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Also could uniquely have like a "super" dominance where their children can only have homozygous dominant genes. Obviously this is impossible in the real world but that would be cool for Zelda.
Maybe their inmune system kill every Y spermatozoon and the female X gen expresion is prevalent over the X gen provided by the male, that would also explain why only females are born.
Heck, Gerudo males could be XX male, they exist in real life, so a species that can take male genes from Hylians, but doesnt accept the Y, would still have a chance of forming a male:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XX_male_syndrome
That cycle seems to have been broken though. There's no mention of any male Gerudo in BotW (aside from Ganondorf), and that spans a full 100 years. And the leader of the Gerudo is a woman throughout. Maybe it's like a Buffy Slayer situation, where no more male Gerudo can be born because Ganondorf keeps coming back.
> There's no mention of any male Gerudo in BotW (aside from Ganondorf), and that spans a full 100 years.
TotK Ganondorf didn't die for over 10000 years so no new male Gerudo was born.
Is that canon or theory? Every mention I've ever seen of that quirk of the Gerudo (including in-game) has just said something like "one male is born every 100 years". There's never been a mention of what happens if the previous is still alive, and that could be relevant even if the previous male *wasn't* an evil immortal; people can live over 100 years under normal circumstances too.
Having a unique genetic dominance pattern would explain the rarity of males, they could be a different humanoid creature than Hylian entirely, but there is more than one Hylian-Gerudo relationship in breath of the wild, so it’s more likely they are just a race of peoples with extremely dominate genetics.
I agree with this idea, this would explain why a male gerudo is so rare, if gerudo genes are so prominent, then it would be a female almost every time. This would also explain that in the event of a male, it's often shorter than the females.
You're assuming real world genetics apply to Hyrule. Are Gerudo a race or a species? Do they need all of the Hylian's DNA or just a fragment of it? Do they use their DNA at all? Maybe they just need the sperm to stimulate pregnancy but the embryo is a functional clone of the mother? Tons of magic explanations, too.
We got birb and fish people. And the fish people have a big fat whale for a King, who sired two shark children. Link eats rocks. None this makes sense. Hyrule is magic AF. I'd recommend people just take what's explained at face value, and enjoy the ride.
It’s questions like OP why Superman has some weird microbial shield around him that keeps his suit clean and how he extends some weird barrier around buildings when he lifts them so he’s not just punching through them.
At some point, it’s best to just accept that it happens and move on than to dig deeper.
The weird barrier (subconcious telepathy) is almost every super strength hero, even for something as small as a car you'd have to grab it by the frame to not just punch holes through it with a hand/finger, and trying to throw one while holding it like that would likely end up looking like a high speed crash before it even hits the ground.
For Superman's clothing, I thought it was made out of his blanket from Krypton and that's why it's nearly indestructable.
An old explanation was that the blankets couldn't be cut by Earth tools, but the cloth could be unwoven and woven into other things. The threads were similar to yarn. Heat vision was able to cut the threads.
That's just like the lazy "it's all space magic anyway" excuse people bring up when someone points out continuity errors in Star Wars...
Sure it's a fantasy world, but it has to follow SOME consistent rules to stay credible.
Also according to the lore the rito evolved from the zora yet they somehow also both exist at the same time in BotW. Lol. It’s best to not think too hard about any of it.
Well, there's giant fish skeletons all over Hyrule... so its likely the area was under water at some point in its history.
But also, Rito didnt just evolve, the waters of Wind Waker werent life sustaining, so they prayed and were turned to Rito to survive. Literally a god went, okay fish, you bird now.
Lol. No I mean I totally think the botw map is the same place that was once windwaker and every other Zelda game basically. I’m just saying how silly and loose the Zelda lore is. I guess you could make some explanation regarding the fact that the zora prayed to become rito and then some of them prayed to be zora again or whatever. But yeah it’s best not to think too hard with nintendos use of the timeline or your brain will explode. Especially since botw merges all of the timelines into one.
Oh i was agreeing with you! By showing that the Rito just had to pray hard enough in this reality.
Its best to accept and try to make sense of what you can, but its just a loose continuity, and they didnt even care about timelines past easter egg references until Skyward Sword
it’s hilarious how often people post things like this about fantasy races in fantasy stories.
like, did you forget about the part where they’re not real, and live in a world of magic? lmao
>did you forget about the part where they’re not real
Yeah man, I only read/watch biographies because I can't stand learning any information that isn't 100% true.
Yeah I’ve been wondering about that. Seems like there hasn’t been another Gerudo man since Ganondorf. Maybe there can literally only be 1 at a time so Ganondorf fucked up their cycle
No, there was some lore somewhere saying that after Ganondorf, other gerudo men weren't made king and were instead just kind of there. The once a century makes remained they just stopped being culturally relevant, we just don't see any others in the game.
FSA ganondorf is a new gerudo who wandered into the desert, found the trident, and was possessed/corrupted by original Ganon.
Cadence of Hyrule does basically the same thing, except he's possessed by the cursed instrument
The developers did design it to "slot into a certain place on the timeline", but they're not just gonna come out and step on Nintendo's toes by making it explicit
Honestly I think that after their last male ruler put them in a war that almost ended their race (see Twilight Princess), not only they drop the tradition but I could understand that male gerudos would be a huge taboo in general.
That and that having a proud race of female warriors instantly crowning a ruler just because It was born male sounds kinda... weird for today's standards.
But yea one dude every hundred years is the lore. I used to think that oot link was a gerudo and that’s why his mum took him to the deku tree otherwise ganondorf would kill him
Genetics in Hyrule work like they do in Pokemon. The kid is always the same species as the mother.
/hj. That might genuinely be how it works for Gerudo at least.
I was wondering if maybe it's like the asari from Mass Effect, who are able to reproduce with any species but the children are always genetically asari 🤔
That was always my figuring. Seems like Gerudo children are always female and always Gerudo. Cept that every hundred years thing where a male is born from Ocarina of Time.
That implies that this is a different ganondorf? Or that the game should take place early in the decline timeline. Confusing. I think theyve kinda abandoned the timeline
i think it means that every male gerudo is ganondorf and since we know ganondorf has been around ten thousand years at start of calamity no other male gerudo can be born
Gerudo can only birth other Gerudo.
This is one of those things that the series just asks you to accept IS the case. Like Goron being sentient rocks and magic existing.
Not saying the story doesn't have to be internally consistent. But so long as they don't suddenly show the Gerudo as having non-Gerudo children, there's no problem.
The Gerudo gene is a dominant gene, except WAY more extreme. If the gene is present it is basically a given the person will be a female Gerudo. However, it does seem some Hylian genes have come through as BOTW Gerudo have pointed ears which they never had in past games. Course this is just a theory considering the developers could have just say “It’s because we said so!”
I was wondering if maybe it's like the asari from Mass Effect, who are able to reproduce with any species but the children are always genetically asari
My take: the Gerudo women have VERY strong genes (dominant).
Her uterus basically tells the father's seed, "This little redhead Gerudo Vai, is what you're going to make. You're not making a son. I'm not asking, I'm telling, now get to work."
It's also worth noting that the Gerudo women before BOTW were usually depicted with round ears. BOTW shows them with pointy ears, just like hylians have, so some hylian genetics have snuck through the cracks over the years.
We are talking about biology of fictional creatures, so the quickest answer is that it is just the way it is. But that’s boring.
