Treants

Best lower your axes while he's around.

This is a very specific type of Plant Person, usually found in High Fantasy worlds, resembling humanoid trees (often nondescript deciduous trees, but more specific or exotic types show up from time to time). They're typically very long-lived if not immortal, and if so will often be portrayed as very old and wise. You can expect them to be big, too — they'll usually be the same size as giants, when both races exist in the same setting. These kind of beings will often be incredibly strong, or have a Green Thumb that gives them the ability to control regular plants. The degree to which they are humanoid can also vary. At one end of the scale, they may essentially be giant humans made out of wood and with leafy hair. At the other they may simply be mobile trees, with only rough limbs and facial features, and completely indistinguishable from regular trees when still.

More often than not, their first and foremost concern will be protecting and caring for their home forests. As a result, indiscriminate logging and exploitation of nature (and, if the setting has it, pollution) will be the most surefire way to arouse their anger — and their anger is a thing to be feared. Outside of that, they're typically uninterested in what goes on outside their forest homes, although they may be on good terms or even associate with races that are In Harmony with Nature, such as elves, fairies and Nature Spirits.

How much of a "true" species they are can vary from work to work. In some cases, they're a natural and self-sustaining race like any other, potentially reproducing like trees do by planting seeds that grow into new tree-people. In other cases, they may regular trees that are "awoken" or transformed into humanoid creatures, sometimes permanently and sometimes not. Mixtures of the two also occur, as do cases of the "transformed tree" type that occur naturally and without direct intervention or intent.

Historically, they're based on J. R. R. Tolkien's Ents, which may also be the reason they don't show up in fiction as often as Tolkien's other races — since Tolkien straight-up invented them instead of borrowing from mythology, his estate has a much stronger copyright claim than it does to his other races, which can explain both why they never gained the universality of elves or dwarves and why few are actually called Ents; the more direct adaptations are usually referred to by more lawyer-friendly names such as Treemen, Treefolk and Treants ("tree" plus "giant") instead. Regardless of the name, they are often included among the Standard Fantasy Races.

Subtrope of Plant Person. See also the Enchanted Forest (where they'll often live), Wise Tree, Nature Spirit, Forest Ranger and Gaia's Vengeance. For when they turn hostile, see also When Trees Attack.

---

Examples:

Anime & Manga

• By the Grace of the Gods: Treants are a type of monster created when a tree, possibly any kind, absorbs too much magic and turns into a monster. They mostly look like normal trees but with arms and a mask-like face. The latter is also their weak point.
• Digimon: Jyureimon/Cherrymon is a Digimon resembling a six-armed cherry tree walking around on its roots, with a face on its trunk including a mustache made out of foliage. It lives in deep forests, and lures and tempts people who wander into its territory deeper and deeper into their woods until they become utterly lost; as such, it is also referred to as the Lord of the Forest. It evolves from a Digimon resembling a walking tree stump, and attacks with animated ivy vines. The one in the anime Digimon Adventure serves as the chief henchman to Pinochimon/Puppetmon, the Dark Master who rules over Spiral Mountain's forested areas.
• The Ride-On King: Huberry Ent is a massive walking tree who controls the forests in the Holy Kingdom.

Comic Books

• Guardians of the Galaxy: Groot is a rare science fiction example of this trope, appearing as a towering, plant-like humanoid alien chiefly composed of wood. A bit of a borderline case, as he doesn't share many traits associated with this trope such as an association with forests, although he does possess some degree of control over plant life.
• Supergirl: In the story "Supergirl's Greatest Challenge", the Tree Men from the planet Arbro are towering, yellow-barked, sapient humanoid trees whose species is facing extinction due to their homeworld orbiting a dwindling star.

Fan Works

• Blessed with a Hero's Heart: Izuku uses his Wild Shape ability to turn himself into a giant Treant to battle the Mobile Fortress Destroyer.
• Equestria Divided: Ents are colossal walking trees — and, notably, humanoids in a world of sapient ungulates — used by the Everfree forces as living siege engines and artillery units, as they can throw boulders quite far and quite accurately. They're sometimes summoned and directed by druids, but more often than not it's the will of the Everfree Forest itself that moves them.
• A New Hope (Danganronpa): Ashton Acercas is a person who became a humanoid tree, and is referred to as the "Ultimate Treant".

