Now that’s a friggin’ title. Heck yeah.
Let me tell you a story of personal obsession and what it means to be someone who desires to answer questions nobody was asking.
It is a story about linguistics. About cultural misunderstandings. About an era of video games when things were messy for both good and ill, the industry hadn’t yet gotten into the habit of tightening everything to a coherent micromanaged vision, artists could put in some pretty weird stuff without getting asked about it, localisation teams were largely making things up as they went along, nothing was being written down, and fandom had not yet embraced the Game Theory model of asking questions about lore.
Mostly it is a story about this one stupid fucking monster from Final Fantasy VII.
The year is, I dunno, probably about 2006. I, your humble host, am in high school. Life is a mixed bag for an extremely tiny late-blooming pre-or-barely-pubescent teen.
The Iraq War, which my imbecile country blundered arrogantly into at the behest of an American president who – at this point in history – we all naively believe is the stupidest man who will ever be American president in my lifetime, is ongoing and has been since I was too young to have political opinions but still old enough to know you shouldn’t invade or bomb a country no matter how stupid of a president tells you to, and being too young to vote means there’s not much I can do about it except develop an ascerbic sense of humour, a general dislike of America and all it’s cultural signifiers, and the first blush of lifelong communism.
But on the plus side, Doctor Who is on TV – only recently returned from its Great Hiatus into which I was born. And as such, those oddities scattered across the school of children who had a thing for old sci-fi shows that weren’t supposed to exist any more and are now stoked that one of them somehow does again, and is good, have naturally drifted into each other’s nerd-orbits and formed a stable arrangement.
And since it is in the nature of teenage nerds to tell each other at length about stuff they think is cool, I will emerge from this high school environment knowing a lot about a bunch of nerd media I have not yet seen for myself, purely through the transitive property of my friends being fans. I don’t know what fresh media knowledge my schoolfriends got out of my side of this arrangement. A lot of undead-related folklore, probably. Knowledge about Narnia, possibly. I’m pretty sure I was the guy that first told at least one of my friends about the Grey Hulk. From them, I would gain second-hand knowledge of Quantum Leap, and Warhammer 40k, and the origin of today’s Question No-one Was Asking: Final Fantasy VII.
Final Fantasy is very possibly the most well-known Japanese RPG franchise that isn’t about pocketable monsters, and Final Fantasy VII is, I think, still today the most popular Final Fantasy game. The popular conception of what a JRPG is – a bunch of 2D sprites of children band together and learn increasingly dramatic magic fight moves in order to eventually kill god – probably owes more to Earthbound or Chrono Trigger than it does Final Fantasy to be fair, but it doesn’t owe NOTHING to FFVII, and – if nothing else – you can ask a random person to describe a generic JRPG villain and they will probably describe FFVII‘s Sephiroth (although, yes, “brooding long-haired blond pretty boy with a big sword who wants to destroy the world because he is sad and eventually turns into some kind of angelic monster” does also pretty-much describe a BUNCH of Final Fantasy villains both before and since; these guys had a set of tropes they really liked).
It was also the favourite video game of my best friend throughout most of high school. Early in our friendship he burned me a CD of music he thought I’d like, the last track of which was a piano duet arrangement of Those Who Fight, the FFVII default battle music (it slaps). This was the same guy who also first got me into tabletop roleplaying games, so like the second RPG campaign I ever engaged in was set in the world of FFVII, while the main game’s plot was happening juuuust over there. I watched the sequel film, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children, at this guy’s house once (it’s… fine).
So, you know, by the time I came out of high school, I didn’t know this video game, but I basically knew this video game. I could have told you all about the basics: Cloud Strife, Shin-Ra, Hojo, Sephiroth, Jenovah, Tifa, Aerith, Zack Fair, Barrett, Vincent Valentine, Red XIII, Cid, Yuffie, Cait Sith, WEAPON, SOLDIER, Meteor, Materia, the Lifestream, Midgar, chocobos, the Sister Ray, Gold Saucer, “this guy are sick”, yadda yadda yadda.