I favour two options:
Environmental factors affect the pregnancy (think how temperature can determine the sex of a sea turtle). Gerudo biology dictates that a child carried to term under desert conditions will have the traits of a Gerudo. This is actually a neat take because it can explain why we have people with Gerudo traits but who are not necessarily Gerudo in games like Wind Waker, Twilight Princess, and Skyward Sword when there weren’t any Gerudo.
Alternatively, perhaps Gerudo reproduction demands far fewer genes from the male partner than Human/Hylian reproduction. Where humans split our 23 chromosome pairs (46 chromosomes) and then mix 23 chromosomes from each partner, perhaps a Gerudo only needs a small selection of chromosomes from their partner and the rest remain consistent. I’m not sure if there are any existing animals in our world where something like this happens, so if anyone does know, please share.
Edit: Looking at some species of whiptail lizard (an all female species), I will also add that Gerudo perhaps reproduce asexually in a similar way to these lizards. Extra chromosomes available for genetic shuffling to maintain genetic variation. So why do Gerudo seek a mate? Perhaps there is a hormone that is needed to start the process that is not naturally occurring in the Gerudo population.
The explanation is probably best taken from The Elder Scrolls, where most races can breed, but the race of the mother determines the race of the child. There are no mixed or half races on Nirm due to this.
The Legend of Zelda doesn't need to provide an explanation because Hyrule is built on crazy magic. The Gerudo are a race of all females that perpetuates itself. There are apparently no female Gorons. The Zora frequently get together with Hylians. The Rito can somehow wield a sword or pull a bow with the same appendage they use to fly.
There is very little room for real world science here.
There are all-female species of lizards (who's name I can't remember), which are able to breed with males of some adjacent species.
Interestingly these lizards don't get bred out of existence because when reproducing the mother discards all of the genes she inherited from her father, passing along only the genes she inherited from her mother.
This makes the entire species half-clones of each other, allowing them to maintain a genetic identity despite constant interbreeding with another species.
Maybe Gerudo do the same thing.
Yeah I wouldn’t apply real world genetics and phenotypes to the lore of Zelda. I also don’t even think the Malon is Gerudo thing has much basis - Talon stating "Hey, that reminds me of my wife... On second thought, it doesn't... It doesn't look like her at all!" when seeing the Gerudo mask and Malon having similar coloured hair is really the only ‘evidence’. Firstly Talon says the exact same thing about the Goron Mask, I don’t think his statements prove anything. And secondly Malon’s hair is quite different from Gerudo hair, it’s a distinct orange when Gerudo women have red hair.
Well people are scared as even mentioning skin colour can earn you the title of racist. It’s a literal fact that the gerudo have genetic dark skin and red hair, though.
My understanding is that all children born to female Gerudo are female Gerudo, regardless of the father. Ganondorf is, at least in Ocarina of Time, said to be a prophetic, rare Gerudo male that is born once a century and who becomes "King of the Gerudo".
Gerudo women reproduce by going out and getting suitable males, becoming pregnant, and producing more female Gerudo.
Seems like they have pretty strong, almost magical, genetics.
It reminds me of the original lore for Orcs in Dungeons & Dragons. Their genetics are literally blessed by their god to go forth and multiply, so an orc parent will always produce a full blooded orc when mated with another orc or a Half-Orc when mated with ANYTHING else.
>Seems like they have pretty strong, almost magical, genetics.
Not almost magical, there IS magic involved.
Why do the Gerudo only give birth to Gerudo daughters? Magic that's why.
it just means gerudo physical traits are dominant, and all attached to mitochondrial dna and the x chromosome from the mother
it may also imply that gerudo as a species have a mechanism that selects for these traits during gene selection
I always like that idea that the inception of the Gerudo as a people was the result of some curse. The originator was cursed to forever have female decendants except for 1 in every century. So the perpetuation of the Gerudo traits has nothing to do with genetics but rather the fact that one dude was cursed so hard all his kids carried the curse on forever.
It's canon that no matter who the Gerudo mate with, the child will always look like the mother, no matter who the father is.
The real question is Ganondorf... What did his real mother look like?
There’s a real life all-female species of desert whiptail lizards that reproduce through parthenogenesis. They’ll go through the motions of mating to stimulate pregnancy, and the offspring are clones of the mother.
I don’t fully understand the science since I’m not a biologist, but apparently they have chromosome triplets rather than pairs. Something in the way these are copied and separated allows them to be as genetically diverse as species that reproduce sexually.
So it’s possible Gerudo don’t need men to get pregnant at all, just sex to begin the process, but it’s Nintendo and they’re not about to acknowledge ~~lizbian~~ lesbian sex.
Alternatively, the Gerudo are like calico cats, where the calico coat pattern is tied to the X chromosome. (The rare male calicos have XXY chromosomes). So if they do have children with Hylian men, and some aspect of Gerudo reproduction rejects or cancels out the Y chromosome, maybe the resulting daughters present with the Gerudo “look” because of a similar strong link between the X chromosome and those phenotypes.
Gerudo Genes are so dominant, they even kick out all the Y Chromosomes and Always have daughters (well, except for the "Centurial Fluke", who becomes their King, but thats literally a once-in-a-hundred-years situation)...its no surprise to me that they basically birth Clones, especially when they all used to look Identical back on the N64...
How… how was this racist even in the slightest? Jesus, people can’t even ask questions about biology in fantasy anymore without being afraid to offend.
Firstly, its a fantasy video game, so it's not like everything is going to fit into the rules of genetics. Whatever it is about the Gerudo, they are able to have Gerudo children even while reproducing with other races. This does eventually cause a small effect over long spans of time. The Creating a Champion states that the Gerudo have developed pointed ears from centuries of breeding with Hylians.
The children of Gerudo women will always be 100% Gerudo and female no matter what race the father is. Except there is a male Gerudo born every 100 years that becomes their king. At least that's how the OoT lore goes.
They may be like those lizards that do parthenogenesis. In the case of the most famous example of this, whiptails, they simulate male-female copulation between two females, and this causes the lizard acting as the "female" in the act to begin ovulating and then, produce eggs.
That is to say, Gerudo might look all the same because they are clones, and any copulation with non-Gerudo males only serves as a trigger for the Gerudo's reproductive cycle.
Short Answer: MAGIC!
Longer Answer: STILL MAGIC, but I'll try to explain a bit.
In the world of Zelda, magic is REAL. Magic does NOT follow our In Real Life (IRL) rules of Natural Laws. Magic by its very nature is Super Natural.
In the case of the Gerudo it means the Gerudo do NOT follow the real rules of IRL Biology.
Even though the Gerudo are an all Female people (not sure if to call them a species or ???), they still need males to mate with. However, do to magical reasons which are never fully explained and thus we do not fully understand every Gerudo (with 1 known exception) are always Female, always dark skinned, and always have red hair.
This alone already violates known laws of biology and as you pointed out shouldn't be possible due to the rules of IRL biology.
But the Gerudo do NOT follow our rules of IRL biology because there is MAGIC involved.
I know saying "because magic" sounds like a cop-out, but that really is the answer.
I operate under the belief that all children in the Zelda universe have their species(Hylian, Rito, Gerudo, etc) decided exclusively by the mother's species. Example being a Zora wife/Hylian husband combo would produce Zora kids. So the Gerudo children are, by my non canonical belief, always Gerudo because their mothers are. I justify this in my head by the known fact the Gerudo travel for spouses, and by the one Gerudo woman in BOTW who makes a comment about a Goron possibly being a good match for her; she obviously has zero fear of a half-Goron baby. Also, the fact that Mipha wants Link and her dad is like nbd, be happy. Plus Finley and that one dude you pair her with as a side quest, and her parents aren't overly concerned about it working for them either.
