Cfrock
Keep it strong
**Before I begin I want to make it clear that I myself am not 100% convinced by the following theory. After having the initial thought last week, I have looked into it and drawn some connections that I find interesting. It is these I wish to share with you today. In an ideal world, after reading this, some of you will be likewise interested and go off thinking of things which will either support or scupper the theory. Either way, my intention with this thread is merely to open the topic for discussion, not to convince you of anything.**
Great. Now that that's out of the way, does anyone else think The Great Deku Tree could be related to the Kikwi from Skyward Sword?
"What!?" you say. "Is he serious?" you wonder. "This man needs locking away in an asylum of some kind!" you cry. Maybe I do, but let's get into it a bit before we start deciding who's going insane, eh?
Theory - The Great Deku Tree is related to the Kikwi race.
It sounds a bit far-fetched, I know. Bush penguins and a giant moustachioed tree related? Balderdash! Nonsense! Then again...
The Great Deku Tree is, despite its prominent place in Zelda iconography, quite enigmatic. What do we really know about it? Not a lot, as it turns out. The first thing we can say for certain about it is that it is a sentient plant. Sentience is the ability to perceive and feel things; it basically means conscious. Plant-life tends to lack sentience, or sentience as animal-life has it, at least. Plants can't think, they have no emotions, they have no complex adaptive behaviours. They simply grow in spring and summer, go dormant during autumn and winter, and then repeat until something eats them or they catch fire. The Great Deku Tree has sentience, it has consciousness. We know this because it talks, it has feelings, it has an awareness of itself, its place, and its history. This immediately separates it from nearly every type of plant seen in the series. Even Deku/Boko Babas lack real sentience, behaving only with the almost blind aggression that would be most reminiscent of the real-world venus flytrap. The Great Deku Tree is only really comparable to a handful of species from Zelda, such as Deku Scrubs, Koroks, and the Kikwi.
The Kikwi themselves are a curious breed. They appear somewhat mammalian in appearance, with their short, downy fur and their stubby arms and legs. But they all have some kind of plant growth on their heads, too (Oolo has some leaves, Lopsa has some tufts of grass, Machi has a curled sprout), and they all have a ready made bush growing on their backs, contained within a very plant-like bulb. Owlan said it best in Skyward Sword:
"This... this is... Unbelievable! You've found me an entirely new plant species! It's precisely what I wanted! Hmm... Fascinating! Should this actually be classified as flora or fauna... I mean, plant or animal? Hmm... You know, this may very well mark the discovery of a new type of species altogether!"
Owlan is a botanist--as evidenced by his extensive (and exhaustive) study of Skyloft's plant-life--and he can't tell if the Kikwi are plants or animals. This isn't even a total work of fantasy. There's precedent for such confusion in the real-world: mushrooms seem like plants but share few common characteristics with them (they are actually in a kingdom all their own: fungi); you'd be forgiven for describing coral as a plant, despite it being an animal; the Elysia Chlorotica, a sea slug, is an animal that performs photosynthesis, a process exclusive to plant-life. Are the Kikwi just animals? Are they just plants? Or are they some kind of mix between the two? A mix seems likely since their bushes and head-sprouts will need to perform photosynthesis to survive but Fi tells us that the creatures themselves do eat food:
"His name is Machi. He is the most relaxed member of the herbivorous Kikwi race."
Both the Great Deku Tree and the Kikwi possess traits common amongst plants and amongst animals, but there is a major difference: whichever way you cut it, the Great Deku Tree is clearly more plant than animal while the Kikwi are clearly more animal than plant. For the two to be related, those animal cells in the Kikwi will have to undergo some pretty dramatic changes to become plant cells (this is because the Kikwi predate the Great Deku Tree by an indeterminate period of time, most likely several hundred, if not thousand, years). Fortunately, there is precedent for this within the series.
Eiji Aonuma said (in Zelda Box, which can be found by clicking here) of The Wind Waker:
"We created the Rito as the evolved form of the Zora that appeared in "Ocarina of Time" and the Korogs as what the Kokiri became once they left the forest. They appear different, but they have inherited their blood."
