While Lunarlla disabled embedding because they (their pronouns are they/them) were getting a lot of backlash, which I will discuss further in, I want to provide the link here in case the embedding is allowed down the road or if anyone wants to go to YouTube to watch.
This video is my new Link is Dead theory. The video and my original response posted on a personal blog both came out in 2021, two years before Tears of the Kingdom released, so there will be no mention of TOTK content.
THE GREAT PLATEAU
Lunarlla claims it's suspicious that Link doesn't awaken with more than three hearts and more than one stamina wheel after 100 years of resurrection when it's likely he was fully "upgraded" when he fell at Fort Hateno.
The implication is that the Shrine of Resurrection was sabotage, or at least sabotaged. The Shrine of Resurrection, according to Lunarlla, should have been able to restore Link beyond what it did. In Zelda's research notes—page 8 specifically, inset—Zelda confesses that she's unsure "we have made all adjustments necessary to restore it to full working order." This is in a world post-Sheikah/Yiga schism; the Sheikah willingly parted from their technology after they became the source of fear for many Hylians, according to Cado in Kakariko Village:
Consider these points:
In order for the Shrine of Resurrection to fit into the monks' plot, they would need to plan for the Hero to be mostly dead, but then would have to allow him to be...mostly resurrected, instead of following after him and finishing his life before he's ever put into the shrine
The monks would have to count on Zelda and the Royal Scientists to unearth it 10,000 years after its burial/its loss after the Sheikah/Yiga schism, and in doing so, Zelda would have to know its purpose in order to bring Link there for a failed resurrection
Rather than the above scenario, I propose Zelda and the Royal Scientists failed to completely restore the Shrine of Resurrection. They had no guidance because the knowledge was mostly lost to the Sheikah, having turned away from their tech to appease the Hylian citizens. There's nothing to suggest to what degree the Shrine was capable of healing. We have no proof that it was ever intended to bring Link back to his prime when the Shrine's true purpose may just have easily have been bringing him back from the brink of death and no further.
We can assume the Shrine finished its resurrection because the fluid began to empty from the tank before Zelda calls out to Link; if it were a tool of the Sheikah monks, why bother draining at all? Why not hold Link there in stasis until Zelda's powers gave out and Ganon was able to complete his resurrection in the castle? Even if Link did awaken at that point, he would have no realistic chance of winning a fight.
Lunarlla is unable to produce a motive for why the Shrine of Resurrection would be used in a scheme to take down the Hero, so it must be assumed that there isn't one.
"The fact that shrines even end with the things required to regain his 'essence' is, in and of itself, suspicious."
How so? The implication from Lunarlla is that there is a connection between the essence (his hearts and stamina, specifically) being missing when Link wakes from the Shrine of Resurrection and the essence the monks give him for completing a shrine. Further, the implication seems to be that the essence taken from Link has been provided to the monks.
What the monks hand over to Link is never really explained. But to provide an alternative to Lunarlla's claim, I offer:
They interred and mummified themselves after Calamity Ganon was sealed 10,000 years ago knowing the next Hero would need training, guidance, and divine help on his quest to end Ganon when he awoke; rather than siphoning off Link's essence and returning it as part of a contradictory plot to weaken Link, I suggest the monks sacrificed their own energy, their own lives, to restore him, according to their Goddess-given prophecies and revelations.
I call it a sacrifice because of how they disappear. See the embedded video from BeardBear; the monk disappears with a stream of green particles and the words "With your arrival, my duty is fulfilled." The green is different from the light blue of the Sheikah teleportation. Even the barrier surrounding and presumably preserving the monk is the same shade of blue seen when Link teleports using the Sheikah slate, the technology dripping when he downloads a rune, when he calls his horse using the ancient saddle, when he spawns the Master Cycle Zero, and when the rune bombs explode.
Green is primarily the color of ghosts.
Poes are blue also, true; however, poes are unnamed spirits, the unknown dead. The Champions are surrounded with the same green spiritual fire. Important spirits are coated in this green, visible even to "regular" citizens, as evidenced by Yunobo seeing Daruk after the freeing of Vah Rudania.
In other words, rather than teleporting away, the monks are dying and fading away to become spirits; I go so far as to suggest the spirit orb they give to Link is their actual spirit, or essence, and the trial of the shrine is to prove that Link is worthy of receiving it. It's a test and a training session.
Lunarlla doesn't offer an explanation for what their disappearance means or for why the monks would be giving him a tool to recover hearts and stamina if they were truly on the side of the enemy. Again, we must assume there is no motive, no reason, and thus cannot be true.
"One of the cutscenes that follows the activation of the Sheikah technology is what leads to the Malice appearing around Hyrule Castle?"
Since Lunarlla addressed the metatextual and in-text appearance, I'll do the same.
Metatextual: the directors hid Hyrule Castle to make the reveal of the Malice that much more impactful during the cutscene. If we look closely, we can see the guardian pillars around the castle, but without any context behind what they are, they're easy to miss or ignore. The castle is shown enough to see that it's there, still standing—the castle looks fine enough to essentially ignore it. Part of why Death Mountain is erupting is probably to draw the viewer's eye away from the castle to keep from looking too hard.
Of course the Malice isn't present yet. The directors want the reveal to be impactful, the same way walking out of the Temple of Time during Ocarina of Time was impactful because we immediately saw the ring of fire around Death Mountain, our first major clue that things had gone wrong in the time we were sleeping; we're in a prolonged sense of the familiar but uncanny in this sequence. Instead of being faced with Sheik, the altered inscription on the pedestal of time, and our towering height to hammer home things have changed, we're seeing a new version of Hyrule. Nothing is overtly wrong, but we know something must be hidden among the uncanny valley landscape.
In context: I have more questions for your consideration.
If the monks were working for Ganon, why would they have waited until the Sheikah technology was awakened to "alert" Ganon to Link's presence? Why not warn him directly after the Shrine of Resurrection was shut off? Why not while he was gathering spirit orbs and runes from the Great Plateau's shrines?
Why not take the opportunity to actually kill him while Link could have been potentially trapped in those shrines?
Lunarlla follows up by saying,
There's no true reason for [the malice] not being there prior. Perhaps it's to allude to the explanation that these are things meant to aid in the hero's quest in defeating Calamity Ganon, and are said to be alerted by his presence?
I agree with this. To go further:
It's strange to have the malice that should've been surrounding the castle for the last hundred years, and was shown to have appeared when Calamity Ganon awakened, not show itself until the specific action of activating the Sheikah technology is committed.
Consider what other Sheikah technology has been activated: the Shrine of Resurrection, the Sheikah slate, four shrines, the runes.