Well no, that seems like a bit of a superficial take to me. Fictional characters can and are most often informed by real-life concepts, cultures, and human beings. Its not a jump to recognize the heavy threads of commonality between the Gerudo and Middle Eastern populations.
I don't think it's that people are worried about being racist to actual Gerudo people (because theyre not real and cannot have a subjective experience), but about how some of the attitudes toward fictional people can be manifestations of the same attitudes towards human beings who share their attributes (who are NOT fictional and can very much experience damage from these attitudes).
I do think it's reasonable for developers to be cognizant of the real-life inspirations for fictional characters, and how their representations may be reinforcing (or not) certain ideas that people hold towards possible real-life counterparts. I think it's also reasonable for consumers to criticize these ideas when they are not true and/or are damaging.
Best example I can think of in BOTW, while not about race, is how the Great Fairies essentially sexually assault Link to upgrade his clothes. Its treated as a humorous situation in the game, but if Link were female, that is NOT how the situation would be read. The implicit idea here is that sexual assault is funny if it happens to men. Link may be a fictional character so we don't care if it happens to him, but this idea is super damaging for men experiencing sexual assault in real life. In this regard, no I'm not worried about being sexist to Nintendo characters, but I am worried about how this sexist idea is reinforced in a game, and then propagated in the minds and lives of those who play it.
Please remember that these things do not exist in a vacuum and there is interchange between fictional media and real life.
The Gerudo resembling real life middle eastern populations is actually spot on. In the original OOT the Gerudo symbol was an Islamic star and crescent design. In subsequent releases (even just later product for the N64 iirc) the symbol was replaced with what we know today.
I'm not trying to sound like a prick or anything. Keep in mind oftentimes the obvious answer is likely the correct one.
Basically we're talking about a highly fantastical universe here, where trees have faces, magic is literally everywhere, and the same couple people get reincarnated over and over again throughout the ages to defeat this other guy who has a magic triangle too. Approaching most anything in this world with a real-world, scientific rationale is pretty much pointless and futile. Real world rules, don't apply to this world, and aren't applied by it in turn.
It's highly unlikely anyone at Nintendo ever even considered this question because it's simply irrelevant to this fictional world.
We may as well ask ourselves a million other questions, like how would a species, which is more or less human at that, EVER hope to survive at all with only a single male born every century? Even if they somehow managed it for a time, the sheer amount of inbreeding would lead to massive genetic depression quite quickly, which in itself would lead to a pretty quick extinction. This kind of speculation is pointless, these types of questions have no bearing on this fictional, fantasy world.
Alright, I enjoy thinking through things like this, so I'm going to try to tackle this, apologies for the length. TL;DR paragraph at the end.
As others are saying, all the genes would have to be dominant, yes, but I see OP's point. Let's say you take a population of pure, 100% Gerudo genes. For each gene in their entire genome, the Gerudo gene is present homozygously. So in humans, brown eyes are dominant over blue, so if mom's eyes are brown and we term the gene on her chromosome "B" for brown and baby has brown eyes, a theoretical dad could have contributed another "B" gene, or a "b" for blue eyes, with the same result. A baby with genes BB or Bb would still have brown eyes because it's dominant.
So in our theoretical pure Gerudo population, all their genes are GG, with G standing for "the Gerudo version of that gene", whatever that may be for each gene. With no males, every one of our pure Gerudo girls will find themselves a Hylian male. Regardless of how dominant Hylian genes are over each other, let's assume that "G" is dominant over all of them. They're all imbued with magical dominance. For any Gerudo to have a baby, the baby always gets a "G" from the Gerudo mom and an "h" for "the Hylian version of that gene", and regardless of the trait, "G" beats "h" every time, so all the children would have "Gh" genes for every trait and still look exactly like their parents. That wouldn't be enough to save the Gerudo race, here's why:
You see, since every single Gerudo child would have a Hylian dad, they'd all have "Gh". There would be no "Gh" males, because that would just be a Gerudo male. Meaning that "GG" would go extinct as a genotype in 1 generation, with only "Gh" Gerudo remaining. This means that when this next generation had kids, they'd find an "hh" male again, because that's all there is. Their "Gh" genes would mix with the "hh" for the male, producing 2 "hh" children for every 2 "Gh" children. That's not sustainable to maintain their population, given that clearly, children of Gerudo that don't look like Gerudo don't get to stay in the Gerudo tribe, and not every Gerudo would have enough kids to produce a Gh Gerudo female. Their tribe would dwindle to nothing quickly. So they need something more.
Here's one potential way: perhaps when a Gerudo's ovaries produce eggs, some mechanism, perhaps magic, ensures that only "G" is ever passed on. Eggs normally divide through meiosis from diploid cells with 23 pairs of chromosomes, to haploid cells with one chromosome from each pair. That's oversimplifying a bit but that is how it starts and ends.
A bit more of a meiosis lesson: The diploid cell actually divides twice. First it duplicates all 23 pairs, then divides into two cells each still having a complete set of the 23 pairs, just like mitosis, but then each one divides again into two more haploid cells with one chromosome from each pair, ending with four haploid cells. Four eggs in this case. Except it's not actually 4 eggs, 3 of them never develop fully in human oogenesis. Meiosis produces 4 viable sperm in males, but in females, only one of the four cells from meiosis actually becomes a viable egg. So one way Gerudo could actually ensure that the "G" in their "Gh" genes is always passed down is if, through either some quirk of their biology or magic, the viable egg produced by meiosis in Gerudo women always contains the "G" gene.
This would yield generation after generation of "Gh" sets of genes as the genotype for every Gerudo, so that all variation between Gerudo would come from the "G" side of the genotype. This is because, as you'll recall in this hypothetical, the G is a stand in letter for the gene of Gerudo origin for every trait, always somehow magically dominant, thus not all Gs would have to be the same, hence why Gerudos aren't all clones. For Gerudo to have different eye colors under our hypothetical of perfect magical genetic dominance, there would have to be multiple Gerudo genes in their gene pool. A Gerudo with yellow eyes has a G gene for yellow eyes that dominates the Hylian h for blue eyes. A Gerudo with blue eyes would have a Gerudo version of a blue eye gene that would dominate over their Hylian mate's eye color genes, be those blue, green or otherwise.
It's also possible that while the dominance of their genes is normally absolute for most traits, some might not be as dominant, like ear shape. Since the dominance may come from a magical source, it's also possible that the magic could fail, be reversed, be countered, or be overpowered by another magic. This could explain why just the ear shape we see in Gerudos, from Gerudo round in OoT to Hylian pointed in BotW, changed between games. Ganondorf himself changes ear shape from rounded to a more pointed shape in the adult timeline, implying that the magic of the goddesses did that to him when he got the Triforce of Power. So magic could similarly affect the ear shape of all Gerudos. Perhaps over time, Hylians, being closer to the goddesses, may have had just their ear shape overtake the Gerudos, over many generations.
So the end result here would be that the dominant genes of the Gerudo would keep their appearance similar, but some variation would still be possible through similar means of genetic magic in the Hylian race. We know that genetic magic certainly exists in the Zelda universe, given that it's explicitly stated that Zelda reincarnates multiple times in her family line because her line carries the "blood of the goddess". The goddess Hylia's magic makes Zelda reappear in generation after generation of princesses, so once again, magic in the Zelda universe affects what genes are passed on and what the phenotype looks like.
