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They aren't breasts, really. They're eggsacs!"I dunno, there's something about the combination of beaks and feathers with some distinctly, er, mammalian characteristics that just utterly squicks me out."
Look closely at a female reptile, a female amphibian, a female bird, a female fish, a female insect, or a nonhuman mammal. You'll doubtlessly notice the lack of a particular characteristic that is common to female humans.
(Pssst: We mean breasts.)
Artists also tend to oversize the mammaries of characters that do have them. Compare the chests of a male and female dog, and you won't find much difference unless she's actually got a litter to nurse just then. Indeed, try to find the baby-feeding equipment on your pet dog (or cat or pig or rabbit or ferret or mouse or whatever). We'll wait.
You will not have the same troubles finding the (let's just get it out of the way) boobs on fictional animal characters, especially the most anthropomorphic characters. In this case, all classes of animals are united when it comes to boobage. The thing is, the mere presence of mammaries makes one a mammal (mostly). Until the taxonomists got all stroppy, it was literally the definition for the class of animals, not the fur or live-birth or anything else (nowadays, pretty much any big-group-of-animals definition is supposed to be who your great-to-the-nth-degree ancestor was, period. But boobs are still a damn good indicator for mammals, since everything that isn't a monotreme has some variety).
We are going to be very generous here: there may actually be a reasonable explanation for this. Prominent breasts, or lack thereof, is one of the simplest instinctive visual cues for Hominids. Giving all female animals big boobs, or at least a body shape that mimics them, allows for distinction between the sexes without some glaringly obvious costume tags. (Though many animators choose the G-rated option of giving all girl characters prominent eyelashes, lipstick, or a bow instead. The thing is, many, many animals already have distinct gender-specific characteristics.)
To be fair, the whole point of anthropomorphizing is to endow a non-human creature with human features. If the character is an alien or artificial life form, then it makes a little bit more sense. Aliens have Bizarre Alien Biology after all, and creators of synthoids and such would probably want their "children" to be anthropomorphic enough to fit in. Not to mention that it's easier to design a skin-tight rubber bodysuit with strange textures for use by human actors. It's also easier for the audience to identify with characters with certain fundamental features they recognize as human.
Or maybe it's for some other reasons, though it is hard to imagine what they might be...
It's also worth remembering that oversized breasts are not there to produce or distribute milk —-it's not the actual mammary glands making Page 3. Human breasts are a secondary sexual characteristic (there's at least one theory that humans' bulked-up mammaries are the results of bipedalism putting the usual primate attractor of round buttocks out of the eyeline, so selection pressure encouraged a similar structure higher up). Certain contortions of animal bodies into more bipedal, humanoid shapes could arguably then justify similar adaptations, although it still doesn't make a damn lick of sense for creatures like birds which are turned on by colourful plumage (with gender roles reversed, no less).
See also Bizarre Sexual Dimorphism, Tertiary Sexual Characteristics, and Feather Fingers.
Examples
Birds
- Some of the female ducks in Disney comics and Duck Tales.
- In Happy Feet, the penguins are barely stylized at all, but the females have shading in their chest feathers to suggest a bosom.
- Truth is stranger than fiction. It turns out that Emperor Penguins do keep a milk-like substance stored in a gland by the esophagus. Bu-u-ut it's...well...the males that do that...so...yeah...[1]
- Furthermore several female penguins do have noticeably more expansive chests than male characters.
- The webcomic Suicide For Hire features birds with breasts. This can't be passed off as puffy chest feathers as some similar instances can, as Hunter Ravenwood once declares an avian ex-pornstar to possess "absolutely awesome areolas". The same comic also features reptiles with some fairly impressive hairstyles. Yikes.
- Is this where we mention the Ooccoo?
- In the otherwise wretched film version of Howard The Duck, the titular avian hero at one point ogles a "Playduck" centerfold, who not only has breasts, but has nipples.
- And only a few minutes later, we get "Duck-Tits! Woo-oo!" (Riffed starting at 1:53 in the video, NSFW...)
- The fan-spoof Girls of Talislanta series erupted into controversy when the avian Arduans were drawn with breasts. The controversy was eventually solved when the pose was changed so that the female Arduan faced the other way.
- Nazi spy pigeon Hatta Mari in the Looney Tunes short Plane Daffy.
- Specifically averted by James Patterson in When the Wind Blows: Max the bird girl's second most distinguishing physical feature (after her wings) is her total lack of mammaries. (She's oviparous.) Broad shoulders and the highly developed pectoral muscles needed to power her wings do give her the illusion of some breast development, even though she's barely pubescent in the first book. (The Max from the Maximum Ride young adult series is an expy of the original Max toned down to avoid Squick.)
- Wave the Swallow, of the game Sonic Riders, though there is as much official art being flat-chested as official art showing budding of the chest. The in-game model tends to the former.
- Everyday Heroes features Dolly Bird, a human/bird hybrid with the Most Common Super Power. Her bio page mentions that she was created by the Somewhat-Below-Average Evolutionary.
- The Contessa, Hungarian hawk and Olympic fencer in Animalympics, has a shapely figure both above and below, accentuated by a dashing blouse and riding breeches. She also has eyeshadow and eyelashes for good measure. Other bird characters, like Babwa Warblers, are treated more naturally.
- Like the Falleen below, the Omwati follow this trope. Among other species in the Star Wars Expanded Universe, they are apparently bird descendants that basically look like humans with feathers. This includes breasts on the women.
Insects
- Webcomic example: Tammy the moth, from Kevin And Kell, sports a pretty impressive set.
- Chantho, the blue humanoid grasshopper girl in the Doctor Who episode "Utopia". She can feed off her own milk with some sort of internal feeding system, too.
