''The Haunted Majora's Mask Cartridge'' In September 2010, Jadusable is a college student who bought a suspicious
Nintendo 64 cartridge labeled "Majora" (indicating it to be a copy of ''The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask
) by a disconcerting old man at a garage sale, with the save data of former owner "Ben" still on it. As Jadusable plays the game, little inconsistencies begin to pop up, turning to outright glitches, leading Jadusable to go to the online site 4chan to post about his playing of the game as it unfolds. Playing as Link, Jadusable attempts different ways to modify the game out of curiosity. It reaches the point where he tries the day four glitch, a well-known glitch in the Majora's Mask'' community where the player skips the third day's ending with the ability to explore the in-game world as depicted in the credits section. This causes the day four glitch to break the normality of the game, and Jadusable soon finds himself alone in Clock Town with all of the inhabitants gone. He is unable to advance the game by turning back time while endlessly hearing the laugh of the Happy Mask Salesman. In an attempt to achieve a "
Game Over" and return to the
main menu, Jadusable forces Link to drown in a pond; when he does, Link clutches his head, screaming as in a mask animation, with the screen flashing to depict the Happy Mask Salesman, smiling and laughing. The game continues, and the "Song of Healing" plays in reverse; a statue of Link is summoned, its face locked in an unblinking stare. The statue follows Jadusable's character, moving just outside of the camera's perspective, throughout the town. Jadusable tries to escape it, but nothing works. In desperation, Jadusable turns the camera to face the statue directly. After a while, the screen flashes back to the Happy Mask Salesman and Link, but only the latter turns this time. The Salesman, the statue, and Link all become locked in place, staring through the screen, directly at Jadusable. Throughout several sessions over a series of days, Jadusable writes in painstaking detail about each bizarre scenario he finds himself in, including spontaneously bursting into flames and lying unconscious (or dead) as the
Majora-possessed
Skull Kid looks on in silence. In a desperate attempt to return the cartridge to the old man who sold it to him, he sees the house empty, the old man's neighbor informing him that he has moved away. Jadusable, after hearing from the neighbor as to what happened in the house that the old man lived in, concludes that the cartridge is possessed by the spirit of its previous owner, a 12-year-old boy named Ben who had drowned almost eight years prior. Subsequently, a figure calling themselves "BEN" seemingly begins contacting him in and beyond the game itself, including changing his computer screen wallpaper to depict the Elegy of Emptiness and speaking through the online
artificial intelligence Cleverbot. Using the Elegy statue as its physical form, BEN seems to take pride in being able to manipulate Jadusable, who subsequently describes a series of dreams about the Moon Children depicted in the game's finale, including himself physically transforming into the Elegy, and how he believes he saw the old man who sold him the cartridge on his street looking into his window. Eventually, BEN is revealed to have been hijacking Jadusable's computer and providing a false account of the story's narrative and resolution to 4chan and YouTube, using it to escape the cartridge onto the Internet, declaring, "Now I am everywhere." A secret note from Jadusable after an apparent
epilogue from his roommate Tyler (who accompanied Jadusable to the old man's former house after the first time he played the game) offers the "true" telling of events and references videos that were never published, seemingly because BEN had deleted them. After publishing his final account of the past week's events, called TheTruth.rtf, Jadusable is never seen again.
