Ganon’s Mysterious Origins (Revisited)
This site is a one-man show, more or less. As a result, the two biggest obstacles for more posts going live more frequently are my free time and my desire to take the research as far as I possibly can. You would not believe how many times an idea for a quick post turns into a days-long research project — or sometimes just never materializes at all, because I’m encountering a dodgy bit of info that I can’t prove one way or another. Occasionally, however, I am presented with information that seems original enough and well-defended enough that it’s something I want on this site.
This is one of those, and in no small part because it serves as a follow-up of sorts to what I’ve written about the Legend of Zelda and in particular how we don’t know the origin of Ganon’s name. This week, I happened across a thread on the Resetera message boards that had some decent theories about where one of video gaming’s biggest bads might have come from, and I’m sharing here because I feel like there may not be that much overlap between my readers and Restera posters.
In a thread titled “Ganon’s Name,” user Birdie suggests that the idea that the Gerudo, in one form or another, may have been hovering in the background of the Legend of Zelda series long before their canonical debut in Ocarina of Time. I put forward the same idea in my post on the Hylian language, using the same logic: that the Geldman enemy in A Link to the Past seems like a predecessor to the Gerudo but more in a linguistic sense than in any related to how these characters act and look. This theory, however, traces the Gerudo back to the Geldam (ゲルダム団 or Gerudamu-dan), a villain group from the Kamen Rider series. At one point in the story, Geldam combines forces with another organization, Shocker, to form Gel Shocker.
Now, I’m saying this as a person whose only real experience with Kamen Rider is seeing commercials for when the American version crossed over with Mighty Morphin Power Rangers back in 1995, so excuse me if I’m way off on my analysis, but it seems like belt buckle design is a big deal in this franchise? As do many suited characters, the Gel Shocker bad guys wore specialized belts, and in this particular case, the buckle design of this villainous supergroup reflects both the Geldam insignia, a snake, and the Shocker insignia, an eagle.
Keep that image in mind as you consider Ganikomoru, a Gel Shocker monster appearing in a few episodes of the original Kamen Rider series. (His name is sometimes rendered in English as Gankikomol.) He’s a hybrid of a crab and a bat, apparently. In fact, his name literally means “bat crab,” with 蟹 or kani meaning “crab” and 蝙蝠 or kōmori meaning “bat.” His role on the show is not as important to this particular conversation as his appearance.
Now consider the previous two images in comparison to Ganon’s sprite in the original Legend of Zelda.
Yes, fancy belt buckles exist outside the Kamen Rider franchise — even belt buckles with skulls, I’d wager. That said, the Gel Shocker insignia does look a bit like a skull, especially if you tried to squish it down to something readable in an 8-bit sprite. And while Ganon is neither bat nor crab, you have to admit to a certain resemblance to Ganikomoru. As the original thread explains, there’s “a vague similarity — the green [on Ganikomoru] being translated as light blue [on Ganon], the red cape being transformed into a tunic, the bat ear to a pig ear, and of course Ganikomoru truncated and shorted a bit into Ganon.” And, honestly, if you tried to draw Ganikomoru in an 8-bit pixel style, you’d probably end up with something that looks a lot like this version of Ganon.
In my previous post on Ganon, I note that the only information we have on the record about the character’s origins is a 2009 Iwata Asks in which it’s noted that his original name was Hakkai, which is the Japanese name of Zhu Bajie, the pig character from the sixteenth-century Chinese novel Journey to the West. This “rhymes,” more or less, because a different Journey to the West character — the Bull Demon King, specifically from the 1960 animated adaptation — was the inspiration for Bowser. But just as the Bull Demon King does not explain all of Bowser’s look, I don’t think Hakkai is the only inspiration for Ganon, and Birdie is possibly correct in pointing out the similarities between Ganikomoru and Ganon. In particular, I think this connection might explain Ganon’s name, which as far as I know is still a mystery.
This is at least the most interesting theory I’ve heard so far, and I’d be interesting to know what you all think of it.
Miscellaneous Notes
Do you think someone eventually explained to the Kamen Rider team that shocker has an alternate meaning in English-speaking culture? I hope so.
One of the other points that Birdie makes in the thread is that as a result of the popularity of Kamen Rider, the first syllable in Geldam gets used as a shorthand for evil in unrelated franchises. For example, the Japanese name for the Transformer villain Sky Bite is Gel Shark (ゲルシャク or Gerushaku, with a hard “g” and not the soft one you’d expect in English). I do admit this seems plausible and I can’t imagine what else that syllable might be doing in the Japanese name. Do you have an explanation? Can you think of other examples?
Another connection Birdie makes in the thread is that the adult version of Link seen in Ocarina of Time bears more than a passing resemblance to Leonardo DiCaprio. It may not be a coincidence that this game debuted about a year after the box office success of Titanic — and that the grown-up version of Princess Zelda in this game looks a little bit like Kate Winslet.
This is a weird one in that I see the resemblance but I’m having trouble pointing out specific features that remind me of Kate Winslet’s. Is it her mouth?
It’s also theorized that other Ganon influences might include Dolph Lundgren, whose first name might be a more palatable origin for the -dorf in Gannondorf than the one I initially guessed. I would recommend the entire thread if you’re curious about other weird pop culture connections, Zelda-related and otherwise.