To Perytonia: What is a "peryton" anyway? · 12:13pm Sep 16th, 2017
Hi everyone!
I'm trying not to spoil stuff, both for the benefit of those wanting to wait for the story to finish and for those who want to read To Perytonia as untainted as possible. I respect the heck out of that, but I also really want to talk about the story as we go. Today, we're talking peryton!
A lot of people have expressed surprise at learning that peryton are an already-established mythological (more accurately: fantasy?) creature, while others have read about them or seen artwork, be it from a general interest in obscure creatures, or from having played Dungeons and Dragons, where they're rather vicious birbs.
Wherever you see peryton, they're invariably a combination of bird and stag. This goes for mine as well. In trying to get a good feel for these people who are a great part of the story I'm telling, I decided I wanted to do some real groundwork first. I did some research, but their origin as one of Borges' creations was honestly uninteresting. I'd already decided I liked peryton as plural over perytons, which is the "official" plural, and I was going to create my own mythos. What I needed the most was a design, so I grabbed my crayons!
There's a higher res version here.
Now, forgive the white background. Like I said, this was really just a visual aid for myself, but it ended up serving as a motivation, too. I usually only draw ponies, but I've since spent a lot of time (at my own glacial pace) drawing peryton, and I'm eager to share more of them in the coming weeks. This one in particular was meant to be a traditional stag at first, but the colours I picked didn't work with the coat, so I decided to leave it as-is, and we have a wonderful cream/brown peryton who you won't meet for a while.
All this said, I like making images in my own head. The LotR movies ruined the books for me in that they supplanted the characters and vistas I had already made for myself, and that works both way. This is not an authoritative representation of the peryton in the story! This really should be very obvious, but it's also important to me that you understand my ideas are not more important than your own. If you had a very different image in your head after reading about them, I'd love to hear about it, or, if you're artistically inclined, show me! I'd love to see other takes on the peryton.
I'm so delighted to see this lovely chap and definitely looking forward to seeing more of them.
Why did you decide to make them vegetarians when the classic versions are carnivores?
Did you feel that the ponies would just give up if they had to struggle to find palatable food on top of everything else?
4670139
Actually an interesting question.
The peryton's head is the same as stag's (or doe's), and that's very important because the way the head shape, jaws, and teeth of an animal evolve is largely influenced by their diet. Stags and does are herbivores, so the peryton should be as well, I guess.
4670123 Aw, thanks! I think you've actually met them, but I don't know if you actually know who it is. Is me being all sneakretive here.
Definitely looking forward to sharing the other two fully finished ones I have.
4670139 4670142 What Shutterfly says is very logical, but I won't hide behind it when the actual reason is very different: I'm really not interested in the carnivore vs herbivore debate. There are already plenty of fics centered around the idea in every flavour from comedy to dark.
Don't get me wrong: I'm happy to do something others have done if I want. I'm writing very un-innovative adventure romances, after all. There are just certain topics and issues I strongly dislike, and this is one of them. I think I made a rant about how I feel about the whole "omg but Princesses live forever isn't that sad tho" thing sometime, too, and it's very similar. I just don't want to touch the issue when it is so very, very out of touch with what I take home from the mood of the canon material. All the more power to you if you like that sorta stuff, of course: disliking something isn't a strength, and I take no pride in this.
Also, the story already contains enough... things. Adding a point of contention that I have no interesting plans for would be bloating the story for the sake of "more content".
I hope that explains it, and that I didn't come across as unintentionally aggressive!
I always thought of them as something akin to this, but with sharp teeth and a bit more ugly/feral looking. Your image of them is much...gentler than the one I assumed, which is why I was initially confused on why you were using them in the story as their image alone in my head made me think they'd try to eat ponies, at least before finding out that they can talk.
i.ebayimg.com/00/s/OTYwWDEyODA=/z/UIkAAOSwQPlV~irJ/$_12.JPG?set_id=880000500F
edit: oh, found the original picture I always thought them akin to!
i.pinimg.com/600x315/ce/27/2c/ce272cebd674e733a6b09494b19059ff.jpg
Ferocious, no?
This is pretty much how I imagined them, based on your descriptions, so... cool.
There are so many different interpretations of peryton appearance out there, and most of them are rather fierce. I saw this crushingly adorable little fawn a couple of years ago, and immediately wrote her into a story I've been slowly working on (minor part but crucial role). In this she seems more like a deer with wings than a hybrid of two species, so maybe not quite as interesting. Cute, though!
derpicdn.net/img/view/2015/8/10/954974__safe_artist-colon-sirzi_artist-colon-yakovlev-dash-vad_oc_oc+only_bathing_deer_eyes+closed_peryton_solo_water_waterfall.png
Anyway, I like how you've written the peryton as a whole. They're so far very benign, even if they're a little gruff to match their environment, but so far they seem to hold themselves to overt, benign principals as a society, which I like. It'll be interesting to see where you take us with that as the three ponies see more of Perytonia.