Moon Children Two days after BEN escapes from the cartridge a cult calling themselves the Moon Children is discovered. A reader discovered a cipher on Jadusable's YouTube channel that eventually led them to a private website,
youshouldnthavedonethat.net, in which three moderators discuss the upcoming "
ascension" of one of their members. A post by the website's administrator, using the moniker DROWNED, appears to speak directly to the readers telling them that their intrusion has been discovered. By exploring the various links, readers were able to discover various details about the cult's background and were able to start contextualizing the prior arc. In life, the original Ben from the
Haunted Cartridge was a member of the Moon Children who had been sacrificed alongside several other individuals under the pretense of achieving ascension. The cult's ideology seemed to congregate around a
prophecy of
end times in which the Moon destroys the Earth. This doctrine was provided to them by their deceased
prophet Kelbris, who died under questionable circumstances, and is now seen within the cult as evidence of his own, successful 'ascension'. As the three day cycle progressed, readers were able to contact a moderator going by the moniker Ifrit, who answered several questions before disappearing and confirming that the original 'Ben' was sacrificed on April 23, 2002. As the third day began the website showed apparent signs of glitching and collapsing, with links that previously worked being broken or leading to nonsensical places and the chatter between the Moon Children growing more manic. To try and give themselves more time to uncover the mystery surrounding the cult, a reader uploaded a YouTube response video playing the Song of Time - a song in ''Majora's Mask
that could send Link back three days. Shortly after the video was published, youshouldnthavedonethat.net'' went offline. The following day, the website returned in an unfinished glitching state - identical to the day the readers discovered it - revealing that in-game actions from ''Majora's Mask'' had effects on the website. With this newfound knowledge, the readers used in-game actions and video responses to advance the story, establishing contact with a character named Rosa, as well as the soon-to-be-ascended moderators with the monikers "Insidiae", "Nekko", and "Duskworld23". However, as a result of the readers actions changing the course of "history", various characters that made it to the end of the original cycle were prematurely taken away or outright killed in this new cycle. It became apparent that every time the website reset by the readers it provided them with a new opportunity to try alternate paths, and through trial and error the readers eventually found the right course of actions to uncover the mysteries of the Moon Children. On November 8, another video uploaded on Jadusable's channel signaled the beginning of the arc's epilogue, with the coming months seeing small changes made to the Moon Children website. On February 17, 2011, a new forum called
Within Hubris was launched as a central hub for the audience to use during the third arc. Within a week of the site's discovery, certain readers in real life began receiving newspaper clippings in their mail that detailed an apparent murder-suicide that took place "three months [ago]" in New York and an apparent message from BEN. On February 27, a video, known as
h b i s r e a l was uploaded featuring the interior of the house in the newspaper. However, before the third arc could be released, Alex Hall put the story on indefinite hiatus until 2020.
Awakening Awakening is the third and final arc in
Ben Drowned, beginning in March 2020 with the reactivation of Jadusable’s YouTube channel and ending on October 31, 2020. Due to its size the arc is colloquially divided into two parts:
Methods of Revolution, which uses a
found footage format centered on exploring a mysterious hotel, and
The Last Hero, which refers to Sarah’s journey to save the corrupted world from the
Haunted Cartridge arc.
Part 1: Methods of Revolution After years of silence, Jadusable's YouTube account reactivates and posts a video featuring a character named Jadus, who begins speaking directly to the viewer while recounting an
alternate history that unfolded in the nine years since the
Moon Children arc. In this timeline, an unexplained event in 2012 triggered a global collapse, leading to a second
Great Depression and the spread of a deadly pathogen named H.E.R.O.E.S., which contributed to the breakdown of American society by the end of the decade. The story is told through in-universe YouTube uploads and interactive
ARG elements. It initially follows a character referred to as “the Second Player,” who awakens in a corrupted simulation known as the Ethereal Hotel. Audience members guide his actions through community voting, similar to a
Choose Your Own Adventure format, and the Second Player's journey is told through a real life
found footage format. As the Second Player explores, he encounters Abel, evades a gas-masked entity called the Jailer, and uncovers fragments of the world’s backstory through disjointed flashbacks. These include revelations about digitized human souls being absorbed into a
collective AI, an encounter with a man named Baker who gives a cryptic warning, as well as the ultimate fate of what happened to Jadusable at the end of the original story — he was consumed by a mysterious entity known as "The Father" after venturing too deep into the glitched cartridge. The arc concludes with the Second Player’s death at the hands of the Jailer, the result of a misstep determined by audience choice, and the narrative then shifts to follow a new protagonist, Sarah. The new protagonist, Sarah, also awakens in the Ethereal Hotel and encounters Abel. As she navigates the dream-like space, the audience cautiously has her choose to trust Abel, hoping to avoid the previous protagonist's fate. Abel seems pleased by this and ends up delivering an "entertainment package" to her room containing a liminal version of a
Nintendo 64 and the original
''Majora's Mask'' cartridge. The audience decides to interact with the game console in lieu of exploring the hotel and as Sarah grabs the controller she finds herself inexplicably drawn into the game world. She finds the game nearly unrecognizable — the code of the game has been corrupted for so long that the world itself seems like it's deeply sick. At the edge of the glitching world she encounters a fragmented spirit of Ben, who has been imprisoned within the cartridge’s code waiting for the inevitable end. Sarah learns that numerous human souls — including Jadusable and Rosa — were trapped within the dying game's code by The Father and are suffering alongside the degrading game world. Ben implores her to help free them and Sarah uses the Ocarina to travel back in time to the beginning of the game to try and prevent the events from the
Haunted Cartridge from occurring.
