I was actually looking for more traditional Chinese, cultivation novel type designs,, >> But thank you anyways!
I got into chinese fantasy designs a fair while ago- and so far i haven't seen many of those designs on toyhou.se
SO HMU WITH YOUR HELLA COOL XIANXIA DESIGNS- THEY'RE RARE AS FRICK BUT I REALLY WANNA SEE MOAR O-:
Haha yeah! We used to own this book on Chinese mythology and suddenly the Jade Emperor appeared in one of the stories and everyone made such a fuss about how important he is and I was like, "You never mentioned this, book..." haha!
There's always a deity for everything, TBH, except I haven't heard a deity for eclipses in any other culture, then again usually that means the sun deity is hiding or something, so that made sense too haha.
Thank you!
I think it's unfair to slam Chinese mythology for being "inconsistent" considering there's 50-something recognized cultural groups in China and not all of these characters are from the same mythological tradition >_> I can't speak for everyone either but as a Beijinger here are some very basic notes:
1. Chinese folk mythology doesn't really have gods "of" things the same way the Greek pantheon does. gods do have domains I guess, but they're just people who have been put in charge of those things instead of personifications of them, so having multiple gods "of" one thing is no big deal. if you travel to a new place and learn about the local gods there, it's totally plausible for those and your gods to exist at the same time; just add them to the pile. so if you are going into the research hoping to find the one true god of x or the specific hierarchy of all the gods, you're going to have a bad time.
2. the traditional Chinese explanation for solar eclipses is there's a big black dog that tries to eat the sun sometimes. people shoot flaming arrows at it to make it go away. I don't know of one for lunar eclipses.
octopi
Oh, I didn't know each region would have different stories! I thought they would have similar origins, but I suppose that makes sense!
Did they all have the Jade Emperor as the head though, or do each version differ?
Ah! When I say "there's always a deity for everything", I meant in general! Since I think there were multiple weaving deities? Told in the story of the summer and the Milky Way? Not sure.
Regarding the eclipse... is it related to the archer (Ho Yi?) who shot the seven (nine?) princes (who were fire birds?) down? I don't remember if that incident brought a drought or meant no moon / night...? I'm rusty haha.
Thanks for pinging us to clarify, though!
oh!! i have a good few!!
i've always been really interested in old traditional asian designs and you could say it's a weak point of mine hahaim chinese myself yet i'm stupidly attached to designs of this category i actually need help
these are some of my charas that are not accurately based off of historical stuff but have that general feel
yung is a jiangshi, or a zombie
gao & xiao are monster twins, villagers literally call them 'tall' and 'small'
xiongmao just a big ol panda guy
chuntian his outfit is kind of an exaggerated fantasy design i think i may have to rework it to something less wild
lu hai deer boy
aviur - he'd be chinese but in my story the concept of china doesnt exist so that's why the name is like that whoops im inconsistent
1. basically the Jade Emperor is in charge because of propaganda. the idea is that the human government is based on the celestial government, and the human emperor is descended from the divine one, so pillaging and conquering whatever they want is totally morally justified. there definitely are other "versions" (the only one I remember atm is a non-anthropomorphic deity just called the sky father), though a lot of them were utterly destroyed in one systematic book burning or other.
2. if you mean the story of the cowherd and weaver girl... I don't remember there being any "gods of weaving" there? like, the weaver girl was just some random spirit who weaves sometimes, not a god who presides over the concept of weaving. very few gods actually do that.
3. no idea what you mean by princes, so here's the tl;dr of the version of Houyi's story I know: there used to be ten sun crow brothers, who would take turns flying across the sky to light the world, but one day they got tired of this and decided to go out all at once. the ensuing heatwave killed thousands before a cool archer dude shot nine of them so nowadays there's only one sun. the eclipse dog is probably from a different tradition.
!!! same hat on both the crossed-out sentences!! I think I've already shared them in this thread but I have this storyverse, which takes place in an alternate fantasy China where they speak some Mandarin-adjacent fictional language and I keep flip-flopping back and forth between what kinds of names people/places should have dskfjgh
Yung is a very good boy and I'm so glad to finally find somebody else who recognizes jiangshi are zombies and not vampires. where the hell did that even come from
octopi
Ah, that's interesting to know about how the Jade Emperor came to be. It's a pity so many things become lost due to book burning! Was that due to the emperor's command as well?
Yeah, the cowherd and the weaver, sorry for being vague! Ah, in the story I read the weaver girl oversaw weaving? Which was why when she was engrossed with her love she wasn't able to oversee the weaving of the humans and weavings became tangled, so I think she was (one of) the weaving deities? Playing games I've always read about the Japanese version too, so I might have mixed that one up in the process.
In my version the crow (?) brothers were like phoenixes, and they were princes? Yeah, I probably have to check that book again and find out where the author was from or something, I suppose.
"Cool archer dude" though. Now I want to make one haha-
hmm not sure if she fits the bill, but li hua is a tgcf oc !!! :0
i definitely had more chinese / chinese-influenced ocs in the past but i kept giving them way too detailed designs for my hands JFNSDJKGNSDG im trying my best with li hua though!! it makes me happy to be able to use the bit of knowledge i've accumulated in my past for traditional chinese clothing and designs in my ocs :>
hello my fellow tgcf trash 👀
thank you so muchh!!! T T that warms my heart,,, ive been working on her character more lately!! hopefully i can get more stuff out soon :'D