I'm in the process of reading through old interviews, and I found this endlessly interesting quote
from 1997 (before OoT was finished):Now obviously Link didn't turn out to be a Kokiri after all, but I don't see any reason not to accept Miyamoto's description of the Kokiri life cycle. They're born and instantly become children, and eventually they just vanish. Of course, we still have plenty of room to speculate the nature of their disappearance. Do they disappear into the Lost Woods? Do they become trees? Do they become new Kokiri? Who knows...
I have never seen this before, it does shed a little bit of light on what was largely an unknown race that is mostly forgotten these days. So this essentially makes the Kokiri the Hyrule version of smurfs. That quote should really be on the wiki since ZU gets a few speculative threads on where do Kokiri go almost every week.
As far as reproduction, I have always taken the Deku Tree to be the actual creator of them, and not just the race. Each and every one of them.
That's because the Great Deku
Tree is our father, the forest
guardian, and he gave life to all
of us Kokiri!
I wonder if the Great Deku Tree
gave life to everything in the
forest, I mean in addition to us
Kokiri?
None of them ever speak of a parent, or even something like a parental figure other than the Deku Tree. The constantly talk of the Deku Tree as their father and creator. Since the Deku Tree created them I suspected something similar to how a plant is born. They are seeds or fruit of the tree, they might even grow from the ground around it. It is never seen or talked about, only that the tree creates them. So I doubt that they reproduce amongst themselves. No kokiri ever mentioned anything about how strange it was that Link appeared in the forest without kokiri parents. Nor even question his kokiri parentage. They accepted that he was there among them, only he did not have a fairy. I assumed that they might have had some form of young childhood because Link was not considered overly strange for once being a baby. If the other kokiri did not have any infancy then it would be absolutely clear that Link was definitely not a kokiri. So far the only thing that ever led anyone to think that Link was different in any way was that he had no fairy. So everything else must be the same, or at least very similar. i also though that they aged to a point and stopped. This was very evident since Mido and Saria looked exactly the same seven years later. Showing that they stop physically aging after age 11 or so.
Their disappearing is an interesting addition to hear, but not too different. It reminds me of the fairies when they are used, they disappear. The kokiri are also commonly called the spirits of the forest, this leads me to believe that they are not quite like the other races of Hyrule. They might have more spirit like properties than most other physical races living there. Poes act very similar as spirits, they often disappear at times or when they are defeated.
And what exactly happens to the Deku Tree when it dies? It sprouts again, like nature itself it returns from the ground and regrows again. The Deku Tree and the Kokiri as representatives of the natural world and the forest they live in would very likely follow the same rules. The kokiri might have the same cycle of life, death, and rebirth as the rest of nature. when they disappear into the forest, they may regrow again like the forest itself does every spring. Repeating the cycle, this is a common aspect of nature deities in real world mythology as well. To simulate the cycle of birth in spring, life in the summer and death in the fall, nature deities will sometimes follow a death and rebirth cycle.
