Fortnite’s first teaser for Season 5 shows a mysterious mask that some players think is hinting at details for the next season’s theme.
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Shared earlier today through the game’s official Twitter account, a mask hovered above the Season 5 text with a starry background. The teaser fueled speculations about new skins and what the future of Fortnite Battle Royale might hold, but many of the questions came from players wondering what the mask even was. Some said it was Egyptian while others said that it appeared to be a reference to Japanese culture, and according to some evidence from a Fortnite player who owns one of the masks themselves, it appears that it’s the latter.
Redditor arminarmout07 shared a post on the game’s subreddit with an image of a Kitsune Yokai, a Japanese mask that closely resembles the one used in the teaser. Though it’s lacking the huge dimensional crack that Epic Games used in the Fortnite teaser, you can still make out the clear similarities between the real-life mask and the teaser image.
Going deeper into the Japanese mask’s background and what it might be, other players pointed out that “kitsune” is the Japanese word for fox, an animal which is said to have special powers in Japanese mythology.
“Some tales speak of kitsune with even greater powers, able to bend time and space, drive people mad, or take fantastic shapes such as a tree of incredible height or a second moon in the sky,” a description of kitsune from the Yokai Wiki page reads.
The supposed ability to bend time and space is certainly an interesting power to take note of with everything that’s going on in Fortnite right now. Dimensional rifts are sucking things up out of the map and spitting them out into real-world locations with objects dropping into Fortnite’s map as well. It’s still nearly impossible to predict what Epic Games has planned for Season 5 with many expecting a wild west map and theme, but the history behind the kitsune does coincide nicely with the state of Fortnite and what could come in Season 5.
An in-game alert to upcoming content was also shared shortly after the teaser went up to provide more context on the image, even if it was just barely anything new to go off of. Worlds will be colliding when Season 5 starts, the alert says, but which worlds those are remains to be seen.
