Elona is Love, Elona is life.
Pale Tree Reproduction.
It’s been theorized before. There are some areas around certain sylvari’s remains that have strange effects, such as the Secluded Glade, but there are also areas around sylvari remains that have no distinguishable effect at all, such as Riannoc’s grave site. I would say it is possible, and that we’re just seeing failed and sprouting seeds, but we don’t really have anything to go off of.
As narcemus said, it has floated around. Personally, I think the sylvari bear seeds within them as they have been referred as the “fruit” of the Pale Tree by a-net. I just think those seeds don’t germinate without some kind of outside influence. Like maybe when tyria needs Plae Trees to grow.
We’ve no way of knowing but it is likely that the Pale Tree can’t easily reproduce herself. Reasons could be
- she hasn’t done it yet and it would be an obvious thing to do
- there would be no point creating a tree shaped child if it essentially a big, static, infertile sylvari.
-it may be impossible to create a new tree with not only the same empathic links to the dream, but also the ability to create its own children with links to the dream.
You know, I’ve been thinking… The Pale Tree is a plant (obviously), and she identifies herself as female. Well, what if she’s like many species of fruiting trees that need a male counterpart in order to produce fruit/offspring? Maybe the Sylvari are the sterile fruit of the Pale Tree, but only because the Pale Tree has no male mate with whom to, uh, “exchange pollen”. If Malyck’s Tree could be found, and it turns out to be male, the Sylvari might end up as “born fertile” fruits that, when they die, form the germinating sprout of a new Pale Tree.
Hmm, very interesting, if Malyck’s Tree and The Pale Tree can do some scoodlypooping, the sylvari born from the Pale Tree afterwards could become fertile and not be genderless.
I like your idea!
Elona is Love, Elona is life.
Sylvari aren’t genderless. They’re just all sterile. But they most definitely have genders – the biological kind, that is. They lack the social kind/understanding of genders (supposedly it’s rather not unusual to see male sylvari in dresses… yup. Now I bet I got the image of Trahearne wearing a frilly dress in your mind, and if I didn’t before I do now!).
Dear ANet writers,
Stop treating GW2 as a single story. Each Season and expansion should be their own story.
Stop treating GW2 as a single story. Each Season and expansion should be their own story.
Sylvari aren’t genderless. They’re just all sterile. But they most definitely have genders – the biological kind, that is. They lack the social kind/understanding of genders (supposedly it’s rather not unusual to see male sylvari in dresses… yup. Now I bet I got the image of Trahearne wearing a frilly dress in your mind, and if I didn’t before I do now!).
Trahearn should put the Princess wand skin on his greatsword :p
So if sylvari aren’t genderless, just sterile, it even make more sense, right?
Elona is Love, Elona is life.
If Trahearne wore a dress, he’d be interesting.
If Sylvari are the Pale Tree’s fruit, maybe they need to pass through a digestive system before they’ll germinate.
If Trahearne wore a dress, he’d be interesting.
If Sylvari are the Pale Tree’s fruit, maybe they need to pass through a digestive system before they’ll germinate.
Why do topics about the Sylvari always end up into salad jokes?
Elona is Love, Elona is life.
Interesting thought to cross my mind…
What if the sylvari aren’t sterile? What if the problem is that they are all fruit of the same tree. For proper reproduction to occur, genetic information from a different tree would be needed. So, just a random thought, what if a sylvari from our Pale Tree and Malyck’s tree had intercourse and created a real sylvari baby. One which held a seed to a new Pale Tree.
Thus far, the Pale Tree’s fruit is created solely from within, without the use of the normal pollen-flower method (from what we can tell). So it could make sense that the sylvari are a different type of “fruit.” This fruit, which is living, would be allowed to go out and find other “fruit” with which to reproduce and create new life. The problem is, thus far, all sylvari reproduction has happened within the exact same genetic pool. Perhaps there is some sort of safe-guard to prevent that from occurring.
Plant reproduction is more complex than the mammal one, but obviously the Pale Tree is even more alien. A normal plant would either clone itself, or make seeds by itself (autogamy), or make seeds with sexual partners (allogamy). Autogamy would lead to clones (except for some mutations during the seed formation), allogamy would allow for out-crossing. But all these cases would result in another tree.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monoecious
Let’s consider out-crossing, and keep “rational”:
Either you consider the sylvari as being intermediary spore/seed/egg bearers (as it is common with parasitic life forms) that are simply walking fruits… that would be sterile for now… (I mean, the seed the bear are sterile, not the nutshell the sylvari are). There seems to be big flowers in the Grove, and pollen (?) floating everywhere.
Or you consider them as not being part of the reproductive apparatus of the Pale Tree, only a byproduct of it. Yes, she call them “fruits” and “children”, but only like a static hymenopteran queen would call its sterile walking worker “children” (or daughters).
A third solution could be that two children of two different trees could be inter-fertile gamete bearers or producers… like walking male and female gametocytes (resp. pollen and immature ovum), or outright walking reproductive organs (with same genetic material for both gender of the same tree).
The third solution you mentioned was the one I was pointing towards as a possibility. We already seem to know that the sylvari from the same pale tree are sterile, in the sense that they cannot reproduce within the same colony.
This doesn’t rule out that they aren’t just fruits containing seeds which they spread once they die, but at the same time, most sylvari death sites that we currently see do not show any signs of a new tree growing, and we know for a fact that the Pale Tree was planted and grew to a very noticeable object within the course of roughly 10 years. So places such as Rhiannoc’s grave should show some sign of new growth which it doesn’t.
That was what I was getting at with my original post. Sylvari cannot have children of their own via sexual intercourse; they do not possess gonads capable of independent reproduction. But what if Sylvari are, as discussed, mobile fruits containing a seed that could sprout into a new Pale Tree? The only reason Sylvari who have died have not done that so far is because, lacking a male reproductive counterpart, all Sylvari born from the Pale Tree so far have borne only sterile seeds.