Lunarlla doesn't explain the difference between the Sheikah towers and the other Sheikah technology—in other words, what makes the towers so significant that they are what awaken Calamity Ganon and trigger the malice, and not all the rest of the Sheikah tech?
They imply that the towers alone act as a beacon to alert Ganon that the Hero is alive and well and is back in the world. I agree. However, Lunarlla's presumption that the towers alerting Ganon proves that the Sheikah monks are on Ganon's side isn't supported by anything in the text. What makes the other Sheikah technology different to Calamity Ganon is that he cannot see those things. Towers bursting from the ground all across Hyrule, including right near the castle in Central Hyrule Field, is something Ganon can see happening. That's the indicator to him that something has changed.
Yet again, Lunarlla doesn't provide a reason why the monks would have possibly obscured the malice around the castle until that moment. Instead, I suggest Ganon felt no need to be posturing around the castle because he was under no immediate threat; Ganon has been constructing a new body in the castle, held at bay by Zelda's powers:
The pulsing heart sac in the beginning is essentially the womb inside which Ganon has been gestating. This Hyrule Compendium entry confirms that Ganon's body is "incomplete."
In other words, Ganon may not be interested in expending the energy to threaten the castle openly because he already effectively controls it. Instead of the monks sounding an alarm or the towers being programmed to alert him, Ganon sees that the threat he worked so hard to eliminate has revived and acts accordingly.
SHRINES
To turn our focus from the monks, let's look at the shrines themselves. Lunarlla suggests they have no value (until the very second line of their Link of the Past section, to spoil the surprise).
"There are three specific shrine types that I feel actually do [prepare Link in his fight]. The Great Plateau shrines, obviously, for providing Link with the runes and training him how to use them."
The fact that there are any shrines that contribute to Link's battle against Calamity Ganon, the monks' supposed master, effectively destroys most of the argument that the monks might be evil or traitors to the Royal Family.
Lunarlla fails to provide a single reason why the monks would give Link such valuable weapons if they were plotting to kill him in Ganon's name or to at least sabotage him to keep him weak for Calamity Ganon's sake. How would it benefit Ganon for Link to have the runes? The runes are the most basic tools and some of the most useful in his arsenal. When Link is stripped of all his weapons, clothing, and inventory during Eventide, challenge shrines, and the Trial of the Sword, even the Champions' Abilities are sealed. But not the runes. If nothing else, Link has his infinite bombs.
Although it is very much not recommended in the context of the game, it's a common challenge among players to complete the tutorial and run immediately to defeat Calamity Ganon. If Link chose to do this narratively, the monks would have provided their master's greatest enemy with the only tools in his arsenal. For what purpose?
Similarly, why would the Champions' Ballad monks be willing to upgrade the Champion abilities? Why would they be capable of it? How did the monks inside the Champion shrines create trials specific to each Champion, and for what purpose? It's not just Link the traitor monks are helping now—they're helping every Champion standing in opposition to their alleged master.
Furthermore, King Rhoam is the one who sent Link to the shrines to gather the "treasure" inside. Impa and Zelda both told Link to free the Divine Beasts. Does Lunarlla claim that the monks are acting independently of the other Sheikah? That they are uniquely working with Ganon, aligned more with the Yiga than with the Sheikah helping Link on his quest? If so, for what purpose?
King Rhoam died during the Calamity; how does he not know about the monks' treachery? Zelda, who has watched every step of Link's journey while she fights to subdue Ganon, has no idea that the monks are moving against her? Impa, one of the Sheikah warriors alive during the Calamity of 100 years ago, never questions the motives of the monks? Urbosa, who battles Yiga regularly not just as Champion but as the leader of the Gerudo, doesn't bat an eye at completing the shrine quests to become Champion in the first place? Never says anything to him about the monks when they meet after Vah Naboris is freed? How are the monks able to execute a plan to overthrow an entire kingdom—to murder a princess, the chosen Hero, and all of the Goddess' chosen Champions—to install a foreign tyrant on the throne without alerting a single person, including the intelligence network of ninja-inspired spies surrounding the entire Royal Family?
"Blessing shrines for serving as a way to learn and understand the world around him, which I feel is important as it familiarizes him with the land he's intended to save."
Lunarlla fails to explain how I should reconcile the idea that the monks are working against Link, setting him at all these disadvantages, but then are also helping him by teaching him about modern Hyrule.
The argument fails here for the same reason it did above: Lunarlla obliterates with one hit (or maybe three) their own argument about why the shrines have to be evil.
"And strength test shrines for acting as training sessions for combat."
I suggest that these are the least helpful type of shrine; you never fight the type of guardians you encounter in strength training shrines in the overworld. The combat you face outside of the shrines is more complex, more subject to the elements and environmental hazards. They do nothing more than establish the very basics of combat, but without the benefit of practicing puzzle solving you get in the rune shrines to test the real functionality of the combat styles.
"Why would these things that exist to allegedly aid Link's training for Calamity Ganon include things that are irrelevant to his fight with Calamity Ganon?"
It's true that there are no timed columns of spikes rushing at Link in his fight with Ganon. The room is barren, with few obstacles between you and Ganon's bio-mechanical body. Lunarlla fails to take into account all of the obstacles between you and Ganon's bio-mechanical body outside of that room, however.
You don't find spike columns; you do find bramble, stinging bees, projectile weapons, monsters with thrusting attacks, wild animals, Yiga members, guardians. The shrines aren't preparing Link just for the Ganon fight, as if he will spawn directly into each shrine and then the inner sanctum, but also for everything else he has to do to get there. Even if Link completes only the mandatory rune shrines and goes directly to Ganon, there is a lot of ground to cover between the Plateau and the castle. If he follows the story and frees all the Beasts and completes all the shrines, he'll have learned what to do if his weapons break—he can use Magnesis to drop a crate on top of a Bokoblin; he can distract smaller enemies with bombs to draw them away and then attack; he can learn how to navigate water using his runes and scrap wood; he can learn what elements might interact with each other to better face enemies in the wild.
Critical thinking is an important part of Link saving Hyrule, in other words. That's what the majority of the puzzle shrines are teaching him; he was already killed once by Guardians, the Champions fell in the Divine Beasts, and the entirety of the Royal Forces were wiped out at Akkala Citadel. Brute strength alone won't save the kingdom, and that's why Link solves puzzles.
As explained above, Calamity Ganon's body is being built until the moment Link steps into the room with him. How should the monks know exactly what to expect when it comes to the battle? In the inset video, Impa explains that the history of Calamity Ganon has turned into legends and fairy tales; King Rhoam says something very similar and then goes on to explain that after hearing a prophesy identifying the resurgence of a Calamity sometime before Link fell 100 years ago, the Sheikah started looking for the Divine Beasts and Guardians to serve.
