I'd have to pick gryphons, for a variety of reasons:
- Lions are badass, eagles are badass, making gryphons badass squared
- Historically associated with strength and protection
- They're often portrayed as having human-level intelligence and how fucking cool would it be to talk to one
- They would give the absolute best cuddles and you cannot convince me otherwise
I'm gonna sound basic, but dragons. Seems like almost all cultures have come up with their own ideas of dragons, from vile monsters to wise sages. Often with fantastical powers, like fire breathing and the like.
I especially like stories with dragons as villains, but working off some humanly inscrutable motivation, just intelligent, powerful beings seeing us as ants.
Also, dragon-adjacent creatures like wyverns, wyrms, drakes and others, there's a lot of diversity in dragon folklore.
In Scottish Myth, they have a version of a Werewolf that, it finds fish, and leaves them on the windowsills of families that are economically struggling. It is called the Wulver. He would make a home by carving a cave out of a mound. They are fond of catching and eating fish, and don't bother folks if they don't bother the Wulver.
The number of times humans made furries completely independent of other cultures is really interesting to me.
Sure, but there aren't a lot of ideas that appear spontaneously on multiple continents. "What if a person had a snake body for legs" happened both in Greece and India, probably totally independently. That's really neat!
Lions are a instantiation of the meta category of predator, which is in itself an instantiation of the 'dragon'. So gryphons are just dragons. My answer is dragon
Lmao, Jordan peterson is so incredibly funny, you just have to see him as a performance artist
unicorns for sure, because they're snooty bitches who have a purity complex despite having a pervy virgin fetish
love brownies too. the idea of a lil dude showing up and doing your fucking chores just for the lols is my DREAM
I thought the Abarimon were a cool concept. But I'm pretty sure they were just a racist allegory for some mountain men that Pliny heard about.
Otherwise maybe the Leucrotta?