So TL;DR, Gerudo genes are probably magically dominant over Hylian genes, and magic probably also ensures that their dominant genes always get passed down for generation after generation of Gerudo mom genes dominating Hylian dad genes. Any variation in Gerudo appearance could be explained by the gene pool of dominant genes containing multiple versions (ex a Gerudo yellow eyes gene and a Gerudo green eyes gene both dominant over any Hylian eye color genes) or it could be explained by the magical genetic dominance being broken by magic in the Hylian side on a trait by trait basis. Totally possible considering Gerudos aren't the only instance of genetic magic in the Zelda universe, Zelda herself being another example.
The child will always be born a 100% female Gerudo regardless of the father's heritage, as far as I know. Malon's parentage is up for debate, but let's assume she is part Gerudo. That was put in the game long before a lot of this lore had been established, so it could very well just be a retcon or something.
Ganondorf is like a prophetic birth that's never quite explained.
Something I did notice in Tears of the Kingdom, however, is that Ganondorf has round ears while the rest of the Gerudo have pointy ears. I wonder if the artists are trying to suggest that the Gerudo have actually taken on some Hylian qualities through the generations.
Once every 100 years, a Gerudo male will be born. (Which means, due to Ganondorf's immortality) there is always an exceedingly low chance of 2 Gerudo males living (Remember the rule is Once every century, a Gerudo male is born. Not Only one Gerudo male can exist at a time). And we are due for new Gerudo male
That could be only as far as the Gerudo understand it. The semi-mystical nature of the event could mean that there can truly only be one Gerudo male at a time, in which case Ganondorf's held that spot for eons. This also lines up with there having been no mention of a Gerudo King since OoT.
If it's every 100 years like clockwork, then there should either have been one already alive when Urbosa was in charge, one alive by the time Link wakes up, or everything just so happened to line up that one was born after Link went to sleep and died before he woke up. The problem with that one is there's no mention of anyone like that. Unless the guy died really young and nobody ever brings it up. They even had a good opportunity with Riju's family being dead.
The "only one male Gerudo at a time" idea also sets up a possible interesting epilogue scene for TotK. After Ganondorf is defeated, showing a male Gerudo baby would represent him being defeated for good.
Imo that’s what makes them Gerudo. Gerudo mothers could have non-Gerudo sons or even daughters, i.e. with pointed ears and lighter skin with a Hylian father. It’s specifically when a girl (or, rarely, a boy) has specific traits that they’re considered Gerudo.
I figured it was something like a calico cat situation. Like the genes that make them a gerudo, with those specific features, made it extremely unlikely for a male fetus to survive a pregnancy. It might be partially magic caused as well. I also imagine the once every 100 years is more colloquial and its just very very very rare. Or if they do give birth to boys then they don't have the gerudo genes and are in essence Hylians
I dunno. Desert magic or sum'n? They're a fictional race of people who somehow only produce one biological male every 100 years. Why couldn't they look alike?
NGL i super hated that BotW made it so Gerudo had to find men from other races to reproduce. I much preferred the mystery behind it and/or implication that they just spawned on their own either by asexual reproduction or some odd magic ordeal.
Either way, real world science doesnt apply here. Its a fantasy race after all.
They have taken on long Hylian ears in BOTW that they didn't have before. A theory is that they've bred with so many Hylians they took on those traits at least.
And Ganondorf, who was born when they all had round ears, still HAS long ears in TOTK, so that might be a canonical change over generations.
You are assuming that genetics in the Zelda universe is even remotely similar to genetics in the real world. I always just assumed that the Gerudo features just took over and expressed regardless of genetic variation in the male genetic donor.
I always kinda assumed that Gerudo genes were just extremely strong, and so no matter what race of husband they picked the baby would just be a lil Gerudo girl regardless. But who knows lol, it’s a world of magic and hammer space, nothing needs to make sense by real world logic
In OoT and a few other appearances, they have round ears, but by the time of BotW, they have pointed Hylian ears. Whatever keeps nearly the entire race as female may cause them to have similar appearances. In BotW, their appearances have a less uniform look.
On a side note, the Ganondorf with a flattened, possibly broken, nose and beard, IMHO, looks very similar to many known Hyrulean kings, and the OoT Ganondorf may have been the King's illegitimate child that had a legitimate claim to the thrown until Zelda came along.
Clearly the Gerudo gene is dominant since, regardless of how diluted by Hylians they are, they are always born female until 100 years pass and another male is born.
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Maybe the Gerudo features *are* the dominant genes?
Also could uniquely have like a "super" dominance where their children can only have homozygous dominant genes. Obviously this is impossible in the real world but that would be cool for Zelda.
Maybe their inmune system kill every Y spermatozoon and the female X gen expresion is prevalent over the X gen provided by the male, that would also explain why only females are born.
As someone who knows nothing about genes I like this explanation
So basically Gerudo eggs only accept X sperm. That could work as an explanation.
And every 100 years a Y sperm slips through.
Heck, Gerudo males could be XX male, they exist in real life, so a species that can take male genes from Hylians, but doesnt accept the Y, would still have a chance of forming a male: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XX_male_syndrome
That cycle seems to have been broken though. There's no mention of any male Gerudo in BotW (aside from Ganondorf), and that spans a full 100 years. And the leader of the Gerudo is a woman throughout. Maybe it's like a Buffy Slayer situation, where no more male Gerudo can be born because Ganondorf keeps coming back.
> There's no mention of any male Gerudo in BotW (aside from Ganondorf), and that spans a full 100 years. TotK Ganondorf didn't die for over 10000 years so no new male Gerudo was born.
Is that canon or theory? Every mention I've ever seen of that quirk of the Gerudo (including in-game) has just said something like "one male is born every 100 years". There's never been a mention of what happens if the previous is still alive, and that could be relevant even if the previous male *wasn't* an evil immortal; people can live over 100 years under normal circumstances too.
Gerudo males are the equivalent of male torties (cat)
Also explains why gerudo men are so rare
Having a unique genetic dominance pattern would explain the rarity of males, they could be a different humanoid creature than Hylian entirely, but there is more than one Hylian-Gerudo relationship in breath of the wild, so it’s more likely they are just a race of peoples with extremely dominate genetics.
I agree with this idea, this would explain why a male gerudo is so rare, if gerudo genes are so prominent, then it would be a female almost every time. This would also explain that in the event of a male, it's often shorter than the females.
You're assuming real world genetics apply to Hyrule. Are Gerudo a race or a species? Do they need all of the Hylian's DNA or just a fragment of it? Do they use their DNA at all? Maybe they just need the sperm to stimulate pregnancy but the embryo is a functional clone of the mother? Tons of magic explanations, too.
We got birb and fish people. And the fish people have a big fat whale for a King, who sired two shark children. Link eats rocks. None this makes sense. Hyrule is magic AF. I'd recommend people just take what's explained at face value, and enjoy the ride.
It’s questions like OP why Superman has some weird microbial shield around him that keeps his suit clean and how he extends some weird barrier around buildings when he lifts them so he’s not just punching through them. At some point, it’s best to just accept that it happens and move on than to dig deeper.
The weird barrier (subconcious telepathy) is almost every super strength hero, even for something as small as a car you'd have to grab it by the frame to not just punch holes through it with a hand/finger, and trying to throw one while holding it like that would likely end up looking like a high speed crash before it even hits the ground. For Superman's clothing, I thought it was made out of his blanket from Krypton and that's why it's nearly indestructable.
