Creating a Creature

I don’t know if it’s glaringly obvious but I love mythological creatures. Which has led me to some theories.

Human creativity is an interesting thing. We are really good at combining ideas, coming up with new ways to put things together, but less good usually at creating whole new things. We can use logic and science to find new elements, we can put together philosophies and observations until we come up with new systems, etcetera, but most things humanity develops are usually combinant or amplifying or decreasing a certain aspect of something. I am not saying humans aren’t creative; however, I am saying that if I asked you to describe a color you’d never seen before, what would you say? It can’t be pink or purple or blue or black or shades or hues of any that you know. What does it look like then?

Anyway, my point with that is that mythological creatures generally tend to fall in one of three categories and it’s rare to get something outside of those. Those categories, for the sake of my purposes, are in my reckoning combinant, amplification, or animated.

Combinant

Think the Chimaera. Take pieces of various animals and throw them together- then maybe add some powers on top to cap it off. Hippogriffs are eagle-horses. Griffins/Gryphons are eagle-lions. Hippocampi, the fish-horses. Mermaids, the people-horses. Sphinx, the lion-with-a-person-head. It’s the very classic “make something new with pieces of something old” trope.

Some can get even more complex:

Amplification

This is taking something and turning it magical. Take a horse and add horns and you’ve got a unicorn. Add wings instead to get a pegasus. Take a lizard, make it big and add a snaky neck and some fire and you’ve got a western dragon. Take a dragon, for instance, and add a bunch of necks and there’s a hydra. Making things more than they are creates a whole new realm of creatures.

Animated

Bring something inanimate to life. A golem is animated clay. There are innumerable types of animated rocks. Ents and dryads, nymphs and so on are all animated nature forces. Even zombies, animated skeletons, mummies, ghosts, and various other forms of undead are essentially the inanimate brought to magical life. Some things are more direct than others but bringing life to the inanimate is another common way to create magical creatures.

Groundbreaking research? No, but I’ll be doing more with this soon.

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