The Difference between a Dog, a Lion and a Year
Yes I took the right meds today. Honest! I totally double checked the bottles.
Ok all jokes aside what am I even talking about with that title? Back in the first parts of the Xianzhou Trailblaze Mission we were introduced to a robot "dog" called Diting.
So what is Diting because I'm pretty sure none of us have ever seen a dog that looks like that right? Well going off of what the wiki said back then they claimed it was a
The nianshou is a folktale monster that parents used to tell kids about in the same way we have parents telling kids to behave for Christmas so Santa will bring presents and not coal. (I don't even know if people still remember the coal part lol) So each year on Chinese New Year the reason for all the firecrackers you might find going off at your local Chinatowns is to scare away this nianshou. That first part of its name? 年 means year. Hope the topic's title is making more sense now.
But here's the problem with what the wiki said. This is the nianshou.
Does it look anything like Diting? No. So Diting is not a "year." How about a dog since Diting's the Xianzhou version of Peppy? Well- Actually it turns out Diting is just a diting 谛听.
It's its own mythological creature but the diting is not very well known especially these days.
So it's not a lion, dog or year right? Weeeell. Like I said it's not one of the more popular ones like the stone lions or the Cocogoat. (Genshin references still work here right?) And the problem with these super old less popular creatures is that their depictions may not always follow a single design. (look up what European dragons looked like before writers consolidated them into winged lizards that breath fire) And to point this out let me show you that Chinese description again which came from Baidu.
Now if we look at the description again it ends off on something pretty evident. Qilin's feet. Now look at the picture provided on the Baidu article. See those five toed claws? Qilin have hooves.
Who does have five toed claws? The stone lion. （石狮 shishi <for people trying to learn Chinese that hate themselves deep down lol. The 'shi's don't sound the same) But that's actually more likely what Star Rail's Diting design resembles,
Complete with fuzzy boot feet!
characterized by its many colors and also no horns. Something the nianshou and diting do share in common is that they should have a single horn. But lions and our Diting don't.
Side Note: If you look at the wiki article for Diting now they've edited out the nianshou stuff and are calling it a lion from the Chinese New Year Lion Dances now.
But that doesn't mean miHoYo screwed up and made Diting look like a lion. Again these less popular creatures don't always get depicted as cleanly as things like dragons, qilin and lions. But it turns out one more famous depiction of the diting comes from Journey to the West and guess how diting is described there?
金毛狮子 means golden lion. (also people learning Chinese that don't hate themselves just call those stone lions 狮子 shizi which is also used to name the real animals) It could be that miHoYo was drawing on that reference for their diting or even making a passing statement about how loose the descriptions can be for some of these mythological creatures.
Ok so that covers the difference between a year and a lion. What about dog? Unlike the diting the stone lions are very popular in Asia. I mean they are so popular they even became popular here.
Anyway the evolution from stone lion into dog comes from its spread into the island kingdom of Ryukyu. In Ancient China you always have a pair of lions guarding your front door. This is a male-female pair and to differentiate between them the female will have one paw on a cub while the male is stepping on a ball. In some depictions though the male will have its jaw closed. So with that foundation we move to Ryukyu where the differences were synchronized with a Ryukyuan folktale about a lion and a dog.
In this depiction the dog replaces the female lion and has its mouth open which in Ryukyu belief is meant to release the household's woes while the lion has a closed mouth to represent preventing the household from absorbing outside threats.
Now we keep that game of international telephone going and you move into Japan where previously the Japanese had statues of something that is now collectively categorized with the stone lions but they kept them indoors. By the 14th century these statues began being placed outdoors like their Chinese and Ryukyuan counterparts and took on more characteristics from the Ryukyu version combining the looks of both lion and dog. Today they are called Koma-inu or 狛犬. 狛 is an archaic term that could mean wolf and 犬 is dog. It's likely we got the term "Foo Dogs" from this depiction of the lions.
Side Note: There's actually another route that lions and dogs somehow related to the diting and other depictions of the koma-inu, stone lions and Ryukyu's lion and dog with regard to how they related to each other.
Anyway I hope you guys found this interesting.
Posted Aug 10, 2023, 10:36 PM UTC