Also, yes, I thought it was funny that a game called Final Fantasy could have six sequels. And, okay, they weren’t really sequels; just anthology instalments, but then some of the instalments also had sequels. This one had at least two! Neither of them were also JRPGs!
Anyway – skip forward a little. The year is now probably like 2011 or so? I’m in uni. None of my friends at uni are very into JRPGs, which works fine because, again, neither am I, really. But several of my friends are into Canadian internet comedy troupe LoadingReadyRun.
I promise this ties together eventually.
See, LoadingReadyRun are very videogame-adjacent. The members are all, themselves, nerds. They run the yearly Desert Bus for Hope event to raise money for the charity Child’s Play, which is all about the value of games and play more generally. At some point while I was in university, they began streaming video games, a concept which at this point in history generally and my life specifically is not exactly new but definitely not old. Over the course of my university years and largely beyond, they would be the primary vector by which I gained knowledge about video games.
Skip forward again, to 2020: I have made it through university, barely, my dreams of becoming a writer have largely petered out and I have begrudgingly gotten a real job, for a company which went into liquidation, then a second real job, under a contract which was not renewed, and eventually a third real job, just in time for the COVID Years. After enough people leaned on them hard enough (including me personally having capital-W Words with my boss in front of the entire office), the company I work for at this point but will leave within the year has graciously allowed its employees to work from home rather than continuing to insist we all mingle together in a huge cramped office building five days a week during the most contagious plague outbreak of my lifetime.
Fortunately, this particular instalment of my many lousy jobs is the one where I don’t have to be on the phone – everything is done via typed communication – which, combined with the whole “being at home” thing, means there is nothing to stop me from having some of what they now call “second screen content” on in the background while I work. And, after I’ve exhausted the entire back catalogue of John Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme, I find my next ideal batch of WFH Second Screen Content in a LoadingReadyRun Let’s Play of Final Fantasy VII (by LRR member Graham Stark who, as a fun fact, also coincidentally once voiced a character in an unrelated parody “abridged series” of FFVII by the Team Four Star guys). After all, I basically know this game, but I’ve never played it or even really seen it.
And let me tell you – I knew the basics of that game about as well as I thought I did, but it turned out there was a lot of stuff in there I could never have predicted. Some of it good (there’s a genuinely sweet depiction of a community-supported crossdressing subculture in there, briefly), much of it not good (they use the R-slur a lot in the early-game dialogue, for… no reason? It doesn’t even really feel like convincing dialogue in-context; it’s like they just wanted to be edgy), and some of it just… weird.
FFVII has some deeply weird monster designs for the various enemies you fight. Some of them are clearly weird on purpose (Yin and Yang are easily the most effective piece of horror I’ve ever seen done in a non-horror game – something about seeing the context-free information “Yang is happy” appear while these two fused half-beings are jittering and struggling hit the exact same note of unprepared visceral terror for me that I have otherwise only really gotten from that bit in Who Framed Roger Rabbit where Judge Doom reveals himself to be a toon by standing up and walking after being flattened by a steamroller); others it’s a little less clear what the intent was (Eligor is a cyborg nuckelavee named after a folkloric Great Duke of Hell, here found aimlessly roaming an abandoned trainyard alongside a bunch of ghosts; and the Hell House is a literal house that grows limbs and a head and then launches missiles at you). Some are a bit of both.
One, in particular is the subject of the question that most potently gnawed at me every day since I saw it, becoming, in essence, my main takeaway from the entire game.
This thing:
Straight off the bat, this is… weird. What am I looking at? An angry mutant carrot? It has four wibbly arms, six eyes, two leafy bits at the top (Stalks? Ears? Hair?), a stinger at the pointy end and a column down the front of… gems? Mouths? Scales?
