Why, for example, is it impossible for a picture of a Korok to exist? People have pictures of wolves and bears all the time hung up in their homes IRL.
Also, you can't consider the end part of the journal non canon and the rest of it canon. Either it's all canon or none of it is. That's cherry picking.
It's a video game. There are going to be elements we the players see that Link the character does not. The "all or nothing" approach runs across the problem of asking why they would bother to have Hylian text on the map and signs when the game isn't in Hylian.
So, if you're admitting that it's fanfiction, then you can understand why I don't support a merge, no?
Every theory is fanfiction, including your own, due to lack of any evidence for any of them. I just went with one that doesn't turn the game into a giant guess of what is and is not canon.
My theory for the placement of BotW explains what some may consider holes, and it does so without coming up with some huge merging event, and using ingame evidence to deduce what is and isn't canon IMO(instead of just saying ''wah wah it's not canon because it goes against my theory'' like I've seen people in other communities do at times) I posted it a topic for it, but one of these days, I plan on going way more indepth on it. IMO, it's the only placement that really makes sense when you eliminate all other possibilities. I won't go too far into it in this topic to remain objective.
So, what is and is not canon of the items present in the games? I'm holding that the DLC is canon, based on the only talk we have about it making it sound like it's canon. And the amiibo outfits have descriptions written up in a way that would work in-universe. Plus, characters do react to some amiibo items.
Yeah, sorry, but ''it doesn't have to make sense'' isn't a good pitch for a theory. By that logic, if it weren't for the official timeline, people could say that TWW is before OoT or that ST is before TWW and people could just defend it by saying that it doesn't have to make sense. Yes, there are events that are seemingly impossible(in other words, plot holes) that happen in other games, but one of the major points of theorizing is striving to come up with sensible ideas based on the available evidence as much as possible.
The problem with this is that, to date, I haven't seen a single idea that is truly more sensible than the merger explanation. And it's not that the merger is that sensible so much as the others either tend to discard anything they don't like from the game to make themselves work, are even more insane, or are based on the most flimsy evidence possible. We have a game that, from all available evidence we currently have, requires explanations that are completely bonkers to make any sense of it and an official treatment that amounts to a shrug.
Spirit and I both have competing merger explanations, and I suspect that Spirit's is the more correct one from a design perspective: It's a merger simply because Aonuma just doesn't
care about maintaining three cohesive timelines anymore. My explanation attempts to make some sense of it, and even then requires a
lot of assumptions about how such an event came about in order to be workable. Yet, still, it does account for everything from an in-universe perspective.
We'll have to see what Aonuma does with the series going forward, but if what I suspect is true he'll simply continue with this new timeline that BotW started and ignore the prior three ever existed beyond things to reference. In which case, the merger will simply be the only option because it'll be the only relevant timeline.
