Topic: Wak Wak Tree is the Vampire Tree

[TheouAegis]

I know both the US and Jap versions call it the Wak Wak Tree, which is an Islamic mythological tree of life or something that grows people that die after two days. I had to google the name when I encountered it in Dawn of Sorrow. But when you consider that the Garden of Madness is populated with Shigeru Mizuki plants (look at the background, those are plants from Jigoku), and when you take into consideration that the Wak Wak Tree doesn't sprout just heads or even actual people but rather large fruits which break open to produce little tiny guys (Fleamen in DoS), there's really no mistaking it -- the Wak Wak Tree is the Vampire Tree.

http://www.animecrazy.net/hakaba-kitarou-episode-3/

[thernz]

So, what's the Vampire Tree?

[Inccubus]

Interesting find. I wonder what the kanji that were translated into "vampire tree" say exactly.

[Odile Kuronuma]

Are you talking about this?

It's the first time I hear this name, or maybe I don't remember it from playing Dos. It's weird because Wak Wak in arabic  is a word that is used  when there's a calamity or something bad happens, at least in moroccan dialect. The description of the tree sounds familiar, because it's said that the fruits die 2 days after they're seperated from the tree.
Anyway cool stuff, but I don't see why it's a vampire tree.

[Ratty]

Yeah it's an interesting find but I don't know what's specifically vampiric about growing people on it? A vampire tree would like, suck the blood/life essence out of it's victims.

[TheouAegis]

Nobody followed that link? Watch the episode I linked in my first post. It's around the 18 minute mark. Geez, there's just no accounting for taste these days.

http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20080807182643/castlevania/images/d/d9/Wakwaktree2.gif

As I said in my first post, the Wak Wak Tree in DoS has more in common with the Vampire Tree than the Islamic Wak-Wak Tree. That giant tree with weird heads from the Saturn SotN is closer to a Wak-Wak tree than the one in DoS.

@Inccubus: If I remember right (I forgot where the scene is in that episode, but I remember laughing at it), it says in kanji 吸血木　"blood-sucking tree". It was a play on 吸血鬼 (vampire). ... And a chupacabra is a 牛血鬼!  (Not really, but it'd kinda fit.)

@Ratty: If it was indeed the Vampire Tree but just renamed the Wak Wak Tree, then what that means is Fleamen were originally a human sacrificed as fertilizer for the tree and as such the Fleamen are miniature versions of the sacrificed human.

[Mooning Freddy]

Don't know about a vampire tree, but there's a tree in Islam called "gharkad" and referred to in the Koran as "the tree of Jews".
http://www.ummah.com/forum/showthread.php?103772-The-Gharkad-tree-tree-of-the-Jews
Prophesy says it's the only tree which will not give up the Jews hiding under it during judgment day.
The quote from the Koran is something similar to "The Jews will not escape their judgment in that day, as every rock and tree will shout and say- look, there is a Jew behind me. Except the Gharkad tree, for it is the tree of Jews."

Jewish religion makes no mention of such tree whatsoever.