That puts to bed to question of what happens to the Kokiri who leave the forest, at least--they become balsa balls. The Koroks of The Wind Waker are one of the few sentient plant species in the series and perhaps more interestingly they were once human, or close to. The Kokiri of Ocarina of Time fame became little potatoes when they left the forest, roughly the time the Zoras were outright evolving into man-pigeons. The Great Deku Tree says this in The Wind Waker:
"Once upon a time, long ago, the Koroks took on human forms, but when they came to live on the sea, they took these shapes."
Evolution is never mentioned in-game or out of it, and The Great Deku Tree doesn't say it made them change, either. It sounds as thought the Kokiri decided to change of their own will. It could happen; Aonuma has said that when a Kokiri leaves the forest they become a Korok. The ability to fly is the main adaptive advantage that both the Kokiri and the Zora gained between Ocarina of Time and The Wind Waker. The difference is the Kokiri could choose to have that, while the Zora had to evolve. All the Kokiri had to do was spend some time outside the forest and POP!, they'd become balsa. One short waddle back to The Great Deku Tree to get a leaf later and they can fly. Excellent for when the flood waters are consuming the world around you. But I digress.
The Kokiri-to-Korok transformation is a clear example of an animal-to-plant metamorphosis, one that didn't take a long time to achieve. In The Wind Waker, The Great Deku Tree describes the Koroks as his "children":
"Now they fear people... but to me, they will ever be my cherished little children."
which ties in quite conveniently with what one of the Kokiri says in Ocarina of Time:
"That's because the Great Deku Tree is our father, the forest guardian, and he gave life to all of us Kokiri!"
It follows that if The Great Deku Tree is the father of the Kokiri, and the Kokiri are the Koroks, then The Great Deku Tree is the father of the Koroks. This is backed up somewhat when one of the Koroks says:
"The Great Deku Tree's power will wane, and our power will wane with it... We might even wither altogether..."
which suggests the Koroks life-force is connected to The Great Deku Tree. (This is at odds with the Kokiri surviving for seven years without it (if the Koroks die without the Tree, surely the Kokiri do too, since they are both products of the Tree) but, then again, the Kokiri were animal organisms and not plants, so it's understandable that the rules would be different.) The Great Deku Tree is a guardian spirit and has some kind of magical power: it is King of the Fairies (well, they do as it says, at least), it provides some kind of protection to the forest (monsters only get in after it dies), it can grow and provide leaves capable of flight at will, and it enriches the water around it with special restorative properties. To have given life to the ageless Kokiri would have taken magic, too, unless we go down the creepy road of a tree getting someone pregnant. Therefore, it is fair to say that the Kokiris' transformation into the Koroks was caused by some of this magic, however passive, from The Great Deku Tree. This explains why the Koroks would lose their power if The Great Deku Tree loses its own; the magic which transformed them would likely be sustaining them, since plant-life doesn't gain energy through eating and the Koroks don't have leaves of their own (their grey colour speaks of a lack of chlorophyll).
So magic then. Magic has turned animal-life into plant-life. We got there in the end. Maybe a simpler example would have been that of Flute Boy in A Link to the Past turning into Tree Boy, or those trees in the Dark World that tell you they were once people who were transformed by dark magic. Then again, neither of those examples involves The Great Deku tree. The point is, if magic can turn animals into plants in the Zelda series then it could do so for the Kikwi. The how is a simple (but thoroughly examined) "Because magic".
The Kikwi share some other things with The Great Deku Tree. For starters, The Great Deku Tree protects his Kokiri and Korok children from a stationary position, exactly the same way Nutsak, the Kikwi leader, does in Skyward Sword. The most noticable is their fancy facial hair. The Great Deku Tree sported a fairly manly horseshoe moustache way back in Ocarina of Time:
while Nutsak has a pretty impressive one himself:
Meanwhile, the Kikwi hermit, Yerbal, is doing just fine with a Fu Manchu:
Speaking of Yerbal, he's pretty interesting when you're thinking about The Great Deku Tree. The Great Deku Tree is a tree, while Yerbal has chosen to live totally alone at the top of one (coincidentally named "The Great Tree"). The Great Deku Tree is responsible for the Kokiri Emerald and Farore's Pearl, while Yerbal knows where to find Farore's Sacred Flame. The Great Deku Tree knows a lot about history, particularly that which involves the Goddesses, while Yerbal knows a lot of history, too, also involving the Goddesses (Hylia, at least--"That story begins very long ago, when the goddess was still with us, kwwwrk..."). The Great Deku Tree lives for hundreds, potentially thousands, of years, evidecned by his fluency in an ancient Hylian language in The Wind Waker, while Yerbal has also been alive for a few thousand years, evidenced by him saying:
"Kikwiiiiiiiiii! Whoozit?! I'm nappin'! Oooh, look at that! A real live human! Haven't seen one of you in a while, kwrrrrrk."
