G-Series Appearances: 17
Other Appearances: Godzilla: Monster Apocalypse
You would think because there's only one Biollante in the whole series that there wouldn't be anything to say here, but after doubling down on covering non-movie material relevant to the timeline of the films, now the prequel novel Biollante is in the mix, and that complicates things. Horrifically, the anime trilogy is the only time in the series that a monster is legitimately different from the rest of the series with it's partially plant Godzilla. Which, if we were following the rules here, wouldn't even make Godzilla Earth actually Godzilla, but just a highly derived cousin of Biollante. Which isn't an exaggeration, the prequel novels (or rather the characters in them) make this exact claim. So, unfortunately, there's no real way aroond that for Godzilla, because even though all the other monsters are the same as their 1954 continuity family counterparts, the monster that's called and is by every other metric Godzilla, is by the standards of this site a distinct type of monster from Godzilla. For Biollante at least this isn't an actual problem, because the explanation the novels give for Biollante is consistent with the version that's actually in the movie: a hybrid of Godzilla and plants. The mix is a little different, the elephant in the room here being Erika. It's pretty subtle in the film and non-existant in the dub (which is why for the longest time I though the inclusion of human DNA in Biollante was axed after the first few drafts), but Dr. Shiragami put something of Erika inside the rose bush that was destroyed in the Mt. Mihara tremor, which is why he wanted Miki to listen to it's "voice" and why he was so desperate to save it. In the finished film this is primarily symbolic, it's as if grief has driven him to believe Erika's soul is inside the plant which is where the interactions between Miki and Biollante take that idea, but Dr. Kirishima seems properly convinced that, genetically, Biollante is also part human.
Where this leaves the Biollante of the prequel novels and the identity of what "a Biollante" even is is, as far as the franchise at large is concerned, generally unaffected. Because of the dub being what it is, and because Erika's habitation of Biollante still seems to be mostly spiritual even in the finished film to the point that Kirishima might just be wrong, licensed material tackling Biollante usually ignores the human part altogether anwyas and just makes the monster a pure plant-Godzilla hybrid. Video games and comics are particularly fond of this. Another wrinkle to this is that we don't know the full scope of what Godzilla Earth is made of, we just know it's "plants" for certain and some "animals" and a Godzillasaurus to a fairly substantial degree. This process could've taken nearly a century to complete because we don't know how long after the atomic age it started nor do we know when Biollante budded off of that path. So does the prequel novel contain speficially the same kind of rose and human DNA in it's genome? Probably not, no. So really what we're left with here is the idea of Biollante, which is thematical taking something terrifying - Godzilla - and turning it into something beautiful by making it a flower. A monster's quintessential "Biollante-ness," then, isn't in the mixture, it's in the idea.
One last note aboot fitting Biollante in as a branch of Godzilla Earth's slow evolution is that it isn't wholly without precedent. Remember that, although the finished film has the characters widening their guesses, the earlier drafts and finished film itself tell us with no uncertainty that Spacegodzilla IS what's left of Biollante. So according to the main series itself, if you take a plant-Godzilla hybrid, leave it to mutate through various circumstances for a while, it can eventually produce something that is far more Godzilla than plant. Does this mean that at some point in the long HGT period of Godzilla Earth's genesis that they incorporated some weird crystal alien? Maybe! Probably not, though. I do like the implication that Godzilla Earth may have roses as part of the pool of genetic data taken from plants in there somewhere.
History: Biollante is the product of grief, a desperate attempt of Dr. Genichiro Shiragami to save what's left of his long dead daughter by splicing the cells of a rose bush with a part of Erika's genes. The rose's life is at stake when a tremor breaks the container keeping it alive, and so Dr. Shiragami agrees to work on an Anti-Godzilla project in order to splice the bush with Godzilla cells. The resulting tribrid killed a Biomajor agent attempting to break into Dr. Shiragami's lab and is discovered the next day in Lake Ashi as a gigantic, towering rose. It called out to Godzilla (3rd), drawing the two monsters together, sparking a fight that ended with Biollante retreating into the sky after exposure to Godzilla's heat beam began to affect it abnormally because of the radiation processing genes from the Godzilla cells. It later returned in a far more heavily mutated form to stop Godzilla from attacking nuclear power plant in Wakasa Bay. The two monsters fought to a standstill until Godzilla began to feel the effects of the A.N.E.B. and went out to see, while Biollante returned to the sky, but not before saying "thank you" psychically through Miki Saegusa. How much of Biollante is and was actually Erika Shiragami isn't ever really clear.
History: Biollante appeared off the coast of Normandy in September 2039, and eventually moved into the city. G-Force engaged the monster and appeared to kill it using Markalite cannons, but the rays only caused the monster to mutate, healing into a second form. Biollante was successfully destroyed by Moguera (UCV) after it drilled into the monster's "core" and destroyed its heart. Analysis of Biollante afterwards led to the hypothesis that it was some kind of subspecies of Godzilla (Earth). It was likely an offshoot of the lengthy horizontal gene transfer process that lead to Godzilla, a "stem-Godzilla" with a higher percentage of plant DNA than animal, and before Godzilla's asymmetrically permeable shield had been evolved.
Notes: The stats are conjectural, but apparently in the novel it is specified that the initial form was only 80 meters tall rather than 85. In addition to this, Godzilla Earth, the end product of the process which Biollante is presumably an offshoot of, is half the weight of comparable Godzillas at 50m. So, the way I figure, if we think of this in terms of Godzilla's stats, we already have an 80m Godzilla, which weighed 30k tons, so a Biollante at that height with the same inordinately light density should be aroond 25k tons. As for the second form, the original plant beast is 141.1765% the size of the flower beast, which would give us a 112.9412 meter tall monster in the AniGoji timeline. Buuut... well, this Biollante's mutation is caused by Markalite cannons, not Godzilla's heat ray, and there's a lack of connection to Godzilla and radiovory in general in the AniGoji timeline, so it's hard to say if the Markalites would affect Biollante the same way. So instead, I played it a little more conservatively and had Biollante essentially be a mirror to the 3rd generation Godzilla the original Biollante was partially cloned from, with the second form being 100m, and again half the weight. Again, totally conjectural, but I gave it a shot.