Films — Animation

• Mavka: The Forest Song features several sentient tree-like creatures, the most prominent being Leshy, the Guardian of the forest, who steps away from this task and passes the torch to Mavka.
• Shrek: The movies feature some humanoid trees, inspired by the Fighting Trees from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. They are first seen in the second movie, arm-wrestling in a Bad Guy Bar; in the third movie they are among the villains that become Prince Charming's henchmen.

Films — Live-Action

• The Wizard of Oz, following loosely from the original book, features a scene with some Treant-ish immobile apple trees. They get angry when Dorothy tries to pick their fruit, but then the Scarecrow deliberately goads them into hurling apples at him.

Gamebooks

• Fighting Fantasy: The world of Titan also features Tree Men, which are the typical gardeners of the forest and fiercely protective of their trees. They are almost indistinguishable from real trees, their mouth and small eyes being typically hidden in their thick, cracked bark. So much that, although elves knew of their existence for a long time, humans have only recently discovered them. Of note is that the SKILL and STAMINA scores given are for their two main attack branches; they are otherwise way too tough to be killed by a single adventurer, but cutting both branches will force them to retreat, severely injured.

Literature

• The Death Mage Who Doesn't Want a Fourth Time: Ents are rather common monsters, and their wood serves as pretty solid building material. Vandalieu accidentally creates his own ents with his magic while building an orchard, and the most prominent, Eisen, evolves into a gorgeous Plant Person.
• E.T.: The Book of the Green Planet: On E.T.'s home planet, Jumpums are giant trees that, as their name suggests, jump around.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Trope Maker and Trope Codifier — although not the Ur-Example — through the Ents.
  • In-universe, the Ents were explicitly created by the nature goddess Yavanna to protect the wilderness from the axes of civilization (and to keep the trees from becoming homicidal). They have an odd sort of immortality: they don't age and live more or less forever, but over time become stiffer, sleepier and more "treeish", rooting themselves and not stirring for increasingly long periods, eventually becoming indistinguishable from normal trees. They still live extremely long before this happens, giving them a very patient and long-term view on things: they consider reaching a decision after three days of continuous debate almost unseemly hasty. While once fairly widespread, they have become very rare by the time of the trilogy, only living deep within Fangorn Forest.
    • In a mild case of Unbuilt Trope, they have a number of characteristics later imitations lack, such as a highly variable numbers of fingers and toes and a form of gender dimorphism: male Ents live in deep forests and guard nature like later examples, but the women, the Entwives, favor agriculture and farmlands and resemble various crops and domestic trees, and were the ones who taught agriculture to early Men.
    • There is also some debate about their appearance — while the Peter Jackson movies popularized the "humanoid tree" image, in Tolkien's writing they're more humanoid, generally being described as giant- or troll-like beings who come to resemble trees as they age. In fact, the word "ent" is derived from an Old English word meaning "giant", and is linguistically related to ettin and jotunn. However, they are stated elsewhere in Tolkien's writings to have originated as spirits that entered the world by inhabiting or mimicking trees, giving more support to an interpretation of them as literal humanoid trees.
  • There are also the Huorns, which are creatures that start out as normal trees and gradually "wake up" in a sort of reverse process to the Ents growing treeish, growing more mobile and aware. They're just as protective of their forests and distrustful of intruders as true Ents, but can be much more malevolent and dangerous. A part of the Ents' job is to corral and calm the Huorns and keep them from becoming too much of a danger to others, hence the Ents being also known as the Shepherds of the Trees.
• Juniper Sawfeather: Unlike most examples, the sentient red cedar tree in Whisper of the Woods is rooted to the spot, but he can move his branches at will and create temporary knots in his trunk that allow Juniper to climb 150 feet up for her tree-sit. June learns that he was originally a human man who was transformed into a new kind of tree because he wished to be immortal and help his people.
• Star Trek: Prior to "Coda'' the expanded universe introduced readers to sentient plants.
  • In the novel Doctor's Orders, Captain Kirk leaves Dr. McCoy in command after the doctor complains one time too many about how things are run while he beams down to a planet named Flyspeck to engage in diplomatic discussions with the non-linear species called the ;At and the Lahit — which are sapient trees.
  • By the time the Star Trek: The Fall novel series takes place, a Lahit individual Rssuu had become a medical doctor and Starfleet officer, serving on as a chief medical officer on a Federation starship. Rssuu used male pronouns in dealing with traditionally sexed species, and the communications device embedded in his trunk had a British accent. Some humanoid officers thought it was a bit unusual to have a sapient tree as a doctor but quickly learned that Rssuu was as good as or better than the majority of humanoid doctors. Rssuu largely lived in a nutrient tray placed in sickbay in the USS Lionheart sickbay where he was stationed, and spread his branches and vines out throughout sickbay.
• The Witcher franchise has Geralt occasionally fight a Leshen (named after the Slavic forest deity Leshy), which resemble animate trees.
• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: The Fighting Trees are a take on this that predates most well-known uses: they precede Tokien's Ents by five and a half decades or so, and resemble trees with human-like faces and arm-like branches that attack intruders by grabbing them or throwing their own fruit at them. While they don't have the ambulatory nature of later treants, they still share their dislike for interlopers in their woods — their purpose seems to be to keep intruders from entering the enchanted forest behind them, as Dorothy and her group find out when they try to enter it and the trees attack them.