Yerbal didn't see Zelda when she was on the Surface and the last humans had left for Skyloft thousands of years earlier when Demise was supposedly on a rampage. For Yerbal to have actually seen one before Link, he must have been sat up that tree for a really, really, long time. You ever hear of that woman who sat on her toilet so long she fused with it? You see where I'm going with this.
For such a cowardly and pathetic race, it seems likely the Kikwi would die off once any kind of half-intelligent predator entered Faron Woods. Their total absence in games further down the timeline would seem to confirm this, or something similar (unfortunate wild fire? Impromptu alien abduction?). But at least one of them had hung around for centuries, spending most of his time alone in The Great Tree. That particular individual knew about the Goddesses and also knew about the Hero's quest for the Sacred Flames, helping him along the way when the time came. He even says:
"I watch over this forest here... when I'm not nappin'."
The similarities between the Kikwi--Yerbal especially--and The Great Deku Tree are right there, the only question is are they significant? If magic can turn a bunch of fairy children into flying potatoes then it can turn a fuzzy penguin into a Shakespearean tree. The questions would be who turned that penguin into a tree and why. The Goddesses so they had a permanent protector for the forest? Faron, the water dragon, so she could go on holiday and never come back? Did Yerbal just sit there for so long he grew into the tree like that woman and her toilet? Or is it all just coincidence and I really am going insane?
I don't know. What do you think? Insane or inane? Worth looking into a bit more or ready for the theoretical scrap heap? What insight can you help shed on this idea?
Keep it strong, Zelda Dungeon.
Great. Now that that's out of the way, does anyone else think The Great Deku Tree could be related to the Kikwi from Skyward Sword?
"What!?" you say. "Is he serious?" you wonder. "This man needs locking away in an asylum of some kind!" you cry. Maybe I do, but let's get into it a bit before we start deciding who's going insane, eh?
Theory - The Great Deku Tree is related to the Kikwi race.
It sounds a bit far-fetched, I know. Bush penguins and a giant moustachioed tree related? Balderdash! Nonsense! Then again...
The Great Deku Tree is, despite its prominent place in Zelda iconography, quite enigmatic. What do we really know about it? Not a lot, as it turns out. The first thing we can say for certain about it is that it is a sentient plant. Sentience is the ability to perceive and feel things; it basically means conscious. Plant-life tends to lack sentience, or sentience as animal-life has it, at least. Plants can't think, they have no emotions, they have no complex adaptive behaviours. They simply grow in spring and summer, go dormant during autumn and winter, and then repeat until something eats them or they catch fire. The Great Deku Tree has sentience, it has consciousness. We know this because it talks, it has feelings, it has an awareness of itself, its place, and its history. This immediately separates it from nearly every type of plant seen in the series. Even Deku/Boko Babas lack real sentience, behaving only with the almost blind aggression that would be most reminiscent of the real-world venus flytrap. The Great Deku Tree is only really comparable to a handful of species from Zelda, such as Deku Scrubs, Koroks, and the Kikwi.
The Kikwi themselves are a curious breed. They appear somewhat mammalian in appearance, with their short, downy fur and their stubby arms and legs. But they all have some kind of plant growth on their heads, too (Oolo has some leaves, Lopsa has some tufts of grass, Machi has a curled sprout), and they all have a ready made bush growing on their backs, contained within a very plant-like bulb. Owlan said it best in Skyward Sword:
"This... this is... Unbelievable! You've found me an entirely new plant species! It's precisely what I wanted! Hmm... Fascinating! Should this actually be classified as flora or fauna... I mean, plant or animal? Hmm... You know, this may very well mark the discovery of a new type of species altogether!"
