Rodrigo Brincalepe Salvador
Zoology Unit, Finnish Museum of Natural History, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland.
Email: salvador.rodrigo.b (at) gmail (dot) com
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It seems Honkai: Star Rail (miHoYo/HoYoverse, 2013) is set to keep baffling me with its choices of birds. Last year there were the tree sparrows (Passer montanus, which are great birds by the way), in Sushang’s splash art. So, I wrote a bit about them and then digressed about the Four Pests campaign and the Great Famine in China (Salvador, 2023).
This time it’s the splash art of a new character that caught my eye (Fig. 1). Robin is a singer and her in-game lore and design contain many bird-related elements. A bit cliché for a singer, of course, but hey, it’s a gacha game and by this time in its life cycle their focus is on making people spend money trying to get new (and often power-crept) characters. Anyway, she is a singer named Robin and her splash art features a bird. A bird that one would expect to be a robin. As you might have already figured out, if I’m writing this article that means the bird is most certainly not a robin.
WHAT IS A ROBIN?
There are several types of birds that can be called robin (Tomotani, 2014). The “original” one is the European robin, Erithacus rubecola, also known as robin redbreast (Fig. 3). And I say original not because it was the first species of robin to appear, but because it is what has been traditionally called robin in English. The European robin belongs to a group called Saxicolinae, which is a sub-family inside the family Muscicapidae (old-world flycatchers). Birds in the Saxicolinae sub-family as a whole can be referred to as ‘chats’ (Winkler et al., 2020a; Gill et al., 2024), but there are some species within this group that are called robins. Besides the European robin, one example is the Japanese robin (Larvivora akahige), which you might know as the Pokémon Fletchling (Tomotani, 2014). The Saxicolinae robins also includes some birds with blue plumage, like the Siberian blue robin (Larvivora cyane) and the Sumatran blue robin (Myiomela sumatrana). Notably, Saxicolinae also includes the nightingale (Luscinia megarhynchos), which is perhaps the bird most commonly associated with a beautiful song.
Outside the “true robins” of the Saxicolinae sub-family, there are other birds that also bear that name. These are animals that the British found when colonizing other people’s lands and which reminded them of the European robin – mostly by having a red breast or by being a cute little ball of fluff. Among those, we have the American robin (Turdus migratorius), which is actually a true thrush (genus Turdus), and the many Australasian robins (family Petroicidae). The latter include absurdly adorable species such as the pink robin (Petroica rodinogaster) from southeastern Australia.
ROBIN’S “ROBIN”
Robin’s bird in Star Rail is a bluebird, which is not a robin but a thrush. Bluebirds belong to the genus Sialia in the thrush family Turdidae (same as the American robin). There are three species of them (Winkler et al., 2020b): the western bluebird (Sialia mexicana), the eastern bluebird (Sialia sialis), and the mountain bluebird (Sialia currucoides).
The western bluebird lives in western USA and Mexico, while the eastern bluebird lives in areas stretching from central/eastern Canada to Nicaragua. They are rather similar in appearance, but the males of the western bluebird have a blue throat, while male eastern bluebirds have an orange-coloured throat (Cornell Lab of Ornithology, 2024). Females of both species have a less colourful plumage. Robin’s bird is thus, a male western bluebird (Fig. 4).
Now why, with so many options available, they chose a bluebird for Robin instead of an actual robin? Was it the blue colour? Perhaps, but there are options of real robins that are blue as I mentioned above. In fact, the red-flanked bluetail, a.k.a. the orange-flanked bush-robin (Tarsiger cyanurus) from Asia, looks rather similar to bluebirds (Fig. 5) and belongs to the Saxicolinae. Thus, the choice was perhaps not entirely related to design.
What about geography then? In Star Rail, Penacony is clearly based in the United States’ Roaring Twenties, so the artist possibly wanted a North American species instead of a Eurasian one. But then again, why not go for the safest choice, the American robin? Perhaps then design choices came into play, including the colour palette and the fact that the bluebird is somewhat cuter than the American Robin. Either way, the end result is that Robin’s robin is not an actual robin.
WHAT ABOUT THE OTHER ROBIN?
I must talk about another gacha game and the only one I play rather religiously. In Fate/Grand Order (Delightworks/Lasengle, 2015) – or FGO for short – Robin Hood has a bird called Robin (Figs. 6, 7). This particular bird is originally from Witch on the Holy Night (or Mahoutsukai no Yoru; TYPE-MOON, 2012), and now it can also be seen in FGO together with the recently-released character Kuonji Alice, its original owner.
Considering the English background lore, we could legitimately expect the bird to be a European robin. Instead, we got a bluebird again. This Robin’s plumage colour pattern is very reminiscent of male mountain bluebirds (Fig. 8), which can be found in central and western North America, ranging from Alaska to Mexico. But contrary to Star Rail’s bird above, this Robin is not an exact match to the bluebird, as some artistic liberties were taken. But yet again, the end result is that Robin’s robin is also not an actual robin.
CONCLUSION
So, what’s the deal with all the (two) blue robins in gacha games? It might be an actual context+design choice in Star Rail, but I don’t think Witch on the Holy Night and FGO really have an excuse here – it could be simple lack of information on birds by the artists and/or developers. After all, most people are rather unfamiliar with bird species, even the ones in their own backyards, to the extent that they actually don’t even take notice of the birds around them every day. And there are plenty of birds around us, even in our concrete jungles.
So, when next walking across a park – or even smack dab in the middle of town – try to pay attention to the birds. Keep your eyes (and ears) peeled and you’ll be surprised at the variety of birds you’ll find. From the conspicuous doves/pigeons, gulls and crows to the smaller (and often shier) songbirds. You can find sparrows and swallows nesting on buildings and all sort of human-made structures (traffic lights, cameras, you name it), thrushes rummaging through freshly-cut grass looking for insects and earthworms, and parents of various species gathering food on their beaks to bring back to their nestlings. Watch them for a little while, what they are doing, how they behave. I don’t expect you to become an avid birdwatcher, but I do hope this exercise will give you a bit of extra appreciation towards the other species that share the planet with us.
REFERENCES
Cornell Lab of Ornithology. (2024) Western Bluebird. All About Birds. Available from: https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Western_Bluebird/ (Date of access: 26/May/2024).
Gill, F.; Donsker, D.; Rasmussen, P. (2024) IOC World Bird List (v14.1). Available from: https://www.worldbirdnames.org/new/ (Date of access: 26/May/2024).
Salvador, R.B. (2023) An unexpected bird in Honkai: Star Rail and China’s war on sparrows. Journal of Geek Studies 10(2): 49–57.
Tomotani, B.M. (2014) Robins, robins, robins. Journal of Geek Studies 1(1-2): 13–15.
Winkler, D.W.; Billerman, S.M.; Lovette, I.J. (2020a) Old World Flycatchers (Muscicapidae), version 1.0. Birds of the World, Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Available from: https://doi.org/10.2173/bow.muscic3.01 (Date of access: 26/May/2024).
Winkler, D.W.; Billerman, S.M.; Lovette, I.J. (2020b) Thrushes and Allies (Turdidae), version 1.0. Birds of the World, Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Available from: https://doi.org/10.2173/bow.turdid1.01 (Date of access: 26/May/2024).
About the author
Dr Rodrigo B. Salvador is curator at Luomus, the Finnish Museum of Natural History. He is a biologist specialized in the study of snails but is often involved in bird research too. He spends perhaps too much time on gacha games, but managed to remain F2P so far – alright, alright, except for a few lucky bags in FGO, but that’s it!