Live-Action TV

• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: Several Ents make a cameo appearance at the end of the pilot episode.

Tabletop Games

• Dragon Dice has the Treefolk, an entire race/army of sapient, mobile trees and their Naiad and Dryad allies, animated by Mother Nature as a last ditch effort against the forces of Death.
• Dungeons & Dragons: Treants have been present as Good-aligned plant creatures since the early days of the game. They were openly named Ents in the first editions of the game, but the name was later changed to treants for copyright reasons. Exactly how they reproduce varies between editions, but they are typically regular trees who spontaneously awaken to sapience and mobility over a period of years.
  • While treants are normally benevolent, those living in the Demiplane of Dread are vicious and aggressive — there's something in the Demiplane that turns all plant-creatures that grow there into homicidal killers, even if they'd otherwise be good guys, and the treants are no exception.
  • Forgotten Realms: The forest of Cormanthor is home to a large population of treants, which resemble different trees — such as birch, willow or oak — depending on which part of the forest they come from. They are also noted to live in symbiosis with other forest creatures, such as grubs that feed on a kind of mold that infests treants' bodies, toxic fungi that grow around their legs and ward off gnawing rodents and bats that nest in their branches and eat parasitic insects.
  • The 1986 creature book Creature Catalogue includes the gakarak, a much more hostile relative of the treant. Gakaraks resemble regular treants draped in moss and lichens, inhabit deep, ancient forests, are incredibly hostile to humanoids and consider them all to be vicious tree-slayers, and are some of the most long-lived creatures in existence. They possess a typical set of Green Thumb powers — specifically, they can animate trees, make plants grow and teleport through vegetation — and rarely speak more of the local languages than they need to to shout "get away from my trees!" before attacking intruders.
  • The Sandstorm supplement, which deals with adventuring in deserts and wastelands, introduces a variety of treant knows as the saguaro sentinel, which resembles a huge, humanoid saguaro cactus. It's True Neutral rather than Neutral Good, but it guards and protects forests same as other treants — it just does so for cactus forests instead. It also has the added bonus that, since it's covered in sharp thorns, it's also effectively immune to melee attacks.
  • Wizened elders are stunted (Medium- instead of Large-sized), gnarled relatives treants found on cold plains and subalpine mountains, right on the edge of the tree line. They're Chaotic Neutral, harsh and sometimes cruel, and bitter toward their "overly-soft" treant kin for "abandoning" them to less-hospitable climates.
  • Dark Sun: Treants are not a naturally occurring race, but are rather formed when a water spirit merges with a living tree growing next to a natural source of water (both extremely rare and precious things in the barren, sterile deserts of Athas) to protect the water and the life growing around it. Due to their origin, Athasian treants can innately cast a number of water-based spells, although they cannot control trees like other treant varieties.
• Exalted:
  • Forest walkers are relatively minor gods resembling large humanoid trees. They watch over woodlands and wildernesses, ruling over the spirits and creatures of the wild and protecting them from harm. Like most of Creation's gods, however, they're far from incorruptible; some like to make bets with mortals where they wager the rights to harvest their forests against their own freedom to seed human-cleared fields with trees, while others have been lured from their charges with promises of worship and fine new temples. They don't get along with wood elementals, though — they predate them by quite some time, and don't appreciate them muscling in on their authority.
  • Kings of the wood are powerful wood elementals resembling, again, humanoid trees. They rule over and protect forests and spirit courts of wood, but do so extremely harshly and tolerate dissent from their subjects as little as they tolerate mortal loggers.
• Magic: The Gathering:
  • Treefolk are a staple type of large Green creatures. For the most part fairly standard examples, they usually appear as reclusive forest dwellers and wardens of the wild, often on good terms with the local elves. They're most frequently aligned with Green, the color of nature and wild places, but sometimes show up in White and Black as well. Frequently, they have high toughness, and often care about a creature's toughness as well — such as Doran the Siege Tower, who causes creatures to assign damage equal to their toughness instead of their power, or Colfenor, the Last Yew, who lets you return creatures to your hand from your graveyard depending on their toughness. Some planes have their own variations:
