Finally, the flarefowl! This should have happened much, much sooner given how important these guys are supposed to be, but it's better late than never, I guess.
The flarefowl or hwnzj is Hinotoria's national bird, from which the country gets its name. It's known for an exceptionally beautiful, elaborate, and varied song, but it only sings these songs at any length in places it feels more or less completely safe. As such, the Hinotorians regard it as a symbol of deep, fundamental harmony, and portray it in stories as being common in times when civilisation is running smoothly and not appearing (or only speaking brief, harsh notes the few times it does appear) when there is a bad government, unrest, etc. In reality, the birds could care less what the government's doing, but they actually are sensitive to obviously hostile behaviour and prefer quiet over noise, making the part about unrest partly true.
Though I designed them to look like pheasant-family birds (tragopans and grouses in particular) I feel like the Hinotorians would probably not eat them as a general rule because, you know, if you outright kill The Bird Of Peace and eat it it makes you look really, really bad. That's probably one thing that separates them from the more Wilful Sengra nearby—it seems really probable some Sengra would just kill the bird without thinking and be like you silly Hinotorians, what's so sacred about a stupid chicken?. ...As you can guess the Hinotorians are at best rather neutral about the Sengra.
I haven't decided whether they are sexually dimorphic or not. At first they were supposed to not be and both be brightly-coloured the way macaws are, but then the way this came out it's honestly pretty crazy for a normal colouration, so I'm leaning toward this being the male colours and the female literally just having a bright head and a drab body like a male tragopan.
If I do that, I might make the female have a greater portion of yellow on the head and a yellowish-brown body so it looks more like the yellow emblems Hinotoria uses in official-insignia-type stuff and that people also use casually as a sort of common symbol of a shared culture (like Jinfèng's emblem).
No comments:
Post a Comment