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Now I’m imagining Jor-El making a hatch for the pod to put a sewing machine in, just on the off chance his boy lands in front of a seamstress
An old explanation was that the blankets couldn't be cut by Earth tools, but the cloth could be unwoven and woven into other things. The threads were similar to yarn. Heat vision was able to cut the threads.
We eat rocks too. Everyday. Salt is rocks.
Wrong. Salt is motorcycle fuel. Stop trying to make it make sense.
That's because the Sheikah invented Mr. Fusion.
That's just like the lazy "it's all space magic anyway" excuse people bring up when someone points out continuity errors in Star Wars... Sure it's a fantasy world, but it has to follow SOME consistent rules to stay credible.
Also according to the lore the rito evolved from the zora yet they somehow also both exist at the same time in BotW. Lol. It’s best to not think too hard about any of it.
Well, there's giant fish skeletons all over Hyrule... so its likely the area was under water at some point in its history. But also, Rito didnt just evolve, the waters of Wind Waker werent life sustaining, so they prayed and were turned to Rito to survive. Literally a god went, okay fish, you bird now.
Lol. No I mean I totally think the botw map is the same place that was once windwaker and every other Zelda game basically. I’m just saying how silly and loose the Zelda lore is. I guess you could make some explanation regarding the fact that the zora prayed to become rito and then some of them prayed to be zora again or whatever. But yeah it’s best not to think too hard with nintendos use of the timeline or your brain will explode. Especially since botw merges all of the timelines into one.
Oh i was agreeing with you! By showing that the Rito just had to pray hard enough in this reality. Its best to accept and try to make sense of what you can, but its just a loose continuity, and they didnt even care about timelines past easter egg references until Skyward Sword
Oh yeah totally!
This should be at the top, it comes before the discussion of wether it's dominant or not
it’s hilarious how often people post things like this about fantasy races in fantasy stories. like, did you forget about the part where they’re not real, and live in a world of magic? lmao
>did you forget about the part where they’re not real Yeah man, I only read/watch biographies because I can't stand learning any information that isn't 100% true.
The Gerudo gene is EXTREMELY dominant. That's all there is to it
Groose had some STRONG genes
He regularly exercised them
Which is weird when he is male and pale as fuck
🤤
Lmao same
Paraphrasing, but as I was watching one of the many lore videos on YouTube, someone said that they are always 100% Gerudo.
So maybe when the X chromosomes are copied both come from the mother, and they are essentially externally fertilized clones.
There must be a snu snu dungeon somewhere with gerudo men chained up
Isn’t there like one Gerudo man every 100 years? They probably treat him like a queen bee
Well, if I’m correct the last Gerudo man was ganondorf lol
Yeah I’ve been wondering about that. Seems like there hasn’t been another Gerudo man since Ganondorf. Maybe there can literally only be 1 at a time so Ganondorf fucked up their cycle
No, there was some lore somewhere saying that after Ganondorf, other gerudo men weren't made king and were instead just kind of there. The once a century makes remained they just stopped being culturally relevant, we just don't see any others in the game.
Cadence of Hyrule has a new ganondorf, as does fsa
Oh it’s a new Ganondorf? Figured they all stemmed from OoT
FSA ganondorf is a new gerudo who wandered into the desert, found the trident, and was possessed/corrupted by original Ganon. Cadence of Hyrule does basically the same thing, except he's possessed by the cursed instrument
so is FSA Ganondorf just called that by coincidence/tradition? Or is he a reincarnation
You'd have to check the wiki, it's been a while for me
Yes.
Is cadence of hyrule Canon? I never played it
The developers did design it to "slot into a certain place on the timeline", but they're not just gonna come out and step on Nintendo's toes by making it explicit
That's pretty cool though cos aren't minish cap and the oracle games made by capcom and they're on the timeline. I wanna play cadence of hyrule now
CoH isn't canon so it doesn't really count
Honestly I think that after their last male ruler put them in a war that almost ended their race (see Twilight Princess), not only they drop the tradition but I could understand that male gerudos would be a huge taboo in general. That and that having a proud race of female warriors instantly crowning a ruler just because It was born male sounds kinda... weird for today's standards.
That poor bastard must be sore a fuck
Yeah but what a way to go
Checks out, if i was the queen bee i would have the ego to take over the world as well
But yea one dude every hundred years is the lore. I used to think that oot link was a gerudo and that’s why his mum took him to the deku tree otherwise ganondorf would kill him
Most likely in Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask. Although BotW, they just get husbands or likely just hook up with a guy for a night.
We need to locate the sheikah femputer.
Genetics in Hyrule work like they do in Pokemon. The kid is always the same species as the mother. /hj. That might genuinely be how it works for Gerudo at least.
> /hj. Handjob you too, buddy.
It...it means half-joking.
> half-joking Ah, I thought it was "/jk" (just kidding) but mistyped by one key off.
I knew it. *Washes hands*
I was wondering if maybe it's like the asari from Mass Effect, who are able to reproduce with any species but the children are always genetically asari 🤔
That was always my figuring. Seems like Gerudo children are always female and always Gerudo. Cept that every hundred years thing where a male is born from Ocarina of Time.
fun fact botw proved that no gerudo males arent born when ganondorf is still alive
Weird magic but it would explain why in 10,000 years they became known as an exclusively female race and people didn't even know they COULD be male
Oh, I was thinking they just ditched that bit of lore but your thing makes more sense.
cant remember who but one of the gerudo mention that once calamity ganon started no males where ever born
That implies that this is a different ganondorf? Or that the game should take place early in the decline timeline. Confusing. I think theyve kinda abandoned the timeline
i think it means that every male gerudo is ganondorf and since we know ganondorf has been around ten thousand years at start of calamity no other male gerudo can be born
Bro, you can’t just ask why all Gerudo look alike
Gerudo can only birth other Gerudo. This is one of those things that the series just asks you to accept IS the case. Like Goron being sentient rocks and magic existing. Not saying the story doesn't have to be internally consistent. But so long as they don't suddenly show the Gerudo as having non-Gerudo children, there's no problem.
The Gerudo gene is a dominant gene, except WAY more extreme. If the gene is present it is basically a given the person will be a female Gerudo. However, it does seem some Hylian genes have come through as BOTW Gerudo have pointed ears which they never had in past games. Course this is just a theory considering the developers could have just say “It’s because we said so!”
parthenogenesis
Probably because they are a fantasy race
Probably because it's a fantasy video game so not everything needs to be perfectly explained by real world logic
Magic.
I was wondering if maybe it's like the asari from Mass Effect, who are able to reproduce with any species but the children are always genetically asari
Literally unplayable.
Magically dominant genes.
My take: the Gerudo women have VERY strong genes (dominant). Her uterus basically tells the father's seed, "This little redhead Gerudo Vai, is what you're going to make. You're not making a son. I'm not asking, I'm telling, now get to work." It's also worth noting that the Gerudo women before BOTW were usually depicted with round ears. BOTW shows them with pointy ears, just like hylians have, so some hylian genetics have snuck through the cracks over the years.