    • In Lorwyn, the treefolk are the most ancient and long-lived of the intelligent races, and are viewed with great respect by their younger neighbors. They reproduce by spreading large amounts of seeds that grow into regular trees, some of which eventually awaken into new treefolk. They differ in size, physical and magical abilities and role in treefolk society based on the species of tree they resemble — for instance, oak treefolk are the largest and strongest of their kind, black poplars are healers and rowans are magicians. They're also the only species on the plane to be on generally decent terms with Lorwyn's highly xenophobic elves.
    • In Lorwyn's dark mirror Shadowmoor, the treefolk become warped, skeletal mockeries of their old selves, often only barely humanoid and highly aggressive towards other beings.
    • In the Gothic Horror-inspired plane of Innistrad, most treefolk, known as lumberknots, are at most only crudely humanoid, appearing as little more than aggressive, mobile trees with woody, fanged slashes for mouths. They're technically trees possessed by spirits. Innistrad is also home to the first spirit treefolk to appear in the game, Yew Spirit.
  • Outside of true treefolk, Green-aligned elementals such as Conifer Strider and Verdant Force commonly appear as towering humanoid trees or agglomerations of plant matter. They often exist as protectors of forests and other wild places against advancing civilization, whether they arise spontaneously for this role or are purposefully created out of preexisting plantlife by powerful entities.
• Pathfinder:
  • The game has Treants straight out of the Tolkien mold, with an extremely long-winded language, the ability to animate and control trees and gatherings called moots that can last for months. They also grow from acorns the size of a human head, germinating as immobile trees before becoming mobile as they mature, and can communicate with any intelligent plant-based creature. There's a tropical variant called the tobongo, which lives in jungles and can turn people into trees.
  • 2nd Edition reinterprets treants as a race of tree creatures called the arboreals, which are split between a number of varieties:
    • Arboreal wardens are the weakest and most common kind. They are active wardens and sentries of the forest, patrolling its edges to watch for intrusions or damage and typically reporting to more powerful arboreals when they cannot handle the threat themselves. On occasion, their wanderlust can cause them to organize into copses to venture beyond the bounds of the woodlands where they were born.
    • Arboreal regents — the direct reinterpretation of the first edition's treants proper — are the contemplative and retiring leaders of arboreal enclaves. They're solitary and sedentary beings who rely on the more active wardens to bring them news of the surrounding world, but who can bring immense power to bear should their forests be endangered.
    • Arboreal reapers watch over the cycles of death and decay that are integral to nature. They are usually warped, twisted or covered in spiked protrusions, and are some of the most proactive and aggressive arboreals both in attacking and driving out intruders and in breaking down humanoid ruins to speed their reabsorption into the forest.
    • Arboreal archives are living memory banks, retaining memories of every major event to affect the natural world in their territories. They are extremely passive beings, mostly advising regents instead of acting themselves, and instead of being born they are created when — after four days of deliberation — a regent is elected to become an archive when the current on of an area is approaching the end of its long lifespan.
  • Frost firs are creatures broadly similar to treants, although based off of evergreen trees instead, found in the far north of the world and in certain very high, cold mountain ranges. It's speculated in-universe that frost firs are descended from an offshoot of treants who adapted to cold climates, due to their physical similarities and the fact that they share a language, but the two species deeply dislike one another over "philosophical differences" (likely rooted in the fact that treants are generally Neutral Good and frost firs Neutral Evil).
