I had seen manaia a lot in Maori art and jewelry before, but I never really knew what it meant until this reader question, so thank you for helping me fill in a blank spot in my Creature Knowledge, Traveling Hobbit!
I had seen manaia a lot in Maori art and jewelry before, but I never really knew what it meant until this reader question, so thank you for helping me fill in a blank spot in my Creature Knowledge, Traveling Hobbit!
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Their medallions can look like their artistic representations. Also how is the new chapter coming along?
They probably don’t have medallions, since Sphinxes had knowledge of that technology, and New Zealand is quite a distance from those areas. It may even be a shapeshifter, since Maori carvings of it change its form to fill whatever space they need it to in doorways, window lintels, other architectural bits, weapons, jewelry…virtually any wooden space you can decorate with motifs will have some sort of representation of this creature. Since it appears to be seen as a messenger between earth and the spirit world, that would explain a lot of its shifting nature.
All in all very cool! I love these sort of reader questions too, because then I get to discover new creatures, and see Kory’s interpretation of them, so double yay! :D
A more Important Point to note is that the Polynesian colonists would not arrive in New Zealand till sometime in the 1200s.
So the Maori legends involving the manaia would not exist till after then, which sets things to after the Great War, and both Sphinxes and Dragons having already gone ‘extinct’.
one final left this semester, and then I see a fish bird man posing as if to say: “You’ve got this,”
“You got this, bro. You go in, smash that paper out and boom, fluffy ducks. Easy as.”
Translation: “You got this, friend. You get in there, do that exam, and hey presto everyone is happy! Easy.”
God, I love Kiwi slang.
Can we see a roadrunner totem? I really love roadrunners. They just fill my heart. Or an archaeopteryx griffin. Both would make super happy.
Beep beep~! *tongue flick*
You are evil.
You now have me imagining a pygmy gryphon based upon the Warner Bros cartoon Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote.
I imagine any Coyote or Roadrunner totem are sick to death of the jokes.
I wonder whether I should expect it to perpetually chase its own behind, or to get a Flash Behavior Patterns Update™ the instant it manages to dip said own behind into boiling oil …
Oh please please please draw this Kory! With a cherry on top. :D A coyote/roadrunner pygmy gryphon would be awesome! Especially if it just so happened to resemble the cartoon. Poor thing would be the brunt of countless jokes though. :P
Eeee! My, he is handsome bloke. He has some killer ta moko (tatoos) as well!