- The Khepri of Perdido Street Station, though they are more along the lines of women with scarabs for heads.
- The webcomic Dreamwalk Journal is all about a world of nude anthropomorphic insects and arachnids with exaggerated sexual characteristics, including huge boobs on all the females. (They apparently use breasts for storing honey or whatever rather than actually nursing.) That's pretty much all you need to know about it.
- Honey B. from Banjo-Tooie sports a pretty impressive pair, and a distinctly waspish waist. In fact, this applies pretty much any time a bee- or wasp-like character in a funny animals situation isn't a gigantic engine of stinging death instead.
- Q-Bee of Dark Stalkers fame similarly has a female body with... generous proportions. But it's revealed that this is all a ploy to capture unsuspecting men for her and her hive to mate with and eat (in her victory poses, she even pulls out a knife and fork). This is most evident by the fact that, in her battle stances, she is posed with the buglike eyes on top of her head leading the body, since the ones on her face are entirely decorative.
- In The Inexplicable Adventures Of Bob, Princess Voluptua's butterfly form does have a bosom. What it does is anybody's guess.
Reptiles
- The Yuan-Ti in Dungeons And Dragons are snake people. It may have something to do with being able to inter-breed with humans (indeed, some supplements explain that "the yuan-ti are descended from evil human cultists who mixed their bloodlines with those of serpents," which is itself unpossible); but it was probably due to... "artistic license".
- Medusas are likewise endowed, but depending on which edition's artwork you go by this is either perfectly logical (only snaky hair) or slightly squicky (scaly and monstrous all over).
- TV Tropes Wiki isn't the only place to wonder about this topic. There is a 17 page thread about whether the Dragonborn from Dungeons And Dragons should have breasts. Some of the confusion may be based on the fact that they are confirmed to lay eggs. A recent article makes it explicit that they are like Mammal-Like Reptiles and monotremes (see below), and do nurse.
- The Argonians in the world of The Elder Scrolls... although this was temporarily dropped for Morrowind. (Unless you install certain mods, Or So I Heard...) This accomplished little other than quite bluntly demonstrating the usefulness of this trope, as it was suddenly quite hard to tell male and female Argonians apart in that game.
- Although closer examination reveals males typical have wider heads, diffrences in body shape and different colouring. That and females have different 'hair' form most males.
- The Falleen from Star Wars, although, technically, they're
synapsids reptomammals. Granted, there were indeed mammal-like reptiles in prehistoric times. But designating the Falleen as such was probably an attempt to justify this trope. And anyway, if they fed their young on milk, it's very likely real synapsids did it like modern monotremes, who secrete milk from diffuse region of skin and thus don't have "large tracts of land". The real reason is because Falleen are supposed to be appealing to a wide variety of species, and being human-created this means breasts must be on the females.
- The orochi (snake people) in Magic The Gathering's Kamigawa block.
- This troper remembers a publication that proclaimed the original set's Shivan Dragon to be a female because "she" had nipples. Putting aside the fact that these were probably meant to be something else and that many male mammals have nipples...
- Averted with Hortense, a lizard in the Talking Animal webcomic Nip and Tuck. She not only has no breasts (or hair), but she is aware that this makes her less attractive to the mammals that make up the majority of the cast.
- This Troper recalls another, very cheeky subversion in a science-fiction novel where most of the characters were Humanoid Animals (though she does not recall the title; maybe it was The Bug Wars or "The Race" from the World War series). The majority of the main cast were non-mammals. The hero was a reptile who noticeably failed to see the appeal of breasts—and he was the only male character who'd look the female mammal characters in the eyes while talking (think about that one). What's more, a female character was visibly Squicked when she had to have the function of mammary glands explained to her. They also found the concept of cheese to be weird.
- From the Crossworlds/Accidental Centaurs universe, the N'Gae subverts this rather cleverly... at first glance, they seem to be playing this perfectly straight, until this revelation. Apparently, all N'Gae, regardless of gender, have those bulges on their chest. So whatever it is, it's probably not mammaries...
- Although, given the author and artists' tendencies in their other fiction, it's about an even chance either way. Given that the N'Gae have hair as well and the entire world the comic is set in is peopled almost entirely by human/nonhuman mixes, it doesn't seem quite so improbable.
- Uncomfortably applied to the southern belle alligators in the How I Spent My Vacation OVA of Tiny Toon Adventures. One of them even sends Buster straight to Marshmallow Hell...
- Tales Of MU averts this, with part-snake woman Celia. Considering that she has human-looking skin and even the ability to grow hair (which she considers an embarrassing condition.), this along with her eyes and fangs is one of her more obviously reptilian traits.
- In an episode of the U.S. Acres segment of Garfield And Friends, Sheldon the unhatched chick was mistaken for a turtle egg by a mother turtle with rather noticable cleavage. On her shell! How are those supposed to work?
- Venus, the literally short-lived female in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Next Mutation series, had nipple-less shell breasts, too. It must have been an endless source of confusion for Leo, Don, Raph, and Mike; at least for the brief period of time that she was alive...
- In Everquest, there are reptile people called the Iksar, the female ones had head-frills, but no breasts. Everquest was pretty good about avoiding this trope actually.
- Everquest 2, however, made Iksar females significantly slimmer than males, and gave them breasts, albeit breasts that could only be described as "minimalist" by MMORPG standards. Still subverted with the Frogloks and Sarnak, however.
- Avoided in the webcomic Last Resort, where the obviously female Cypress (being otherwise surrounded by her father and male cousins) has no breasts to speak of, and not much in the way of hips either. In fact, the comic even correctly portrays her as the largest of the four (typically female reptiles are bigger than males). However, she does seem to go for frilly / poofy clothing that reasonably obscures this fact most of the time, and we're not even going to go into how everyone in her species has a head of hair.