  • Mosslords, while not treants in-game, hit most of this trope's points. They're towering humanoid trees, although unlike treants they're leafless, draped in carpets of moss, four-armed and with tangles of roots instead of feet; they have numerous abilities centered around plant life, which they can animate, control and communicate with, and are especially adept at controlling fungi; and they're utterly devoted to bringing Gaia's Vengeance against civilization. Unlike treants, however, moss lords are Lawful Evil, and hateful and malicious in their campaign against civilized society.
• Res Arcana: The Treant creature is a Plant Person with a Green Thumb that passively generates Life essences, and apparently has the knowledge required to create Elan essences based on how many Death an opponent has.
• Rifts: The Forest Wardens, also called Tree Men, Bark Hags and Forest Lords, resemble large, humanoid trees and are only found in the Dark Woods of Alabama. They're extremely reclusive and paranoid — from their perspective, the Rifts tore them from their homeworld and flung them into a place they don't understand, and they view the outside world with fear and dread. This leads them to react with immense violence against any perceived invasion of their haven, which includes any attempt at logging or settling or the passage of any moderately sized group. They're also intensely protective of plant life, and view even plucking weeds, picking flowers or leaving harvested fruit uneaten as horrific crimes, further driving them to violence. They do however tolerate lone travelers and other natives of the Woods, provided these don't commit any "crimes" against plants. Physically they're fairly standard, but can resemble almost any sort of tree and possess prehensile feet that allow them to brachiate through the treetops, and both males and females have thick leafy "beards".
• Warhammer:
  • The Treemen are the mightiest inhabitants of Athel Loren, formed when powerful spirits merge with living trees. Incredibly powerful and ancient, they command great respect from lesser forest spirits and the Wood Elves alike, and are rightfully feared by those outsiders who don't think they're myths or long extinct. They also inhabited Athel Loren long before the Wood Elves and are quite xenophobic, to the point that many see the Wood Elves, who have inhabited and defended the forest alongside the Treemen for millennia, as unwanted interlopers, and want them out of their woods. They've undergone a fair amount of design evolution over time; early treemen largely resemble ogre- or troll-like humanoids made out of wood, with broad heads, no necks, and long and sometimes multiple arms; 8th edition redesigns them to be more humanoid, with distinct necks and smaller heads, large clawed hands, and clusters of leafy branches growing from their necks and shoulders.
    • Older lore mentions Treemen as also inhabiting Avelorn, one of the kingdoms of the High Elven realm, itself a forested land thick with magic and ruled over by the avatar and high priestess of the elven goddess of life. Some sources further claim Avelorn to be home to the largest population of Treemen in the world, by implication eclipsing even Athel Loren's. This was however phased out as the franchise developed, and more recent sources make little to no mention of Avelorn's Treemen.
    • An early campaign riffing on Macbeth features a group of treemen led by a certain Klinty attacking McDeath's castle, which was prophesied not to fall until Klinty's Wood came to it. Being treemen, they're also exempt from the No Man of Woman Born clause.
  • Storm of Magic includes rules for using magic items to awaken forest terrain and turn it into units of living trees. The Woodwaker's Wand creates a fairly straightfoward version that acts as a mobile garrisoned building, cannot rout, and throws barrages of branches as a ranged attack. They also get additional traits depending on the specific form of forest that they were awakened from, such as regeneration for a fungus-infested forest or poisoned attacks for one crawling with venomous animals. The Living Deadwood Staff instead creates animated undead trees.
• Warhammer: Age of Sigmar: The old treemen were reborn in the Mortal Realms as the Sylvaneth, and are now one of the main armies of Order. They range from the literally tree-sized Treelords and Treelord Ancients, their leaders, to the more human-sized dryads (sapient, but very-single minded) branchwraiths and branchwyches (their magic-users), and the military-specified Hunters of Kurnoth. The entire race, even across realms, is connected by a telepathic song that allows them to communicate long-distance, and always connects them to their goddess Alarielle. While they were created to be gardeners and shepherds of life, they can and will turn their song towards war when enemies despoil their forests.

