Anime & Manga Trees?

[Verdance]

Alright, I've been thinking about this for a while and never gotten a satisfying answer: what's up with big ass evil/ powerful trees in manga and anime? I feel like I've seen this imagery in so many anime and sometimes also Japanese video games, often the final battlefield or the home or weapon of a powerful antagonist. That sort of thing. I'm wondering if it's a specific homage to an old or well respected series, or a reference to mythology or some other cultural artefact, or what.

(If you don't know, feel free to drop any examples that you've noticed. I'm trying to collect them.)

 

[Cross]

In Japan, there's a mentally of respecting nature. The Shinto religion believes inanimate objects like rivers and trees can possess kami which are basically spirits. There are good kami and evil kami.

Trees can symbolize life. Like in Tales of Symphonia, there's the Yggdrasil tree. That particular reference has ties to Norse mythology and Oden. A corrupted tree, since mother nature is considered good in many cultures, could be a way of showing how far things have fallen. How wrong everything is and in need of rejuvenation.

There's a legend around cherry blossom trees that they supposedly get their beautiful pink color from the blood of corpses buried under them.