Crow fanart, from my "Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past" (LoZ: ALttP) Sprite Redraw project; the game was released on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) in 1992 in NA
Yes hi in order to avoid studying for my CLT practical tomorrow I’m instead hyperfocusing on figuring out what the ever-loving HECK Gohma from LoZ Ocarina of Time even is. She doesn’t have eight legs so she’s not an arachnid. None of this is really important to anything anywhere but here I am spending a few solid hours researching and bothering my friends about it anyway.
So in a serious conversation with @bowserblr I’ve gone through this series of thoughts on the subject. With his permission, I’ve included the whole silly thing under the cut.
Me:
in English Queen Gohma's subtile is "Parasitic Armored Arachnid" and the only parasitic arachnids are mites and ticks, which prey on warm-blooded animals, not plants
and in Japanese it's "Shell Parasite Beast"
and there's scale insects which have shells, but they're leaf suckers, not root feeders
actually wait, still not scale because they're leaf suckers, but maybe a parasitic borer?
okay so there are parasites that eat boring insects but no parasitic boring insects lol
Bowserblr:
I always thought it was just edgy to be cool
They came up with a spider-like concept and then named it like it was the creepiest thing imaginable
I suspect if anyone has any insight, it would be the Zelda wiki but you've probably checked there already?
It's also weird to call something that feeds off of plants as a parasite because so many insects do that in so many different ways
Me:
I know, right? and arachnid isn't too far off, it does look like a scorpion, but regardless, it needs 8 legs to be an arachnid, which gohma don't have at any stage
I did check that site, which is where I found the Japanese name
You're right, it probably is just to be edgy lol
So dropping the "parasite" from the search, we have "arachnid" in the English name, none of which eat plants, and "shell" from the Japanese, which I'm gonna check for again now
Okay so a case could be made that OoT Gohma's model has maybe six legs rather than the four it looks like she has, so she's potentially a (giant) insect, which, cool, that narrows it down from arthropod to insect instead of arachnid, but, y'know, insecta is a huge class of animals lol
Bowserblr:
I didn't even make the connection that Gohma was feeding off of the roots and that that was the source of the Deku Tree's strife
Like I had always assumed that Ganon came there, fucked his shit up, and Gohma happened to live there and became super bad
Me:
I mean that's a good interpretation too, and she might not even be a root feeder, i mean we kinda have to go back to arachnid for the reason i think she's a root feeder in the first place: the giant webs in the "ceiling" of the boss room in the 3DS version, which are threaded around the ceiling which consists of the giant roots of the tree
but then there are insects that create webs, for example: tent caterpillars
I can't recall if those webs in the boss room exist in LoZ64, but there are plenty of other webs inside the Deku Tree
and I have conflicting thoughts about the reasons the Deku Tree is so hollowed out, too:
- obviously there's man-made things within, like ladders and bars and doors and that waterway with its gates and....water..machines...turbines...?? (I'm blanking whoops) But that could be the tree growing on top of and "absorbing" those things, as trees do irl
- but something had to have hollowed the tree out so much, unless magic made him grow that way lol That is a lot of heartwood missing man. But trees can potentially survive losing much of its heartwood and even thrive that way, so whatever Ganondorf's curse did to the Deku Tree and/or Gohma, it must have affected its roots, because roots are v important to plants lmao
Me:
Okay let's broaden our scope of study from OoT to LoZ as a whole lmao
-the original LoZ is a six legged one eyed creature the Zelda Wiki refers to as a giant arthropod (not wrong, but not specific at all)
-"As is traditional for the species, Gohma's appearance is that of a large arachnid with one eye." Zelda Wiki says about only the second game in the series to have Gohma at all (Link's Awakening). The sprite for Gohma may or may not have 8 legs, going by those 4 little appendages, but could just as easily only have 4 legs with 4 weird spikes
-Oracle of Season's Gohma sprite gives them six legs, two of which have pincers like a scorpion
-Wind Waker's Gohma boss looks like motherfuckin centipedes (which uh, hey, they're venomous, so like, poor Valoo??? Or I guess, spewing lava out of your mouth could be considered like venom I guess lol). But this Gohma also bears a strong resemblance to the Magtail enemies in this game, which aren’t Gohma, obviously, so maybe Gohma is just the boss’s name in this case? Let’s count this one out
-Twilight Princess's young Gohma have four legs and the boss has 8 (and pedipalps and chelicerae!!! wow! real spider morphology!!!)
-Four Swords Adventure's Gohma have six legs
-And Hyrule Warriors's Gohma actually does have 8 legs, it just confused me with the shield thing lol
To sum it all up: Gohma as a recurring enemy in the Legend of Zelda series as a whole can only accurately be referred to as an arthropod, which, while not wrong, is wildly unspecific. Sometimes they’re an insect, sometimes they’re an arachnid, and sometimes they’re neither.
Regardless, um, hey designers, just so you know, arthropod young typically have the same amount of legs as their adult counterparts lol
This has gotten me no closer to deciding what OoT’s Gohma is, just in case you were wondering. I just...researched a bunch of Gohma for no reason, that’s okay. I guess I thought maybe if I could pinpoint recurring features across the series I could decide what I want OoT's Gohma to be, but that didn't happen lol
I guess she could still be a borer, but there aren’t any borers that produce webs.
It’s a fictional creature but I’mma obsess about this for hours regardless