My mental image was actually pretty similar to what you've got, but with longer tail feathers and a more animalistic head. Mostly, I was going by the image in Carabas' blog post about this story, which is what directed me to your story in the first place.
camo.derpicdn.net/d940bda5a3f16bcdd5b94f241fc71e3db8a45f27?url=https%3A%2F%2Fvignette1.wikia.nocookie.net%2Fwarriorsofmyth%2Fimages%2F3%2F32%2FPeryton%252Ba4-1-.jpg%2Frevision%2Flatest%3Fcb%3D20121110192823
4670178 The second one there is the 3.0 D&D Monster Manual, isn't it? It certainly looks a lot like it. But yeah! Let's be real here, nearly all mythological creatures are bloodthirsty, evil, or at the very least, sinister, and that just doesn't fit with what I usually write.
4670196 Aw, what a cutie! That picture is certainly closer to the ponies/the show wrt. proportions and such, whereas my fumbling attempts at art are trying to get at a slightly bigger divide. The peryton are meant to be a little imposing, but I also "failed" in making something that would fit with the show's style perfectly, so I don't know where this leaves us, hah.
I'm really glad to hear that the picture actually fits the description for some, though. That's both unexpected and delightful. Interested to hear what you think of the peryton further down the road, always!
4670201 I saw that one! Carabas is a gem for the link/boost, and it was really fun to see him just toss in a picture of peryton, too! It's basically the same setup that I went for, four legs instead of the talons-only variant in Phaoray's comment right above here.
The longer tail feathers and larger wings are really beautiful, but overall, it's a more realistically proportioned peryton rather than the one I did, which is kinda halfway between that and a more MLP-y style. I'm still doodling peryton every now and then, and I'm tempted to see what I can do with exaggerated, sweeping tail feathers. As a result of all this messing around, there's no telling what "long" and "short" tail feathers actually mean, but I'm super okay with extra gender ambiguity.
Cute! But creepy. But cute!
4670306 My visualization of ponies vs peryton here is a bit of a mish-mash because of the show's cartoon presentation of Ponies. With your story, that internal image of peryton is much more freely in the realm of what a real hybrid would look like, not really incorporating the show's cartoon nature, and I'm totally fine with that.
I try to hold a bit of that realism in my head when imagining ponies, too – though with the more exotic elements that separate them from just being "little horses" – but it's a bit difficult since every week that cartoon appearance all gets re-affirmed by the show.
All of that just means that I like what you've done. So there.
The D&D version has a curse spread by casting their shadow on something (granted, they're also pseudoundead cursed things) and I was sure you were doing something with that in the first city with the lack of flying.
Not necessarily a curse, but a cultural norm would have been sufficiently odd.
4670316 Creepy? What! I'll accept weird, but creepy? How dare you, sir. How dare you.
4670368 I'll take it as a compliment if that's how it's intended, absolutely! I expect everyone approaches the whole book-from-cartoon thing in a different way. Most peoples' heads actually visualise stories in 3d, after all.
4670842 That sort of stuff is very much my jam. I also absolutely love fables. Huge importance given to seemingly-minor events is my fetish!
I didn't want to saddle their culture with additional incomprehensible oddities though. I already have an emphasis on challenges in communication, and we've seen by now that the peryton, while as insular and presumptive as the ponies in many ways, are very hard to truly offend (despite Dash's best efforts). Including it just as a norm or even a habit would've been cute, but I think I replied to someone else about the idea of bloat.
Sorry. Thinking out loud, and had never heard about this particular part of peryton "Myth" (if D&D rules could be called that), so thanks for the info!
4671260
I dunno, man, there's somthing about the big clawed feet being the hindlegs with dainty little hooved forelegs...
4671260 I wasn't trying to head in either direction (good or bad) just that it's how I default to at least trying to visualize things. In the end as long as the story is well-written (and no doubt I'm enjoying your story), it doesn't really matter to me how the author chooses to describe something, as long they aren't overtly breaking immersion in some way. To Perytonia doesn't make me work at all to stay immersed, and that's more fun for me.
For what it's worth, what you've drawn is very cool. Based on the story so far I would have guessed that it's a doe because of the lack of flamboyant color, but you mention that it's a stag. Maybe this kind of this is another difference between peryton in other cities?