This thing is a random encounter during one specific section of the game. The party has been captured by the evil megacorporation, Shin-Ra, and held in prison cells conveniently adjacent to its R&D labs, where the company’s profoundly evil chief scientist, Professor Hojo, spends his time creating chimeric monsters, genetically engineering supersoldiers, and experimenting on a damaged alien superorganism named Jenova (and yes, he is officially a professor, meaning definitionally that, in addition to all of that, this guy also finds the time to host academic lectures, but that never comes up). They escape only because something – later revealed to be the game’s main villain Sephiroth – got in and freed the aforementioned alien superorganism, and in the course of that event almost all of the Shin-Ra staff members present at the time ended up dead (it’s not totally clear whether they were killed by Sephiroth, the superorganism, or both, for the most part – I think officially the canon is that it was technically Sephiroth possessing Jenova), and a bunch of creepy monsters are running loose among the remains – spiky, sickly-looking, weird-footed panthers called Zenene; mechanical “Brain Pods” with severed heads in them; and these multi-armed carrot-looking blighters – who wouldn’t sound any weirder than the other two things I just mentioned, except for their name.
These things are named VARGID POLICE.
Vargid. Police.
WHY?!
What makes them vargid? What does it mean to be vargid? What makes them police?
Are they police who exhibit vargidity, or do they police vargidity, or is ‘Vargid’ their species and they are the law enforcement of Vargidkind?
I need you to understand that this is not how most names in this game were. Some of them were weird, yes, but they were either wholly made-up words that someone presumably just thought sounded good, or odd mashups of English words that presumably sounded good to a Japanese person, or words that one can pretty obviously identify as an error in translation or transliteration (Odin‘s spear is referred to rather amusingly as the “gunge lance” instead of “Gungnir”). Other names in this game are weird, but in a way where you can see how they got there.
How the hell did anyone get to “Vargid Police”?! And where did they get there from?!
This, then, was the question that consumed me.
Someone, somewhere, at some point, must have had some kind of reasoning behind naming this thing. “Vargid” could be just a made-up alien-sounding name, but “police” has to be the end result of some kind of process.
I had. To know. How.
Thus began my quest.
My first port of call was to scour the internet to see whether anyone else had already asked and answered this question. After all, this game’s pretty old, and it was pretty popular – surely I wasn’t the first person to see the name “Vargid Police” and become interested enough to look into where that came from?
Folks, I think I was the first person to see the name “Vargid Police” and become interested enough to look into where that came from.
The wiki doesn’t seem interested in the question. One or two fan forums or blogs have the occasional person ask it, jokingly, but never actually indicate any genuine desire for an answer, let alone make any effort to find one.
I was forced to make do with what I could figure out for myself. So let’s do that now.
To begin with, there isn’t a lot to go on regarding what these enemies are supposed to be, which makes it tricky to guess what might have inspired their name. They only appear in the Shin-Ra R&D labs, only after Jenova gets loose and the labs get trashed, and nothing in the original game is specified about them except their name.
My first assumption was that these were things left behind by Jenova – alien parasites or pilotfish or something that got sealed away with her and released when she was.
However, a popular and convincing theory I’ve seen online is that all of the enemies in this little section – Brain Pod, Zenene and Vargid Police – are Shin-Ra genetic experiments that have escaped from their containment chambers in the chaos much like the player party have.
That certainly seems to make sense for the other two – the Brain Pod is a severed human head somehow animated by a weird robotic contraption, which is pretty classic mad scientist stuff, and the Zenene absolutely looks like a failed experiment in trying to replicate the anatomy of plot-relevant Shin-Ra test subject Red XIII – or, perhaps more likely, Frankenstein a bunch of corpses of Red XIII’s species back to life given the Zenene has the same weaknesses against Holy and Restorative magic as obviously-undead enemies like Ghosts, Dragon Zombies and the Brain Pods they share a lab with, and they look almost identical to a later enemy which, given the location you fight them in, are heavily implied to be the undead remains of Red XIII’s tribe haunting the battlefield they fell on. (As an aside, I suspect the name of ‘Zenene’ is a transliteration error, and it’s actually supposed to be ‘Xenene’ or ‘Xenan’ – as in, “thing which is foreign/strange”. In addition to all his other myriad flaws, turns out Hojo is racist.)
