That's how almost all animal ears in anime works though.
[citation needed] because the overwhelming majority I remember seeing were a single pair, usually up on the sides or top of the head but sometimes down replacing the usual human ones - I think the latter was more common in older works.
Having 2 pairs is go to way to avoid uncanny valley effect that actual missing human ears would cause.
It's at best replacing one cause with another. More to the point kind of lazy af since at that point it's largely indistinguishable from just putting on a headband with fake ears, design-wise.
Only, y'know, with the added baggage of unanswered questions about how the whole setup is actually supposed to work.
Not having them would feel more disturbing, no matter how much more sense that would make.
A most subjective assessment; arguably even moreso than my dislike of chimeric doubled-up external ears.
That's why often, even if it's not specifically mentioned whatever characters still has their human ears or not, authors simply sidestep this issue by giving characters hairstyle that cover place where ears normally would by. Finding examples where characters with animal ears are confirmed to not have human ears are actually way harder. Hell, in most cases you might not even realize character actually have 2 pairs, because having human ears is so obvious, you don't even think about it. Only series with characters having 1 pair I can think of from top of my head is Zakuro and even there, character always cover the spot where ears would be with hair.
That's more because having bald vaguely ear-shaped spots intruding on the hairline at the sides of the head would look godawfully stupid and more than a little jarring though... design-wise covering the whole area with suitable hairdo is basically just the least amount of work and effort, animango gurls (and for some reason it's overwhelmingly females we see with kemonomimi) tending to have ample locks to work with anyway. Not that they had a monopoly on it ofc, looking at you Inuyasha...
Aren't you overthinking simple manga about cute anime girls with cute animal ears way too much?
"What I'm getting at here is, the less you try to make sense of it the happier you'll be."
- the conclusion of literally my first post on this thread, at the top of the page
It works fine as a standalone comedic premise, but you have to actively avoid thinking any further about it else you'll quickly find yourself in some fairly disturbing neighbourhoods. I might further point out that certain types of criminal might find some of those side-effect behavioural changes desirable to inflict upon themselves or others for ex...
Tattoos, piercings, earplugs etc. permanently alter your body as well and are completely cosmetic and yet there's plenty of people who have them.
Tattoos are literally only skin deep (and nowadays more or less removable, albeit at some expense; convenient when people ink on the names of "fated lovers" they later acrimoniously break up with...) and piercings are readily detachable if necessary; also IIRC in most cases the holes made for the latter will tend to close up over time if not consistently kept open with foreign objects. And neither will eg. stop you from wearing work-appropriate headgear (eg. various protective helmets or hair nets) or readily go gangrenous from frostbite - ears from warm-climate species are not going to have the necessary adaptations for the cold of higher latitudes (or elevations for that matter).
More to the point, both are as subject to the vagaries of fashion as anything else people use to decorate themselves and hence rather poor arguments for your case. Wasn't too long ago that tattoos were the mark of a sailor or criminal (eg. the yakuza "suits" but usually more specifically a former jailbird, the Russian vory being a particularly prominent example, and several past societies visibly tattooed convicted criminals - often on the hands and/or face - as an alternative identifying stigma to branding) and earrings on men were seen as the sign of, again, an underworld type or a sailor - or homosexual (the latter two tending to go fairly closely together in popular perception anyway for obvious enough reasons).
Which history is of course why these days they're a common affectation of poseurs trying to look all tough and rebel and Totally Radical; "tribal-tattoo Dim Mak master mall ninja" is a derisive trope in some circles...
Naturally both have carried whole other meanings in other times and contexts. In particular tattoos were a fairly common signifier of status and/or age-cohort owing to the rank painfulness of traditional inking techniques.
last edited at Oct 17, 2019 1:13PM