Video Games

• Age of Wonders: The Treeman appears as a unit for the Elves in Shadow Magic. It gets concealment, which means that if this wall-crushing behemoth stands in a forest, foes will not see it until it's one step away.
• Battle for Wesnoth: Woses, large humanoid trees allied with the elves and thought to be wardens of nature. Their ambush skill also makes them effectively invisible in woodlands.
• The Black Heart: Hashi's people, the wooden men, are long-lived treefolk charged with protecting the natural world.
• Dark Cloud: Treant is a talking tree who gives Toan a sword to defeat the Killer Snake guarding the way in a local dungeon. He's not anthropomorphic in any real way, however — in appearance, he's essentially a giant tree with eyes.
• Defense of the Ancients:
  • Rooftrellen, the Treant Protector, is a giant humanoid tree sent out into the world to explore the world of man and judge how much danger it poses to his home grove and the treants who stayed behind. He focuses on using a variety of Green Thumb powers.
  • Nature's Prophet can create treants from trees around the game map, although they are much smaller and weaker compared to Treant Protector.
• Demon Hunter: The Return of the Wings: Woodrippers are tree monsters with wines for arms.
• Don't Starve: If a player chops down too many evergreen trees, there's a chance of a nearby evergreen turning into a Treeguard, a powerful monster resembling a humanoid pine that will try to kill the player unless pacified by planting pinecones. The Shipwrecked DLC adds Palm Treeguards, which resemble a cluster of palm leaves with a face and arms mounted on two trunks serving as legs. They spawn when palm trees are cut down and are pacified by planting coconuts.
• Dragon Age has the Sylvans, who are spirits or demons who cross the veil and possess a tree. Most are belligerent and will attack anyone unfortunate enough to pass near them, but in Dragon Age: Origins, the Gray Warden meets a nice Sylvan who has a tree branch that will allow them to pass a barrier, and may choose to peacefully interact with the Sylvan and acquire it or to kill the Sylvan and take it by force.
• Dwarf Fortress: In pre-release versions, elves could animate trees to turn them into treants, but these were eventually relegated to being fictional in-universe (showing up in artwork), and later removed entirely. Treants are occasionally seen in mods though, which tends to go about as well as expected given magma is the universal dwarven problem-solver unless the modder plans for that and makes them able to survive being immolated.
• Edge of Eternity's treants are completely immobile, but they're very skilled at convincing groups of people to murder each other so they can absorb nutrients from their corpses.
• Fall from Heaven: The Ljosalfar's World Spell, "March of the Trees", causes all forest tiles within the faction's borders and unoccupied by enemy units to transform into Treants for five turns. After that, they turn back into forests wherever they're currently standing.
• Final Fantasy: Treants, generally resembling walking trees of various sorts — generally leafless, sometimes with tops broken off into stumps, and with faces in their trunks — appear as monsters in various games, debuting in Final Fantasy IV. They're weak to fire attacks and often found in forest areas, and Triffids, Ents and Elder Treants appear as stronger Palette Swaps of the basic Treant.
• Gems of War: The Treant is one of the troops associated with the Forest of Thorns, a faction of elves, beasts and nature spirit hailing from the deep forests. One of them is the main antagonist of the Forest of Thorns quest line, having been corrupted.
• Grandia: Treants appear as basic enemies at various points. The very first ones encountered by the party are fairly early in the game and take Scratch Damage from non-magical attacks. Their purpose is to encourage the player to take time to level their magical skills and not to try and power through the game using only melee attacks.
• Heroes of Might and Magic:
  • In III, the level 5 Rampart creature Dendroid is a slow and fairly resilient tree-man with the special ability to bind creatures they attack with roots, making it impossible for them to move until the dendroids move or are killed.
  • In V, the level 6 Sylvan creature is a Treant. Fittingly, they are very slow, but very resilient, having almost as much endurance as some level 7 creatures.
• Kingdom Rush:
  • The Weirdwood tower is a giant humanoid tree, described in-game as a treant, that throws acorns at the enemy.
  • The Rotten Forest tower spawns evil treants to attack enemies.
• League of Legends: Maokai the Twisted Treant was once a benevolent nature spirit, but was twisted into a force of vengeance when the Ruination blighted the verdant isles where he lived. He's an implacable foe of defilers of nature, and seeks to restore his home to its former wild glory. He can birth small ambulatory saplings to serve as minions and create massive walls of thorns.
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: While the majority of the Koroks are a mix of woodland sprites and plant people (and thus very tiny), Hestu, a wandering Korok musician, is the largest of the bunch—he towers over Link—and resembles a humanoid tree. His legs and arms look like branches, while the top of his head resembles a bonsai tree, with leaves as hair.
• The Legend of Spyro: The Eternal Night: The Ancient Grove is inhabited and defended by a number of humanoid agglomerations of wood and plant matter — the common growths, the stronger grove beasts, and the towering boss Arborick — who endlessly patrol the forest in search for intruders and attempt to crush Pyro with sweeping blows of their limbs. While quite strong, they're vulnerable to fire.
• Lord Of The Sword: The Tree Spirit is a walking, angry treant. It spits seeds and it throws rocks at Landau.
• Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga: Chuckleroot straddles the line between being this and a "regular" living tree, being an animated, speech-capable and at least partially mobile tree who guards the heart of an ancient forest. The boss Trunkle resembles a Treant, but is a subversion as it's actually made of rock.
• Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes features Treants as one of the two Champion units for the Sylvan faction. They're somewhat weak for a Champion unit, but can steal the life of the enemy hero after hitting them, and stay on the field as a barrier after attacking.
• Mo' Creatures: This Minecraft mod includes ents in the form of giant, humanoid birch or oak trees. They can create clusters of grass, ferns, saplings, mushrooms or flowers and don't take damage from any weapon but axes. Oak ents have hollow boles in their legs with the eyes of small creatures peering out.
• Myth has the Forest Giants, who look like twelve-foot-tall bearded men with wood for skin and leaves for hair. Since chopping down a tree is akin to murder to a Forest Giant, they're mortal enemies of the Trow, who clear cut their ancient homeland for resources centuries ago.
• Octopath Traveler has Raging Treants and Peek-a-boos, both of which resemble humanoid trees. They tend to occupy mid- to late-game forested areas.
• Paladins: Grover from the aforementioned Smite is a playable character. Wielding an axe, he fights for the forest and occasionally references his former rider, Sylvanus.
• Patapon: The third game has Treants. They normally don't move, but if you try to use fire weapons on one it'll wake up and start flinging fireballs at your army. If it happens to be a rainy day, they gain huge amounts of health regeneration.
• Pokémon: Trevenant are Pokémon resembling humanoid trees that inhabit the Winding Woods of Kalos. Highly protective of their forest, they can control regular trees and show great kindness to the Pokémon that inhabit their land and nest in their bodies, but will ruthlessly attack anyone who exploits their woods. Physically, they're a bit unusual, being about human-sized, walking on six roots instead of legs and being technically the ghosts of humans who died lost in the forest.
• Quest 64: Treants are demonic-looking trees, who attack by throwing blades of wind. In Quest: Brian's Journey, they look like livelier trees with lots of leaves, and attack by throwing rocks.
• The Rewinder has the Tree Sage, a humanoid tree who's actually a nature spirit using the wood as its body.
• Smite: Sylvanus, the diminutive god of forests and the wilderness, goes into battle on the back of Grover, a massive treant. A couple of unlockable skins turn Grover into more exotic variants on this trope, such as a treant covered in giant blue-and-red mushrooms or one based on a cactus.
• Total War: Warhammer: Treemen appear in the Wood Elf army roster with a couple of tweaks from their tabletop version, such as legs ending in a tangle of roots instead of feet.
  • The Wood Elf subfaction of Argwylon, led by the treeman Durthu Oakheart, focuses on treemen and other forest spirits above the Wood Elves — for instance, only Ancient Treeman generals and not elven Glade Lords can be put in your council — in contrast to the main Wood Elf faction, which does the opposite. Drycha's Wargrove of Woe takes this theme further, relying heavily on purple-tinted malevolent treemen and other forest spirits in lieu of elves.
  • Avelorn, one of the playable High Elf factions, is unique for being able to recruit forest spirits such as treemen due to the close connection its ruler, Alarielle, the avatar and high priestess of the goddess of life, has to the natural world. Avelorn's treemen are visually distinguished from Athel Loren's by their gray bark and rose-red leaves.
• The Trader of Stories, having a large Constructed World, features immensely long-lived Dancing Trees as one of the many races that inhabit it.
• Warcraft:
  • Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos:
    • Treants are human-sized treemen, usually summoned by the Keeper of the Grove by targeting a forested area. Corrupted Treants can be seen in some maps, where they also have poison attacks or the Entangling Roots ability.
    • The giant trees that serve as Night Elf buildings are known as Ancients, and while they can attack and move around, it's very much a last-ditch option, as they do both very, very slowly. Depending on the specific type, they can be composed entirely of vegetable material or include greater or lesser amounts of rock and crystals, resembling a continuum from typical humanoid trees to pieces of the landscape that fashioned the vegetation growing on them into limbs, got up and walked away. At least on type of Ancients, the Trees of Life, are stated to be the saplings of the World Tree Nordrassil.
  • World of Warcraft:
    • The Treants and the Ancients from Warcraft III make an appearance in this game too. The Battle for Azeroth expansion includes a variety of Ancients formed out of rock and living coral found in the underwater area of Nazjatar.
    • Druids with the "Restoration" specialization have the ability to shapeshift into the "Tree of Life" form, which gives them enhanced healing and plant-based attack abilities, as well as higher armor. Initially they looked identical to treants; however, they were given a unique appearance in Mists of Pandaria. An item called Glyph of the Treant was added for players who prefer the appearance of the old treant form, which is a purely aesthetic spell.
    • Shadowlands introduces the tirnenn of Ardenweald, who look like treants with long arms and three trunks for legs, and generally speak in low, raspy voices. Despite their alien appearances and speech patterns, they're mainly Gentle Giants who tend to Ardenweald's plant life, and slow to anger or action.
• Wargroove: The plant-hybrid people known as the Florans have Green Giants. Like the game's other giants, they have enough strength to significantly harm most foot-soldiers without themselves taking much damage.

