The Windmill Guy

You might be familiar with Ocarina of Time, the first Zelda game on Nintendo 64. There's some time-travel stuff that happens, which is loads of fun to think about. In particular, there's one guy who stands in the windmill all day long in the Adult-Link times, doing nothing but complain about a "mean kid [who] came here and played a strange song" that made his windmill spin out of control¹. He teaches Adult Link the Song of Storms. Link then has to go back as Little Boy Link and be the mean kid.

Now, I was doing a little bit of thinking on time travel paradoxes earlier today, and those of you familiar with 'em will recognize this one here. Little Boy Link gives the windmill guy the Song of Storms, but he also receives it from the same guy as Adult Link. So who is the composer of the Song of Storms? (Hopefully you realize I'm asking about a composer in Link's little world, not about somebody working at Nintendo.)²

Anyone who has watched the Legendary Frog movie "The Return of Ganondorf" recognizes that the Song of Storms is used in association with insanity. Figures. That windmill guy seemed just a bit off his rocker anyway. Might I suggest that thinking about this paradox was just too much for his poor little mind and drove him over the edge?

Now, there actually is a very easy way to resolve this. First I present you with what the windmill guy says when Little Boy Link first talks to him:

Go around! Go around and around and around! What fun! I'm so happy! I'm a music man who loves to go around and around! Go around and around!!! I'm trying to come up with a musical theme inspired by this windmill...going around and around and around!!!¹

So the windmill guy is a composer. The whole Song of Storms is already playing when Little Boy Link first arrives in the windmill, so we have reason to believe that the windmill guy had already come up with enough so that Link could use it to screw up the windmill.

That leaves two questions for us to answer:

1. How come Link could affect the windmill, but the windmill guy couldn't?
2. What drove the windmill guy crazy, if it wasn't thinking about the paradox?

To the first question, I can't think of a better answer than "magic." Some ocarinas have it; some music boxes don't.

As for the second one, I guess the windmill guy just couldn't accept that not all instruments are created equally magical. That must have been what drove him nuts... y'know, like Snow White's evil stepmother. Remember her? Yeeeaaah, her. She was creepy.

Footnotes

1. Source: Ocarina of Time Text Dump, American Version
2. Source: "Who Created the Song of Storms?"