I am not used to being a fan of lore of the games. Let’s say that time is over and now, with three churumbeles demanding attention, the idea of starting to read texts or listening to audio conversations that someone has left lying around, well… What do you want me to say, I feel like sticking splinters under it as much as the ones. I’d rather be riding junk in Legend of Zelda.
But -because good stories always start with a but, except for those about racists and homophobes-, with The Legend of Zelda Tears Of The Kingdom it’s not just that it fell into the lore pit despite having passed over it for years, it’s that I am also entering areas in which I regret practically the second I start reading.
The science behind the reproduction of the Gerudo tribe
What would be the real-world biological equivalent of the tribe’s reproductive system? Gerudo? That has been my last well. For those who don’t know where tremendous madness comes from because they are just as lost as I am in lore issues, I’ll explain where the shots go.
The issue is that in the saga The Legend Of Zelda there is a tribe called Gerudo whose great particularity is that all its members are female. They seem to have relationships of sentimental interest in other tribes such as the Hylians, whose race they are their own. Zelda and linksbut at the level of explanation the thing stops there.
His private life is even more private than the rest, living in isolation and without contact with males of other species until they are of legal age, and also limiting who can enter his village. It could be said that beyond seeing them share a roof with other cultures, especially because it is a Nintendo game, we do not know to what extent they are intimate Gerudo with the rest of races and species of the franchise.
Solving the mystery and finding some similarity to a real world species would be relatively easy if we stopped right here, but you’ll admit that that would be a lot more boring. To give it a good twist, it is time to add that, every 100 years, in the tribe of the Gerudo a male member is born who will become king, and only until the king dies and the cycle restarts, the Gerudo They will continue to breed females.
Beyond the logic of The Legend of Zelda
Logically behind this there is a plot in which the character of Ganondorfthe near extinction of the Gerudoand more deep lore topics than right now, with the biological eggplant we have at hand, it is difficult for me to find it more interesting than all this.
In any case, I just wanted to put the bases of this well on the table so that you understand where we are headed -which by the way is towards absolute nothingness, but sometimes the emptiness of a well can also be just as interesting-. In summary, that only females are born until a male is born and then it starts again.
Despite the fact that I expected to hit the wall of the most logical ending, actually in this absurd and stupid search for reasoning about a world in which there are giant fairies that come out of even bigger flowers, I have managed to narrow down the even more absurd search responses to two specific species.
Three species that still inhabit our planet today and that, in a twist of fate, and with a good plate of those mushrooms that Link snacks on, could shed some light on the reproductive system of the Gerudo in the saga Legend of Zelda.
The equivalent of Gerudo in the real world
To explain the birth of females despite an exchange or relationship with other races and genders, the first real living being that we can cling to is the whip tailed lizarda species in which there are no males and which reproduces by parthenogenesis.
Parthenogenesis is a reproduction system through which the female produces her own eggs but requires stimulation to self-fertilize. There is a relationship with other species that do have males, but there is never a genetic exchange.
This would explain to a large extent that the Gerudo go to the Hylians in search of “a couple”, as mentioned in some games of the franchise, and that in the absence of fertilization by the other species, they maintain the female chromosomes and there is no mutation that modifies their appearance.
This leaves us with the question of what happens to the male that arrives every 100 years, which could be the process of a mutation but is not very specific. We could jump to similar species like the Komodo dragonwhere there are males but the females can also self-fertilize in the absence of a male, but it is still not what we are looking for.
The Final Twist: From The Legend of Zelda to Finding Nemo
From here I have gone through bees, more lizards, and a good handful of theories ranging from the pheromones that the male secretes from the Gerudo maintaining a production solely of females, until the possibility of holding on to what would have been salvation for my self from a handful of hours ago: magic.
But although I have already said that we were not going to get anything clear about this, it felt really bad for me to leave you with this taste in my mouth. I needed a twist to the height of this question with which you could close the tab a little more happily. And since I don’t like to fail you, let’s go for the final turn, the one that takes us from Legend of Zelda to Finding Nemo.
Between the clown fish the female is the dominant gender and, as a hermaphroditic species, her sexual traits always tend towards that gender. However, in the absence of a male, one of those females will become the destined male for the species to continue mating.
If the male dies, another female will modify her traits to become the new male, thus maintaining a chain like that of the males. Gerudo which, with a longevity of 100 years, would give some sense to that similarity. Marvin, from Finding Nemois he Ganondorf from that story, but with the script hole that should have forced him to become a female after the death of his partner.
And to the surprise of anyone brave enough to come this far, biology in Legend of Zelda is more accurate than a Pixar movie about the world of the sea. It turns out that the doubt about the real equivalent to the reproductive system of Gerudo it wasn’t so crazy after all.
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