10 Reasons Not To Mess With Trees Power Grid by The Mary Sue Staff | 12:55 pm, April 19th, 2011 You are seeing this message because you have javascript disabled. To use our slideshows you need to enable javascript. There's no cross domain hackery or tracking voodoo, it's just some sweet jQuery animations. Please, think of the animations. In the meantime, enjoy the html version below. I guess. If that's your thing. Allow Us To Explain This Friday is Earth Day, and more than that, it's also Arbor Day (at least here in the USA). While last year, various Earths got all the glory in our Power Grid, this year we'll be paying tribute to trees. They line our streets and parks, sit in pots in our homes, and exist in vast hordes across many areas of our planet. Here are ten of the most compelling reasons why you really, really should think twice about messing with those giant, green, tough, old creatures, judging by a vast swathe of fictional supporting evidence. They Might Take Your Car and Beat You With It Trees have feelings too. Or at least they have primal instincts that any organic being would have in order to defend itself against things. Like cars. And people. Take the Whomping Willow from the Harry Potter series. The one with which we're most familiar is the one planted on the grounds of Hogwarts the year Remus Lupin arrived. Its placement was intended to disguise a secret passageway to the Shrieking Shack in Hogsmeade, where the werewolf could make an inconspicuous (and safe) transformation at the full moon, by being such a terrifying and dangerous presence that even the most mischievous student wouldn’t have gone near it. The willow made its first appearance in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, when Harry and Ron crashed the latter's parents' car into it, at which point the willow basically took hold of the car and kicked its passengers' asses with it. The excitable tree was also responsible for destroying Harry's treasured Nimbus 2000, though that was soon replaced by a far superior Firebolt. Moral of the story: tread lightly around the Whomping Willow. You Could Be Unless The Lorax speaks for the trees, for the trees have no tongues, but he sure don’t do much other than speak. No, the true threat of Dr. Seuss’ The Lorax is the Once-ler. Not that he might do horrible things to you, but because you might become him. The Once-ler was once the CEO of an industrious manufacturing business but when he destroyed the last of his remaining natural resources his business crumbled. His family, who he was responsible for employing, didn’t even stick around to help out. Now he lives alone on the second floor of a run down house in a horrible neighborhood with nothing green and a smog-filled sky, stewing in his own guilt and hoping against hope that somebody will show up, listen to his story, and undo the terrible mess that he’s made before he vanishes just like the Truffula trees. Ents It's one thing to kill sheep. It's quite another to do it when the shepherd is around. In the Middle-earth of J.R.R. Tolkien, Ents are those shepherds. They were created in direct opposition to the existence of Dwarves, to protect forests from the industrious nature of the other race. Dwarves were something of an afterthought in Middle-earth, brought to life by a lessor diety who hadn’t really gone through all the paperwork necessary to get permission to create a new race of people. So his personal project got stuck in pre-production limbo for several thousand years while the company's focus got put on the boss' big projects: Elves and Humans. But as soon as Aulë's pet project got greenlit, everybody else wanted their own. And so, tree people. By the time we're introduced to Ents in The Lord of the Rings, they are a sleepy, dying race. There have been no Ent children for a few thousand years, because the homes and habitat of the female members of the species were destroyed by Sauron and no one has seen them since. But while slow to anger, Ents are nothing to trifle with, and they eventually singlehandedly topple the stronghold of Saruman and send an entire forest to consume an army 10,000 strong. So don’t mess with Ents. They haven’t gotten laid in three thousand years. Bodily Harm, Possible Death, Vivid Hallucinations At the heart of the Foggy Swamp sits the Banyan-Grove Tree, an enormous member of its species with branches as wide and comfortable as any city sidewalk. But the center of Foggy Swamp is not the only place you can find the Banyan-Grove Tree. Like the actual Banyan trees that the creators of Avatar: The Last Airbender were undoubtedly inspired by, the roots and branches of the Banyan-Grove Tree extend all over Foggy Swamp. In fact, the Banyan-Grove Tree is Foggy Swamp. And it is not without its defenses. Primarily, there is Huu. Huu, you ask? This powerful water bender bends the water in swamp plants to form a giant marsh golem at his command, with an eerie bark face. Usually the mere appearance of this building-sized but uncannily quick monster is enough to frighten off intruders. And when that fails, visitors to Foggy Swamp have reported intense hallucinations where their greatest fears and deepest guilty moments haunt them. So keep your machetes to yourself. They'll Molest You If you are unsure of your abilities as a magician, it's best not to try magic spells while in a compromising position. Like Schmendrick, the magician from The Last Unicorn. Schmendrick is a terrible magician, never really accomplishing what he wants when he tries to impress people with his magical abilities. And this mess he gets himself into with a seemingly inanimate tree ... Yeah, the last thing you want to happen when you've been tied to a tree by a bunch of thugs is to accidentally cast a love spell on it. His intent was to cast a spell to free himself, but since Schmendrick is Schmendrick, he ended up turning a big tree into a buxom anthropomorphic creature with his head squished right up against her ... heart. That is, until the Last Unicorn saved him from himself. Don't let that happen to you. The Swamp Thing Swamp Thing is the most classic “eco-terrorist” hero the