#Tamamo Nine

[melusineisthebestest]

Tamamo Bocchi when?

[call-me-noa]

Tamamo Aria

[the-howling-storm]

The Tamamo Nine's Capable and Beautiful Secretary - Tamamo Vitch

Ever wondered what would happen if FGO actually decided to make Koyanskaya the same Vitch from the Tamamo Nine instead of the plot twist reveal from Tunguska? So did I. So here's an edit of how she’d probably look in the classic Tamamo robe.

Disclaimer: I love Koyanskaya despite how many feel about the Tunguska reveal, me included. But I feel like it’s grown on me and I believe if it wasn’t as rushed, it would have turned out to be much better of a twist. That being said, I do wish the actual Vitch from the Tamamo Nine showed up in FGO. We need more Tamamos Lasengle. Cat is great but she shouldn’t be the only one directly referencing one of CCC’s best endings. Take my fox girl money goddammit.

[typemoonconfessions]

[hastamamocatdoneanythingwrong]

Yes... She's the dreaded

Tamamo no High!

tamamo is in the new fate game but they made her a big headed tiny girl weird looking thing :((((

Tamamita...

[everyryuujisuguro]

[madmanwonder]

Tamamo no Mae: *Bitter* This world is filled with nothing but darkness, cruelty, pain, suffering and despair. Life is short and meaningless.

Jaune: Hi Tam. What to head out to get some lunch and enjoy the scenery in Vale with me?

Tamamo no Mae: *Happy* Yes, Jaune-Sama! I would love to go on a date with you~!!!

[the-monkey-ruler]

I was a little confused, so Daji ran away and took the name Tamamo Mae? So they are the same fox? Tamamo Mae = Daji? can we say that she then returns to China and then is finally defeated? Or it's like, a version of Daji who escapes to India and then Japan?

I am not quite sure if Tamamo Mae version and the Indian version connect back to her OG storyline and probably not, so calling them alternative versions is a good way of describing it. They are certainly inspired by one another and I also see their names being connected when looking at their descriptions. I would recommend reading their baidu pages here to look at it better yourself.

[hastamamocatdoneanythingwrong]

BABY TAMAMO!!!

Newest little babu!!!!!

I am blessed..

OH SHE'S JUST A LIL GUY !

[naive-petals]

“If Koyanskaya isn’t Daiji.” Read related to Tamamo mama. “Does that mean i don’t have to get her a gift?”

[ydotome]

The Kamiki bloodline...was created by said onmyojis in order to appease Nine Tails' course. For generations, those destined to become Head Priestess were all named "Tamamo"... and by performing a sacred dance called "Divine Summoning"... in which she would become and assimilate with Nine Tails, she would appease the spirit. More than any Head Priestess before her, the current Tamamo's dancing was both stronger...and more beautiful. - Ao no Exorcist: Shimane Illuminati-hen - Episode 6

[yamayuandadu]

I have to admit I’m not a huge fan of “foxes gain a tail every 100 years” being treated as a central, unshakeable tenet of portrayals of supernatural foxes. While not entirely inauthentic and attested both in China and in Japan in some capacity (though afaik not before the 19th century, and at least in the former case the oldest evidence I can find is a novel), I think it entrenched itself a bit too firmly in popculture and even in popular understanding of primary sources (contrary to a common misconception, no version of Tamamo no Mae legend alludes to it, for instance). There are other, more interesting takes on how the age of a fox might be reflected in their appearance or behavior - ones which lean more heavily into what imo makes fox literature interesting, namely the use of shapeshifting supernatural animals as a stand-in for the Other. 

A Tang period source quoted by Xiaofei Kang in Cult of the Fox (p. 29) states that the age of a fox is reflected in the family name used by their human alter ego: “Foxes one thousand years old are surnamed Zhao and Zhang; foxes five hundred years old are surnamed Bai and Kang.” This is basically an extension of the hu (狐, fox)/hu (胡, foreigner) wordplay, since Kang was customarily the family name granted to people from Samarkand (Kangju in Chinese - it’s basically like a nisba) and its surroundings while Bai - these from Kucha (apparently it’s the sinicized form of the name of the ruling family); meanwhile, Zhao and Zhang were (and still are) common Han Chinese family names. In other words, the age of the fox was reflected by how well they can imitate a human - a younger fox had an air of otherness and stood out much in the same way as a foreigner would, a senior fox could basically assimilate effortlessly.

