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glumshoe:

I think if Saharan silver ants had humansonas they would look like this:

rowan-is-a-legal-derp:

Ship this is a really unsettling thought, please put it back lol

glumshoe:

no it’s a good and valid thought and objectively true

anomalous-heretic:

I’m more disturbed by the idea of Animals having “humansonas” like a deranged furry.

glumshoe:

No no it’s great. Think about it. Think about which traits non-human animals might value as most attractive about themselves that they would then attempt to… zoomorphize onto their human OC’s, in the way that humans give anthropomorphized cartoon animals boobs and hourglass figures and expressive faces.

Birds seem inclined to find us pretty sexy as-is, boy I imagine they’d give their humansonas brightly-colored hair and clothing and really loud voices. Bear humansonas would just be exhuberantly fat. Salmon human sonas would be huge and swollen and lumpy. Spider humansonas would have big women with wide hips and tiny men with disproportionately huge meaty hands.

draconym:

So as Ship (and now everyone in my patreon discord) is well aware I have unfortunately given a great deal of thought to the topic of “how would animal artists draw humans to make them more appealing in their own eyes.” I’m using birds as my example here because I agree that birds are already inclined to find humans very sexy, so I won’t have to drastically alter our bauplan to make it pleasing for birds to look at.

First, as a jumping off point for thinking about the ways in which humans alter animals to make them more appealing to human audiences, let’s look at the art of Don Bluth. You might remember the penguins from “The Pebble and the Penguin” (1995). They’re pretty emblematic of the way Bluth draws animals in general.

Bluth’s birds are fairly recognizable as birds, but they move and emote like humans and they have a lot of un-birdlike features that humans find important to communication: eyebrows, hands, beaks that move like mouths. Teeth. Let’s not think too much about the teeth. Humans often add these features to fursonas, but they’re not things that I expect birds would find especially necessary to retain in a humansona design.

I do think that there are a lot of things that birds would keep as-is, because as mentioned, a lot of them already seem to think pretty highly of the human look.

In my experience, the things that birds find especially attractive about humans and want to preserve or exaggerate are as follows:

– Big shiny hair. Birds are really into beautiful plumage so it makes sense that hair and plumage would be analogous in their eyes. The ideal humansona would have really big, colorful hair. Anime Hair. Miyazaki hair that can move to express emotion in the same way that feathers can.

– Large, expressive eyes. I think they’d like big cartoon eyeballs as much as we would. Most birds use their eyelids and/or pupils to convey emotion.

– Long skinny legs. Many humans already have these and it’s definitely something birds like about us. A lot. They might want to make our legs have more avian proportions, though, which probably means much shorter femurs and comparatively longer shins.

– Clothes. My parrot calls his own feathers “shirt” and I think it’s reasonable to assume that birds find clothes and plumage pretty similar. They cover our bodies, they alter our silhouette in pleasing ways, they come in many colors, and they can be removed but we both generally would prefer that this not happen in public. Clothes can stay.

– Feet. Every parrot I know has a foot fetish. This might just be because human feet are roughly parrot-sized and they’re a pretty nonthreatening part of the human, but I also think birds just have a thing for feet. We can still make our humansona’s feet look a little more relatable to birds, though. Certainly they should look like they’re able to pick things up with them.

Okay, so we have a list of things to keep. What to improve upon, though?

– Beakier nose. I think birds probably do find our noses pretty appealing, but they might be more relatable if they were more evocative of beaks. Make the nose big and pointy, but keep the head nice and round. Chin isn’t very important. Mouth isn’t that important for expressiveness, either, so we can de-emphasize that.

– Less Scary hands. Some birds probably find hands scary looking, considering they’re one of the most dangerous parts of the human. They’re a defining feature of primates, though, so we can’t just get rid of them or turn them completely into wings–but we can make them look less like big frightening paws. Make them cuter. More friendly.

– Rounder body. A lot of humans have long, bendy torsos that move in a decidedly unbirdlike way. A humansona with a more spherical body and a more rigid spine is going to read as more birdlike, which is better.

– Longer neck. Making the neck a little longer would help our humansona emote more like a bird. A goose in particular might give their humansona an absolutely rokurokubian neck.

So now that we’ve got our humansona planned out, we’ll create a character that is still recognizable as a human, but which has exaggerated features that make it more likeable to most birds: brighter colors, big expressive eyes, longer neck and legs, clothing that evokes plumage, de-emphasized hands and fingers, rounder body. The ideal form.

Yeah. Perfect.