Thanks
With regards to the coat of arms: I do have a background story. The dragon has been my avatar on this forum since I joined. I wrote the post below 3½ years ago (I'm 100% the post has been pruned, since), in a thread about creation mythsː
Miott) is an island nation. I work from the perspective that the islands actually exist here today. After a long domination of catholicism, their views on the world and its creation are similar to those of other catholics.
They do have traditional mythology, though, involving Emion /'əmjən/, a dragon-like creature (my avatar), who basically personifies the North Atlantic ocean surrounding the island (hence the tail), as well as the weather (hence the wings). The Miott see Emion as the protector of the islands, but at the same time they are at the mercy of his erratic behavior and angry outbursts. Traditionally, the Miott did not have a universal creation myth or a universal god. They believed that different locations on the earth had their own creatures who, like Emion, manifested themselves through the weather and other natural phenomena. The world and the universe were simply 'there'--an eternal given, inhabited by all kinds of creatures, including creatures like Emion (known as node /'noðə/)
Any "end of the world-scenario" would be brought about by the wrath of one of these node, either because of repeated attacks (floods, erosion, storms...), or more violent events (volcanic eruptions, earthquakes) destroying a region. A node lashes out when he wants to protect his home (against another node), or, to put it simply, because he's a hormonal idiot who doesn't know his own strength and can't think straight when he's angry--to the point that he destroys his own home.
I added the thistle for fun a long time ago (9 years ago, according to the date stamp of the file...
damn!), to see how it would balance out the shapes. I never actually used it, but I came across the drawing with the thistle again last week, and decided that I quite liked it.
I had to retrace the original drawing as a vector, because the original was simply a sketch in MS Paint (done with a pen and tablet), and I'd lost access to an earlier vector copy (due to a software change).
Of course, the thistle is a flower that grows on the islands, and over in the
Map of Miott thread, we're having a discussion on its possible political history is actually steering towards a long Scottish influence, so in that sense, it actually kind of makes sense to have it in the coat of arms.
jal wrote:That. Also, the dragon isn't coat-of-arms-looking enough. Coats of arms typically are very complex, with all these tiny little details etc. See
here for examples and inspiration.
JAL
Believe me, I know what coats of arms look like
What you're thinking of is the elaborate supports and frills they put around them to make things look more important. If you look at the actual shield (the escutcheon), though, they aren't much more complex than what I proposed above. In fact, many of them are a lot simpler (just look at Argentina and Albania on the very first page of the link you posted).
Let's look at Luxembourg (because of its relative similarity).
What you're thinking of is this:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... mbourg.svg
And what you should be thinking of is this:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... rg.svg.png
Sure, it's not a typical European dragon, nor does it look anything like an east Asian dragon, but as you can read above, its form does have a history.
