u/Tuturo002

I definitely don't think every monster in SH3 was an actual person but there are many things that make what he say sound reasonable.

1 - The "monster" who killed Harry is sentient and he follows Claudia orders, also since the place where they lived wasn't a haunted town like Silent Hill shouldn't a monster like that be unable to exist there?

2 - Leonard also looks like a monster but he's also fully sentient, talks like a normal person and also Claudia was devastated by his death, if he really was that horrifying monster why would she be sad over it

3 - The cultists are very much still present in the church, the church definitely doesn't seem abandoned like the hospital or the amusement park, and yet we don't see any human there other than Claudia and Vincent, to me this one is the only place where most of the monsters are actual people

Why does Heather see them as monsters? I'm not sure, maybe she was so blinded by revenge the way she saw people got distorted, or ever since Claudia forced her to be impregnated with god in the mall she also started seeing a distorted view of reality

(And in Heather's defense though all of them attacked her first)

Crocus shows he had a deeper connection with Roger -> Shows him being revealed as a member of Roger's crew later on wasn't a last minute addition

Crocus saying Roger and his crew were waiting for someone -> Makes sense with the flashbacks we saw in Wano that Roger knew he was 20 years too late and that he wasn't Joyboy

Also Roger's speech about freedom and inherited will (two things linked with Joyboy) in chapter 100 while Dragon saves Luffy in Loguetown kinda proves this even more, if these two were hundreds of chapters apart like most other "foreshadowings" that are just a reach (Skypea for example) I wouldn't believe it but these two being 5 chapters apart makes me think Joyboy was a thing since the beginning but Oda forgot about it while adding new lore and only remembered about it in Fishman Island (and then forgot about it again until Wano)

The strawhats didn't get a single w in the arc other than escaping from the island alive

- Egghead was destroyed and is unhabitable now

- They couldn't save Vegapunk, his clones will probably find a way to revive him later on but in the arc itself they failed to protect him

- They couldn't even beat the Gorosei and a mentally nerfed Kizaru, Saturn died but it was due to his incompetence, not anything the SHs did

- The government still has access to the mother flame, seraphims and most other technologies Vegapunk developed

I even see some people talk about how this arc has 0 stakes solely because of Nika Bonney but she barely even did anything with this power anyway, the Gorosei she threw away was clearly alive and well after that

The only arcs where they had it this bad and didn't end the arc with a big party with their allies in the pre timeskip was Sabaody and Marineford, honestly if you don't see this you're just blinded by nostalgia

I see many people talk about how the powercreep after Dressrosa ruined the show or whatever but honestly it seems pretty tame compared to what happened after Ennies Lobby

Luffy went from beating all his main enemies in every arc in a 1v1 (bar Logia merchants like Aokiji and Smoker) to needing to team up with every single strawhat to beat them like against Oars, Moria and a single Pacifista in Sabaody or get crushed anyways like against Kuma or Kizaru, also he needed to team up with most Impel Down fugitives to barely beat Magellan

I guess you could say that Luffy needed to team up against a bunch of people to beat Kaido too but even then he was introduced as an unbeatable beast that barely anyone could even damage while Moria was a washed pirate and Pacifistas were one shotted by a bunch of people even before the timeskip

It just feels like it cheapens the story and turns it from one of the best games ever made that touches on topics like despair and sorrow like no other game ever did into some early 10s creepypasta like Sonic.exe, especially because the theories barely touch on the story itself and just focus on very minor things like that elegy of emptiness statue (guess we have to thank Ben Drown for that one)

I have no clue how these theories even got popular, even if we look at this game in the lens of "most of the game never really happened and it was all in his head" kinda like Silent Hill it would be much more meaningful to say that the game is about Link overcoming all the trauma he went through in OoT, dealing with the loss his childhood and Navi's death