True, the basics are known; that's how King Rhoam and the Champions are able to act. But where does it say what Calamity Ganon will do during a conflict? Looking at the tapestries, the legends all focus on the pig form Ganon takes; Calamity Ganon's Sheikah tech/malice Frankenstein form is something completely new; we know this because Ganon was never able to infect the guardians and Sheikah tech before the Calamity of 100 years ago. Even if the monks interred themselves 100 instead of 10,000 years ago, they still would not know what to expect out of a battle with Calamity Ganon.
Lunarlla doesn't offer any evidence to argue that they should, so I assume there is none.
"Lest we also forget the concerning reality that... Link can die in shrines."
Not in all of them.
Regardless, which Triforce piece does Link have?
Facing the shrines again and again despite knowing he might die is one of the ultimate tests of courage. Link has been asked to go, without the benefits of his memories or personal connections, and destroy the monster that shattered the kingdom of Hyrule 100 years ago—a being that was already responsible for the deaths of almost every person he does tangentially remember as his memories recover, and was nearly responsible for his own death. Forging his courage in fire is one of the greatest things the shrines can do for him.
"Shrines are fucking death traps. that's their real purpose. I cannot be convinced otherwise of this."
I return to a metatextual example again: I am not very good at combat in BOTW. I have no tricks or skill, I barely manage to flurry rush, I run from Lynels, I lose weapons and shields and go out of my way to gather materials to upgrade my armor despite constantly wearing Majora's Mask. But somehow, I manage to navigate Link through the shrines relatively unscathed.
I've only backed out of one shrine; I've never hit a game over in one of them. Compare my ineptitude to the canon portrayal of Link's abilities, inset. Lunarlla shows footage of this memory further into their video, but it's also relevant here. If I'm able to navigate the shrines without too much trouble, then especially for an in-text Link capable of defeating hordes of monsters on his own with just a scratch or two, the shrines aren't very good at being death traps. They don't kill Link.
Remember that Lunarlla agreed that there are shrine types genuinely useful for Link to challenge on his journey. So why, then, is it so difficult for Lunarlla to make the leap that if some shrines are useful, maybe all shrines are useful, even if they come with a level of danger?
"They do not, in the grand scheme of things, aid the hero at all in his quest to fight Calamity Ganon—outside of the reward for completing them." [emphasis mine]
Lunarlla yet again fails to see how they're contradicting their own claims. Link was mostly dead; he is now more than slightly alive. The shrines are an essential tool to making sure he's fully alive. Lunarlla even drops a line further down that destroys most of the credibility this entire section may have had, but we'll get there. For now, enjoy the idea of Miracle Max restoring Link in place of the Shrine of Resurrection.
They continue:
The solution to unlocking [the Under a Blood Moon] shrine is to have Link stand on the podium with nothing but his undergarments on as a blood moon rises. How do the monks know about blood moons? Why do they know about blood moons? And why would they be forcing Link to be in his most vulnerable state during one? [...] Why is there a shrine involve with one of the most prominent symbols for Ganon?
To test Link's courage. That's why.
The how? While the game offers nothing concrete, Lunarlla doesn't even begin to speculate to further their point. So I will:
Hino is an NPC at the Dueling Peaks stable and a blood moon scholar; it's almost a guarantee you'll have a chance to speak to him before you encounter your first blood moon. When you ask about the phenomenon, he says this: "It's happened so long now that no one really pays it any mind, but I have no plans to give up on my research." If, again, we concede that the monks are traitors and are lying about their motives, we still have no reason to believe Hino is lying. Hino's words imply that the blood moons would have started before the Great Calamity 100 years ago—why not be precise if they started so recently? So the blood moons reasonably started between 100 and 10,000 years ago. I suggest it was closer to 10,000 years; Hino defends his choice to keep researching a phenomenon considered so mundane by the rest of the population that "no one really pays it any mind." In other words, the blood moons may very well have been commonplace when the monks were originally interred.
STRENGTH TEST SHRINES
[...]When you defeat a strength test shrine, they will say this... "Your triumph over the test of strength subverts a prophecy of ruin. From the ashes of Hyrule, a hero rises." Now that...that is incredibly suspect and ominous wording. Defeating a Guardian subverts a prophecy of ruin, huh? Quite interesting when you consider the fact that 100 years ago, Link was defeated by none other than a Guardian.
Lunarlla doesn't elaborate on this point in the Strength Test Shrines section, so let me extend some questions:
If the monks are traitors working against Link, why would anything they say be credible? They also say "May the Goddess smile upon you" and that they are "dedicated to helping those who seek to defeat Ganon." If we have to take those as lies to believe Lunarlla's claims, why would we believe the monks when they speak about the prophecy and its subversion?
If we're assuming the monks aren't being sincere when they speak about the prophecy the same way they are when they claim allegiance to the Royal Family against Ganon, what is the purpose in revealing their hand?
What evidence is there that the monks' words about the prophecy are a condemnation of Link's actions in defeating the shrine, as implied by Lunarlla's claims?
The monks' words about the prophecy, I suggest, were the monks commenting on Link's prior defeat and his resurrection to become more powerful. The prophecy said that Hyrule would fall, and it did; the Hero fell with it. His return and ability to defeat the very same enemies that nearly killed him in the past is how the prophecy is being subverted. In other words, the prophecy did in essence come true, but Link has returned to disrupt the expected outcome—that Hyrule would remain under Ganon's control. Hyrule now has a chance.
LINK OF THE PAST
I already ruined the surprise of Lunarlla voiding the entire Shrines section, but now I can share the details.
"Breath of the Wild Link is absolutely a force to be reckoned with. His power, especially once you complete all the shrines, is not something to be taken lightly."
In other words, the shrines are of great value to Link, and thus the monks must be working to help him succeed, along with the others who know the prophecy, including King Rhoam and Zelda.
If the monks were working to sabotage Link, they are spectacularly awful at their jobs.
THE TRIAL OF THE SWORD
While this section opens with Lunarlla contradicting their condemnation of the shrines and monks by praising the Trial of the Sword for helping Link to recover his true power, let's focus on the following:
"How exactly did anyone, including Hylia, according to the monks, think it was a good idea to suppress the Master Sword's true splendor until Link went through... All that?"