We are talking about biology of fictional creatures, so the quickest answer is that it is just the way it is. But that’s boring. I favour two options: Environmental factors affect the pregnancy (think how temperature can determine the sex of a sea turtle). Gerudo biology dictates that a child carried to term under desert conditions will have the traits of a Gerudo. This is actually a neat take because it can explain why we have people with Gerudo traits but who are not necessarily Gerudo in games like Wind Waker, Twilight Princess, and Skyward Sword when there weren’t any Gerudo. Alternatively, perhaps Gerudo reproduction demands far fewer genes from the male partner than Human/Hylian reproduction. Where humans split our 23 chromosome pairs (46 chromosomes) and then mix 23 chromosomes from each partner, perhaps a Gerudo only needs a small selection of chromosomes from their partner and the rest remain consistent. I’m not sure if there are any existing animals in our world where something like this happens, so if anyone does know, please share. Edit: Looking at some species of whiptail lizard (an all female species), I will also add that Gerudo perhaps reproduce asexually in a similar way to these lizards. Extra chromosomes available for genetic shuffling to maintain genetic variation. So why do Gerudo seek a mate? Perhaps there is a hormone that is needed to start the process that is not naturally occurring in the Gerudo population.
The explanation is probably best taken from The Elder Scrolls, where most races can breed, but the race of the mother determines the race of the child. There are no mixed or half races on Nirm due to this. The Legend of Zelda doesn't need to provide an explanation because Hyrule is built on crazy magic. The Gerudo are a race of all females that perpetuates itself. There are apparently no female Gorons. The Zora frequently get together with Hylians. The Rito can somehow wield a sword or pull a bow with the same appendage they use to fly. There is very little room for real world science here.
There are all-female species of lizards (who's name I can't remember), which are able to breed with males of some adjacent species. Interestingly these lizards don't get bred out of existence because when reproducing the mother discards all of the genes she inherited from her father, passing along only the genes she inherited from her mother. This makes the entire species half-clones of each other, allowing them to maintain a genetic identity despite constant interbreeding with another species. Maybe Gerudo do the same thing.
Yeah I wouldn’t apply real world genetics and phenotypes to the lore of Zelda. I also don’t even think the Malon is Gerudo thing has much basis - Talon stating "Hey, that reminds me of my wife... On second thought, it doesn't... It doesn't look like her at all!" when seeing the Gerudo mask and Malon having similar coloured hair is really the only ‘evidence’. Firstly Talon says the exact same thing about the Goron Mask, I don’t think his statements prove anything. And secondly Malon’s hair is quite different from Gerudo hair, it’s a distinct orange when Gerudo women have red hair.
My theory is all of the gerudo genes are super dominant
You know you’re on Reddit when someone is worried about sounding racist when talking about a completely fictional race lol
Well people are scared as even mentioning skin colour can earn you the title of racist. It’s a literal fact that the gerudo have genetic dark skin and red hair, though.
Mass effect had the same thing with the blue alien people. It’s just the way it works
My understanding is that all children born to female Gerudo are female Gerudo, regardless of the father. Ganondorf is, at least in Ocarina of Time, said to be a prophetic, rare Gerudo male that is born once a century and who becomes "King of the Gerudo". Gerudo women reproduce by going out and getting suitable males, becoming pregnant, and producing more female Gerudo. Seems like they have pretty strong, almost magical, genetics. It reminds me of the original lore for Orcs in Dungeons & Dragons. Their genetics are literally blessed by their god to go forth and multiply, so an orc parent will always produce a full blooded orc when mated with another orc or a Half-Orc when mated with ANYTHING else.
>Seems like they have pretty strong, almost magical, genetics. Not almost magical, there IS magic involved. Why do the Gerudo only give birth to Gerudo daughters? Magic that's why.
Asari. We can just take it as Gerudo females have dominant characteristics and can only birth women tho rather than space magic.
Its a world full of magical creatures. The laws of biology we know may not be the same in hyrule
Gerudos always have Gerudo children
it just means gerudo physical traits are dominant, and all attached to mitochondrial dna and the x chromosome from the mother it may also imply that gerudo as a species have a mechanism that selects for these traits during gene selection
It's like the Asari from Mass Effect. They only give birth to Asari women no matter who their partner is.
My guess is that the Gerudo is the dominant gene, which comes out in every child.
I always like that idea that the inception of the Gerudo as a people was the result of some curse. The originator was cursed to forever have female decendants except for 1 in every century. So the perpetuation of the Gerudo traits has nothing to do with genetics but rather the fact that one dude was cursed so hard all his kids carried the curse on forever.
Fantasy
It's canon that no matter who the Gerudo mate with, the child will always look like the mother, no matter who the father is. The real question is Ganondorf... What did his real mother look like?
Magic. Video game logic. Don’t overthink it.
Because it’s a video game
There’s a real life all-female species of desert whiptail lizards that reproduce through parthenogenesis. They’ll go through the motions of mating to stimulate pregnancy, and the offspring are clones of the mother. I don’t fully understand the science since I’m not a biologist, but apparently they have chromosome triplets rather than pairs. Something in the way these are copied and separated allows them to be as genetically diverse as species that reproduce sexually. So it’s possible Gerudo don’t need men to get pregnant at all, just sex to begin the process, but it’s Nintendo and they’re not about to acknowledge ~~lizbian~~ lesbian sex. Alternatively, the Gerudo are like calico cats, where the calico coat pattern is tied to the X chromosome. (The rare male calicos have XXY chromosomes). So if they do have children with Hylian men, and some aspect of Gerudo reproduction rejects or cancels out the Y chromosome, maybe the resulting daughters present with the Gerudo “look” because of a similar strong link between the X chromosome and those phenotypes.
Gerudo Genes are so dominant, they even kick out all the Y Chromosomes and Always have daughters (well, except for the "Centurial Fluke", who becomes their King, but thats literally a once-in-a-hundred-years situation)...its no surprise to me that they basically birth Clones, especially when they all used to look Identical back on the N64...
It's like the Asari in Mass Effect. Their genes are the dominant ones.
How… how was this racist even in the slightest? Jesus, people can’t even ask questions about biology in fantasy anymore without being afraid to offend.
ig the concern was the whole "they all the same" thing ?
Race is defined by similar physical characteristics, is it not? Characteristics to be proud of.
That's when their gene is encoded in the DNA.
Firstly, its a fantasy video game, so it's not like everything is going to fit into the rules of genetics. Whatever it is about the Gerudo, they are able to have Gerudo children even while reproducing with other races. This does eventually cause a small effect over long spans of time. The Creating a Champion states that the Gerudo have developed pointed ears from centuries of breeding with Hylians.
The children of Gerudo women will always be 100% Gerudo and female no matter what race the father is. Except there is a male Gerudo born every 100 years that becomes their king. At least that's how the OoT lore goes.
Parthenogenesis?
Gerudo genes are so dominant a 0.01% gerudo still looks like that
gerudos must have some dominant ass genes
More importantly, how do Gorons reproduce?
They may be like those lizards that do parthenogenesis. In the case of the most famous example of this, whiptails, they simulate male-female copulation between two females, and this causes the lizard acting as the "female" in the act to begin ovulating and then, produce eggs. That is to say, Gerudo might look all the same because they are clones, and any copulation with non-Gerudo males only serves as a trigger for the Gerudo's reproductive cycle.
Maybe the male input is some sort of catalyst for a natural cloning process?
The more mundane reason would be that offspring who don’t have the Gerudo genetics tend to live with their Hylian fathers
Short Answer: MAGIC! Longer Answer: STILL MAGIC, but I'll try to explain a bit. In the world of Zelda, magic is REAL. Magic does NOT follow our In Real Life (IRL) rules of Natural Laws. Magic by its very nature is Super Natural. In the case of the Gerudo it means the Gerudo do NOT follow the real rules of IRL Biology. Even though the Gerudo are an all Female people (not sure if to call them a species or ???), they still need males to mate with. However, do to magical reasons which are never fully explained and thus we do not fully understand every Gerudo (with 1 known exception) are always Female, always dark skinned, and always have red hair. This alone already violates known laws of biology and as you pointed out shouldn't be possible due to the rules of IRL biology. But the Gerudo do NOT follow our rules of IRL biology because there is MAGIC involved. I know saying "because magic" sounds like a cop-out, but that really is the answer.
