3 ms·
I expected some reference so some country's lore where foxes did that, but the real explanation is actually much nicer.
by adrianN 5y ago
I expected some reference so some country's lore where foxes did that, but the real explanation is actually much nicer.
- notanzaiiswear 5y agoThat country with that lore is now Skyrim. Would be funny if it would spill over into the real world or into other games.
- js8 5y agoPerhaps NPCs should mention it, on occasion.
- cfj 5y agoIn Ghost of Tsushima, foxes lead the player to shrines, which grant certain items. In The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, you can befriend dogs by feeding them and they'll lead you to treasure. Not foxes sure, but almost the same thing. I wonder if the developers of these games were inspired by Skyrim's "feature".
- ewidar 5y agoI don't know for sure, but there is quite a lot of lore around foxes and dogs, see Kitsune and Komainu for example. Since Zelda is a Nintendo game and Ghost of Tsushima is set in Japan, I would think it has more to do with real world lore than a reference to Skyrim.
- rightbyte 5y agoI recall that in Ocarina of Time there was a dog in the windmill village that lead you somewhere when you gave it food? Might remember wrong though.
- delecti 5y agoThere was a dog in Hyrule Castle Town that you had to "befriend" (stand vaguely near for a few seconds), and the dog's owner rewarded you with a Heart Piece if you returned it to her. I don't remember any significant dogs in Kakariko Village (where the windmill was), or the ability to give food to any of them.
- rightbyte 5y agoOh. Ye that is probably what I was thinking about. The windmill village was throwing chickens into a hen house.
- ohgodplsno 5y agoJapan has this, in a way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitsune https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kitsune. Ghost of Tsushima makes it an explicit way to find treasures.
- thaumasiotes 5y agoI don't know about Japan, but as far as I know the fox tradition in China has no element of leading people anywhere. Foxes, like anything else, may practice various magical arts notably including shapeshifting. (They are much more common as the subject of stories than other things are, but not very different in kind.) They may pursue any number of idiosyncratic goals. A common theme is that they take the form of a human woman and have sex with a human man; this may either be benign behavior or something more nefarious such as a way to slowly drain the man's life force. The sexual theme is so common that 狐狸精 "fox spirit" became a term of abuse for overly sexual women. Chinese people like to translate the term into English as "vixen".
- Symmetry 5y agoKnowing the Elder Scrolls games it's going to be in the lore going forward, never fear.