Non Mammal Mammaries Discussion - Television Tropes & Idioms

Killersquid: Yea, I was eating a sammich, and I saw the page picture. Needless to say, I stopped eating. Thanks for the Nightmare Fuel guys.

Seven Seals: Took this one out:

The Skrull in the Marvel Universe. Of course, they're shapeshifters, so maybe it's just to distract the monkeys, but then why would the Empress have had them when Galactus showed up for lunch?

Why wouldn't she? If you ignore the shapeshifting aspect, the Skrull are like any other humanoid race (with all the implausibility that entails), complete with eyes, nose, ears, mouth, limbs and all the other bits and parts in proper arrangement. If the Skrull's native forms were asexual, or wildly different from the human form, you'd have a point, but as far as I know they're not. (They can shift gender, but they still have genders.)

Update: oh wait, I think I get it. The Skrulls are originally supposed to descend from reptilians, which would make this trope apply. But that's pretty iffy when you consider that their development was guided by the Celestials, who could presumably have made the Skrulls resemble anything they liked. (Of course, we have to ignore that the whole reptile vs. mammal distinction is being applied to aliens.)

"Try to find the baby-feeding equipment on a dog or pig, we'll wait?" WTF? Have you seen am old bitch or sow who's raised a few litters? Her teats practically hang down to the ground! Mind you they aren't on her chest.

Kilyle: Yeah, was going to note that we have a dog frequenting our place over here who must have just had pups or something, because she's got 'em draggin' the whole length of her. Looks uncomfortable. Also, I do know where the gerbil ones are, seeing as we had several dozen gerbils born over the course of our gerbil-owning days.

The Grim Fandango example seems similar to the scene of two chickens kissing in Chicken Run. In that case, it's very deliberately shown from an angle that keeps you from seeing the point of contact. —Document N

Kilyle: I think Zhaan isn't the best person to put down for this trope. It's my understanding that what you see a humanoid and get told he or she is a plant, then in the absence of a story, you can probably assume an "evolutionary path" that makes their breasts about as reasonable as ours if we were in fact descended from fish. (A la the Cat: "I'm so excited all six of my nipples are tingling!") Of course, in some cases there's a story - such as in Trigun, where it happened fast and rather unusually, or in some other bits where the form is mostly a mimicry ("You're the people I imprinted on, and so I'll choose a form like yours.").

GG Crono: Would someone care to provide a link to the "recent article" mentioned in regards to Dragonborn? I'm interested in what it has to say.

Sparhawk: Not to mention a link to the quote at the top of the page. It currently goes to The Comics Curmudgeon's front page, and no clue as to what he was talking about.

Trouser Wearing Barbarian: Removed the pothole to Tertiary Sexual Characteristics in the Kung Fu Panda example, because female tigers (and felines in general) are leaner and sleeker than males. It's not like they colored her pink and gave her eyelashes or something.

Gaucelm: Just wanted to say that the person who wrote the article seems to be really, really annoyed by this mammary thing... TOO annoyed, methinks. This is anthropomorphizing! Fiction! Deal with it!

Klaue: Yeah, me too. I mean, how is this any more illogical than, for example, the speaking part? No animal I know, especially not insects, could actually form a big enough range of sounds to form human language, even if intellectually able to. Still, the talking animals trope page doesn't sound nearly as annoyed.

One thing I thought it'd be nice to mention - prominent breasts on females are an evolutionary advantage, as it signalled to sentient males that the female was pregnant and was therefore available for consequence-free sex. This turning out not to be true made it much easier for the female to pick the most attractive mates. So not only do authors need to consider a base animals gender signals, they need to consider pregnancy signals as by similar reasoning (and assuming that the sentient animal was supposed to evolve in a similar way to humans) they're going to be the primary sexual characteristics of the females.

Clarste: If we're talking about evolutionary advantage, why would males be turned on by consequence-free sex? It's a waste of energy, and surely we're more vulnerable to predators while tired or whatever. Consequence-free sex is a bad thing, in terms of evolutionary viability. And if we're talking about "sentience" all bets are off anyway. Someone who's smart enough to know that they can cheat the system and enjoy sex without consequences is also smart enough to notice that women have breasts anyway. I think your causal relation is fundamentally flawed. If anything, being pregnant should be a turnoff. Men who dislike having children are not selected for, evolutionarily.

Anyway, human females always display signs of being fertile ("in heat" is how we describe these signs in other mammals). This is part of a "hidden" menstrual cycle which is thought to have several sociological effects, marriage being the most obvious. Basically, when you can tell fertility at a glance, males can completely ignore females until mating season. When fertility is hidden though, males need to be more paranoid about preventing other males from secretly mating. Therefore, it's much harder to sustain an "alpha male" strategy like most apes do, and instead the males invest more time in a smaller number of wives that they can guard more closely. This is an advantage for the females, since the male is more likely to protect his children when he's forced to put so much investment into only a few wives. Swollen breasts are likely a side effect of this hidden fertility, and are selected for for the same reason other random sexual characteristics get exaggerated in animals (peacocks being a good example). Sometimes things are just random. Evolution doesn't imply efficient design, and I really doubt breasts have anything to do with sentience whatsoever.

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