Board Thread:Episode Discussions/@comment-25787298-20160519120227/@comment-1512913-20160520124128

The tree was said to keep the wrapped victims alive, true, but I'm quite sure that there has to be a point when they die before turning into White Zetsu. I mean, it's not like their bodies are alive one second and the next they turn into White Zetsu, they get completely mutated and changed, one shouldn't consider the White Zetsu to be people that they once used to be. In the transformation, there has to be a point of death of their humanity, both in physiological sense and mental sense and then basically from the corpse the White Zetsu gets created.