random posted:
[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.
kittey posted:
From the top of my head: Konohana Kitan, Granblue Fantasy, Spice and Wolf, Dog Days, Neko Musume Michikusa Nikki, Centaur’s Life/Worries and Negima. Touhou zig-zags it with almost all characters having just one pair of ears but Orin having two.
Like Nev said most of the time they cover up the human ears with hair but they still have them. If you actually showed just smooth skin where ears should be it would be super creepy and weird and I dont recall ever seeing it.
Centaur’s Life/Worries plays it completely straight and hairstyles without bangs show that most characters just have hair growing where “side ears” would be. After reading a few volumes, you’ll get used to it and “missing ears” will be the least of your concerns, considering everything else in that series.
I did probably think more about older series than newer, but turns out it's not as obvious as I thought. I was convinced the lack of ears would jump to me and I'd remember it as jarring and the reason I didn't was because most of the time the lack of hair was covered or because they had 2 pairs. Seems like it's not as disturbing as I believed and because of that I didn't even notice it. I think when I first got into anime, I noticed the 2 pair thing and since then I just remembered it as norm and never paid attention to it again.
random posted:
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...
That... make sense. Even if exact area where ear should be would be empty, hair from above would natural grow down and cover it. As I said. I always assumed the ear was simply covered most of the times and there was no reason to go out of your way to confirm whatever it's there or not, but that explains it way better.
"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
Yes, I did see your previous post. My point was more, despite being the one to say you're better off not thinking too much about it, you then proceed to go in very deep detail about how it could work. And thinking about exact mechanics how it works is fine, but I still think you overthought it too much. Like, it's clearly just decoration, so no reason to think how to make it work as second pair of ears. They clearly use some new manga technology, so things like hair loss or attaching it to head probably has some easy hand-waveable way to add and remove it. And examples of animal traits imo were way off. From the ones we got so far it's clearly more in terms of behavior or traits more specific to certain animals/groups. I think it's safe to assume stuff like "being carnivore" (and humans are already omnivorous anyway, so it shouldn't affect them more than normal) etc. doesn't count because it's not really a specific trait. I would even think twice about something like being more aggressive etc. For the most part they're clearly not harmful traits. And well if they were, they definitely wouldn't legalize it. Either way, I agree there's no point thinking too much about it, but then you started to think way too much about it, so I replied.
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.
elevown explained my point pretty well. Also yes, I'm aware holes from piercings usually close over time when you don't wear them, but I'm pretty sure earplugs stretching is irreversible. I put earrings here more as a example of purely decorative. The point was people don't mind doing that kind of purely decorative stuff to themselves, even if it's unremovable or will leave some marks. Also again you're looking at it from the wrong angle. It's more likely they're cooking them up in some kind of lab and so they probably aren't the exact same thing as real thing, so there's no reason to assume they can't handle the same climate as you. They probably just adapt to your body in some way. Or they came with universal resistant or something. About headgear, I can easily see making adjustment to them so animal ears will fit a common practice. Or you know, works requiring headgear can simply require lack of animal ears.
