#bruhhhhhh i NEED to get better at noticing this shit they had me FOOLED

[linksqueerawakening]

something i didnt realize until (relatively) recently is that the yiga in BOTW steal peoples faces. once i met a yiga and chuckled bc his face was so small for his head, and it stuck in my head. then a few irl days later i was wandering around and came across a merchant on the road and froze bc. it was the exact same guy! but this one had a name, not just unlabeled as "traveler" or something the way yiga are when you talk to them. and he was just a normal friendly npc

after that i started paying attention and realized that pretty much all of the disguised yiga along the roads in botw are using actual NPCs you can meet as their disguise. usually traveling merchants

ive been thinking about the implications for like a month now. like. can they not make their own original hylian designs? is the spell limited to only copying someone else? is the same thing going on in TOTK, or am i just not noticing it happening bc there are so many more NPCs wandering around so its harder to remember them all? if they arent copying people in TOTK, is it bc they only learned how to make new faces in the interim between the two games, or is it just that theyre copying people that link cant run into? we know there are more people in hyrule than the ones we see; several gerudo in BOTW mention their husbands who live in some other locations outside of gerudo town, presumably in homesteads outside of any town? but close enough that the married vai can reasonably send their money home and ya know. spend time with the guy they spent so much time hunting down. are some of those unseen husbands being impersonated by the yiga clan? are there more prisoners like the ones forced to make clothes in TOTK that are being kept for their faces? or have they just improved the spell? or am i just unobservant and they ARE copying NPCs we meet, and my memory is just bad? do any of the BOTW merchants know they were being impersonated? if they saw a yiga disguised as them, would they even know it IS a magical face-stealing assassin, or would they come to the far more plausible explanation that they have a coincidental look-alike or long-lost twin?

the one question i dont have is "why mainly traveling merchants?" bc quite frankly that just makes sense. someone that goes to and from settlements and stables, a face thats familiar enough to let in, to not question why theyre on the road, but not so familiar as to notice any out of character behaviors. it might just be the smartest bit of critical thinking ive seen on the yigas part, though i suppose theres always a chance they didnt think that hard about it. they could very well have just gone with the people they see a lot in their own travels between settlements and targets