funny seeing people ask tough-ish yinglet questions (especially creator focused ones like "what inspired them?") to random yinglets they find instead of asking Val (who made 'em, but admittedly isn't on cohost) or, well. asking me
like. you can ask me. I probably have an answer, and if I don't I can probably ask Val
yao is zhe go to for canon!
also, i admittedly get slightly nervous when i see yao like a post where i state some yinglore...i feel like zhere is zhe risk of a followup where im just spouting somezhing very wrong
from what I heard from Val over a good while, it was a bit of a combo of different things!
- Val rehabilitated a killdeer chick at one point, and the legs were such an unusual shape that he ended up liking the energy. when you see a little creature moving around a lot, day to day, you start to internalize how they look while they're doing it. while the shape isn't exactly accurate to what a yinglet's legs ended up becoming, it certainly inspired them
- he raised rats for a while too, and at one point ended up with quite a few of them, partly by accident. rodents have a ton of different behaviors (like sleeping in piles) and some general shapes that ended up in an early take on what yinglets could be, as seen from some of his early art of them. they've gotten a lot more canine-ish rather than rodent-ish in snout since then, and have way bigger eyes and ears
- Nevreans might have had a minor inspiration because he used to draw them a bit, before starting the comic, but it's hard to tell how much actually ended up in yinglets. there's a planned appearance from some kind of "migratory bird" people, but they haven't shown up in comic yet; I'd imagine those are more solidly inspired by nevreans, if anything is
- their (sort of) gender trinary, described by Ran as female, preener, and seeker, is inspired by the existence of color-variant behavioral morphs among the common side-blotched lizard. these have a kind of rock-paper-scissors competition going on in the lizards, but in the yinglets' case, it inspired the concept of gender in a non-human intelligent species being more complicated than just "there's two of them" for polymorphic reasons, alongside any cultural ones
- and of course, the whole concept of "what if a low-level enemy species that shows up in RPGs was just a whole-ass people who were trying to get by instead of being that XP fodder?" ended up being a kind of inspiration for their general energy. it's why they have kobold/goblin level mischief, goofballing, and patheticness going on, in canon
so, yeah. there's a few different sources of inspiration! they all kinda combined into these majestic, flexible little scrongly critters we love.