- In a children's book called Larklight, a reptile girl (who is presumably the equivalent of a teenager) is remarked upon as not having these - specifically in the context of how ridiculous it makes her look when she wears a dress not specifically tailored for her. Of course, the tail doesn't help matters there.
- Several Kremlings from the Donkey Kong Country series (particularly Klump and K. Rool) have nipples... and navels. Um...
- Averted in the Cordwainer Smith short story The Dead Lady of Clown Town, where the narrative specifically mentions that the rather pretty snake-woman is completely flat-chested. Although, since the snake-woman also mentions that her people can't reproduce naturally, there's still no justification for her curvy hips.
- Since she was genetically engineered by humans, and was not a product of evolution, she can have pretty much whatever her designers wanted her to have.
- Subverted in the webcomic Wereworld, a webcomic set on a planet where "Lycanthropes" can shift between animal, human, and hybrid form. All female Lycanthropes have breasts. However, a special tribe of dragon Lycanthropes exists, and the females of the species have no breasts, no hair, no nipples, nor anything that indicates their gender when compared to the males of the species (they have mohawk-like ridges and horns that look like hair, but no actual hair — though they do have navels, strangely enough). This is spotlighted when Blaze, a female dragon lycanthrope, is chosen to make contact with the main character as a messenger of the dragon lycanthrope council. It is quite a humorous scene when Aris, another female dragon lycanthrope, tries to explain to Blaze that she looks like a male to other species, regardless of how sexy she looks to dragon males. This is fixed with the dragon lycanthropes' unique ability to transform to a semi-human form. However, Blaze misunderstands Aris's explanation of "the importance of having breasts among the other races", and gives herself far too large breasts. This led to Blaze's humorous line "If you're gonna do something, do it grand". So far, no other non-mammal lycanthropes have shown up to compare the dragon tribe to.
- Jack L. Chalker's Well World series included a naga-like species with six arms and six breasts, though these were later retconned into glands for storing water.
- The Garjla were an alien species of humanoid reptiles in Cosmos Eternal. But it was worth noting that, while the species correctly did not have nipples or navals, the females had very definable curves, as opposed to the heavily muscled forms of the males. The species is stated to hatch from eggs and it is clearly explained that they cannot breed with humans, so this was possibly done to make the species more appealing. There are two Garjla main characters, though, and both are male.
- This is common in One Piece, in which zoans (people who can turn into animals) usually retain several human features in their half animal form, including hair and, in females, breasts. Even in the recent case of two female characters who can turn into snakes. At least they didn't have nipples.
- The female Nagasta in Dominic Deegan have prominent breasts. When one reader asked Mookie why, his answer was "I like boobs."
- Alexandra in the French comic Dungeon The Early Years.
- This troper remembers reading a Star Fox comic in Nintendo Power and wondering why a minor villainess (who was some sort of lizard) had these.
- The Skrulls of the Marvel Universe are usually referred to as reptiles; they're green, anyway. Would be justified, as they are shapeshifters, if the few female skrulls shown in their "natural" form weren't as vulnerable to the Most Common Superpower as everyone else in MU. Of course, they have hair, so maybe they're repto-mammals or something else entirely.
- Skrulls are egg-laying mammals, not reptiles. They lay eggs and then nurse their young after they hatch.
- Averted in Not Quite Daily Comic. Lulu the Turtle Girl looks like a (very creepy) child even though she's in her seventies.
- Averted in Ozy and Millie. Isolde, a female dragon, has a perfectly flat chest. She still wears a bikini top when at the pool, however.
- Averted in Order Of The Stick prequel book "Start Of Darkness":
Oracle: Now get out, I have a hot date with this kobold chick, and my oracular powers tell me I'm getting to second base tonight.
Eugene: Wait, if she's a reptile, how do you get to second base?
Oracle: OUT!
- Played with in #676, where only one of the two reptilian hookers has breasts - they're implants. (Given the accompanying dialogue, this is likely a reference to the dragonborn, as mentioned above.)
- The Cardassians from Star Trek: Deep Space 9 have scaly skin and prefer hot climates, which suggest they have a reptilian ancestry (although this is never made explicit), yet Cardassian women still have cleavage (sometimes). Depending on how generous you're feeling, you could almost handwave this by assuming the Cardassians evolved from their world's equivalent of Synapsids.
- Whatever they are, it doesn't stop them from interbreeding with the more obviously mammalian Bajorans.
- I go one even more specific and call them therapsids, which are much closer to being like Earthly mammals. Some therapsids did in fact have what are called "milk lines," even before they stopped laying eggs—so it's not hard to imagine that perhaps the Cardassians evolved just a little further in a mammalian direction while still retaining scales and a more reptile-like metabolism.
- Harkovast, a fantasy webcomic featuring various animal races, features a reptilian race called "Tsung Dao" whose females fit in this trope. However it is explained that in this magical setting, all races can cross breed, making the need for mammary glands a somewhat universal adaption.
- Averted in Azure Bonds, where the heroine isn't sure of the sex of her saurial companion, due to her realization that a reptile wouldn't have breasts or wide hips for birthing.
- Similarly averted in Guards, Guards, where even Sybil Ramkin, an expert on swamp dragons, doesn't realize that the draconic "King" of Anhk-Morpork is female until the end.
- The fact nobody has mentioned Nessie from Richard C Moore's Boneyard is a tragedy as she is essentially this trope incarnate despite being a female version of Gillman from the Creature of the Black Lagoon she outsizes all the other girls by several cupsizes.
