Bats exist at the intersection of well-known and little-known. Most people know what a bat is and have a vague concept of what it looks like, but because of their small size and nocturnal habits, relatively few have seen a bat up close. As a result, bats in fictional media are often depicted with wildly wrong anatomy.
It doesn’t help that real-life bats are anatomically bizarre. Many bats have massive ears, tiny faces, or a frankly unnecessary amount of nose membranes, and all bats have knees and feet that face backwards (seriously). The wings of a bat, though, are surprisingly simple: at a basic level, they’re just arms with extremely long fingers connected by a membrane. Many creators are unaware of this or don’t consider it important, and as a result, fictional bats (and other creatures with bat-like wings, such as dragons) tend to have fingers in places they absolutely shouldn’t.
Elbow fingers specifically are especially common, but this trope applies to fingers connecting to any point on the arm other than the hand.
Subtrope of Artistic License – Anatomy and Somewhere, a Mammalogist Is Crying.
Examples:
- Elbow fingers seem to be a staple of dragon wing anatomy in the Wings of Fire graphic novel series.
- The Great Mouse Detective: Fidget has fingers on his elbows and in his armpits.
- Happily Ever After: Batso the bat has three fingers and one thumb on each hand, plus one finger on each elbow.
- The Winged Demon in The Nightmare Before Christmas has fingers in all the wrong places.
- The cover art for the Wings of Fire books depict every dragon with elbow fingers.
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- In the fifth edition, all of the chromatic dragons avert this trope, but the same can’t be said for the metallic dragons. Likely to visually differentiate them from their chromatic counterparts, the metallic dragons tend to have wings supported by various spikes across the arms and body, sort of like a fish’s fin. The strangest example of this trope is the bronze dragon, who lacks the singular elbow spike it had in previous editions in its ancient form, but still has it in its wyrmling form.
- The fifth edition art of the balor gives it multiple mid-arm fingers.
- Multiple of the bat plushes from Jellycat, including the Bashful Bat and the Wrapabats, have fingers in the wrong place, whether it be in the center of their arms or emerging from their armpits.
- Pokémon:
- Either Zubat’s fingers are in the wrong place, or it has an extremely long palm.
- Averted with Golbat in its 3D model and newer official art, but in earlier sprites and art, one finger on each wing was drawn branching from the middle of the arm.
- Aerodactyl is an equally wrong pterosaur example, with one finger on each elbow.
- Spyro the Dragon gets this right in his modern redesign, but older versions of Spyro had elbow fingers, both in-game and on the box art.
- Other dragons in the classic Spyro games are very hit-or-miss, with some having fingers on the hand only and others having multiple elbow fingers. All of the dragons are given proper wing anatomy in the remastered trilogy.
- The titular character of Bat Pat has wrist fingers and elbow fingers. It seems that his correctly-placed fingers were allocated to his hands.
- The Owl House: The Bat Queen’s fingers are not where they should be.
- A bat decoration at Lowe’s
is guilty of this. - The bat emoji in the JoyPixels licensable emoji set (previously known as EmojiOne) had two mid-arm fingers on each wing until June of 2017.
