During the Robot Rebellion group project, I saw a lion humanoid among the sample pictures provided, and I instantly took a liking to it. I never found a way to make it during that group project, and I placed it into my to-dos.

When the Alien Invasion group project came up, I knew I had to up the custom on my to-do list. Upon claiming, I wanted to make a Han Solo/Chewbacca team for the group project, but ultimately fell short, and only finished the Chewbacca part.

Initially named Leon, I changed it to Zhishizhi, after a quick reminiscing of my hometown back in China. Remembering Shishi City (one of the cities within my hometown Quanzhou) being named after a stone lion. I used it to name my custom. I changed the S to Z, to stray away from possible connections to other meanings of "Shishi", primarily the word meaning urination in Japan.

Placing the custom character's origins firmly within China, I decided he should be a translator, to be able to work with the G.I.Joe team - being able to understand alien languages wouldn't hurt for the character too!

For the lack of a tail for the figure, I concluded that his tail was inside the armor, thereby ending up with the idea that the armor hides Zhishizhi's true strength. However, due to the filecard having limited content space, I'll add this little tidbit here:

Like Samson, who loses his strength by losing his hair, Zhishizhi's strength will diminish greatly if somebody gets a hold of his tail...!

I figure, he gets tickled by somebody holding it (his tail). Lol