The Vargid Police themselves seem less certainly like mad-science creations, though they certainly still could be. They’re the odd one out among the monsters fought in this section in not being weak to Holy or Restorative magic, implying that they aren’t Frankenstein-style undead creations like the other two, but that doesn’t rule out them being genetically engineered living creatures.
If they are, that implies that “Vargid Police” is what Shin-Ra (or, more specifically, probably Professor Hojo) called them, which… doesn’t seem to particularly explain anything. Hojo doesn’t seem to be all that big on unusual and whimical names elsewhere in the series. Most of his creations are just named by a serial number or a functional description of what they do (the Brain Pod sure is a pod with a brain in it). He wasn’t even the guy that decided to call the alien superbeing “Jenova”.
The game has one other extractable tidbit here in the form of a second enemy, appearing much later, which looks identical to the Vargid Police except being purple instead of orange (which doesn’t even do much to stop it from looking like a carrot, if you know anything about carrots). These ones are called ‘Twin Brains‘, suggesting that those two leafy bits at the top are where they keep their brain(s). They attack less with the pointy stinger and more with what seem to be magic/psychic powers, and, most curiously, they are not found in an R&D lab, but rather on a mountain… near a Shin-Ra reactor… which happens to be the previous location of Jenova before she was moved to their main building.
Huh.
There are a handful of possibilities here.
It could be that the Twin Brain and the Vargid Police are not really meant to actually look identical to each other, and they only do to the audience because of the limitations of the late-90s game engine – the same way almost every single human in this game has the same face. A pallete-swap of an existing enemy takes less work and less disc space than a whole new sprite, so maybe this is one of those things where the reasoning is purely Doylist with no intended Watsonian implications. I dunno that I buy that, though. Why would they put the palette-swap of their weirdest enemy here, in the vicinity of the other Shin-Ra facility where Jenova was contained? That feels more than coincidental.
The second possibility is that the Vargid Police are Shin-Ra creations which were being held in the reactor facility around Mt Nibel at some point but some of them escaped and adapted to the local environment to become Twin Brains. I don’t think I buy that either, though. See, the first time you encounter Twin Brains on Mt Nibel is actually in a flashback taking place some time before the start of the game, so if they evolved from Vargid Police then Vargid Police would have to have been created a long time ago… but the Vargid Police are found in the R&D labs, which suggests that, if they are creations of Hojo, they’re a project he’s currently working on.
The third possibility is that Vargid Police are made out of Twin Brains – ie, that Shin-Ra collected these things it found in the vicinity of one of their reactors and experimented on them to, I dunno, make them more controllable or something. That feels very plausble and in-character, although on its own it doesn’t go any further towards explaining what Twin Brains are or how they came to be.
The fourth possibility is that Twin Brains and Vargid Police are things made from experimental samples taken from Jenova, and Shin-Ra has been creating things like this at every facility they’ve held Jenova at. This one seems very plausible, because “stick Jenova cells into a thing and see what it does” seems to be about 85% of Shin-Ra’s scientific philosophy. There are at least three named characters and a bunch of nameless extras in just this game whose backstory is “Shin-Ra stuck them full of Jenova cells”, plus Hojo eventually does it to himself, plus there’s a prequel game which introduces a bunch of others, and I think technically most of the antagonists of one of the sequels are too? Jenova cells are for FFVII what Death Stars are for Star Wars.