- Not to mention this was lampshaded in an issue that took place at the beach when one of the characters Outright asks "Why does a lizard have such huge tits anyway?"
- All of the female dragons from Draconia Chronicles [2] seem to fit this trope.
- Averted in the Psychoshop, where a reptile descended humanoid female is similar enough to make love, but has no breasts, no nipples, and no navel.
- In Exalted the signature Casteless Lunar NPC, Madame Vert, is seen most frequently in her hybrid beast(wo)man form, a humanoid Claw Strider with the proportions of a swimsuit model such as here; WARNING: nipple outline may make this NSFW. While there's some sense there—her most natural shape being a human woman—it's still breasts on a scantily-clad lizard-woman.
Sea Creatures
- Female Zoras in the Legend Of Zelda games.
- Hard to miss in Ruto's official artwork◊.
- This troper prefers to think of it as nothing more than a "pseudobust", or overdeveloped chest muscles. Trust me, mama Zoras can't nurse.
- Semi-averted in Twilight Princess, where both male and female Zoras are identical and flat chested. The deceased Zora queen, on the other hand...
- I thought the ones you meet were all male, of the Zoran Royal Guard-equivalent. Of course the female ones (such as Rutela) would play the trope straight, you just don't see any.
- The Zora working at the Zora River Boating Course is identified as female by Iza, and the Zora looks just like any other Zora.
- Female Decapodians from Futurama are humanoid shellfish. According to Word Of God, their "breasts" are actually egg sacs. Still, the ones with the biggest are considered the most desirable. Somewhat justifiable as the males would be subconsciously attracted to the females that would offer the highest chance and quantity of procreation.
- As Decapodians die immediately after mating, leaving their fertilized eggs behind in the sea, females of their race would never get the chance to use breasts as Nature (as opposed to Fan Service) intended.
- In addition to the Falleen, tons of non-mammalian humanoid species in Star Wars fall under this trope, including Quarren◊, which is all kinds of wrong.
- Parodied by the Mermaids in Tales Of MU. They have breasts, of course, but are ignorant of lactation. Instead, they are used to get free beer and lure sailors to their doom.
- Parodied and subverted on this page of Campus Safari. Sure, the female shark has two curved masses, but they're gills. The site's wiki also states that males have gills in the breast area, too, but they're less prominent due to their wide chests.
- In the game Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, Hydra, giant queen of the fish-like Deep Ones, is depicted with breasts. May be somewhat justified, since it is known that Deep Ones can interbreed with humans, and therefore must presumably share some genetic material.
- It's at least worth noting that the usual reason of making the female creature more attractive/feminine definitely doesn't apply here - imagine the Stone Age fat goddess idols, and add a few extra pairs of breasts, scales and sharp, fishy teeth. Since Hyrda is supposed to be ancestor to quite a bit of terrestrial life, it isn't entirely impossible idea.
- Averted in H 2 O: Just add water. The show features 3 otherwise normal girls who just happen to turn into mermaids when they get wet. Their clothes disappear when they transform. As it is primarily a children's show, they are usually wearing themed bikini tops. One the occasions when we got to see what's under the top - it turns out to be a thick layer of scales, which grow over their chests, seemingly only for modesty reasons.
- The fish in Radiohead's Paranoid Android video. Strangely enough, that's the only humanoid feature that fish has, and isn't even noticeable at first...
- Played straight by necessity by The Merrow of the Lorwyn setting, where the Males and females would be indistinguishable if not for the breasts.
- The Naiads from God of War. Poseidon apparently gussied his daughters up, presumably to make Spartans want to make out with them.
- Short lived Cartoon Network series Fish Police featured antromorphic fish. Didn't help one of the main characters was a blatant pandering [[Fanservice to]] dads who might be watching.
Oversized Mammal Mammaries
- Averted in Free Fall. The Wolf-Woman Florence is flat because she has no children. In one early strip, her bare chest is censored (even though there's really nothing to see) via multiple stripes, as appropriate for canines.
- In the scenes where she's nude, though, when covering herself for others, an arm goes across her chest where one would find breasts on a human female. Granted, having only two arms and a tail for coverage limits how much one can cover without the help of clothes.
- She really doesn't need to bother with her hands since the fur covers everything as long as she isn't nursing or in heat, but it's a modesty convention she's learned having lived among humans all her life.
- In Lisanne' Norman's "Sholan Alliance" books, this trope is averted by the felinoid extra-terrestrials. In fact, it's stated in one book that the fact that female humans have breasts at all times makes them quite attractive to the males.
- Similarly averted in, of all things, a Star Trek novel called Uhura's Song. The plot concerns humanoid cat-people who, upon meeting Uhura, ask her where her children are since she has breasts. She explains that human females keep their breasts even when not nursing, and the cat people basically say, "Oh, interesting". At least it was mentioned.
- Wing Commander seems to be a little confused about this. In the Secret Missions add-on to the original Wing Commander, the Kilrathi priestess is shown with a multi-part bra covering three sets of human-style breasts, while the Wing Commander Academy cartoon showed the relatively few females that were seen as being flat-chested, and the intro to Wing Commander Prophecy has a wall drawing of a Kilrathi female with one pair of human-style breasts.
- This issue comes up a lot where anthropomorphic cattle are concerned. (And see also Furry Confusion.) To wit:
- This troper remembers a rather amusing discussion on whether female minotaur PCs of the text based RPG Grendel's Revenge had "Udder Armor" or "Breast Plates" as part of their armor set. Thankfully, One Size Fits All provided no specific answers.
- Similarly, female Tauren in World Of Warcraft have normal human breasts instead of udders, making for some really weird appearances.
