#gohma

Gohma World Eater

Since monster design is one of my passions (I did a bunch of it for student games and films in university) I will definitely be fleshing out this already very fleshy Gohma design in the future.

While Gohma is usually depicted as an arthropod, (it manifests as one that Link fights within the pocket dimension) this one eats worlds, and so I wanted to literally break it out of its shell. I combined the de-shelled gelatinous result with some Gloom Hand influence from TOTK and Gohma World Eater was born!

The World

The point in time I decided to branch my storyline off of directly follows Twilight Princess since that’s what the HD Experience trailer had hinted at with the small discrepancy that my storyline happens about a generation in the future (trying to avoid traumatizing Twilight any further). However, in a pretty direct contrast to the very nature centric imagery in TP, I want to take this visually in an inter-dimensional space adventure direction.

As wild as it sounds, eventually I hope to design something like communications systems this world could use loosely based on Ancient Tech or Twilight magic for this world so Demo isn’t going into his battle totally alone!

Demo/Link

I know that there’s a running joke that every boy child under the sun in Hyrule must be named Link— to diverge from this and since I generally refer to him as Demo, his first name is Demo and his middle name is Link. Why? Because..why not.

Personality-wise, I haven’t developed Demo much, but I imagine him as a pretty timid and quiet guy in daily life. He likes tea with milk quite a lot. He’s also a creative person and loves puzzles, often gamifying things for others to make ordinary tasks fun for them.

The guy is absolutely terrified of spiders, so his current situation fighting a giant one is a personal hell for him, but hey, this is why he has the triforce of Courage right?

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In this iteration of Hyrule, gohmas aren't "monsters," they're simply natural animals that evolved and exist in the world. They're named after monsters from folklore/legendary tales of past Heroes and Princesses, but they themselves are not magical, or "evil." Just critters.

People will sometimes refer to gohmas as "spiders" colloquially due to similarities but they're technically not spiders at all despite the resemblance. They're more like a hybrid of spider and scorpion. Let me explain! These guys are arachnids, with two body segments and eight jointed legs. More like a spider, the abdomen is rounded. They also produce silk from their abdomens and make webs. Their legs are "hairy." More like a scorpion, their pedipalps are pinchers/claws they use as weapons and for general grasping. More like a spider, they have "jackknife" chelicarae (mouthparts) and are venomous.

There are a variety of colors of gohma, from green to red-brown, and their chelicarae are often vibrantly colored like those of Earth's jumping spiders. These guys have eight eyes, one pair bigger and forward-facing and the others arrayed. But their most notable and famed characteristic is their round, almost spherical abdomen ("almost" because of the very slight point at the back end where the spinnerets are) that has defensive patterning with the appearance of an eye.

Yep! These animals aren't like the monster-y gohmas of old, which are said to have had a single giant, evil eye (or a large eyeball embedded in their abdomen, in some cases). But the eye-pattern, which is meant to frighten predators and which has given rise to tales of "eyes watching from the trees" is the reason why they're called gohmas!

Gohmas are a rarer animal in Hyrule these days due to "pest control" efforts in their habitats in recent centuries, and are indigenous to the jungles of Faron. Most varieties live there, preferring warm, humid climates and the cover of the many plants and caves there. A few varieties live further east, nearer Lurelin and the other beachy villages on the coast, and dwell in and around palm and coconut trees (they're also known to bury themselves in the sand to surprise prey). All gohmas are social creatures. The ones in the east live in small family groups that protect the territories of their chosen trees with larger claws than their relatives further west. The jungle ones are straight-up eusocial, forming bigger colonies that have one or more egg-producing "queens." Gohmas eat insects, using their sticky webs to catch them. Jungle gohmas like to weave webbing on banana and other fruit trees to catch the flies and other bugs that are attracted by the sweet fruit scent. Smaller, younger gohmas in the colony will even lay webs over the openings of scented, alluring carnivorous plants and "steal" prey from them! Larger gohmas will just straight up grab frogs, rodents, and small birds with their claws, kill them with venom, and then wrap them up to be liquified and eaten.