#magtail

[nairanorica]

And here's the postcard design I made for the event! It's quite big for me (A5) and it was so much fun. There was so much space to put little details and play with paint! Also very fun to create this little "monster researcher sona".

How many monsters can you spot/recognize? (I'll put the answer in the tags, but still)

Also comparison of original and printed postcards under the cut:

I'm really happy how they turned out :D

[serwill]

Just wanted to hop in and say thanks again for the stream last night. I had a great time! Do you have any plans on when you're going to stream again? -Cut

omg my loopdie-loop !! 😌🩷✨️ tysm for hanging out with me !! especially as i was so afraid of those magtails LOL i'm glad you had fun !!! 🥺🩷🩷🩷 i am off work sunday and monday, and i am itching to play wind waker some more !!! so it will be coming up soon 😌 tysm for asking 🥺 for wanting to know 🥺 i'm still a lil scaredy to talk but !! we're getting there 😌 i will see you soon !!

[dead-set-goat]

On the topic of bug creature analysis, which are your favourite fictional arthropods? Not necessarily based on any existing ones just your average bug monsters if you will!

TY for the ask! My favourites tend to lean towards the silly colorful kinds, I'll exclude the Pokemon because there's a lot of em heh!

Gohma from Zelda WW as well as OoT

Mothulas (Wind Waker still) and the magtail

Also the whole metroid species is really fun, was obsessed with these guys despite never finishing a metroid game myself (pictured are diff life stages, the bloby iconic form is actually the larva). Also the luminoth are a cool race, Metroid Prime 2 has some very interesting creatures, I should play that sometime...

Eastward has A TON of fun insect enemies.

Also adding this monster hunter scarab beetle-like enemy, I have not played the game this one's from, it's a shame they aren't making more insectoid enemies...

[ganymedesclock]

But yeah like... I feel like it is important to keep track of what characters are canonically doing and like, but, if the only thing Wind Waker- again, I’m picking on my favorite Zelda game here- ever explains to me about Kalle Demos is it’s connected to Ganon purely because it’s Evil and he’s Evil...

...so the one-in-a-million chance that a korok vital to the Deku Tree’s ceremony would fly over this abandoned islet and fall into it, and the Deku Tree would actively choose not to give Link Farore’s Pearl because he’s too worried about Makar, necessitating Link run a dungeon and defeat a boss...

...is clearly just Ganon’s Great Plan, even though Ganon has no reason to need the Deku Tree out of commission, or the ceremony disrupted (as letting the deku sprouts spread and flourish would actually help him with one of his stated objectives)...

...even though if Ganon was actively trying to kidnap Makar and disrupt the ritual he has a thousand more efficient ways to do that especially if he’s ostensibly able to just randomly will monsters into an area from the other side of the sea...

...and again Kalle Demos was in the very deepest heart of the Forbidden Woods, a place nobody goes to that is in fact completely inaccessible from the sea...

...and there’s no good explanation for where he even got Kalle Demos since we don’t even see like. implications of agriculture within Ganon’s Tower and by all accounts Kalle Demos just looks like a completely natural part of Forbidden Woods...

...and Ganon actually wants Link to gather the pearls, open the way to Hyrule, and pull out the Master Sword because he wants his power unsealed...

...Then, no, I’m not going to evaluate Ganon in Wind Waker as someone who in an extremely roundabout manner passively ruined a lot of people’s lives because a huge amount of the bad things that happen make no dang sense as tactical masterstrokes by a guy who is generally depicted as having his shit together and not taking weird-ass roundabouts.

I’m going to evaluate Wind Waker Ganon as someone who a solid two thirds of his game boil down to an excuse plot that we have very little evidence he had anything to do with. Did Ganon sabotage Valoo or did Valoo just accidentally sit in a magtail nest and get bit by a larger-than-usual bug. The only one of the four main bosses that really seem to have Ganon’s handiwork is Molgera because yeah it is kinda fishy that a desert creature conveniently moved into a very plant-themed temple and even that could’ve just picked a safe dry place to burrow in when the floodwaters started coming in. It and Jalhalla were ostensibly Ganon’s murder weapons but again, that seems a bit roundabout since neither of them suggest they’re aware enough to take orders.

[solarsyrup]

you know what I really like about wind waker? almost all of its bosses are essentially giant-ized versions of common enemies with similar attacks and weaknesses

gohma -> magtails

kalle demos -> boko babas

gohdan -> armos knights

helmaroc king -> kagarocs

jalhalla -> poes

ganondorf -> darknuts

even the big octos are literally just enormous octoroks

like the game trains you to fight certain enemies and then clues you in on how to apply your skills to larger challenges how cool is that

[animarune]

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

[ljt47]

pied magtail maybe not sure (at Llanishen, Cardiff, United Kingdom) https://www.instagram.com/p/CD2mBC0Hlt8/?igshid=ft5z8xyykjl

[mgdphoto]

Magtail by Michael Devereux Via Flickr: Non-classical framing. Magtail: the new name for magpies as that's a silly name.

[happyfuncandywrap]

[inkloose]

A magtail for the ZeldaCollab that causeimdanjones put on~

[sumetal]

i drew a girl

[zelda-gijinka]

[sumetal]

!!!