Owlan is a botanist--as evidenced by his extensive (and exhaustive) study of Skyloft's plant-life--and he can't tell if the Kikwi are plants or animals. This isn't even a total work of fantasy. There's precedent for such confusion in the real-world: mushrooms seem like plants but share few common characteristics with them (they are actually in a kingdom all their own: fungi); you'd be forgiven for describing coral as a plant, despite it being an animal; the Elysia Chlorotica, a sea slug, is an animal that performs photosynthesis, a process exclusive to plant-life. Are the Kikwi just animals? Are they just plants? Or are they some kind of mix between the two? A mix seems likely since their bushes and head-sprouts will need to perform photosynthesis to survive but Fi tells us that the creatures themselves do eat food:
"His name is Machi. He is the most relaxed member of the herbivorous Kikwi race."
Both the Great Deku Tree and the Kikwi possess traits common amongst plants and amongst animals, but there is a major difference: whichever way you cut it, the Great Deku Tree is clearly more plant than animal while the Kikwi are clearly more animal than plant. For the two to be related, those animal cells in the Kikwi will have to undergo some pretty dramatic changes to become plant cells (this is because the Kikwi predate the Great Deku Tree by an indeterminate period of time, most likely several hundred, if not thousand, years). Fortunately, there is precedent for this within the series.
Eiji Aonuma said (in Zelda Box, which can be found by clicking here) of The Wind Waker:
"We created the Rito as the evolved form of the Zora that appeared in "Ocarina of Time" and the Korogs as what the Kokiri became once they left the forest. They appear different, but they have inherited their blood."
That puts to bed to question of what happens to the Kokiri who leave the forest, at least--they become balsa balls. The Koroks of The Wind Waker are one of the few sentient plant species in the series and perhaps more interestingly they were once human, or close to. The Kokiri of Ocarina of Time fame became little potatoes when they left the forest, roughly the time the Zoras were outright evolving into man-pigeons. The Great Deku Tree says this in The Wind Waker:
"Once upon a time, long ago, the Koroks took on human forms, but when they came to live on the sea, they took these shapes."
Evolution is never mentioned in-game or out of it, and The Great Deku Tree doesn't say it made them change, either. It sounds as thought the Kokiri decided to change of their own will. It could happen; Aonuma has said that when a Kokiri leaves the forest they become a Korok. The ability to fly is the main adaptive advantage that both the Kokiri and the Zora gained between Ocarina of Time and The Wind Waker. The difference is the Kokiri could choose to have that, while the Zora had to evolve. All the Kokiri had to do was spend some time outside the forest and POP!, they'd become balsa. One short waddle back to The Great Deku Tree to get a leaf later and they can fly. Excellent for when the flood waters are consuming the world around you. But I digress.
The Kokiri-to-Korok transformation is a clear example of an animal-to-plant metamorphosis, one that didn't take a long time to achieve. In The Wind Waker, The Great Deku Tree describes the Koroks as his "children":
"Now they fear people... but to me, they will ever be my cherished little children."
which ties in quite conveniently with what one of the Kokiri says in Ocarina of Time:
"That's because the Great Deku Tree is our father, the forest guardian, and he gave life to all of us Kokiri!"
It follows that if The Great Deku Tree is the father of the Kokiri, and the Kokiri are the Koroks, then The Great Deku Tree is the father of the Koroks. This is backed up somewhat when one of the Koroks says:
"The Great Deku Tree's power will wane, and our power will wane with it... We might even wither altogether..."
