#I might be confusing Platypi with beavers

[ghostkingdiangelo429]

Why be scared of death when you can be scared of platypi (and beavers)?

[clarste]

Would a baku count as a beast youkai? Since they originally were more like chimeras than how Doremy leans more towards being a tapir.

Short answer, if Shou counts then why not Doremy?

Long answer: History is unclear on the subject, and it’s very difficult to tell the difference between a mythological animal and real one. If there even is a difference at all.

For example, it’s well known that Japanese folklore contains stories of foxes and tanuki with magical shapeshifting powers. While tanuki aren’t common in the West, foxes sure are and that confuses people sometimes. So Western writers will often use the Japanese word ‘kitsune’ to describe these supernatural creatures.

But I think that’s missing the point somewhat. The point of the folklore is that foxes are inherently magical beings. They aren’t special magical foxes with a separate origin, they’re literally the same foxes. Foxes are all wizards, although not all equally skilled. And it’s not like attributing supernatural powers to ordinary animals is uniquely Japanese either.

Take the salamander, for example. Old-timey people believed that salamanders were born in fire because when they took in firewood and burned it, sometimes they saw salamanders comes out (presumably they were just nesting there and started fleeing the fire). So salamanders became known as fire spirits. It wasn’t that there was a separate magical animal like you might see in modern fiction, it was once believed that all salamanders were inherently fire spirits.

So is a baku one of those? Maybe. The word for the dreameating youkai and the word for the mundane tapir are both ‘Baku’ in Japanese. No distinction is made. A little unlikely though, in my opinion, since tapirs aren’t native to Japan. It’s unlikely that ordinary people saw an ordinary tapir and thought it must be eating their dreams.

A second possibility is that they named the real animal after the mythological one. This happens… sometimes. The regenerating invertebrate Hydra, for example, or the Komodo Dragon. Or lemurs. It’s doubtful that whoever named these animals thought they were literally the legendary creatures, but they were considered similar enough in some way to name after the myths. It’s possible that the mundane tapir Baku were named after the mythological Baku in this way. They were said to have the nose of an elephant and the feet of a tiger, etc. So if some sailor or whatever saw a tapir they might think ‘whoa, it’s a real-life baku!” Tapirs have hooves though.

And a third possibility is that descriptions of a real life animal take on legendary proportions as the tales get told to people who’ve never seen them before. For example, the Kraken which might be based on giant squid or other large sea animals, or the Catoblepas which according to the Greek natural historian Pliny the Elder is supposed to be a kind of African cow that can kill with it’s gaze and/or breath. Possibly based on a wildebeast. The point is that travelers are really freaking bad at describing what they’ve seen accurately.

So the legendary Baku with the nose of an elephant and the feet of a tiger may have been based on the real tapir in the first place, just like how you might describe a platypus as having the bill of a duck and the body of a beaver. And platypi were even considered a hoax back in English. In fact, this is specifically what Shou is supposed to be: an artist’s interpretation of a tiger. No one in Japan had ever seen a tiger, but they got like a billion stories about them from China, so they had to imagine what they looked like.

Anyway, based on my brief research it’s unclear what exactly the origin the mythical baku is. It could be any of these things. But I’m also comfortable calling any of these things a beast youkai anyway.