- Human-like breasts are a design advantage for humanoid mammals of any species, since they allow the mother to nurse while holding the child in their arms. It should also be noted that, proportionatly, tauren females are quite petite compared to the other races.
- This troper is certain he's read works where there are no female minotaurs. Males are human-shaped, but have no nipples. They're not even, technically, mammals, but parasites, breeding true with... um... others.
- You're probably thinking Dungeons And Dragons, 2nd edition. This was actually a common trait among minotaurs throughout fantasy canon until Magic The Gathering portrayed them less as vicious killers and more as a relatively peaceful, honorable people.
- No one's ever specified whether the female Dragonlance minotaurs have breasts or udders, though they are known to be more lightly built than males
- This trope was reversed -and maybe even broken- by the rather lousy movie and spinoff series, Barnyard, wherein all bovines have udders. Even the male ones.
- Not QUITE all. Occasionally seen in the background of various groups shots are one or two longhorn steers, always standing upright and ALWAYS with the lower section blocked from view by other characters or scenery. As opposed to the fat-and-flabby look of the 'male' cows or the hourglassing appearance of the 'female' cows, the longhorns are very obviously masculine with exaggerated upper-body musculature. A friend of this troper has declared the 'male' cows to simply be 'metrosexuals'.
- And on top of this, adding to the gender confusion, the female cows have hourglass figures. And bulls are a different species. (If you're wondering how disassociated somebody could be with agricultural life, here's your answer.)
- There was an episode where the male protagonist shot something white at a male cop's eyes. It was probably supposed to be milk but...
- [[ Male lactation is possible (but rare) in all mammals.]]
- Hey, Nathan Jones managed to pull it off. Granted he only did so after heavy abuse of steroids, but still.
- An unrelated, but equally bad case of Did not do the research resulting in unintentional squick was the advert for Nestlé Cereal Bars on UK TV, using an animated character called "Uter the Cow". Uter spoke with an Arnold Schwarzenegger-style voice, and had some sort of gun-like contraption, attached to his(?) udder-area by means of a long tube, out of which he expelled what was presumably meant to be milk.
- In the 1941 remake of the 1934 Disney cartoon Orphan's Benefit, the normally flat-chested Clarabelle Cow gains a human-like bust after being accidentally undressed by Goofy.
- The Webcomic Sluggy Freelance hung a lampshade on this with the 'Star Trek Adventure' where they meet a amazingly pneumatic Alien who is, of course, a male of his species.
- A cartoon in a long-ago issue of Playboy showed a landed flying saucer with a bevy of semi-naked, very human-looking, very voluptuous 'aliens' surveying the area. Spying on them from behind a nearby tree are two human males, one saying to the other "That's nothing, wait until you see their females."
- And more recently, a No Celebrities Were Harmed version of World Of Warcraft has the female of every species looking like a supermodel with a weird looking head.
- Might be one of the reasons why Krystal divides the Star Fox fans: While furries loved the character, many others hated her for various reasons. Her Stripperific clothes in Star Fox Adventures didn't help, of course. For the record, she's not the first female character in the series, but Kat only showed up in radio transmissions until Command.
- Amanda, Slippy Toad's love interest in Command and an amphibian, is not a mammal (duh), yet she has breasts.
- In Dungeons And Dragons 3.0e, the artwork on the Monstrous Manual depicts Gynosphinxes with prominent breasts. This is on par with mythology though.
- Averted in Kung Fu Panda, where Tigress, who happen to be Master of Kung Fu (Tiger style, of course) and one of the main characters, has no signs of feminine mammaries (as well as thin waist or lush thighs). Compared to male snow leopard Tai Lung, however, Tigress is leaner and sleeker, thus looking female and sexy without abusing cat anatomy.
- Rifts plays it both ways. Female Dog Boys are engineered to have humanlike busts apparently solely because it makes them more familar and acceptable to humans... but considering the variation between canine-like and human-like physiology within the species it's totally possible some don't. Kill Hounds, which are more in the plausible deniablity column, have no such niceties. The feline Battle Cats have humanlike breasts as well. Their Kill Cat cousins, the rat and bat conversions, and the Ursa Warriors are anyone's guess; very little art of them exists.
- A female Mutant Rat in the Machinations of Doom comic has 'em.
- The Whiteboard has a rather spectacular case of this trope. The main female character certainly redefines "foxy", and the other female character is rather, erm, prominent too. The same goes for two other female characters.
- In one of the Myth Adventures novels, a woman is attempting to use an illusion to look like a werewolf despite never having seen one. Later on, when she meets one, the female werewolf laughs over the, "And you only had two breasts".
- In a Mad TV skit Babe the pig is a half human, half pig who is on Bay Watch. All of the Bay Watch lifeguards are upset until he gets a bikini top which covers his multiple rows of nipples.
- In a trailer for Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, Scrat the saber-toothed squirrel gets all the fur ripped off his chest, exposing two dots of nipple. Not only are there fewer nipples present than seems plausible for his species, which would presumably have large litters like other squirrels, but rodents' nipples are generally arranged in paired lines that extend forward from the groin, not on the chest as in human males.
- Rouge the Bat from Sonic The Hedgehog. And boy, do they want you to know it.
- Played with in the Discworld novel Feet Of Clay, where with Cheery noting about how hard it is to be openly female and a dwarf, Angua (a werewolf) muses internally that at least she doesn't feel like she should be wearing three bras sometimes.
- Mrs. Boggy in Banjo-Tooie. One of the most blatant of the game's many very inappropriate (and thus hilarious when discovered) hidden references/images, most of which are 100% more subtle than ... those. They're at least completely covered, but just look at her running animation and make your own decision as to whether you're supposed to notice or not. (For the record, this troper finds this one more on the side of disturbing than ... anything else.)
