I sometimes think about Ganondorf's upbringing, and keep coming back to the final chapter of Y the Last Man.
The basic premise of the series is that something has killed off all the men except Yorick there, who is now old because the final issue flashes forward sixty years. He's talking about how society was entirely women and was, largely, doing okay for itself, but then a boy is born again and suddenly the old indoctrinations start rearing their head, and giving him a big head...
And I think about that in the context of the Gerudo a lot.
if you've seen some of my other posts about Zelda, you know that I subriber to the theory that Termina's Ikana tribe are the historical equivalent of ancient Gerudo. If that sounds interesting, you can read more about it here:
💬 1 🔁 23 ❤️ 96 · So anyway Ikana Canyon was a Gerudo kingdom. Desert people ruled over by a powerful and proud red-haired king, its peopl
But anyway, the fact that Termina has some shared ancient characters in it like Koume and Kotake, and the ghosts of Sharp & Flat, among others, kind of implies that there's at least a parallel history up to a point, similar to how Lorule would later in A Link to the Past. And links between Lorule and Termina are a whole 'nother can of worms lol.
But what I'm trying to get at here though, is that it doesn't really make sense for the Gerudo to even have a word for "King" unless there was a history of such things existing in their culture. Look at Egypt, for a real world example. They only had the one word for their ruler, "pharaoh", which was masculine, to the point that notable woman pharaoh Hatshepsut wore fake beards in order to assert her authority.
So, like, the Gerudo, as an all woman society, who are demonstrably ruled by women when there's no males around, women who bear the rank of "Chief", I might add, suddenly have a "King" whenever a guy is born. Which to me implies that the Gerudo were not always all-women and women only, because if that had been the case, Ganondorf would not only be a "Chief", he would be walking around dressed like Urbosa, with some chest inserts to assert proper authoritative femininity for good measure.
So I'm thinking we can draw some parallels from how Termina's history went down with good ol King Igos to extrapolate that maybe something similar happened in the days past, between Skyward Sword and Ocarina of Time.
Like the Ikana in Termina, what if the Gerudo used to be a pretty mixed sex race, but were cursed somehow upon the discovery of... something. Four Swords Adventures shows that there's a giant pyramid in the desert, hidden away and kept by an even more secretive tribe, the Zuna. And that in that Pyramid lies the trident that Ganondorf would go on to use. We are told in the narrative that Young Ganondorf heard a voice coming from the trident, that corrupted his mind. Much more recently, in the first Hyrule Warriors, we got a much better look at Ganondorf's trident.
Here it's called the Trident of Demise, and is inferred to be made of Demise's sword.
which presumably means that voice was none other than mister blade licker himself, Ghirahim.
So we can make some inferences that while in Termina the clan fell and was cursed due to the influence of the will of Majora, over in Hyrule it was because of the corrupting influence of Demise. For whatever reason, after the fall of Igos' Hyrule counterpart, only one male in a hundred years would be born, and they would be the embodiment of Demise's malice made manifest on earth.
Now, here's some other things to think about - would there ever hypothetically be a period where Demise's curse was completely gone, or gone enough, or overridden by some other curse, or a parallel world where the curse wasn't a thing, or whatever, that we would see male gerudo be commonplace again. Just, giant olive skinned men existing alongside their distaff counterparts, living their lives, being rulers or workers or just people?
Would certainly be interesting to see...