Lunarlla interpreted the monks as saying the Master Sword is naturally base 60 power and glowing blue and the base 30 power without a glow is the sword being suppressed by Hylia and the Sheikah monks. I suggest another way of thinking of the Master Sword's power-up: the "underpowered" base 30 is the natural state of the sword and the jump to 60 is a special state released by being surrounded by evil. Rather than the monks releasing a limiter they had placed on the sword, does it not make more sense that the monks are allowing the sword to stay in an unnatural state?
Although we cannot take this as proof one way or the other because the evidence isn't within Breath of the Wild, there are there are other instances across the series where this happens:
The Wind Waker's Laruto explains that "Due to Ganondorf's evil designs, the Master Sword you hold has lost its power. [...] In order to return the power to repel evil to your sword, you must find another to take my stead in this temple and ask the gods for assistance."
One Makar and Medli are awakened, the Master Sword glows; they have to take action in order to power the sword up, raising it above its base ability
Skyward Sword's Fi guides you to the sacred flames to transform the Goddess Sword to the Master Sword—it doesn't glow when it's transformed, indicating the lack of glow is the base form, not a form where something has been removed.
"Why are [the monks] allowed to mess with the power of a sword that was made for the specific purpose of sealing the darkness?"
The Sheikah have been connected to the Royal Family as far back as Skyward Sword chronologically and Ocarina of Time in terms of release date. They were give the responsibility of watching over the Shadow Temple, the gathering place of "Hyrule's bloody history of greed and hatred" (inset). Even in BOTW, the Sheikah are still servants of the Royal Family, protecting Zelda and Link even as Fort Hateno fell, acting as the Royal Scientists and helping to excavate the Divine Beasts in King Rhoam's memory. The Sheikah are proven to still be valued members of the Royal Family's inner circle. The more poignant question would be why the Sheikah monks are exempt from the prestige afforded the rest of the Sheikah people.
If the answer is that no one knows the Sheikah monks are down there, which also hides their scheming from the eyes of the royal family and other Sheikah, there's still their connection with the goddess and the Master Sword; how do they fake that? Why would they pretend allyship with Link just to power up the one sword destined to destroy Ganon?
Lunarlla fails to produce or even to explore an answer to any of these questions, so there must be none—in other words, without a reason why the Sheikah would have fallen from grace, we must assume they didn't.
"In memories, shrines with guardian scouts are included, and in trials during the Champions' Ballad, the guardians glow orange, an indication that they are currently free from corruption. Once they are corrupted, they glow Calamity Ganon's signature pink."
Why would it be significant that some guardians be "corrupted" but not others? Why are the orange shrine guardians held in opposition to the corrupted guardians in the Trial of the Sword if all the Sheikah monks are equally evil?
THE SCOURGES OF THE LAND
"The main bosses of the game, Ganon's very own creations, and Calamity Ganon himself, have the Sheikah technology they boast glowing not Calamity Ganon's hot pink, but the monks' signature orange."
Lunarlla is assuming the orange coloring belongs to the monks solely; to make this claim would be to condemn all Sheikah and all Sheikah technology equally. Every piece of Sheikah technology, from the Sheikah slate, to the Divine Beasts, to the towers, to the shrines, to the Master Cycle Zero, to all ancient weapons including the guardians, all have orange highlights with their Sheikah blue. But that is not a claim Lunarlla has explicitly made.
"[T]he Blights and Calamity Ganon himself would qualify as, like, the most corrupted things on the planet, right? [...] In spite of that, they do not glow the color of corruption. They glow the color of the people allegedly on Link's side. [...] Why would they be colored that way if it was not meant to be suspicious?"
Lunarlla wants to draw a distinction between the "uncorrupted" guardians that are under the control of the monks in normal shrines and the "corrupted" guardians that are present in the overworld and in the Trial of the Sword shrines. But they also don't explore the significance of that distinction, even as they claim the uncorrupted guardians are proof that the Blights are aligned with the monks. If the monks are aligned with Ganon, would both colors not be interchangeable?
In other words, Lunarlla cannot piece together the real connection between the monks, the uncorrupted guardians, the corrupted guardians, and Ganon. This is worth exploring, because contradictions keep cropping up in their arguments.
Let's take stock:
Orange-glow guardians are unique to shrines because they are uncorrupted by the malice, probably because they were out of reach and protected
Orange-glow guardians are under the control of the monks within the shrines
Lunarlla claims this is evidence of the monks being evil, because the guardians within the shrines both attack Link and because orange-glow Sheikah tech is associated with the Blights, versus the pink-glow of the majority of guardians
Pink-glow guardians are found in the overworld and in the Trial of the Sword
Pink-glow guardians are under control of Calamity Ganon
Lunarlla claims the guardians have different palettes depending on which "side" is controlling them (contradicting the idea the monks are aligned with Ganon if they on different sides)
Blights glow orange, meaning they're aligned with monks, meaning the monks are aligned with Ganon because they are Ganon's creations
Lunarlla claims to want to explore the significance between the colors, but only offers more unanswered questions.
If the monks and Ganon are on the same side, why is it significant that there is a difference in coloration among the guardians? If they are on opposing sides and the corruption is a visual indicator that the guardians are no longer under control of who they should be—the monks, or at least the Sheikah—then the focus on orange versus pink makes sense. But if the monks and Ganon all have the same goal, to kill Link and keep Hyrule under Ganon's thumb, why would they not all be corrupted? Or why would the corrupted Guardians need to have been corrupted in the first place? They should have done Ganon's bidding without his interference.
Or if we take it a step further and assume that Ganon had to corrupt the guardians because the guardians were under control of the Sheikah and not the monks, why wouldn't the monks have added the guardians they control to the war? If the monks truly control the guardians in the shrine and are using them as tools to murder Link rather than train him, why could they not command the guardians under their direct control to do Ganon's bidding? Or if the guardians weren't under the control of the monks and still acted according to the original Sheikah programming, would that not eliminate the whole argument against the guardians orange glow connecting the Blights to the monks? It would connect them instead to the Sheikah, which would connect them to the technology, which would free the monks specifically from any wrongdoing.
To build on that reasoning, allow me to present the very image they chose for the quoted voiceover:
Compare the before and after of Vah Rudania with the Blight:
Vah Rudania doesn't have any exposed parts; the inner glow of the blue lights (not orange) are turned pink to show its corruption, as if the glow is coming from within the shell of the body—unlike Windblight and friends, which are individual pieces of technology held together by a "body" made entirely of malice.
The way the Sheikah-built technology is corrupted looks completely different than the Blights. Rather than them inhabiting an already built body with "cracks" for the malice to shine through, the Blights are unrelated pieces of Sheikah tech held together with a malice body. The pieces of technology don't house malice the way the guardians and Divine Beasts do, so the orange isn't being overpowered. It's not a matter of the Blights secretly signaling their allegiance but a coincidence in how they were constructed.