The final possibility I can see is that Twin Brains and Vargid Police are two related varieties of thing that naturally pop up around Jenova somehow. Possibly, as I said earlier, alien parasites on her body, or alien pilotfish that are drawn to her – or possibly the result of natural wildlife or vegetation being warped by her presence, either accidentally or as a defence mechanism while she’s too injured to otherwise defend herself. This one also seems pretty plausible, because, again, turning things into monsters or superhumans is kinda just what Jenova’s DNA does.
I think, if I had to pick one theory, my favourite is a combination of the last three there: Twin Brains naturally occured around Jenova while she was imprisoned in the Mt. Nibel reactor, and Hojo was intrigued enough by this to intentionally replicate the effect under controlled conditions when he brought her to the R&D facility, thereby creating the Vargid Police.
Cool, so I now have a working theory of what a Vargid Police is meant to be.
Does that shed any light on why it might be called that?
Well… no. It doesn’t seem to.
Not on its own.
But put a pin in this. We’ll come back to it later.
For now, we must move on in our search for answers.
See, 2020 was also, conveniently enough, the year that Final Fantasy VII got a remake.
Well. Uh. Sort of? Part remake, part reimagining, part… time travel sequel, I think? I dunno man; it probably isn’t important. What is important is that the remake game (or games, rather; it expands the story to a whole trilogy) has the Vargid Police in it too, with a more detailed appearance and a canon description.
Behold:
…eugh.
They look a little less like carrots now – if anything, more fungus-y what with that awful skin texture. It’s still not clear what those things down the front are. That tail stinger looks a little obscene, in an H.R. Giger sort of a way.
Still not very clear what their deal is from this. But, like I said, we also get a description:
Monsters originally created by Shinra’s R&D Division, but are now feral after some escaped the lab and bred in the wild.
…well. That confirms something: at least in the remake continuity (which… explicitly isn’t, actually, the same as the original continuity, due to… I dunno, man, some bullshit involving whispery time ghosts that I do not have space to get into here), the Vargid Police are created by Shin-Ra – although long enough ago that some of them got loose and formed a feral breeding population in “the wild”.
That last part is because, in the new timeline, the whole thing with the entire lab being smashed up when Jenova is released doesn’t happen the same way, and you instead fight these things out in the slums.
But wait – there’s more!
The remake also changes their name.
The Vargid Police aren’t Vargid Police any more! Someone at Square Enix must have noticed the name was odd, and looked into what the original intent was in order to find a better translation, because now they’re –
…now they’re Varghidpolis.
what the FUCK is a Varghidpolis.
The fucking city of the Varghids?
That only makes LESS sense!
Once again, I am thwarted. Like the forumgoing fans online, whoever was in charge of the updated names for the English translation of the Remake apparently did not consider “figuring out what the deal with the name ‘Vargid Police’ was” a worthwhile enterprise, and just kinda phoned it in with a slight retransliteration that they presumably figured wouldn’t raise so many eyebrows.
Incidentally, the Twin Brains also appear in the remake timeline, and they don’t look that much like the Vargid Police any more, but they are still close enough to maybe be related – possibly, again, being the thing the Varghidpolis were created from – and they are also stated to have been “unseen in the region” until “the local reactor started malfunctioning”, which seems like more evidence in favour of “Jenova’s influence leaking out is what made these things”.
The remake timeline also adds a few variants all implied to be more recent experiments by Shin-Ra with making the Varghidpolis more powerful: the self-cloning Trypopolis (…hole city?!), the flying Byobapolis, and the imaginatively named Experimental Varghidpolis. That last one is apparently created by injecting Jenova cells into a regular Varghidpolis (what did I tell you?), which possibly weakens my theory that these creatures come from Jenova originally in the first place, but on the other hand the effects of the Jenova cells also seem to make them look more like the Twin Brains, so… you could argue either way for that one, probably.
I tried for a while to see if I could identify any pattern in the names here that might explain the logic at play, but… I could not. I hit a wall. They all just seem like nonsense words.
