#sorry for the late response but I needed time to elaborate a whole scientific article on this

[icology]

In the sacrifice room, there are 53 standing coffins, the 54th being knocked over at the start of the game. In congruency with this fact, there are 53 shadows that you fight in this same room at the end of the game. It's a safe assumption that these are all the shadows The Queen has at her disposal and they all come from the sacrificed children.

A horrific but often overlooked fact can be paired with this observation: In the game's manual, it is stated that horned children are born once per generation. That's an indefinite space between 20-30 years, but we'll average it and say 25. Ico is the 54th child, so 54 generations have passed since the planning for The Queen's dark ritual began. 25 * 54 = 1,350 years But hold on, The Queen definitely seems to know a lot about this process, with an assuredness that hints at personal experience. It's very possible that this has been done before. Which would make it approximately 2,700 years that the tradition of sacrificing horned children has carried on. For reference, our earliest coherent historic texts date back to about 2600 BCE. Approximately 4,623 years ago. From a certain perspective, we have about 4,623 years of historical documentation. 2,700 years is over half of that. And I only know that much because I have Wikipedia, imagine living in this time period! There's a good chance, even if The Queen only attempted this ritual once, that the process of doing it has consumed most of humanity's recorded history... and 99.9% of all people do not have access to the earliest historic records. The line "Do not be angry with us, this is for the good of the village." is given a strange weight when considering this. Not only has that man probably carried out this exact same task ~25 years ago, not only has he heard about this process since he was a boy, he has also accepted that, from a limited human perspective, this has been happening since the dawn of time.

Interesting topic!

Adding to this horrific fact, we all know that in the universe of the games, Ico is considered a spiritual successor of Shadow. As far as the little lore we have allows us, we can kinda agree that Wander was the very first horned kid, but those were not the first humans to be sacrificed in that universe, like Mono for having a "cursed fate", and the chosen ones in the world of The Last Guardian, who were taken away. Much like in Ico, it seems that people are familiar with it enough that pretty much no one interferes (save for, you know, WANDER.) A thousand years is a long time for people to sit with this knowledge and to reflect on it, but they seem to not question the natural order of things and just let them happen, like you said. In a section of the special symposium that the team did for The Last Guardian, Ueda actually answers a question related to this:

Q: "When the boy was abducted by the eagle, the village leader didn’t seem that sad, he looked like he had given up to some extent. If he truthfully didn’t want the kids to be kidnapped, then it seems a bit strange that he had them sleep all gathered together."

A: "For the whole village, it might not have been thought of as something to be avoided – they thought of it as destiny. It was like being “The Chosen One”. (read the full interview here)"

So yes... when they said "this is for the good of the village," maybe they really believed it to be true, and perhaps they also feared the consequences of not doing it. There is also a scene in Castle in the Mist (Miyuki Miyabe's wonderful novelization of Ico) where the theme of the queen's guards is discussed. In the story, one of the guards who accompanies Ico to the castle seems to pity him and acts compassionate, unlike the other one, who just seems to go along and follow the orders he's been given. It is an unspoken truth, and no one questions it.

One thing I wonder about this subject: are the enemies in Ico really part of the sacrificed kids? Or are they some sort of "imitation" that the Queen creates with her magic, weird and gnarly as they look? Guess we'll never know!

(Tagging @sparkylurkdragon on this one cause I feel like this little piece of horrific trivia might come in handy for their amazing fanfiction on immortal Wander and his journey since SOTC)

#sorry for the late response but I needed time to elaborate a whole scientific article on this #today's subject: history #ico #trivia #answered