Untitled

Some headcanons on Shadow’s powers after being brought back in a post-manga scenario:

Sunlight doesn’t hurt him, but it does make his powers weaker. Strong, direct sunlight can even drain him to the point that it saps his physical energy, making him tired and cranky.

He’s much more comfortable in weaker light: overcast or cloudy days, in the shade, indoors, at dusk/dawn. His powers grow stronger the darker it gets, and in good solid darkness — like at night, or underground — he can do pretty much all the things he could do when he had the Dark Mirror boosting him. However, it’s not without cost. The Dark Mirror was a “fountain of darkness” he could draw on near-limitlessly; without it, heavy use of his powers requires time, rest, and food to recover from.

The Four Swords manga was first published on September 28th, 2004. Can you believe these guys are 16 years old now?!?

Vio: Red, the… the thunder storms still aren’t…

When I saw Akira Himekawa’s tweet about the five Links social distancing, I could help but try to recreate it in cosplay :P

Yesterday I promised there’d be fluff this weekend, so here’s both figurative and literal fluff: Pokemon trainer Links - featuring Red’s giant, fluffy Arcanine :D

I mean, caveats and disclaimers here.  It’s totally possible that I’m reading too much into this, or that some meaning got altered in translation.  And even if I’m right about this: that doesn’t really matter.  You’re not obliged to ship something just because it’s “canon,” or because the authors endorse it.  You can ship things that are canon, not canon, ambiguously canon, never-gonna-be-canon-in-a-million-years.  You don’t have to ship anything at all if you don’t want to

That said:

“There was an especially strong fan response in Japan and overseas to the friendship between Purple Link and Shadow Link.  As manga authors, we feel blessed that the characters’ feelings came across so clearly.”

They say “friendship,” sure, but outright saying “a whole bunch of people ship them and that’s exactly what we had intended" probably wouldn’t have gone over so well with Nintendo.  (Besides, Vio and Shadow are friends, too.  Ideally I would think your romantic partner should be one of your best friends.)

But look at what they did say.  They mention the fan response - which, sure, hasn’t been 100% shipping, but… it’s been a lot of shipping.  Whatever your personal stance on the pair, you gotta admit a lot of people do ship them.

Himekawa goes on to say they “feel blessed that the characters’ feelings came across so clearly.”  If you say you have communicated clearly, you mean that the person you’re communicating with interpreted your message the way you intended them to.

If the fan response - which has been, to a major degree, “they’re in love” - makes Akira Himekawa say that the characters’ feelings “came across clearly,” that implies that “they’re in love” was the intended message in the first place.