Various Animals
- The dinosaur-descended humanoids of the Super Mario Bros movie. Granted, it wasn't a very good movie, so this was just one of its many WallBangers.
- On the subject of dinosaur-people, this was pointedly avoided in Dr. Dale Russel's "thought experiment", the Dinosauroid. He reasoned that, like a bird, the mother Dinosauroid would feed her children regurgitated food. The creature fails spectacularly on damn near every other level, but at least he averted this one trope.
- Averted by Chrono Trigger: Azala, leader of the Reptites, is female and non-pnuematic.
- The Quintaglio Ascension trilogy involves somewhat anthropomorphic characters based on the smaller members of the Tyrannosaurus group. The "somewhat" part is important; while they have human-like intelligence and personalities, they're basically recognizable as the animal they are based upon and the author does not fall back on giving them human-like gender differences; females are somewhat larger and more aggressive(!) and males sport a dewlap but that's about it.
- There's a funny bit in the third book where the heroine sees a picture of a female human and is completely baffled by her breasts.
- Subverted in Chimera's Copper; the chimera lacks breasts, despite the hero's desire for them. (Sigh, Piers Anthony...)
- Explained away in Triquetra Cats with the Antreyui, they are descendants of humans who have been spliced with the DNA of animals, so they're not so much anthropomorphic animals but thereomorphic people, the lizard people and bird people may have reptilian and avian traits and features but they are still mammals.
- Averted in the latest Pokemon games, Diamond and Pearl, which introduce gender differences. Many fans predicted, for instance, that the more anthropomorphic species such as the Machop family would be given humanoid mammaries and maybe additional articles of clothing. But no; in fact, most of the gender differences are subtle, barely existent, or based on gender dimorphism in the Pokémon's real-life counterparts, so good on GameFreak! (OK, female Wobbuffet wear lipstick, but it's just for the comedy value.)
- But not averted in the originals, where this is a notable characteristic of the Pokémon Nidoqueen. And the extended Nidoran family looks fairly reptilian.
- The male/female difference was also done a bit more conventionally with the horn size, although this difference was least prominent, oddly enough, at the Nidoran level. Since Horn Drill was a TM in generation one and Nidoran female appeared to have a large enough horn to use it, this could result in the bizarre situation of a Nidorina (which has no horn at all, though she does have a really large forehead) with Horn Drill.
- Justified with the various anthropomorphic races featured in the MUCK game SouthernCross. Almost all of the races are basically human, with a bad tempered Planet-God having tried to kill humanity by mutating them over and over until they died. It didn't quite work, and while a few pure human lines survive, 'human' now refers to basically any anthropomorphic character not explicitly stated as Non-Human. Therefore they not only possess mammalian features that would not be at home on their apparent species, but are also reproductively compatible with other 'humans' ( but generally not with explicitly stated non-humans ).
- Subverted in Gargoyles: Disney gargoyles are an egg-laying species with breasts, but Word of God addresses this by explicitly stating that gargoyles also nurse their hatchlings. Egg-bearing mammals don't work quite this way, but gargoyles apparently do. It helps that they're part of their own biological order, called "gargates" by Greg, who describes them as "One of those animals around in the dinosaur age that gets confused with dinosaurs but isn't necessarily a dinosaur unless it is a dinosaur. So Yeah."
- There's an alien race in Cosmos Eternal called the Grishie, which are stated to be warm-blooded amphibians that, similar to frogs, spend their infanthood in the water and the water only, then become land animals when they reach childhood. The problem? Female grishie seem to have human-like curves, though they do not have nipples or navels. But it is worth noting that Grishie give birth to live tadpole young, rather than laying eggs. One of the main characters is a female grishie doctor, though she has fairly modest curves and dresses conservatively, lessening the curiosity of the situation.
- In the game Mario & Luigi, Bowser gets them after Cackletta takes over his unconscious body - on the outside of her shell.
Plants and Robots (How's that for a brain-breaker?)
- Zhaan from Farscape.
- The the show also flips this one on it's head in one episode. "Female of the species" anyone?
- Rosemon from Digimon Savers has jubblies that bounce.
- Mahoro from Mahoromatic subverts this nicely; She's a combat android and so big boobs would only be a hindrance. However on the battlefield of love she finds herself drastically under-armed when it comes fighting for the affections of her Master, so much so that she changes her wish for Earth peace to a wish for bigger breasts as well as asking for a modification from her creators at VESPER in a letter "home." It is promptly denied to a round of applause.
- Jabe, from the Doctor Who episode "The End of the World". Possible justification, as her race ("From the Forest of Cheem, we have... trees!"), may be half-human (one of the "mongrels" referred to by Lady Cassandra). The only stated fact of their evolution is that they are descendants of tropical rainforests transplanted from Earth five billion years earlier.
- The Neti from Star Wars, though they at least are shape-shifters and implied to choose such things because they want to look more humanoid.
- The Cactacae of Perdido Street Station.
- Lyekka from Lexx. (Unfortunately for Stanley Tweedle she's also "smooth round the bend".) Justified because she is a psychic predator that took that form specifically to prey on male humans.
- There's a large-breasted sunflower in Conker's Bad Fur Day. You need to pollinate her with the king bee to increase her bust size. Which you can then use as a trampoline. So Yeah...
- Alura Unes/Venus Weeds from Castlevania. They look like a (maybe green skinned) naked girl in a rose, but they are (like everything else, pretty much) monsters out for your delicious Belmont blood.
- Possibly justified, this troper seems to recall some reference to it being an intentional artifact that allows them to lure in unsuspecting victims.
