Why Cuca and Saci aren't in the game

The test, and why it exists

Before any art starts, every candidate figure has to pass four questions. Does the figure represent a human being or a human group? Is its identity tied to ethnicity, race, nationality, gender, or a practiced religion? Has the obvious generic base for this figure already been used, historically, as an insult against that group? Is the recognizable form an identifiable authorial creation, even if the origin myth itself is old? If any answer is yes, the figure gets cut, no debate, before any art starts.

Saci: fails the first three, no room for debate

Saci is a boy. He's Black. And the obvious generic base for "one-legged, mischievous, forest figure" — if I tried to draw that without the human face, the closest base would be something like a primate — would read, almost inevitably, as racist caricature. There's no version of this figure that clears my own filter without risking reproducing exactly the kind of image I decided, on principle, never to put in the game. It fails three of the four tests. I'm not reopening that discussion.

Cuca: fails, and the research turned up a bonus I wasn't expecting

Cuca gets cut too, but on the first test: she's a witch. Old, human, with an alligator head — not an alligator. The alligator head, on top of that, is Monteiro Lobato's invention (a canonical Brazilian children's author), a text that's been in the public domain for some years now, but the image most people actually recognize — blonde hair, hawk claws — is the authorial design of a Brazilian TV series from the seventies, still under copyright. And there's one more layer I only found by digging: Cuca isn't even Brazilian in origin. She comes from the Galician-Portuguese Coca, the dragon of Saint George, imported here in the colonial period and naturalized over time until she looked like ours.

That doesn't change the verdict — she still fails for being human — but it changed how I think about "Brazilian folklore" in a way I didn't expect when I started this research. A figure I was absolutely certain was ours, from the root, is actually a European dragon with a swapped name and layers of authorship stacked on top of each other for two hundred years.

What made it: Mula Sem Cabeça

The legend's origin is human — a cursed woman — but the form anyone actually pictures, and the form that becomes a sprite, is equine: Mula Sem Cabeça (a headless-mule figure from Brazilian folklore). Headless, fire coming out of the neck. No ethnic dimension attached to the figure, no base that's already been used as an insult, no identifiable modern authorship competing with the popular legend. It clears all four tests without effort, and that clean pass is exactly what confirms the ruler is working — it doesn't cut everything, only what actually deserved to be cut.

A third cut, for the most delicate reason on the list

Caipora (a forest-guardian spirit from Tupi-Guarani cosmology) also got left out, but not for the easy reason. She's generally described as small, dark-skinned, riding a peccary, sometimes with one foot turned backward. That alone fails the first test on its own — the form any illustration has historically used is humanoid. But the real reason I never even got as far as debating silhouette is different, and it's the same reason I left the whole Australian Aboriginal mythology off the incursion map: living Indigenous cosmology isn't the same category as "secular European folklore in the public domain." It's practiced tradition, with real custody, and I have no way of knowing, without real cultural consultation, whether putting Caipora in the game would be homage or appropriation. Curupira got the same treatment, for the same reason. Boitatá is the only one from that family that made it into the roster — but only as a snake that glows, with its field name anchored to a cataloged Jesuit letter from 1560, not to the fire-guardian figure that oral tradition carries. That's the difference between citing a dated historical record and illustrating a still-practiced belief, and I treat those as two different categories of risk.

The line that decided it, and why I agree with it

When I brought this list in for a final call, the answer was direct: "Even if it's a strong figure from any folklore, better to leave it out than to look like what you're not." I agree with that more today than I did when I started the project. It's tempting, in an incursão celebrating Brazilian folklore, to want to include exactly the most famous figures — it feels incomplete without them. But "feels incomplete" is a much smaller cost than "looks like caricature," and the ruler exists precisely to stop me from making that call under pressure to be complete, at a moment when my own judgment could be wrong without my noticing.

What's left, and why it isn't a consolation prize — it's the actual point

The whole incursão doesn't need a single myth figure to have identity. Golden lion tamarin, alligator, river dolphin, jaguar, giant water lily — regional fauna and flora go straight in, no ceremony needed, because they aren't characters, they're generic bases with their own palette and geography. That's where the incursão's Brazilian identity actually lives, and it alone already carries the whole roster. A creature's nome de campo (field name) might, eventually, carry an echo of Mula Sem Cabeça or another approved figure — but that's a lore bonus on top of a base that already worked without needing it. If I ever need to check whether a new incursão is leaning too hard on myth and not enough on real fauna, this is the ruler: does the fauna alone give it identity? If it doesn't, the incursão is built on decoration, not structure, and I need to redo it.