Webcomics

• Erfworld: Gumps are a type of forest-capable unit ^note meaning they can move in forest hexes without penalties, and also a pun on Forrest Gump used by the Royal Crown Coalition, shaped like giant, humanoid trees. There are also Tannenbaums, which seem to be pine tree-shaped, Christmas-themed Gumps.
• Oglaf has occasionally featured an unnamed tree-species. Their males look like Treants while their females are humanoid Plant People.
• The Order of the Stick: Durkon does not like trees, viewing them as Combat Tentacles-equipped Stone Wall Giant Mooks that just aren't moving yet. However, when he faces actual treants animated by a crazed druid that sent them on a rampage against civilization (and that had been made resistant to everything but Sonic damage) he figures out a way to deal with them.
• Something*Positive: During a D&D game, the party encounters hillbilly rapist treemen. This gets their Asshole Victim to quit the roleplaying group, for which the other members send the GM thank-you notes.

Web Original

• Acquisitions Incorporated: After the "Homecoming" arc, Walnut gains an additional Wildshape in the form of a humanoid tree so massive that it counts as a siege weapon.

Western Animation

• DuckTales (2017): In "The Missing Links of Moorshire!", a purple tree-giant lives on the magical golf course where the Ducks are transported. Glomgold enrages it by hitting its head with a golf ball.
• Flowers and Trees: The short focuses on three treants, two lover trees and one evil tree who pines for the female tree, out of a larger population inhabiting a forest also home to animated flowers and woodland critters. Out of rage after his attempts to woo the female tree fail, the evil tree tries to burn the forest down but gets burned by his own mechanisms. The lover trees continue on to their business like nothing ever happened.
• Futurama: "Bender's Game", in a direct parody of The Lord of the Rings, featured a giant tree person called Treedledum. The fellowship ended up using him for firewood.
• The Hollow: The Last Ironwood Tree, though she only starts looking like one once she is complete, when she is able to move around on her two legs.
• The New Adventures of Superman: In "The Tree Man of Arbora", a tree-like being brought to life near a meteor crater grows arms and legs and begins wandering about, consuming enormous quantities of water. It displayed enormous physical strength, easily ripping the hood off of a car to get at the water in its motor and breaking a dam apart with its bare fingers. It at one point disguises itself in a forest by standing still and becoming indistinguishable from normal trees, until a boy carving letters into its trunk angers it back into motion. At the end of the episode, Superman takes the creature to the planet of Arbora, which is entirely populated by tree men.
• The Neverending Story: The Animated Adventures of Bastian Balthazar Bux: The Tree Trolls, who are trees with arms, faces and legs. They can be stuck-up and snobbish, but they're largely decent people, and Bark Troll is Bastian's closest companion in Fantasia.
• VeggieTales: "Lord of the Beans" has the Elders of the Razzberry Forest, whose knowledge of mysterious plants and beans goes back ages. This may be because the Elders are humanoid trees. They have facial features, and they can use their limbs as arms. The wizard Randalf (Mr. Nezzer) warns Toto Baggypants (Junior Asparagus) and his friends not to laugh or even smile in the Elders' presence, or the consequences will be dire, as the Elders had lost their senses of humor sometime around the fourth millennium.
  Toto: So these Elders must be as old as the trees?
  Randalf: No. They are the trees.
• Winx Club: In Season 6, the Treant are ancient human knights who shapeshifted into huge trees. Selina awakens these beings against Linphea, and they keep Linphea's fairies and warriors hostage during the Winx's fight against the witches. Flora, with her new Bloomix powers, eventually stabilizes them by planting their roots back into the soil.

---