"There are multiple ancient guardian weapons in the game wielded by guardian scouts or crafted at Robbie's shop, but none of them resemble the Blights' nor Calamity Ganon's weapons. Where the hell did Ganon get those from?"
We don't know how the Sheikah weaponry works; no one in Hyrule knows how the technology works. Even Robbie is reverse engineering the weapons or relying on barely-refurbished tech to craft them on his behalf. It's possible the absolute control the Blights had over their own technological body parts allowed them to manifest an energy weapon suited to their needs in fighting their mirrored Champion.
I agree with this suggestion Lunarlla posited: "[D]id the Blights just naturally have the ability to control Sheikah technology because of the Sheikah technology they wear?" But let me take it a step further to explore why that is likely. Ganon has "infected" the Sheikah technology with malice; it has acted almost like a science fantasy horde of nano bots capable of hacking and controlling any technology. Essentially, the autonomous guardians have been reprogrammed. The Divine Beasts are not autonomous, so the Champions piloting them need to be replaced. The Blights likely mirrored the Champions they were sent to kill in order to create the best matchups possible.
There's only ever mention of one Sheikah Slate in Zelda's notes, so I don't think the Champions had their own versions. But they may have had something that allowed them to connect to the Divine Beasts. Or if not, the Sheikah tech attached to their bodies may have allowed them to mirror the Champion abilities; the runes are born from them. The only one I struggle to explain is Urbosa's electricity, which is not a rune. Maybe it's just summoning the electricity inside Vah Naboris' body and redirecting it, rather than summoning or producing electricity from "nothing" (atmospheric charges, etc.).
Lunarlla says this "raises" incredibly concerning implications without, yet again, really delving into what those are. That there is a connection between the monks and the Champions? I explained above that the monks created trials for the Champions to become Champions, and Lunarlla hasn't actually made a single statement about what the implications are or what is so daunting or concerning, just that it is.
BENEATH THE GROUND
"Just like the Sheikah technology rose from the ground, so too did Ganon himself. It seems he also knew of the plan to seal him prior to his resurrection as he quite instantly enacted a damning plan of his own."
King Rhoam is recounting to Link the Calamity of 100 years ago not happened, both the leadup and the event itself, so we knew he was speaking about his Calamity, and not the one of 10,000 years ago—meaning, of course, that Ganon was breaking out of a seal that had held for 10,000 years; if we believe BOTW is at the very end of the timeline, Ganon has been sealed countless times before. If we disregard the rest of the games and stick only to BOTW, Ganon is known to have been sealed at least once before the Calamity 100 years ago. Ganon is not stupid. He had at least 10,000 years to scheme. That's why he targeted the guardians and Divine Beasts; they were they keys to Zelda and Link's success 10,000 years ago, so it follows that Ganon would have learned from his defeat and created a new plan.
If he had come up with the plan impulsively as soon as he was freed from his seal, how would that implicate the monks?
"It's almost as if [Ganon] knew of these 'prophecies' so constantly mentioned as well, and thus knew exactly how to cease their success in his defeat. [...] How would he truly know this one will resemble the one from 10,000 years ago without some semblance of granted knowledge?"
The prophecies were about Ganon and his actions; why should he not have an idea of what they said? Or if he had never heard what they literally said, they were formulated around Ganon's plans. And considering that, the prophecy is less of a prophecy and more of a history lesson, which makes it more difficult to pinpoint where the monks had a hand in manipulating the prophecy to assist Ganon.
They didn't withhold anything, because King Rhoam still found the Divine Beasts and guardians; did they plant the prophecy for King Rhoam to find in the hopes that he would unearth the Divine Beasts and Ganon would be able to use them for his own benefit? If that's Lunarlla's claim, why not leave them buried and force King Rhoam to battle without them? Ganon would have had a better chance at success if they had remained off the playing field, but I will accept the argument that he is too greedy and craves revenge too deeply to miss the opportunity to insult his enemies as he injures them.
Ganon isn't a passive player in the matter of the prophecies, the Calamity, or attacking the kingdom. Hyrule is on the back foot because Ganon is the one launching the attacks; he has autonomy in his role as the aggressor. Link and Zelda are always forced to act second. That's the "granted knowledge" that Ganon has. Rather than giving the credit to monks, implying they create a whisper network throughout the shrines and somehow reached out to Calamity Ganon to inform him of what Link and Zelda were planning, allow Ganon to have it. He is the one orchestrating every Calamity.
The similar mummification process that Ganon(dorf) and the monks share is interesting, but one is the ritual mummification based on a real life Buddhist rite and is (as far as I can tell) considered sacred as it is a path to enlightenment, and the other just looks...ghoulish.
Compare the way the monk and Ganondorf look.
The monk is skinny, yes, but their skin is relatively smooth; they're in a serene pose. Their face is designed to invoke grandparents or the cartoon stylization of an ancient turtle (including the sea turtle in Majora's Mask). They are regal and quiet. They look like they've been meditating for 10,000 years, meaning their design carries across their character in their visual representation as well. They look frail but not frightening. Their death isn't sad because they look as though they've prepared for it. This has been their purpose, so they will quietly fade away, likely to reach enlightenment like their historical and real world inspiration.
Ganondorf, however, belongs in a mummy movie.
There's nothing smooth or serene about this ghoul. His skin is either gone or has shrunk even further than the monks' and hugs the very fibers of his muscles. He looks like he is in pain with that pose; he looks frail but in the same way that Imhotep in The Mummy (1999) does—in that he will still find a way to rip your body apart with little effort.
Even if the technique were the same, it's clear the circumstances were very different. I love subverting the "ugly means evil" tropes, so I'm a little disappointed to have to reinforce its use here, but I suggest the body language (in-game) and design elements (metatextual) are contradicting Lunarlla's claims clearly.
THE CHAMPION'S LAMENT
"So, you're telling me that these fucks are allowed to create a weapon that can kill anything in one. Single. Hit. and they put Link through a trial wielding this weapon to aid his fight with Calamity Ganon but don't let him take it to his fight with Calamity Ganon?"
Yet again, Lunarlla forgets about the presence of stinging bees and bramble on the way between The Great Plateau and Hyrule Castle.
If the monks were truly on Ganon's side, they would have had an easier time sending Link on his way with the Obliterator and watching him die because he snuck too close to a horse.
