Kobold Girl Tailtuft

started Pato Box today, desperate for some, any, more punch out esque boss fights. I think Pato Box delivers on that! the two real fights I've done are a really good execution of that kind of puzzle solving boxing match! unfortunately Pato Box is at least as much slowly meandering through hallways in over the shoulder third person looking for things you need and extremely mediocre storytelling as it is puzzle boxing. I'll be honest though? I don't really care. I would put up with 40 hours of mediocre visual novel to get to play a handful of punch out style fights I haven't played half a dozen times

they're gonna do laps around the tower!!

2015: get an industrial piercing
2016: join local roller derby team
2017: go on disability for vertigo, get frustrated by lack of roller derby media
2018: write book about a werewolf who plays roller derby
2020: stop playing roller derby due to covid
2022: join new roller derby team, change name to match girl from my book
2023: roller derby number doesn't match my name anymore, need new number, can't decide
2023: donate to local wolf sanctuary, get assigned wolf tag number
2024: 3D model ear tag with new number, have it cast in silver, attach it to industrial piercing so it doesn't fall off
2024: ... oh.

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}

ok what inspired them?

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.