It’s also worth noting that the “new tail every 100 years” stuff is fundamentally at odds with how many sources describe the nine-tailed fox. At least early on they are basically their own thing - in the early sources they typically appear as omens, without an indication a normal fox can turn into one. Shanhaijing pretty much outright says that the nine-tailed fox is merely “a beast (...) whose form resembles a fox”; you could risk saying it’s a fox in the same capacity as the similarly nine-tailed Luwu (陸吾) is a tiger.

It also needs to be noted that there are very few fox stories where a fox has a number of tails different from 1 or 9 - and neither of the two most notable exceptions, two tailed medieval Tamamo no Mae and the three tailed “astral fox” from Dakiniten-adjacent sources - has anything to do with the notion of acquisition of tails. As far as Chinese fox literature goes I couldn't even find a single exception.

[watcher-servant]

Tamamo:

Random Girl: What's your type?

Jaune: My girlfriend.

Random Girl: So what's your type then?

Jaune: My girlfriend.

Random Girl: And what does she look like?

Jaune: She looks like my girlfriend.

Random Girl: So what would you rate me out of ten?

Jaune: I shouldn't do that, I think it's rude to rate people on appearances alone.

Random Girl: You can't rate me at all?

Jaune: Sorry.

Random Girl: So what would you rate your girlfriend out of ten?

Jaune: *Enthusiastically* She broke the scale because she's so beautiful and amazing and I love her!

[typemoonconfessions]

[tamamita]

Funniest thing to get mad at

[anggitay]

(this got pretty long imo so I'm putting a cut)

The headcanon I developed to explain how Alter Egos work is by looking at the Sakura Five and Tamamo Nine

Both groups are, by definition, Alter Egos of their original. BB herself should be part of the Sakura Five as she is an Alter Ego of CCC!Sakura. But she manages to get her own class of Moon Cancer. Why is that??

The answer lies in a member of the Tamamo Nine, and indeed, all of it's members (who isn't Tamamo-no-Mae). Specifically, Tamamo Cat.

Tamamo Cat should be an Alter Ego. It's even stated that the eight other members of the Tamamo Nine are Alter Egos of Tamamo-no-Mae. Yet, Tamamo Cat is summoned in the Berserker Class Saint Graph. It's hinted that the rest of the Alter Ego members of the Nine share this trait of manifesting as a non-Alter Ego Class. But how did they get this ability??

Simple: they overcame the struggle that all Alter Egos suffer under, the struggle of identity.

The Tamamo Alter Egos, after being cast-off from the original, all developed a sense of identity that did not hinge on Tamamo-no-Mae. You can see this in Cat's Ascension art: as she grows stronger, her appearance grows further away from the shrine priestess image that Mae has made her own. Instead, she focuses on her skills as a cook and becoming an idealized version of a housewife. Sure it started as a desire to one-up Mae, but it evolved into becoming her own thing: her name is Cat, she is a cook, and what she wants is to eat good food and share it with people. That is her identity, her core, and thus she is no longer an Alter Ego of Mae, but has an ego of her own. Thus, her Berserker manifestation.

BB similarly has done this, separating herself from CCC!Sakura's identity and thus earning the Moon Cancer class for herself. Her Alter Egos, the Sakura Five, are struggling under that problem still: they don't know who they are outside of BB, and until they do, they're stuck as Alter Egos. Meltryllis getting a Lancer version and having the desire to be seen as the greatest ballerina/figure skater/idol out there instead of just being a sadist for the sake of sadism shows that they can do this and achieve self-identity that doesnt involve their progenitor.

As for Jekyll and Hyde being Alter Egos, you're right about that. Here's hoping they get the ROMA treatment and have an Alter Ego version that has better mechanics than the Assassin/Berserker version.

Important question how do you think Jekyll/Hyde being an alter ego works thematically as well as gameplay-wise? asking for reasons

Honestly the only reason he isn't an alter ego is because Prototype predated the existence of the Alter Ego class. By literally every metric he's not just an alter ego, he's one of the ONLY examples of a servant who'd be an alter ego with no strings attached and being entirely true to the original story.

in other words, to answer your question of "How would he work as an alter ego", the answer is Yes.