When Link loses his hearts and the Obliterator beings to glow, I interpreted that as the trade off; Link can't get something for nothing during these trials. To grow stronger, he must face his fears. To wield such a powerful weapon, he must give up the majority of his life to power it. Lunarlla implies the trade is made in such a way that Link fails to benefit; it's only made to punish or deprive him, not to empower him. It challenges him, yes, because these are divine trials. But the trade necessitates Link lose something to fuel the Obliterator, meaning he wouldn't be able to keep it with him and maintain his hearts. In the same way that Eventide and the challenge shrines can remove or suppress Link's possessions and abilities, I suggest the Obliterator would similarly suppress him so that he couldn't try to cheat with hearty durian meals. You cannot get around a trade for something so powerful.
That is also the reason why the Master Sword requires a certain number of hearts to release from the pedestal in the forest; Link must prove his bravery, strength, resolve, and willingness to sacrifice in exchange for holding such a powerful weapon. The precedent for losing hearts to hold a weapon is set in the same game, the base game even, that the Obliterator debuts in. Is Lunarlla willing to contend the Master Sword is also a tool for Ganon? Is the Deku Tree aligned with the monks because he expects Link to show wisdom in knowing when to let go? He is willing to let Link die (see inset) trying to pull the Sword, so why is he treated differently?
"[...] A recreation of the Blight fights where you were restricted to what the Champions were left with when they had to fight them. How. The absolute. Fuck. Do they know that? They claim it's illusory realms created by Link's fear, but, like, Link wasn't there when the Champions were defeated. That's why they were defeated!"
Because Link knew them and what weapons they use. It's that simple. The same way Link's weapon is the Master Sword, Daruk, Revali, Urbosa, and Mipha all had their own signature weapons.
If we wanted to give this claim—that the monks were witness to the Champions' demise—the benefit of the doubt, we could still argue that Link subconsciously chose those weapons for the illusions specifically because that's what he expected the Champions to be using, and that's what filled in the majority of the details for those fights.
What does Lunarlla suggest the purpose of the illusion is if it's not what it says on the packaging? What does it reveal about the monks? What "concerning implications" are they dancing around without naming? They present the answer the game presents, that the monks are able to access Link's memories and create a realm of illusion (similarly to how the Silent Realms in Skyward Sword work, or how the Trial of the Sword work, I think) but then dismiss the idea out of hand without so much as an exploration as to what they mean by "concerning implications."
"Everything you've done leads to a monk literally trying to kill Link with his bare fucking hands."
Does he though? What indication is there that Maz Koshia is fighting to the death? Compared to other challenge shrines, Link is able to keep his inventory, his food supply, all his weapons, and the Champion abilities. This final battle is for Link to show the results of all of the training he has done through the shrines, Divine Beasts, and the Champion trials. Maz Koshia wants to see his full ability as the Hero to see if he is worthy of the Master Cycle Zero and ready to defeat Calamity Ganon.
Maz Koshia doesn't even require Link to kill him before he stops the fight and rewards him; Lunarlla concedes that the combat shrines are beneficial to Link, so why does that not extend to Maz Koshia's training now?
"A monk who eerily shares attacks with the Blights and with Kohga, by the way."
The Yiga are Sheikah who broke off close to 10,000 years ago. The Blights use Sheikah technology. Not understanding something doesn't make it eerie.
CONCLUSION
"It's just a theory."
It's a 30-minute product of planning, scripting, recording, compiling footage, and editing all posted on YouTube.
THE HBOMBERGUY TWIST
I have not spent over 8,000 words so far attacking Lunarlla because I have a bone to pick with them; in fact, any lingering...annoyance not edited out had nothing to do with them but with the presentation of their arguments.
This is an essay about criticism and how fandom spaces claim to value it while simultaneously shooting it down whenever it suits them.
There are two (and a half) issues to contend with:
The (especially fandom-based) treatment of analysis as something that they can win by being correct
The unwillingness for the above group to engage with their own thinking to better the skills necessary to create a solid critical essay
The real-world impact of atrophied critical analysis skills in terms of media literacy and understanding the world around us
To start, I'll define and contextualize how I'm approaching literary criticism as a concept; I have a Bachelor's in English from Temple University in Philadelphia and should have gone to grad school to further my education if my mental health hadn't suffered from the school environment. Now I write critical essays for fun. Here are the definitions I'm working with:
Literary Criticism
The approach to interpreting literature—e.g., identifying its themes and messages, finding deeper meaning in those themes/messages, without commenting on the quality of the work (a review). Writing an essay about the Sheikah monks being evil is engaging in Literary Criticism. It's a critical essay.
Literary Theory
This is the umbrella term for the meta-analysis of literary criticism. Theories are schools of thought dealing with contextualizing the way you approach your criticism. If you were to write critically about the way Zelda's arc in Breath of the Wild mirrors the specific coming-of-age girls go through, that her powers awakening are her reaching womanhood and all of the things womanhood Mean, you might be using Feminist theory to do it, or reading the text through a feminist lens.
Supported/Unsupported vs Wrong
If something is supported by the text, it means that I can quote sections of the novel, video game dialogue, etc. directly and be able to draw conclusions from the analysis of those quotes.
Zelda is the princess of Hyrule = supported claim; evidence is throughout the text supporting this
If something is unsupported by the text, it's more of a vibes-based reading; there's nothing that necessarily explicitly comments on the claim, or maybe there's a leap in logic made to get from what is in the text to the claim.
Zelda is a lesbian and in love with Mipha, who's in love with Link
(Most readings bring together a blend of supported and unsupported claims to weave together a wider story that you want to tell about the text.)
The Interlopers were Sheikah rebels who were banished to the Twilight Realm and turned into the Twili
If something is wrong, that indicates something blatantly contradicting the text; I suggest that it's easy for individual points to be not just unsupported but outright wrong, but it's...more difficult for a full reading to be wrong.
Link is the princess of Hyrule = factually incorrect in any game or series media thus far, blatantly wrong
These are necessary distinctions to make because Criticism and Theory are established terms with centuries of scholarship behind them; fandom spaces have latched on to "theory" in more of a scientific sense, which roughly boils down to creating a story to make the data make sense. The social media algorithm has set the fandom "theorists" up to be stuck with this term to get any recognition versus the literary terms, but there's also the issue of people not knowing the difference. Criticism and Theory have more familiar definitions that are in wider use outside of literary spaces, so it's easier for people to gravitate towards those terms.
For the sake of clarity, I'll refer to the "theorists" on YouTube and other social media as "lorists," as in lore-crafters or lore analysts, throughout this essay. It focuses on what the videos actually emphasize without confusing common-usage vocabulary and literary vocabulary.
Not being familiar with literary spaces enough to require new vocabulary for communal recognition also means that lorists might not be familiar with how criticism really works—the expectations, the conventions, the creative process.
