couldn’t even think about one without going headfirst into an anxiety attack. so yeah, for years and years after that he was TERRIFIED of guardians. and ended up staying at kakariko for a little over a year after that. (he did manage to sever enough of its legs to keep it sedentary, though.) and vio was like Great. his dad sent him ahead on the horse and stayed behind to fight it, because he’d had a lot of experience with killing guardians, but he’d overestimated his health at the time and got tired out far too quickly and ended up falling to it. they were crossing a part of hyrule field on a return trip to kakariko after an incident, and yknow how hyrule field has some pretty hilly parts? yeah, one of the stalkers just popped up from behind a hill, no big deal, and went after them.
i guess this specific part of his backstory isn’t too spoilery compared to what comes before it, so leaving out the really spoiler-type stuff, long story short his dad was killed by a guardian when he was ten, after a series of very unfortunate events. he’s president of the anti-guardian fan club. vio is notoriously the most avid guardian-hater. (i like to think that kohga has a pet skywatcher he keeps monitoring the area around the hideout.)
this isn’t to say that guardians are sentient in any way, they’ve just been given certain algorithms, and if you know how to code them you can alter them to work for you. so a very experienced yiga with very specialized, late-stage training can actually walk right up to a guardian and tell it what to do, and the malice harbored within said yiga keeps the guardian from attacking them, because the guardians are programmed to recognize malice = friend.
wouldn’t they have some kind of firewall? and the answer is sure, to normal people, but the yiga have a little thing called malice on their side, which also happens to be what the guardians run on. the ones that patrol hyrule castle are there until they’re disabled, because of course they’re ganon’s honor guard, but as for the ones just roaming hyrule? the yiga will program them to go to certain places or monitor certain areas. the yiga do actually work with the guardians. and i was gonna not tell you this because i wanted to keep it secret until it became relevant in some way but whatever, that’s probably a long way off and i just like this as a concept. shadow isn’t particularly fond of guardians as a concept, but he doesn’t fear them. he doesn’t learn to properly fear guardians until a very very close run in with a stalker while he’s visiting his mother in the gerudo desert. and then one day it starts coming way too close for comfort and he’s like haha. he doesn’t really understand why but he thinks it’s pretty neat.
and green is getting dragged far far away from this thing like “uhh but we had lunch half an hour ago?” so he keeps sneaking out to get a look at this thing. “okay dad i’m gonna go grab some firewood from the shed” and then he goes and sits outside for a while watching the thing hover around this one specific place.
so he started pulling on his dad’s sleeve and he was like “dad!! what’s that weird bird over there?” and his dad took one look over at it and he was like OKAY GREEN TIME FOR DINNER WE’RE GOING HOME. it was a skywatcher, and it was off in the distance, but of course he was a little kid and wanted to go check it out. green saw his first guardian ever when he was about twelve.