Part 2: The Last Hero The final part of
Awakening returns to the original storytelling format of
Ben Drowned, with the key difference that the audience is now able to work together to choose the protagonist's actions in the story. Throughout Sarah's journey in the cartridge she confronts the Moon Children, saves the various souls trapped in the game world, frees Rosa from an endless time loop, and collects items for a mysterious character named Matt. Her path eventually leads to a surprise encounter with Jadusable — who fights and ultimately kills her. Her death triggers a real world website to be revealed for the readers, similar to the interactive
youshouldnthavedonethat.net from the
Moon Children arc. This new website revealed the truth of the bizarre digital world that
Awakening is set in; it's one of many virtual worlds that are a part of the "Eternity Project" — a series of servers that houses the digital consciousnesses of humans who opted to escape the distress of the real world by permanently uploading themselves (ascending) to live in virtual game worlds. While the majority of these virtual worlds function normally, the ''Majora's Mask'' world is hopelessly corrupted and broken due to it being a failed "beta" test of the Eternity Project a decade ago. It's heavily implied that the Moon Children were unwittingly used by the Eternity Project to gather data on the ascension process. Readers discovered additional locked pages that eventually led them to Eternity Project's
backend and a hidden command line. After some deliberation, the audience decided to input the hexadecimal code for reviving the player in ''Majora's Mask'' and causes Sarah to reappear in the game. In the arc’s climax, Sarah returns to the cartridge world with minutes before the moon crashes and encounters dozens of digitized humans arguing with each other. They debate amongst themselves back and forth whether Sarah should let the moon fall or perform the fourth day glitch — the same glitch that caused the world to fall apart and unleash BEN in the
Haunted Cartridge. One offers finality, while the other choice offers a potentially worse fate. Some of the digitized humans ask Sarah for oblivion, saying they've suffered in this broken world for far too long, while others wonder if they even have a soul left at all. The audience, and by extension Sarah, ultimately chooses to do the fourth day glitch in a last ditch effort to fix the broken world and corruption is released once again, transforming the game world into a surreal nightmare reminiscent of the original arc. As Sarah makes a final stand against Matt and The Father, she reunites with Jadusable, who ultimately decides to help her confront the corrupted simulation and defeat Matt. Despite their victory, The Father arrives determined to erase the world, believing it has too many anomalies to be fixed. Sarah shows The Father the Pendant of Memories, an item she collected after saving Rosa, that represents the willpower and the souls of the digitized humans in the cartridge. After some contemplation, The Father agrees to give the world another chance by removing all harmful anomalies — including Sarah herself — while restoring the cartridge to its original, uncorrupted state, allowing all of the digitized souls to at least be able to leave peacefully. The series concludes with Ben, now inhabiting
young Link's body, waving to the audience beside the now-purified Elegy statue, with Sarah, Jadusable, and The Father's fates left unknown. ==Reception==