GoKawiilThis 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.