Fascinating new Shadow of the Colossus fan theory

[matoya]

Saw this on the SOTC reddit, and thought some people may be interested. It's a pretty serious analysis of SOTC (with a smaller one for ICO) that is worth checking out. I don't think I fully agree with the author but who knows? Everyone has known for years about the Nimrod / Tower of Babel connection, but I haven't seen anyone really tie the rest to religion.

Link: The Hidden Meaning of Shadow of the Colossus & ICO

TL,DR: This is about a hidden subtext not anything to do with in-game lore. The author suggests in addition to slyly referencing Nimrod / Tower of Babel, Ueda-san also references the Wandering Jew of Christian legend and Emon Saburo of Buddhist legend to criticize war and aggression in the Middle East. It sounds a bit odd, but if you read his reasoning it sort of makes sense, I'm not going to paraphrase here as I'd probably mess it up.

[matoya]

When I posted this I wasn't aware that the website is a white nationalist website. Sorry about that. But, like some of the comments in reddit I think this analysis is onto something, even if the politics are uncomfortable.

[GamerL]

I always found it fascinating how much Japanese media had commentary on the Iraq war back in the 2000s, it wouldn’t surprise me if SOTC was part of that trend.