There was a failure in my education to really discuss what criticism is, so I can't blame the fandom lorists completely; if their educations were like mine, then they were taught on purpose or by failure in execution that there's a way to be "correct" in criticism. In other words, the author wrote with one set meaning in mind, and our job was to find it; if we did, we were "right." It was something to win. We may have heard that "there's no right answer" in English class as opposed to in math, for example, but we were never really given the opportunity to internalize what the cliché meant.
My English classes insisted, "Jack represents the Id, Ralph the Ego, and Piggy the Superego." That was the correct answer in those classrooms, not just one interpretation of The Lord of the Flies through a Freudian lens. There was no room for other interpretations, as if we had a fraction of the experience needed to craft an alternate reading; we only received training in how to recognize the widely accepted or "canon" interpretation. I don't know how other classrooms across the nation might have handled teaching teenagers to think, really think, but being trained to only recognize certain patterns only allowed us to recognize one or two un-original interpretations and not to learn how to read into deeper meanings ourselves—Is Hamlet Crazy Or Is He Faking It? was one topic sentence I could choose for an essay in high school, and my answer was a resounding I Have No Clue.
The idea that criticism can be "won" in this way makes it difficult for the fandom lorists to leave room for doubt in their own arguments. Rather than asking rhetorical questions to show what they were unable to answer themselves, e.g. because there's not enough evidence in the text to provide something satisfactory, they may do what Lunarlla did throughout their essay and refuse to have an inner dialogue about the question, brushing it off as meaningless in the end. They can't leave any room for the possibly they're "wrong" in their interpretation, so the lorists choose not to chase down the logical progression to its conclusion; they have an idea in their heads, and rather than critiquing their ideas to craft a solid, well-supported argument, they double-down on the first ideas they have.
There is a third component to the recipe of lorists' half-baked criticism: the devaluation of analytical reading in wider fandom and even wider society as a whole. This meme may be familiar to anyone who has spent time in Tumblr fandom spaces:
Shanspeare (they/them) has a beautiful video essay on this topic: "Why the Curtains are Blue: The Implications of Being Uncritical." They discuss how English studies became so devalued that the above meme became popular and widespread; to summarize, English is seen as "useless" because it has no immediately identifiable monetary value, so there has not been historically an emphasis on developing critical thinking skills. (The historical background to how this happened is fascinating; please watch Shanspeare's full video!)
Because criticism isn't seen as a worthy pursuit, not worthy of doing well or outside of being a casual hobby, feedback is treated as an assault. It's not done seriously, so anyone engaging with the arguments with the intention of pushing back, furthering the questioning, or especially outright refuting, is seen as "doing too much," as Shanspere says. In other words, anyone engaging critically with a lorist's work is accused of bringing a sense of seriousness to something that was inherently unserious—like countering a joke with a "Well, Actually"-style correction.
The problem is that for many lorists, every lore video or essay is seen as unserious and any act of engaging with criticism is unworthy of real effort; they care enough to plan, write, edit, produce, and post their criticism, but not enough to allow others to engage with what is inherently a piece of media that exists to be engaged with. Fandom members react similarly to anyone who writes a critical piece that criticizes (common usage here) media for being homophobic, racist, sexist, etc.—more on this specific behavior later.
On the Wayback Machine, we can see that Lunarlla's video description once said the following:
As I mentioned in the introduction, Lunarlla did receive a torrent of hateful and offensive, transphobic comments; their decision to shut down comments for that reason is not a problem. The people attacking them for their essay were behaving like cruel children—anyone attacking a lorists or anyone who writes a "bad" critical essay out of a sense of entitlement for better-quality content is childish and does not have the moral high ground.
At the same time, however, it's not just because of the transphobia that they closed down comments. It's because comments were "scrutinizing this video to a very absurd degree." Without seeing the comments to review them, we can't judge objectively what people were saying and how "absurd" the scrutiny was; in other words, was it that people were challenging Lunarlla's ideas at all? Were they also writing 8,000-word essays rebutting their arguments? I assume the truth was somewhere in the middle, in that the commenters combined nitpicking with genuine engagement.
Because the Wayback Machine didn't accurately capture the comments, I can't provide proof of this, but Lunarlla at one point pinned a comment speaking against the critics engaging too seriously. "This isn't a persuasive essay," Lunarlla said. "It's just a theory."
As someone who comes from a literary background, the pervasive attitude Lunarlla exhibits—an attitude they have become the poster child for in this essay—is a problem. They create a 30-minute long critical reading of a text and post it with the title "Why I DON'T Trust The Monks And YOU Shouldn't Either." That is the definition of a persuasive essay title. And this was the definition of a persuasive essay; Lunarlla presented claims, backed them up with evidence, and opened up comments for engagement. They do say they appreciated the interesting comments that came in, but again, I'm not able to draw the line between an interesting comment or unacceptable comments without seeing the comments.
"Since I am very much an outlier in the theory community, this video draws comments like that in more commonly, so it is best to just disable the comments for now."
If I've interpreted the above quote correctly, it appears that Lunarlla blames the unpopularity of their claims for drawing the ire of commenters and not the quality of their claims. Interestingly, the like to dislike ratio swings far more positively on this video, as captured on July 20, 2024:
So we come to the other portion of the comment section that may have helped validate Lunarlla's belief: the viewers who seem to only want lore spoonfed to them and will accept what they are given without critiquing the content, creating reinforcement feedback for lorists like Lunarlla, encouraging them to do more of the same rather than learning to better craft their essays.
Lunarlla's presentation is lazy, preferring often to leave their questions open-ended (or even dismissing them outright as unworthy of exploring), which forces the viewer to come to the conclusion Lunarlla should have; however, because of the common prevalence of the The Curtains Are Blue meme mentality and the decline of literary reading, many in the audience are incapable of doing the work the lorists shirk and thus are incapable of recognizing how poorly crafted the arguments are—they accept and praise the critical essay because they don't know how to counter-argue anything presented.
Media Literacy Now, a nonprofit dedicated to improving the teaching of media literacy in public schools in the U.S., issued a report with some data related to the presence of media literacy as a subject in schools. In their 2020 report, they reference an article from Stanford University which claims a significant number of students tested for media literacy struggled to recognize bias or credibility in social media posts.
Pew Research Center, a research center reporting for the better understanding of societal trends, published in 2021 that reading for fun has dropped among 9 to 17 year olds according to federal data, hitting the lowest percentage in some age groups since 1984 when the report first started. In another 2021 article, Pew reported that 23% of adults said they hadn't read a book in whole or in part in the last year.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), a congressionally mandated project that interprets educational statistics to measure national student performance in several subjects, reports that reading comprehension among 8th graders fell in 33 states/jurisdictions with an additional 18 seeing no change between 2005 and 2019. Although EducationWeek, an education-focused group reporting on trends in education, says that reading comprehension tests are flawed, failing to accurately measure comprehension versus existing knowledge pools, we can still likely use the NAEP statistics as a broad indicator of the state of reading comprehension.