DC Universe has, next to some interpretations of Catwoman. He’s also probably one of the most blatantly tragic figures there too. And by blatant, I mean a slap in the face groan-worthy awful fate as only Alan Moore can provide. See, the original Swamp Thing was a typical comic origin trope: scientist Alec Holland trapped in a lab explosion near a swamp by a colleague who wants to put the moves on his wife loses his human form and becomes a grotesque moster made of plant matter. When Alan Moore got his hands on the series in the ‘80s, he slowly turned the story on its head. Instead of a man longing for a cure and a return to the life he once knew, Swamp Thing eventually realized that he had never been Alec Holland in the first place. He was actually a disembodied sentient force that could embody itself in any plant matter. While embodying himself in that Flordia swamp, he’d swept up a bit of Holland’s consciousness as the man lay dying. Though he had all of Holland’s memories, he couldn’t be human again: he’d never been human in the first place. I know what you’re saying: Alan Moore? DC Comics? Hung out with John Constantine? Why didn’t this guy ever appear in Sandman? The answer is: one of his supporting characters did. Matthew Cable hunted Swamp Thing for many years, believing him to be responsible for his own death. Eventually, through a series of unrelated events, Matthew died while in the Dreaming, and was offered the job of being the Raven of Dream, the Prince of Stories. And now you know. They Can Just Make You Commit Suicide What have you done to improve your carbon footprint? Nothing? Okay then. In M. Night Shyamalan's vaguely-titled movie, the trees and the plants are out to make humans kill themselves. First, people start killing themselves en masse in Central Park, and eventually the neurotoxin makes its way to Pennsylvania, where Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel proceed to run away from the outdoors. Eccentric Plant Man explains that plants can produce a chemical to defend themselves against outside threats, and that's what he thinks is going on here, targeting large groups of people. But then, it starts targeting individuals because ... humans are responsible for ruininng the environment. That, there, was the patented "Shyamalan twist." Yup. Killer They'll Eat Your Kite Sometimes you set out to write a great Power Grid entry as if the thing you were writing about actually existed and were threatening, and then you find out that someone has already made hilariousness out of it by talking about it entirely normally. The Wikipedia article on the Kite-Eating Tree of Peanuts fame is perhaps the greatest appearance of the label “This article does not cite and references or sources” that I’ve ever seen. And it contains gems like: A Kite-Eating Tree is a deciduous tree of indeterminate type, once referred to as a "Kiteus Eatemupus". Once, after the tree ate yet another of Charlie Brown's kites, Lucy shouted at it so loudly that it regurgitated not only that kite but also a flood of other people's kites, suggesting that, no matter how many kites the tree holds, it only eats one at a time, saving the rest for future feasts. Once Lucy van Pelt threw Schroeder's piano into the Kite-Eating Tree, which it also ate, proving that the phenomenon was not simply a product of Charlie Brown's imagination. So don’t mess with kite-eating trees, or we’ll start having to invest in kite-zappers and kite-swatters and all manner of aerosol kiticide sprays. K. eatemupus: an invaluable part of our ecosystem. They Just Might Be A Stealthy Army with Tons of Hitpoints Dwarves in the world of Rich Burlew’s D&D inspired Order of the Stick fear trees as a terrible organized threat that may strike at any time. After all, they say, why else would they almost always hang out in groups? In the words of Durkon Thundershield, Just one tree has Colossal size, natural armor, damage reduction, hundreds o’ hit points, and enough limbs ta make a dozen or more attacks per round... Can’t they move, lad? Or is it just that they move so slow, we cannae see them sneakin’ up on us?.. It’s like yer people always are sayin’: “If a tree kills alone in the forest, does it make a sound?” You Could Ruin Everything As a general rule we try to use no more than one example from a given fandom in one powergrid. But you can’t possibly leave Treebeard off of a Power Grid about trees, and the destruction of the Trees of Valinor pretty much set the stage for the entire history of Middle-earth. In the beginning, Middle-earth was completely dark, and the gods of the place created two trees, one that shone with silver light and one that shone with gold. When the silver tree was brightest, the gold was dimmest and vice versa, and they cycled through their phases every two dozen hours or so, creating day and night. That is, until Morgoth (the Sauron of early Middle-earth, of whom Sauron was merely a lieutenant) invited the (literal) mother of all giant spiders to come and eat the trees. Middle-earth was plunged into darkness until the gods crafted two magical airships, one gold and one silver, to traverse the skies and light the world. The light of the Two Trees was gone forever, except in the color of three gems known as the Silmarils, which were made by Fëanor, literally the greatest elven craftsman to ever live. Before the Silmarils had been precious, now they were invaluable. You may have heard of a book called The Silmarillion. It’s the book Tolkein had to write to explain the entire history of the Silmarils, their theft, and the ensuing blood oath sworn by Fëanor that is the direct source for pretty much every bad thing that happened in Middle-earth history or politics right up until the gods decided they’d had quite enough of Elves and Humans and that they were going to go live in the Elven afterlife forever and ever and never come back. Follow The Mary Sue Follow @TheMarySue Like us on Facebook filed under Avatar: The Last Airbender, Dr. Seuss, Harry Potter (franchise), Peanuts, The Last Unicorn, The Lorax, The Lord of the Rings
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