Hear Ye, Hear Ye

“He’s huge!! So chubby!”

“Is he gonna goddamn dive already for fuck’s sake?”

This graffiti appeared overnight at 5 different job centres in Birmingham.

It’s referencing the increasingly harsh benefit sanctions in the UK which are punishing disabled people in particular.

Claimants who cannot work due to severe disabilities or chronic illnesses are being categorised as “fit for work” in order to meet targets and are not being given enough money to survive.

The majority of people who legally challenge their benefits sanctions or ‘fit for work’ decision have them overturned, but only after months without the money they need.

Estimates generally put the number of people who have died in the last few years directly due to benefit sanctions in the thousands. These include people who have died of starvation, exposure, because they couldn’t afford electricity to keep their insulin cold, or because they couldn’t afford treatment, among other things.

The DWP has even sent letters to people declaring them fit for work when in fact they have already died from their illness.

Fuck the DWP and job centres.

With Age of Calamity coming along soon, my hype levels have been through the roof. A sequel to Hyrule Warriors that’s also a prequel to BOTW, one of my favourite games ever? It’s like a dream come true. But due how the game is inevitably going to end, it also got me thinking of how dark BOTW was, so I made a compilation of all the creepy/messed up things I noticed, found out, or realised:

In the music for the Divine Beasts, you can hear a series of beeping sounds. This can be translated into a morse code signal. That signal is an SOS. For 100 years, the Champions were calling out for help with the only other things capable of hearing them being the other machines corrupted by Ganon.

The Bokoblins/Moblins/Lizalfos seem to be content with leaving people alone if they don’t enter their territory, considering they haven’t gone and destroyed the remaining villages. They’re moreso like animals, with their own hunting and gathering lifestyles. If left alone, they probably won’t go out of their way to attack people. They’re just as much of victims as Hylians are, as they wouldn’t have to be killed in the first place if Ganon hadn’t controlled them as his army.

The Zora tell Link that if Vah Ruta's corrupted production of rain is allowed to continue, it would result in deadly flooding in areas of Hyrule. Around the general Lanayru area, you can find the ruins of several Hylian villages partially flooded and lacking the Guardians remains found in almost all the other ruins across the land. Vah Ruta probably did create such floods beforehand after the Calamity while Link was in the Shrine of Resurrection.

The canonical reason for why in previous games you can find so many Rupees in grass or under stones is that they are placed there by a tiny race of creatures known as the Minish as an act of kindness. Considering how rare it is for this to happen now, Ganon fucked over Hyrule so hard that that even they were brought to the brink of extinction.

Many people were apparently so disheartened by the state of Hyrule after the Calamity that they were driven to suicide. If Link prepares to jump off a bridge with an NPC nearby, they’ll think you’re about to kill yourself and will try to talk you out of doing it.

In one of Zelda’s attempts to awaken her sealing powers, she passed out after doing so in freezing cold waters and Urbosa had to pull her out before she froze to death. Reading Urbosa’s diary tells us that said event happened a year at most after Zelda’s mother died. The poor girl was under so much pressure to be who destiny told her to be that she gave herself practically no time to grieve and nearly killed herself.

The Yiga Clan are a sub-group of Shiekah that have abandoned their allegiances with the Royal Family of Hyrule and chose to follow Ganon instead. Of the Shiekah we see in game, all of them expect Paya are either middle-aged, elderly, or children. Practically the entire generation of Shiekah that Paya was part of were so affected by the Calamity that they left to serve Ganon.

In one memory, Zelda is trying to enter a particular Shrine and gets frustrated at Link’s constant presence in the process. When you visit that corresponding Shrine later on, it ends up being A Major Test of Strength. If Zelda had somehow gotten down there, she’d probably have been killed by the Guardian.