New Race Announced! The Au Ra

[jomoru]

I'd love to know how you know what the art team did and didn't take inspiration from when designing Au'Ra.

Au'Ra are 100% made up? Ridiculous. Nothing is 100% made up. When they decided they'd add Au'Ra, they no doubt went "Lets take humans and mix them with lizards", they took two very real things and used that as the basis for creating their fictional race. Again; Mimesis is a thing.

In that the only lizards that have horns don't in any way look like Au'ra horns. I'm going to go with the idea that they went with the decades of "dragon girl/boy" picks that exist in Anime/manga to draw from as an idea.

But lets ignore that, lets actually go with your idea that they were all "We need a new race lets look to the natural world in how to build it" so they decided "lizard tail" and "um lets go with antelope horns" and "human body"


Now there are lizards(and antelopes) which have extreme dimorphism. Some that do not. And some even have the females much larger than the males. So any choice about sexual dimorphism is a purely artistic CHOICE. You can't say "it happens in nature" because there is as many counter examples to throw at you.

And what visuals would that be? That existing races have no real sexual dimorphism's? Aside from actually sounding like a good reason to add a race with such differences, it actually makes sense given the basis for existing races. Only Miqo'te are the only other race it would really apply to (since everything else is basically just Human), but sexual dimorphism's in cats are very subtle outside coat colour, which Miqo'te unfortunately don't really have. Big cats would have offered something, but Miqo'te are more than certainly based off house cats and the Japanese Nekomata mythology. All Japanese cat girls are.

what's the difference between "human with cat ears" and "human with the sexual dimorphism of bees" your "rules" are fairly arbitrary. There is no mandate in art that one has to completely follow natural rules especially when one mixes and matches.

Now the story has setup that the PC races are in fact some unified entity, "The races of Man" that there is some unity in the PC races in the face of the various beast tribes. SO making a race that goes against that visual does cut into the idea of them having some sort of unity of nature.