- Averted in, of all things, Disgaea with the Flora Beasts. While these nymph analogues certainly appear to be female, a close look will reveal that they have no breasts to speak of. The game not only uses this to trick the player, but takes it a step further by actually naming the Flora Beast in question Bridget. Then again, this is Disgaea, and given their tendencies with female characters, this may have been simply a coincidence.
- Then again, they are demons, like Q-Bee listed above.
- Cosmo from Sonic X. In a climactic moment near the very end of the series, she suddenly transforms from a child to a full-grown adult, complete with breasts and child-bearing hips... in spite of the fact that no other female of her species is portrayed with these. Furthermore, the scene comes complete with gratuitous close-ups of her swelling bust and posterior, which makes the whole thing more than a little bit worrying. Surprisingly, this scene managed to survive the 4kids dub fully intact.
- Nope, don't think so. They screwed that up too.
- Several female Transformers, including Arcee, Thunderblast, Beta, and all who are named Blackarachnia. (It should be noted that most Blackarachnias are also at least partially organic...but they're spiders.) Notably, in one episode of Transformers: Cybertron you get to see Thunderblast's "breasts"... jiggle. In another episode, she has nipples. Why, Japan? Why?
- Botanica is a twofer: a plant that turns into a robot!
- Really, just about any Robot Girl that wasn't made for Sexbot purposes. Some of the others might be justified simply by aesthetics, but sometimes there is no excuse for the robots to be Ridiculously Human Robots, let alone Robot Girls with huge knockers.
- A botched spell from Schmendrick in the film The Last Unicorn caused a nearby tree to sprout a female face and large breasts, with which it subjected the bumbling wizard to Marchmallow Hell. Possibly justified, as perennially-dateless Schmendrick's subconscious might've affected the magic's effects, and the tree did have a couple of suggestively-placed large boles on its trunk.
Other
- In the Adventure Game Grim Fandango, every human character is a stylised skeleton. Yet the females have inexplicable bulges on their chests. Although this is consistent with the Day of The Dead figures that the artwork is based off of.
- Furthermore, some characters have the appearance of being fat, and it is implied that two characters have somehow managed to have sexual intercourse with each other. And when these two "kiss", a smooching noise can be heard, rather than the expected clicking of teeth against teeth. The game hangs a lampshade on this when Manny sees the love interest roll a stocking down her curvaceous leg - only to reveal bare bone underneath (Manny's still uncomfortable about it). How the stocking has the bulge of a calf muscle that isn't actually there is never explained.
- A similar effect is also seen in this comic at A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible, though not with breasts.
- Somewhat justified, however, because the characters are Calaca dolls, not real skeletons. Hence the oversized heads, the non-transparent interior, etc.
- In the What If episode of Ben10, "Gwen 10", some of Gwen's female versions of the aliens have busts. Including the one that's essentially made of gemstone. This is even weirder, given than Gwen herself had yet to hit puberty. (Of course, the aliens Ben transforms into also seem way past puberty.)
- Let's not forget Green Skinned Space Babe Xylene, who sports an impressive set. She mentions that her species hatches from eggs. OK, maybe she's a Monotreme and would nurse them afterwards. Oh, but then she says that parents of her species do not take care of their offspring at all. Really?
- Myaxx is pretty well endowed, seeing as her species seems to be extremely Squidlike.
- The June 1953 edition of the classic E.C. comic Weird Science featured a story called Right on the Button in which a man marries an alien woman who stabs him to death on their wedding night when she sees he has a navel, revealing that he is a (GASP!) mammal, born from a (GAG!) womb! But like all EC pretty girls, she has great tits! (Unlike Xylene, she never said she doesn't take care of her babies after they hatch, to there is the possibility that she feeds her young on milk. But what are the chances of that?)
- Extremely evident in the concept art for the available player characters in the upcoming MMORPG Earth Eternal. The sixteen "races" are all anthropomorphic animals of every imaginable species. And the main difference between the males and females is... guess what?
- They've actually extended to 22 races now, including demons, yetis, cyclopes, and ROBOTS. The main difference between genders remains.
- Somewhat related: the Redwall series has a unique problem. Most of the characters are mammals, but there are no non-anthropomorphic mammals (besides the horse in the original novel and it's been more or less retconned out at this point.) Yet they are always eating cheese. If this troper is remembering things right, it was eventually explained that the milk is "Greensap milk", produced from "roots and tubers". (Mm, tastes like Deus Ex Machina. But at least it avoids the potentially embarrassing problems of locating the real stuff...)
- On one episode of the Nelvana cartoon Matthias suffers an instance of Marshmallow Hell at the paws of Constance Badger. (If this troper recalls correctly, Constance is the only character to have noticeable cleavage.)
- I hadn't seen that series, but thank you for never the less bumping it right up my mental Nightmare Fuel list.
- Parodied to hell and back in "South Park"s recent "Heavy Metal" tribute, appropriately entitled Major Boobage. Everything in the various dream sequences sports an impressive set of breasts, complete with nipples. There are ostrich-things with breasts, planets that are basically disembodied breasts, and a trio of trolls with huge breasts growing out of their shoulders. The kicker? There is exactly one human woman - "and you never really get a good look at her boobs". This troper found it hilarious that only her boobs were censored.
- On that note, there is the "Drawn Together" twist ending parodying the first "Superman" movie, where Captain Hero changes history — and the evolutionary timeline — to make everyone boob-monsters that go around saying "Boob," Pokemon-style.
- Subverted in the Guardians of the Galaxy comics; the Alpha Centaurians have a marsupial-like pouch instead of breasts (though oddly, the females still cover the chest area with clothing).
