don’t bother to watch the introduction on the title screen.

After the player enters their name, Link is deposited smack dab in the south of Hyrule (or what part of Hyrule consists of the game’s map), directly in front of a cave. Upon entering this cave, Link encounters an Old Man, who legendarily states…

Throughout the rest of the game, Link encounters the Old Man again and again, who offers him advice, or gambles with him, or charges him for busting his door. Much of what the Old Man says has become memetic in some way, mostly because of its nonsensical nature due to mistranslation. It’s ironic then that the most iconic and memetically mutated statement is the most coherent one.

Originally, my plan was to look at the statement in its original Japanese and try to parse out what a more accurate translation would say. I ended up giving up, as I wasn’t able to find clear matches for some of the characters used in the Famicom version of the game. And even then, determining which characters formed a complete word was made difficult due to the Japanese language’s lack of spacing words as in English. It was just too much for somebody with very little understanding of Japanese (although I’ve been trying for years to find time to learn more). If enough people really want me to, I can have a friend of mine who lives in Japan look at the text and see what she’d say.

The meme that sprang from the Old Man is pretty simple. There’s only so many ways it can be varied and mutated. Sadly, this means that it’s easy for the joke to get overused. Like if you fill a post with them–oh wait, irony.

I’ve posted ones similar to this before, but this photo was taken by yours truly. A few years ago, my roommate’s girlfriend found it on the Internet and printed it out. We put it on our door, and all six Pokémon were gone within an hour or two.

It’s an obvious joke, but I’d actually never seen this one before.

This image comes to us courtesy of DjPavlusha on deviantART.

I think this one is my favorite.

And this one is probably the most famous variation.

And cue the comments griping about the post in 5…4…3…2…1…

Well, that’s it for this week’s Majora’s Memes. Don’t worry, they won’t all be this, well, repetitive. Some of the memes won’t really require many examples, and others will have more varied ones. This one just happens to be a little basic. Tune in next week!

Source: deviantART