So it should be a good sign that so many members of fandom are engaging with the material enough to craft lore videos and to write critically, right? It should be. However, we come back to the combination of lorists shutting down engagement on their own work and of fans shutting down the practice of others to create analytical essays that critique harmful content in media. Reading and even writing critically can be hobbies, true; however, unlike, for instance, building model planes, playing with slime, or cooking, consuming art as a hobby often has the ability to influence our way of thinking, even if we're not actively engaging critically with the material.
For an extreme but important example, see Spielberg's regret following the release of Jaws and the rise of trophy hunting that helped reduce the shark population on the east coast of the U.S. by nearly 50 percent. Peter Benchley, the man who wrote the book from which Jaws was adapted, famously became a conservationist to try to balance out the harm his novel did. Although experts quoted in the Smithsonian article argue that there are other contributing factors, maybe even ones that were more effective at destroying the shark population than Jaws, any increase in shark hunting because of a novel or film is indicative of a Problem.
It may be tied to a lack of media literacy, specifically the failure to understand the credibility of a source, that the people of the summer of 1975 trusted Jaws to report something factual about sharks, or it could be a broader issue of fiction influencing reality.
To bring it back to something more contemporary, it may be a low-hanging fruit to mention YA Twitter—a subset of Twitter users who primarily engage in a community of (mostly but not exclusively adult) readers of Young Adult novels—but the overlap in the fandom lorists and their audiences and the YA community's constant war over criticism vs "cancel culture" is another extreme but prevalent example of the refusal to engage with criticism (both literary use and widespread).
The New York Times staff writer Katy Waldman published this article in 2020: "In Y.A., Where Is the Line Between Criticism and Cancel Culture?" The issue is a complex one, which I will not be delving into here, but as someone who used to be involved in Book Twitter and who wanted to publish YA novels, I have seen firsthand the criticism and the backlash. Generally, the initial critiques came from a well-meaning place as an attempt to warn especially marginalized people of material in a novel that could have real-world harm, either individually or in wider societal scale; because early release information so often lacks warnings, readers took it upon themselves to try to give people the information they required to make informed decisions about their reading habits. I have personally been surprised by sexual assault in novels because no reviews or especially marketing surrounding them bothered to mention its presence.
Not every single analytical read was made in good faith as a way to inform, of course; clout and power trips were part of the culture, especially on Twitter, but having read many of the critical reviews or analysis, I interpreted them as attempting good, even if they may not have achieved it.
But even with the analysis that had the best intentions, there was inevitably pushback, often not just because of the contents of the analysis but because of the act of the analysis. Because criticism is seen as lesser, as ruining the fun for people, anyone who tried to inform potential readers of what they might encounter in a novel was seen as stirring up trouble, of ruining the fun of anyone who enjoyed the novel or who wanted to read it.
Waldman writes this in her New York Times article:
Part of the job of the editor—part of the process of vetting and critique, from the submission stage through publication—is to anticipate the many possible reactions to a project, such as a romance that trivializes the Kosovo War. A kerfuffle like the one over “Wolves” “is a good immediate trigger point for me to look at the titles on my list and the products I’m considering and to take that beat of introspection,” an editor at a major publishing house, who works on Y.A. and children’s books, told me. “Even if you disagree with the way a critique is delivered, or with the results of the critique, there’s something there to be unpacked.”
Literary criticism, including critique of novels, of lorists' work, of what fandom has produced, is essential. Being able to analyze media helps us to better understand our culture, our biases, our own ways of thinking—if we shut down the conversations that are supposed to come with criticism, we shut down our ability to assess or even to change the way we function; life imitates art and art is influenced by life. Media and its criticism are caught in an ouroboros with the real world, constantly feeding from each other. Why should we take that tradition any less seriously because it's coming from a fandom space? Analyzing not Oscar Wilde and William Golding and Shakespeare but Kiera Drake, Sarah J. Maas, and Laurie Forest? Why when it's fanfiction should we not be able to view it through a critical lens and have opinions about it?
Maas' A Court of Thorns and Roses series has earned notoriety for its racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia (because there are zero trans people in the novels, which is just as meaningful as a talking point), and other claims of being problematique; if someone were to read ACOTAR without knowing how to read critically, they may not pick up on the issues of the protagonist Feyre being drugged and bitten non-consensually, forced to dance while inebriated, or the biological imperative in male fae that makes sex a mate-or-die style affair—except this time it's the women who could die.
Someone who may not know how to read critically, whose experience in fandom spaces has been poisoned with The Curtain Is Blue and This Is Just For Fun, may not read about male fae becoming violent in the pursuit of sex and see how it absolutely mirrors rape culture in the real world; toxic masculinity says that it's natural for men to get wild, take what they want, when it comes to sex. The fae in Maas' novel have an even stronger biological scapegoat built in; but to return to the Jaws discussion, if it's alright for the fae to treat Feyre like this in a romance novel, isn't it alright for men to treat women in the real world the same? Again, this might be an extreme example, but the novels are praised in some parts as feminist—shouldn't they do a better job of critiquing the very idea that men are beholden to their urges?
THE REAL CONCLUSION
So where does this leave us? What do we do about it?
I don't know. For the commenters and lorists who already see what they're doing as hobbies with no greater impact or not worthy of serious effort, I don't know how to change their minds. I didn't write an essay rebutting all of Lunarlla's points to present to Lunarlla like a peer review, but it was to highlight how easily each talking point could be contradicted, refuted, or at least explored further using evidence in the text. Who was the audience for that?
Me, for one, because I still have a shameful, petty side. But even if the comments weren't turned off, I'd never shove that long comment in Lunarlla's face because despite my thinking the boundary against engagement is harmful in a grander scale, it's still a boundary. So the audience is maybe someone who has felt a way about fandom engagement or in media engagement overall but hasn't been able to voice how they've been feeling, or for people who agree with me to have a place to put down their irritation and maybe find deeper understanding (or at least an option for why fandoms are the way they are, because this is not a formal research paper written by a researcher or journalist). Or maybe there will be people who are interested in criticism but don't know how to approach it and they'll be able to join the Zeltiks of the Zelda lorists.
Like many critical essays, this was a way to explore my thoughts, to wrestle with what I was seeing and to interpret it in a way that might interest or influence others; that's all criticism needs to be at its core.
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