#gibdos

Gibdos from The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

"This creature make it impossible to do the shadow temple and the well, I'm 28 and I still need my older siblings to do these levels for me"

● They’re not a new species by any means, having lived in The Depths under Gerudo for a very long time. Sightings of them above ground before The Upheaval where incredibly rare, and often chocked up to the heat of the desert playing with someone’s vision. They’re a native species to The Depths, much like how the Frox are.

● They’re a solitary species, preferring to stay with their own kind as opposed to other monsters. Prior to The Upheaval, they were oddly docile as well, leaving the Gerudo alone for the most part and only being directly aggressive if their hive was in danger.

● Their change in behavior is mostly a result of their Queen being infected with Gloom, making them far more aggressive. They’re seemingly intelligent enough to show some form of anger following her death, which is why they are still highly aggressive.

● Gibdos are generally sent out of their Hive to hunt in hordes led by a Moth Gibdo when they aren’t at their Hive. Moth Gibdos also guard the outside of the Hive as well.

● Rely on sheer numbers and their incredible durability to hunt prey, preferring to swarm prey en masse and tear them apart.

● Following The Upheaval, their tactics are much the same, but they have also begun making use of their corpse-like appearance as a way to perform ambushes.

● They begin lives as larva roughly the length of an arm, before rapidly developing into their adult forms over the course of several days.

● Despite the typical Gibdo being an adult, some have been shown to metamorphose into Moth Gibdos. The Queen plays a role in this process, wrapping certain female Gibdos in silk and leaving them be for a few days. During this process, the Gibdo eats its way out of its silk bindings. This silk is believed to be rich in nutrients, which stimulate the Gibdo’s body into producing wings. As a result, Moth Gibdos are always female, while the wingless ones are predominantly male.

● A new Queen is created similarly to how bees create a new queen. The Queen creates and stores a potent chemical compound, and when she is killed, her Hive feeds this compound to a Moth Gibdo. The compound causes a massive growth in size and heavily alters the body.

● Their “ribs” are actually a set of vestigial legs, which are rather useless. However, when a Moth Gibdo is turned into a Queen, these ribs develop into two extra sets of limbs.

● Their incredibly tough exoskeletons have developed as a result of how inhospitable The Depths are, with their exoskeletons protecting them from being hurt too badly by the incredibly vicious sandstorms that occasionally occur down there. In addition, larger Frox occasionally prey on Gibdo, and as such Gibdo have also developed their exoskeletons to make it far more difficult for Frox to eat them.

● However, due to their exoskeletons developing to protect against physical attacks, attacks that are more magical in nature can destroy their exoskeletons. While this isn’t guaranteed to kill the Gibdo and they can grow back their exoskeletons rather quickly, it leaves them vulnerable to more conventional attacks.

● Their diets have made their Guts a very powerful compound when used in elixirs, making them exponentially more powerful. Because of this, they’re hunted quite frequently following their discovery.

● While they prefer to hunt living creatures, they will scavenge if necessary.

● Despite having biological sexes (studies on Gibdos compared to Moth Gibdos have shown they do in fact have genders), the Queen is the only one capable of reproducing, and even then it’s done through self-fertilization.

● When they are on the surface, Molduga tend to ignore them, as their low weight makes it nearly impossible to detect their vibrations and they’re generally very quiet when not hunting.

● While they generally ignore other monsters, they avoid Fire-Breath and Electric Lizalfos and Electric Chuchus due to the risk they pose to their exoskeletons.

● Ironically, despite the adults preying on them, Gibdos seem to prefer Little Frox as food.

● They seem to be neutral towards the Yiga, as they never go out of their way to attack them even if they enter their territory.

We all know the gibdos from totk, right?

Clearly inspired by the undead versions from other games, but the game takes an interesting turn by making them a sort of hive insects, with a queen and nests. Which was disappointing at first. Its like they wanted to make them undead (the only hint at this is the "Wrath of the Executed" snippet from a Yiga journal) but didn't want to commit to the more human redead/Gibdo designs from any other zelda game.

Again, disappointing. But not a total loss. Because the thing about hive insects is that their hives are typically full of larvae. And considering the totk redeads still carry some resemblance to corpses... it's not hard to imagine how they reproduce. Berserk has a very similar concept to this, only it's... a bit more disturbing.

I imagine, similar to this, the queen is the only true "insect," and does something to "process" the deceased into new drones. They are cocooned, have something supernatural done to them, and emerge later as fully formed gibdos. The magic involved in theirs and the queens creation is so intricate, that elemental magic can destabilize them. Anything else is useless.

They attack in massive numbers for the express purpose of multiplying. Any casualties are carried off upon retreat.

So were the Gibdos retconned from being undead humans to insects to prevent potential controversy in terms of… potential cannibalism with the cooking system?

…about how, even if Ganondorf knew and cared about the Yiga Clan (which itself isn’t a given), they didn’t seem to have any way of communicating directly with each other.

That means, among other things, that the Yiga had no prior warning about the Gibdos.

Imagine being a Yiga bandit, heading towards Kara Kara Bazaar to steal some money and supplies. There’s a bad sandstorm today, but it’s nothing you haven’t dealt with before.

Up ahead, you see a shambling, humanoid shape. Perhaps an exhausted traveler, an easy target for mugging?