which suggests the Koroks life-force is connected to The Great Deku Tree. (This is at odds with the Kokiri surviving for seven years without it (if the Koroks die without the Tree, surely the Kokiri do too, since they are both products of the Tree) but, then again, the Kokiri were animal organisms and not plants, so it's understandable that the rules would be different.) The Great Deku Tree is a guardian spirit and has some kind of magical power: it is King of the Fairies (well, they do as it says, at least), it provides some kind of protection to the forest (monsters only get in after it dies), it can grow and provide leaves capable of flight at will, and it enriches the water around it with special restorative properties. To have given life to the ageless Kokiri would have taken magic, too, unless we go down the creepy road of a tree getting someone pregnant. Therefore, it is fair to say that the Kokiris' transformation into the Koroks was caused by some of this magic, however passive, from The Great Deku Tree. This explains why the Koroks would lose their power if The Great Deku Tree loses its own; the magic which transformed them would likely be sustaining them, since plant-life doesn't gain energy through eating and the Koroks don't have leaves of their own (their grey colour speaks of a lack of chlorophyll).
So magic then. Magic has turned animal-life into plant-life. We got there in the end. Maybe a simpler example would have been that of Flute Boy in A Link to the Past turning into Tree Boy, or those trees in the Dark World that tell you they were once people who were transformed by dark magic. Then again, neither of those examples involves The Great Deku tree. The point is, if magic can turn animals into plants in the Zelda series then it could do so for the Kikwi. The how is a simple (but thoroughly examined) "Because magic".
The Kikwi share some other things with The Great Deku Tree. For starters, The Great Deku Tree protects his Kokiri and Korok children from a stationary position, exactly the same way Nutsak, the Kikwi leader, does in Skyward Sword. The most noticable is their fancy facial hair. The Great Deku Tree sported a fairly manly horseshoe moustache way back in Ocarina of Time:
while Nutsak has a pretty impressive one himself:
Meanwhile, the Kikwi hermit, Yerbal, is doing just fine with a Fu Manchu:
Speaking of Yerbal, he's pretty interesting when you're thinking about The Great Deku Tree. The Great Deku Tree is a tree, while Yerbal has chosen to live totally alone at the top of one (coincidentally named "The Great Tree"). The Great Deku Tree is responsible for the Kokiri Emerald and Farore's Pearl, while Yerbal knows where to find Farore's Sacred Flame. The Great Deku Tree knows a lot about history, particularly that which involves the Goddesses, while Yerbal knows a lot of history, too, also involving the Goddesses (Hylia, at least--"That story begins very long ago, when the goddess was still with us, kwwwrk..."). The Great Deku Tree lives for hundreds, potentially thousands, of years, evidecned by his fluency in an ancient Hylian language in The Wind Waker, while Yerbal has also been alive for a few thousand years, evidenced by him saying:
"Kikwiiiiiiiiii! Whoozit?! I'm nappin'! Oooh, look at that! A real live human! Haven't seen one of you in a while, kwrrrrrk."
Yerbal didn't see Zelda when she was on the Surface and the last humans had left for Skyloft thousands of years earlier when Demise was supposedly on a rampage. For Yerbal to have actually seen one before Link, he must have been sat up that tree for a really, really, long time. You ever hear of that woman who sat on her toilet so long she fused with it? You see where I'm going with this.
For such a cowardly and pathetic race, it seems likely the Kikwi would die off once any kind of half-intelligent predator entered Faron Woods. Their total absence in games further down the timeline would seem to confirm this, or something similar (unfortunate wild fire? Impromptu alien abduction?). But at least one of them had hung around for centuries, spending most of his time alone in The Great Tree. That particular individual knew about the Goddesses and also knew about the Hero's quest for the Sacred Flames, helping him along the way when the time came. He even says:
"I watch over this forest here... when I'm not nappin'."
The similarities between the Kikwi--Yerbal especially--and The Great Deku Tree are right there, the only question is are they significant? If magic can turn a bunch of fairy children into flying potatoes then it can turn a fuzzy penguin into a Shakespearean tree. The questions would be who turned that penguin into a tree and why. The Goddesses so they had a permanent protector for the forest? Faron, the water dragon, so she could go on holiday and never come back? Did Yerbal just sit there for so long he grew into the tree like that woman and her toilet? Or is it all just coincidence and I really am going insane?
I don't know. What do you think? Insane or inane? Worth looking into a bit more or ready for the theoretical scrap heap? What insight can you help shed on this idea?
Keep it strong, Zelda Dungeon.