In English.
So we are left with only one recourse:
Looking forwards to the Remake and its sequels proved to be a red herring. We must go the other way.
I, a painfully white middle-class Scottish person, must investigate Final Fantasy VI in the original Japanese.
This is a little tough. I don’t speak Japanese, even remotely. But I also refuse to give up on stupid bullshit, so.
In the original Japanese, according to online sources, Vargid Police is called vagidoporisu. It seems the translators just kept the Japanese name almost entirely, and barely even transliterated it. Japanese, as I understand it, doesn’t really do end-consonants, whereas English does them a lot more often than it does end-vowels, so it’s common practice for transliterations between the two to add/remove vowels from the ends of things, making ‘vagido’ into ‘vagid’ (they probably added the R to make it look less, uh, yonic) and ‘porisu’ into ‘poris’ or, thanks to Japanese having a sort of R/L merger going on, ‘polis/police’.
That explains that.
So what does ‘vagidoporisu’ mean in Japanese?
Well… like I said, I don’t speak Japanese, but I’ve asked around and I’ve googled around, and…
I don’t think it means anything.
It’s another goddamn nonsense word.
…maybe.
Put another pin in this bit.
For completeness, let’s look at the Japanese names of those variant monsters.
The Experimental Varghidopolis is called Neovagidoporisu – “New Vargid Police”. Straightforward enough.
The Byobapolis is called Biobādokku, which… uh, okay. Also doesn’t seem to mean anything, but i can see how they got from there to the English name, I guess.
Trypapolis is called, bizarrely, Myūtanto Teiru. I can’t even begin to fathom how they got that out of that.
Twin Brain is called Daburuburein. And it’s around here that things started to click a little.
See… sometimes Japanese works, like Final Fantasy games, think English words sound cool. So they name stuff based on English words, but transliterated to be more easily pronouncable in Japanese.
Doing this same thing backwards with “vagidoporisu” was how we got “Vargid Police”. Applying those same principles to “daburuburein”, gives you “Double Brain”.
They called the thing “Double Brain” (after its double brains, presumably), but to make it sound cool they named it in English instead of their own language, and then transliterated that into “daburuburein”. The translators for the English release correctly figured that it was meant to be called “Double Brain”, but for whatever reason they got the thesaurus out and replaced ‘double’ with ‘twin’. I guess they thought it sounded better.
Taking this same approach, one can also figure out “Myutanto Teiru”. Take away the ending vowels, swap Rs for Ls, and you get, basically, “Mutant Tail”. Because it’s a mutant with a tail. Checks out, I guess.
This is progress. Now we have a system. We know how these names came to be, and we just need to reverse-engineer them.
This is familiar, in fact! I recognise what’s happening here!
“Vargid Police” has the same kind of etymology as “alicorn”!
…let me explain.
If you know the word ‘alicorn’, you probably know it means, well, this:
That’s because it was a pretty obscure word before the My Little Pony franchise made it their go-to term for winged unicorns.
Technically, originally, it’s just a synonym for unicorn in general. The ‘wing’ connotation came later because combining the pre-existing mythological concepts of “horse with wings” (pterripus) and “horse with horn” (unicorn) to make the best-of-both-worlds “horse with wings and horn” was an obvious Cool Thing to Do and once we’d done it we needed a name, and there was this obscure synonym for unicorn just sitting there, and we figured it was close enough.
I know the word ‘alicorn’ because it has one of my favourite etymologies of all time. It is a consequence of multiple recursive translation/transliteration errors.
(I mean, OK, technically the etymology is not completely known, but this is one of the theories).