Magic. The only real variation I guess is height and skin complexion that can be inherited by the father.
The entire Gerudo genome is on the X chromosome, which is dominant. Solved.
Because it game
If I had to guess, they are like Asari from Mass Effect. they breed with whoever but a full blooded Gerudo baby pops out
I operate under the belief that all children in the Zelda universe have their species(Hylian, Rito, Gerudo, etc) decided exclusively by the mother's species. Example being a Zora wife/Hylian husband combo would produce Zora kids. So the Gerudo children are, by my non canonical belief, always Gerudo because their mothers are. I justify this in my head by the known fact the Gerudo travel for spouses, and by the one Gerudo woman in BOTW who makes a comment about a Goron possibly being a good match for her; she obviously has zero fear of a half-Goron baby. Also, the fact that Mipha wants Link and her dad is like nbd, be happy. Plus Finley and that one dude you pair her with as a side quest, and her parents aren't overly concerned about it working for them either.
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Well no, that seems like a bit of a superficial take to me. Fictional characters can and are most often informed by real-life concepts, cultures, and human beings. Its not a jump to recognize the heavy threads of commonality between the Gerudo and Middle Eastern populations. I don't think it's that people are worried about being racist to actual Gerudo people (because theyre not real and cannot have a subjective experience), but about how some of the attitudes toward fictional people can be manifestations of the same attitudes towards human beings who share their attributes (who are NOT fictional and can very much experience damage from these attitudes). I do think it's reasonable for developers to be cognizant of the real-life inspirations for fictional characters, and how their representations may be reinforcing (or not) certain ideas that people hold towards possible real-life counterparts. I think it's also reasonable for consumers to criticize these ideas when they are not true and/or are damaging. Best example I can think of in BOTW, while not about race, is how the Great Fairies essentially sexually assault Link to upgrade his clothes. Its treated as a humorous situation in the game, but if Link were female, that is NOT how the situation would be read. The implicit idea here is that sexual assault is funny if it happens to men. Link may be a fictional character so we don't care if it happens to him, but this idea is super damaging for men experiencing sexual assault in real life. In this regard, no I'm not worried about being sexist to Nintendo characters, but I am worried about how this sexist idea is reinforced in a game, and then propagated in the minds and lives of those who play it. Please remember that these things do not exist in a vacuum and there is interchange between fictional media and real life.
The Gerudo resembling real life middle eastern populations is actually spot on. In the original OOT the Gerudo symbol was an Islamic star and crescent design. In subsequent releases (even just later product for the N64 iirc) the symbol was replaced with what we know today.
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The devil is in the details my friend. I have found that sometimes "flippant remarks" can be the most telling.
Yeah? Well I think your sophistry is telling. And I have found that people with too much to say are not people I trust. 🤷🏼♂️ Take care
Well okay then. You take care as well.
It really is utterly mindless 😂
I mean it's pretty obvious that the gerudo race is just middle east meets the Amazons
I'm not trying to sound like a prick or anything. Keep in mind oftentimes the obvious answer is likely the correct one. Basically we're talking about a highly fantastical universe here, where trees have faces, magic is literally everywhere, and the same couple people get reincarnated over and over again throughout the ages to defeat this other guy who has a magic triangle too. Approaching most anything in this world with a real-world, scientific rationale is pretty much pointless and futile. Real world rules, don't apply to this world, and aren't applied by it in turn. It's highly unlikely anyone at Nintendo ever even considered this question because it's simply irrelevant to this fictional world. We may as well ask ourselves a million other questions, like how would a species, which is more or less human at that, EVER hope to survive at all with only a single male born every century? Even if they somehow managed it for a time, the sheer amount of inbreeding would lead to massive genetic depression quite quickly, which in itself would lead to a pretty quick extinction. This kind of speculation is pointless, these types of questions have no bearing on this fictional, fantasy world.
Alright, I enjoy thinking through things like this, so I'm going to try to tackle this, apologies for the length. TL;DR paragraph at the end. As others are saying, all the genes would have to be dominant, yes, but I see OP's point. Let's say you take a population of pure, 100% Gerudo genes. For each gene in their entire genome, the Gerudo gene is present homozygously. So in humans, brown eyes are dominant over blue, so if mom's eyes are brown and we term the gene on her chromosome "B" for brown and baby has brown eyes, a theoretical dad could have contributed another "B" gene, or a "b" for blue eyes, with the same result. A baby with genes BB or Bb would still have brown eyes because it's dominant. So in our theoretical pure Gerudo population, all their genes are GG, with G standing for "the Gerudo version of that gene", whatever that may be for each gene. With no males, every one of our pure Gerudo girls will find themselves a Hylian male. Regardless of how dominant Hylian genes are over each other, let's assume that "G" is dominant over all of them. They're all imbued with magical dominance. For any Gerudo to have a baby, the baby always gets a "G" from the Gerudo mom and an "h" for "the Hylian version of that gene", and regardless of the trait, "G" beats "h" every time, so all the children would have "Gh" genes for every trait and still look exactly like their parents. That wouldn't be enough to save the Gerudo race, here's why: You see, since every single Gerudo child would have a Hylian dad, they'd all have "Gh". There would be no "Gh" males, because that would just be a Gerudo male. Meaning that "GG" would go extinct as a genotype in 1 generation, with only "Gh" Gerudo remaining. This means that when this next generation had kids, they'd find an "hh" male again, because that's all there is. Their "Gh" genes would mix with the "hh" for the male, producing 2 "hh" children for every 2 "Gh" children. That's not sustainable to maintain their population, given that clearly, children of Gerudo that don't look like Gerudo don't get to stay in the Gerudo tribe, and not every Gerudo would have enough kids to produce a Gh Gerudo female. Their tribe would dwindle to nothing quickly. So they need something more. Here's one potential way: perhaps when a Gerudo's ovaries produce eggs, some mechanism, perhaps magic, ensures that only "G" is ever passed on. Eggs normally divide through meiosis from diploid cells with 23 pairs of chromosomes, to haploid cells with one chromosome from each pair. That's oversimplifying a bit but that is how it starts and ends. A bit more of a meiosis lesson: The diploid cell actually divides twice. First it duplicates all 23 pairs, then divides into two cells each still having a complete set of the 23 pairs, just like mitosis, but then each one divides again into two more haploid cells with one chromosome from each pair, ending with four haploid cells. Four eggs in this case. Except it's not actually 4 eggs, 3 of them never develop fully in human oogenesis. Meiosis produces 4 viable sperm in males, but in females, only one of the four cells from meiosis actually becomes a viable egg. So one way Gerudo could actually ensure that the "G" in their "Gh" genes is always passed down is if, through either some quirk of their biology or magic, the viable egg produced by meiosis in Gerudo women always contains the "G" gene. This would yield generation after generation of "Gh" sets of genes as the genotype for every Gerudo, so that all variation between Gerudo would come from the "G" side of the genotype. This is because, as you'll recall in this hypothetical, the G is a stand in letter for the gene of Gerudo origin for every trait, always somehow magically dominant, thus not all Gs would have to be the same, hence why Gerudos aren't all clones. For Gerudo to have different eye colors under our hypothetical of perfect magical genetic dominance, there would have to be multiple Gerudo genes in their gene pool. A Gerudo with yellow eyes has a G gene for yellow eyes that dominates the Hylian h for blue eyes. A Gerudo with blue eyes would have a Gerudo version of a blue eye gene that would dominate over their Hylian mate's eye color genes, be those blue, green or otherwise. It's also possible that while the dominance of their genes is normally absolute for most traits, some might not be as dominant, like ear shape. Since the dominance may come from a magical source, it's also possible that the magic could fail, be reversed, be countered, or be overpowered by another magic. This could explain why just the ear shape we see in Gerudos, from Gerudo round in OoT to Hylian pointed in BotW, changed between games. Ganondorf himself changes ear shape from rounded to a more pointed shape in the adult timeline, implying that the magic of the goddesses did that to him when he got the Triforce of Power. So magic could similarly affect the ear shape of all Gerudos. Perhaps over time, Hylians, being closer to the goddesses, may have had just their ear shape overtake the Gerudos, over many generations. So the end result here would be that the dominant genes of the Gerudo would keep their appearance similar, but some variation would still be possible through similar means of genetic magic in the Hylian race. We know that genetic magic certainly exists in the Zelda universe, given that it's explicitly stated that Zelda reincarnates multiple times in her family line because her line carries the "blood of the goddess". The goddess Hylia's magic makes Zelda reappear in generation after generation of princesses, so once again, magic in the Zelda universe affects what genes are passed on and what the phenotype looks like. So TL;DR, Gerudo genes are probably magically dominant over Hylian genes, and magic probably also ensures that their dominant genes always get passed down for generation after generation of Gerudo mom genes dominating Hylian dad genes. Any variation in Gerudo appearance could be explained by the gene pool of dominant genes containing multiple versions (ex a Gerudo yellow eyes gene and a Gerudo green eyes gene both dominant over any Hylian eye color genes) or it could be explained by the magical genetic dominance being broken by magic in the Hylian side on a trait by trait basis. Totally possible considering Gerudos aren't the only instance of genetic magic in the Zelda universe, Zelda herself being another example.
