u/Loxeres

Haven't played in a while, but last night I had a dream regarding Hearthstone and specifically this god-forsaken card.

This was the free pre-release card of a new Hearthstone set, and it caused an uproar.

People were raging in threads about this being unplayable and stupid, whilst oriented towards a single very specific deck, which was outrageous for a card used to preview the new expansion for the wide audience.

They found the name of the card 'Dragon Clan Freak' inherently stupid as well as the lore reasoning of this, clearly Blood Elf Paladin, being part of something known as the Dragon Clan.

But most importantly people were up in arms about the decision to drop a whole paragraph of flavor text in it's text-box. Never seen before, inherently stupid and worsening the game-play readibility.

To makes things worse, the new set launched with a tavern brawl... The Dragon Clan Brawl. You built a standard deck and on your first turn you drew a Dragon, a Legendary and a Divine Shield minion, just as the card's Battlecry did. That's it and people justifiedly called this tavern brawl out for how boring it was and the outrage sparked up again.

But then the next expansion came and it launched with the same tavern brawl, The Dragon Clan Brawl once again. The set didn't even have anything to do with the card. Reddit exploded with rage-fueled posts, people were making tons of memes, everyone either gave into the hatred or the hysteria of Blizzard pulling this off once again for no apparent reason.

...that's about it. (The name, stat-line and rarity match the card in my dream, but I couldn't recall the type of the last of the three cards it drew so I chose a Divine Shield minion. The art was of a Blood Elf kneeling before a sword, the sword being front and center in the art. The flavor text follows the idea of what was said in the actual one, but the name Yu Metsu was definetly there, while a queen of similiar name to Aq Nu Sinai was mentioned.)

A while back I found a likely Yōkai connection I haven't seen anywhere yet, neither on Bulbapedia nor in a Lockstin & Gnoggin video.

Since the release of Scarlet & Violet™, Bombirdier's design has struck me as odd. Looking, to my untrained eye, rather Japanese for an Iberia-based region. Almost as if mimicking old Japanese artwork. Its eyes, hairstyle and overall visage striking me as out of place in Paldea, whilst making its beak and legs stark red seemed like a confusing choice in comparison to the typically orange depictions of European storks.

So there I was one day, watching an educational YouTube video on the topic of Japanese mythology, when the commentary got to Tengu—a winged devilish-looking Yōkai, who I've already been familiar with before. They began recalling numerous myths of Tengu dropping rocks from the sky on folk traversing the mountain paths.

...and then it hit me (not a rock).

Bombirdier very possibly draws inspiration from Tengu, replacing the traditional image of the stork as a baby-carrier with the Yōkai's rock lobbing obsession. By the way, this occurrence is called Tengutsubute and was obviously used as an explanation for natural phenomena in the past.

This would explain the coloration of Bombirdier's beak and the inexplicable nudge at the end of it, shaping it to resemble a Tengu's nose. Its traditionally Japanese looking eye contour and hair/feather bun would follow suit to reinforce the Japanese nature of the creature. Even the color-scheme of red, black and white consists of the colors primarily associated with Tengu.

My case may not be the strongest, but I do believe it lends an explanation to several previously rather ambiguous design decisions regarding the Pokémon.

PS: I'm quite aware Shiftry is likewise based on a Tengu itself

___Illustrative image for the purposes of easy visual comparison.