What happened was, some French people saw unicorns being referred to in English as, well, “unicorns”, and wrote that down. Other French people saw that and read it as “un icorn”, meaning “an icorn” or “one icorn”. What’s an icorn? Well, obviously, it’s a horse with a horn, since that’s what’s being referred to in the texts as “un icorn”. So those French people wrote down that the horse with a horn was “l’icorn”. “The icorn”. Then a whole different group of French people again saw that and misread it as “licorn” – for which reason, the modern French word for a unicorn, to this day, is une licorne (yeah, at some point the word got force-femmed, I guess). But it didn’t stop there – some British people saw the French calling the horned horse a “licorn” and wrote that down. And then other British people saw the horned horse being called “a licorn” and misread that as “alicorn”.
I’ve never before seen another word with an etymological chain so comedically stuffed with the same kind of bungle over and over again like this – but that’s basically what we’re looking at here with the Vargid Police! The word’s been misinterpreted back and forth between two languages in a very similar way. “Vargid Police” and “Varghidpolis” both are to “vagidoporisu” what “alicorn” was to “l’icorn”, and whatever original English name ‘vagidoporisu’ is a questionable transliteration of would be the equivalent of the “unicorn” that “l’icorn” first came from.
So what is “vagidoporisu” meant to be a transliteration of?
Honestly, weird as it might seem, I think it does make sense to assume “porisu” is meant to be “police”. There isn’t really another English word that could be transliterated into Japanese that way, so far as I can figure, and while it could be a “-polis” suffix there aren’t any English words ending in “-polis” that start with anything remotely like “vagido”.
But… if that’s what’s happening here, if the “porisu” bit really does come from “police”, then… what on Earth is “vagido”?
Well… I can’t find any real evidence for any theories – no obvious precedents in other Japanese-transliterated English words I can find – but I do have a suggestion:
I’m serious.
As serious as he is in that image.
I think the FFVII monster is meant to be called Vegetapolice.
Because… look. Look.
What have I been saying, all this time? Over and over? When I try to describe these monsters, what’s the imagery I keep resorting to?
They’re carrot-shaped. Their brain parts are leafy. Their skin, in the remake, is fungal-looking.
These things are plants.
Or they were. They started that way. Before Hojo’s experiments, or Jenova’s influence, or the reactor’s radiation, or whatever it was that caused them to mutate into monsters with eyes and arms and stings, these things started as vegetables.
So. Vegetapolice. Vegeta, because it’s short for vegetable. But then, why police?
I have a theory here too. I think that bit’s a translation error.
What is, in many contexts, especially in fantasy fiction, considered a synonym for “the police”?
The guard. The city guard.
It’s a fucking vegetable guard. Local vegetables around the reactor where Jenova was kept mutated into monsters to guard her, as a result of some natural Jenova-evolved defence mechanism. And the Shin-Ra scientists, seeing that, realised they had a potentially literally dirt-cheap method of creating guards, soldiers, enforcers, whatever. If they could replicate this phenomenon in their own R&D department, they could learn how to literally grow security guards from the fucking soil like carrots.
That’s what Hojo was working on, that gave rise to these creatures.
Vegetable. Guards.
Vegeta-police.
Vagidoporisu.
VARGID POLICE.
Does this seem too much of a stretch to you? Too far-fetched? Too little evidence?
Well, see if this changes your mind: the very observant among you will have noticed I never finished back-transliterating all of the names of the Remake timeline’s Varghidpolis variants. I missed out Byobapolis – or “Biobādokku”.
If “Daburuburein” is “Double-brain” and “Myutanto Teiru” is “Mutant Tail”, then what’s “Biobādokku”?
Well, “bio-” is pretty obvious. It’s a biological organism. A bioengineered creature. But what’s the word that the “bio-” prefix has been attached to here? “Bādokku”?
It’s fucking bio-burdock.
Because these things. Are made. From root vegetables.
Because they’re fucking Vegetable Guards.
My first instinct, to describe these things as carrots, was always correct. The true etymology was inside me all along.
My quest is complete.
My soul is free.
I have achieved my great dream.
My fantasy. Finally.
The Court of Ranternal Affairs 