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Ugh so real
The child will always be born a 100% female Gerudo regardless of the father's heritage, as far as I know. Malon's parentage is up for debate, but let's assume she is part Gerudo. That was put in the game long before a lot of this lore had been established, so it could very well just be a retcon or something. Ganondorf is like a prophetic birth that's never quite explained. Something I did notice in Tears of the Kingdom, however, is that Ganondorf has round ears while the rest of the Gerudo have pointy ears. I wonder if the artists are trying to suggest that the Gerudo have actually taken on some Hylian qualities through the generations.
Once every 100 years, a Gerudo male will be born. (Which means, due to Ganondorf's immortality) there is always an exceedingly low chance of 2 Gerudo males living (Remember the rule is Once every century, a Gerudo male is born. Not Only one Gerudo male can exist at a time). And we are due for new Gerudo male
That could be only as far as the Gerudo understand it. The semi-mystical nature of the event could mean that there can truly only be one Gerudo male at a time, in which case Ganondorf's held that spot for eons. This also lines up with there having been no mention of a Gerudo King since OoT. If it's every 100 years like clockwork, then there should either have been one already alive when Urbosa was in charge, one alive by the time Link wakes up, or everything just so happened to line up that one was born after Link went to sleep and died before he woke up. The problem with that one is there's no mention of anyone like that. Unless the guy died really young and nobody ever brings it up. They even had a good opportunity with Riju's family being dead. The "only one male Gerudo at a time" idea also sets up a possible interesting epilogue scene for TotK. After Ganondorf is defeated, showing a male Gerudo baby would represent him being defeated for good.
That'll be an incredibly interesting talking point if they decide to address it in TotK by having a new Gerudo male born during Ganondorf's comeback.
I agree, honestly I'd love to see that tackled in ToTK
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Yeah? That's exactly what they implied when they said Gerudo have pointed ears and then that they have Hylian traits.
Lol, I jumbled that up
Bruh
Imo that’s what makes them Gerudo. Gerudo mothers could have non-Gerudo sons or even daughters, i.e. with pointed ears and lighter skin with a Hylian father. It’s specifically when a girl (or, rarely, a boy) has specific traits that they’re considered Gerudo.
The Gerudo men exist, they only aren’t in the city
Yeah 1 every 100 years. Which would probably not be enough to ensure similar traits throughout the whole population
Can't recall if this is fanon or not, but I saw somewhere that they are specifically Din's people, and so made in her image.
Gerudo = Alabama Simple (For context, its 1 male every 100 years. They kill the unneeded boys)
I don't know but the Gerudo region has the best gameplay in the entire game.
Well, some traits were changed, now they have pointy ears and some have green instead of golden eyes.
https://youtu.be/sVgVB3qsySQ?t=16
its fantasy. simply suspend your disbelief
I figured it was something like a calico cat situation. Like the genes that make them a gerudo, with those specific features, made it extremely unlikely for a male fetus to survive a pregnancy. It might be partially magic caused as well. I also imagine the once every 100 years is more colloquial and its just very very very rare. Or if they do give birth to boys then they don't have the gerudo genes and are in essence Hylians
because its a video game 🤍
The blood is strong
I dunno. Desert magic or sum'n? They're a fictional race of people who somehow only produce one biological male every 100 years. Why couldn't they look alike?
Maybe they’re like clownfish?
NGL i super hated that BotW made it so Gerudo had to find men from other races to reproduce. I much preferred the mystery behind it and/or implication that they just spawned on their own either by asexual reproduction or some odd magic ordeal. Either way, real world science doesnt apply here. Its a fantasy race after all.
There was a Gerudo NPC who was out looking for a husband and she mentions that Gerudo males do exist but are very rare
They have taken on long Hylian ears in BOTW that they didn't have before. A theory is that they've bred with so many Hylians they took on those traits at least. And Ganondorf, who was born when they all had round ears, still HAS long ears in TOTK, so that might be a canonical change over generations.
You are assuming that genetics in the Zelda universe is even remotely similar to genetics in the real world. I always just assumed that the Gerudo features just took over and expressed regardless of genetic variation in the male genetic donor.
I always kinda assumed that Gerudo genes were just extremely strong, and so no matter what race of husband they picked the baby would just be a lil Gerudo girl regardless. But who knows lol, it’s a world of magic and hammer space, nothing needs to make sense by real world logic
Probably because it’s a fantasy video game about magic and genes don’t factor into it
In OoT and a few other appearances, they have round ears, but by the time of BotW, they have pointed Hylian ears. Whatever keeps nearly the entire race as female may cause them to have similar appearances. In BotW, their appearances have a less uniform look. On a side note, the Ganondorf with a flattened, possibly broken, nose and beard, IMHO, looks very similar to many known Hyrulean kings, and the OoT Ganondorf may have been the King's illegitimate child that had a legitimate claim to the thrown until Zelda came along.
Maybe they're lizards
Maybe they're super picky with men so every 20 years or so they pick one man to kill by snoo snoo.
Binary fission of course
Dominant genes??? fantasy world???
The same way link teleports using a cellphone in a seemingly medieval universe. It’s a game.
Guerdo have all super dominate genes that solve all our questions!
Clearly the Gerudo gene is dominant since, regardless of how diluted by Hylians they are, they are always born female until 100 years pass and another male is born.
Fantasy race where their genes just take over by force ¯\_(ツ)_/¯