- Doctor Who shows a Chimeron woman nursing her child... with a miniature power generator. Chimerons suckle on energy. So why do Chimeron women have breasts?
- Because the actresses playing them have 'em?
- ...Batteries?
- ...Headlights?
- The furry comic Jack uses this trope, as it includes insects, birds, reptiles and even dinosaurs, all with breasts. Possibly justified, however, as all furries were created from human DNA. It's possible that the mammal/bird/etc classifications are just cosmetic. They even show a mammalian furry married to an insect "furry", with little big-eyed mammal kids with antennae. Oddly enough, they've showed such cross-breeds earlier many times in the series, without the explanation given until then.
- Avoided in the space-age video game Mass Effect. There are several alien races present throughout the game, but only males are seen of each species (with the notable exception of the Asari). This is partly explained with the Salarians, a race of warm-blooded amphibians with short life spans. It is stated in the game that Salarians lay eggs, and that fertilized eggs give females, but unfertilized eggs give males. Due to the culture of the Salarians on their home worlds, 90% of the Salarian species is male. Females are simply so rare that the player does not run into one. A possible explanation for the other species within the game is that the females are simply undistinguishable from the males, though nowhere is this stated, so it is only this Troper's theory.
- Also in Mass Effect are the Asari. The Asari are an all-female race that can mate with any species and any gender (!) by making a spiritual-like connection with their mate. The Asari are noteworthy for their female-like curves, even though they are clearly not mammals. However, the Asari are stated to give birth like any human female can, so perhaps they nurse their young as well.
- Potentially present (or averted) with the Quarians, though we've only seen a female Quarian, and then only in a full encounter suit, so what they're like inside is anyone's guess.
- A few have been seem outside their suits, in the books, too bad the only one described in detail was badly mutilated and had a fungal infection (as in mold and mushrooms were growing on him)
- Subverted in Final Fantasy XII. The Seeqs and Bangaa are pig-like and vaguely lizard-like species, respectively. The females are simply indistinguishable from males to the Humes (humans).
- There is one female bangaa with a voice part, so they at least sound different. And it's also fairly hard to tell the difference between male and female moogles.
- Grimmer Reaper subverted this in a rather amusing way. The extra-dimensional realm of "Home" is populated by demons that take the form of ogres, trolls, goblins, gremlins, and imps, as well as some rarer forms. But what is amusing is that while it at first appears to one that the Demons are all-male, it is explained that female demons are simply indistinguishable from the male demons. Females even have male voices. Demons can tell each other's gender, but human characters cannot. A recurring joke in the series is that the human characters will often assume they are talking to a male demon, only to later realize, either through conversation or by getting a better look at the demon's clothing, that they are speaking to a female demon. Another rather amusing aspect is that some Demons, though not all, tend to have trouble telling the genders of the human characters.
- Averted in the Official Fanfiction University of Redwall; the human-turned-mouse heroine gets up too early on her first day, dresses sleepily, and realises too late that she's automatically put on five bras, one for each, um, set, and since she now has no protruding breasts there's nothing to hold them up, so they fall off. Many jokes in the story are made about unusual animalian anatomy, as the boys who were unlucky enough to be in the bathroom when a lizard boy discovered what "hemipenes" are found out.
- Confusingly played straight and/or averted in Archie Comic's Sonic the Hedgehog. Salma and Juanita, the daughters of Espio, both have hair (and, being older, Salma also has boobs). Saffron the Bee has hair as well. This could be explained by the gene bomb that mutated all life into what it is today in the comics. However, the cover of Sonic Universe #8 shows that Argyle now has distinctly different punk hair which, not only wasn't present in his initial appearance, is rare for any male character, even if they are a mammal (the only other male with distinctly different hair is Antoine the Coyote). Let's see the Xorda explain that one.
And Last But Not Least...
A variant of this trope applies to male non-mammals, in that other animal classes don't have "dangly bits". Or, at least, not as many bits. Unless you drank milk as a baby, keeping your gonads outside the body cavity just isn't done, guys. Except in fiction, as follows:
- In Small Gods, a tortoise who's really the god Om is lifted into the air by a chelonicidal eagle, but persuades it to deliver it to a specific location rather than drop it on a rocky surface. Its method of persuasion involves a hard beak and a solid grip upon certain delicate pieces of anatomy ... anatomy which, as a bird, the eagle wouldn't actually have. (At least, not externally where they can be grabbed.)
- Any time a reptilian, avian, or other non-mammalian male gets kneed in the crotch, it shouldn't be nearly as impaired as is generally depicted.
- Averted in one fantasy short story (can't remember name or author) where one of the main characters brawls with a reptilian humanoid as a test to enter Death's domain. He knows that to achieve the Groin Attack effect, he needs to aim at the right patch of scales rather than anything external. He gets the spot right, but even that doesn't work the way it would on a human.
- Also in Far Scape, where Chiana, in a fight with a Scarran, asks, "Hey, do Scarrans have mivonks?" and then kicks for them...then winces and hops around, having hurt her foot. It replies that they do, but they're on the inside.
- In The Order Of The Stick, a graphic insult slung at Belkar by the kobold Oracle ( Lickmyorangeballshalfling) caused a debate among fans about whether doing as he'd suggested would require invasive surgery.
- Given that Belkar already stabbed him to death, he might as well go all the way. Though an earlier strip established that Belkar has no knowledge of reptilian anatomy.
- Subverted in Star Trek VI The Undiscovered Country, when Kirk gets in a fight on the prison planet and kicks an alien in what he thought were its knees, defeating it immediately, to which the shapeshifter quips, "Not every species keeps their genitals in the same place, Captain." That being said...knees?
Duck Tits, Woo-oo!
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