Quote Originally Posted by SannaR View Post
Yes, but so far in all of the fights they have kept some part of what they really look like when not in their partial humanoid form. That and in a lot of stories snakes are not to be trusted. I can only think of one story where a snake wasn't evil and it's a Pacific Northwest Native tribe story that partly explains why the sun is in the sky and how some animals came to look the way they do. In that story the snake which has fur tries to carry the hot glowing ball to wherever it needed to go inside it's coils but the ball was too hot and it burned off all the fur. For me there's going to be some disconnect as historically you can't trust a snake and yet we're going to have to because the story so far tells us this has to be true.
Going on a tangent slightly here but the idea of snakes being 'evil' is more a Western/Judeo-Christian concept (due to a confusion of the Biblical story of the Fall of Man being caused by a snake tricking Adam and Eve into eating the Forbidden Fruit with the seperate idea of Satan as an enemy of God), as there are a number of cultures where serpents are not evil, but benevolent (Australian Aboriginal belief for example, the Rainbow Serpent is a creator deity responsible for creating the entire universe - read: the Australian landscape). Snakes being evil beings has probably come about simply due to their cold-blooded nature as reptiles and how many snakes (serpents included), are not only highly venomous but downright aggressive - it's not hard to then take that further as making them into an evil flying menance tormenting the 'just and good'.

Seiryu being based on Chinese/Japanese mythological ideas thus makes sense - dragons in many Asian cultures naturally being regarded as divine entities and Seiryu as a serpent Auspice in an Asian-counterpart culture fits the bill nicely.