I know I just made Moira the Albino Goth Raccoon, but that was made with a community driven design process, where I let the inspiration for all the design cues come from the chatters- which was a lot of fun yes, but also meant it did precisely 0% to scratch the itches for the ideas I had already wanted to make so it was really inevitable that another model would be on the way I think.

I noticed recently (and then had it pointed out to me a few times after that, reinforcing the idea) that my male characters tend to fall into two camps- extremely feminine girly boys, and gigantic stompy beasts, with not much in between. The reason for this is that I'm straight enough that "average male" character territory tends to be where I start to lose interest, so I need to push male characters to some kind of extreme to get much out of 'em. In my case that usually means "basically a girl" or "basically a werewolf", haha. But it does create a bit of a missing middle so I figured having someone to fill in that gap could be good, but if I'm going to stay interested in the character I'm gonna have to get weird with it. Human looking anatomy just ain't gonna do it for me.

Right out of the gate this had me thinking something avian or lizardy, as I find those species tend to tolerate exotic anatomy particularly well. I didn't have anything specific in mind exactly, but was just sort of keeping my eyes open for inspiration to strike, which it eventually did in the form of stumbling on a picture I had saved sometime years ago while doing some file sorting. It was just a picture of a "great eared nightjar", which the image described said bird as basically being a "dragon bird" which immediately had my interest. I started poking around to see if anyone else had done anything with this creature and didn't see much of anything on e6 which had me very excited, but then after a little more searching I found some people had done work with it on FA in the past and because I'm a huge fucking hipster that took the wind out of my sails a bit.

But the idea had struck a chord so I started thinking- what about an -actual- dragon bird hybrid? And that kinda intrigued me so I did some quick design doodles and like what I saw, so I started modelling it up! But around the point I was making some horns for it I started to think about how annoying horns can be to deal with, they can cause a lot of trouble when a character is laying on their back and this boy will probably be on his back from time to time if you know what I mean. I was debating to myself what I was going to do with them when the lightbulb moment struck.

I started thinking about evolutionary mimicry, how some species will evolve to look extremely similar to some other species as a form of defence, so what if not dragon-birb, but birb that -looks- like dragon? At which point I realized I had circled back around to the original idea but at least I'm doing it in a more unique and creative way now so that was good enough for me, hah.

So, that's what we've got here! A bird who has evolved in such a way that their feathers resemble the plates, horns and tail of a dragon, and even some eastern-dragon like tassel things. I figure, if you're literally made of chicken, evolving to look like an apex predator at a glance would probably be a pretty handy trait to have. It lends him a somewhat fierce demeanour, but I figure since it's all literally a facade, he's probably a total dork or shy boy or something underneath all those simulated pointy bits.

He's not particularly huge, nor particularly small- he should fit just nicely right in the middle amonst all my male models and serve as a nice gap filler (heyo). And also like, he's a dragon bird, how do you go wrong?

Naming and ref sheet and first smutting all coming up in the near future!