Artistic Licence – Anatomy

Even skeletons can't escape from Secondary Sexual Characteristics.

The thigh bone connected to the back bone,
The back bone connected to the neck bone,
The neck bone connected to the head bone.

— A variant of the nursery rhyme Dem Bones

Anatomy is the study of the structure of an organism, specifically in relation to humans and animals. It has become an essential part of biology and the study of it is also important for art. However, some rules are made to be broken. Fictional works have taken the human form to its logical extremes, from impossible figures to organs that work differently to reality.

These are usually played for fanservice, comedy, or horror. Occasionally all three at the same time.

This is a Sub-Trope of Artistic Licence – Biology and Anatomy Tropes, and related to Artistic Licence Medicine, Anatomically Impossible Sex, and Pregnancy Does Not Work That Way.

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A Super-Trope to:

• 90% of Your Brain: People do use all of their brains in reality, just not all at once, which would cause a seizure.
• Accordion Man: Even if you survived being crushed, your body won't look like an accordion.
• Ambiguously Human: When a supposedly human character's physiology deviates too much from the norm.
• Amusing Injuries: The artistic licence Played for Laughs.
• Anatomically Ignorant Healing: When a body part is accidentally reattached to the wrong place.
• Anatomically Impossible Sex: Sexual intercourse that would be painful at best and debilitating at worst if it was ever attempted.
• Anatomy Anomaly: One character has a more or less stylised body than the others.
• Art Shift: When the new art style changes the body proportions.
• Balloon Belly: In reality, even a very full stomach doesn't cause this much bloating, while gaining weight is slower and more evenly distributed than this trope suggests.
• Barbie Doll Anatomy: Nipples and genitalia removed for stylistic or ratings-related reasons.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: Using the artistic licence to emphasise that something is not from this world.
• Bizarre Human Biology: The artistic licence is used to show that a human character is physically different from others.
• Black Bead Eyes: Animated characters' eyes are just dots when that is not normal for their species.
• Black Blood: Changing the colour of blood for stylistic or ratings-related reasons.
• Black Dot Pupils: Cartoon characters are stylised without irises when they would have them in real life.
• Bloodless Carnage: Shooting or stabbing someone will cause bleeding in real life.
• Bloodstained Defloration: Widely disparaged as inaccurate because it does not happen reliably in real life — although it's also far from unheard of. When it does happen, it also usually doesn't have anything to do with the hymen as is popularly believed, but rather insufficient lubrication causing the woman to suffer vaginal tears.
• Body Horror: The artistic license is Played for Horror.
• Bones Do Not Belong There: Animated skeletons or beings given an x-ray view have bones in parts of the body that usually don't have them, or invertebrate animals are depicted with internal skeletons.
• Boobs-and-Butt Pose: More stylised examples have the character contort their back in an unnatural manner.
• Breast Expansion: Unless surgery is used, boob growth is much slower in real life.
• CPR: Clean, Pretty, Reliable: While CPR has saved lives, effects like shattered ribs aren't usually portrayed in fiction.
• Cranial Plate Ability: When a character acquires new abilities thanks to a steel piece implanted (accidentally or via surgery) in their head.
• Cranium Compartment: It's impossible to remove the top of your own head and survive.
• Dinner Deformation: Even if you could eat something bigger than your head, your body wouldn't take its shape.
• Dismemberment Is Cheap: In real life, losing a limb is a life-altering event even if you get a good prosthetic.
• Forcibly Formed Physique: An adult body cannot be forced into another shape without killing them.
• Hard Head: Head injuries tend to be more traumatic in real life.
• Hartman Hips: More stylised art styles have hips that are unnaturally bigger than the rest of the body.
• Heart in the Wrong Place: Normally a human heart is just a little to the left of center, not nearly as far as media often shows.
• Impossible Hourglass Figure: The waist is too thin relative to the bust and hips.
• Inflating Body Gag: Inhaling too much helium does not make you float.
• Invulnerable Knuckles: Combatants punching things/other combatants don't injure their fists.
• Kevlard: Body fat does not make you Immune to Bullets.
• Literally Shattered Lives: Even if a body has been frozen, it cannot be shattered to pieces.
• Made of Bologna: Internal anatomy is portrayed as a homogeneous solid without bones, organs, or blood.
• Made of Iron: Characters shrugging off physical punishment that would leave a real person incapacitated or dead.
• Made of Plasticine: Bodies are shown being sliced, diced, and torn apart far too easily.
• Mister Seahorse: It's anatomically impossible for a cisgender, perisex man to get pregnant.
• My Brain Is Big: A large brain does not automatically equal increased intelligence.
• No Dead Body Poops: Showing a corpse pooping would ruin the mood of a scene.
• No Periods, Period: Periods aren't usually mentioned unless it's a plot point.
• Nobody Poops: This bodily function is seldom mentioned unless it's a plot point.
• Noodle People: This art style shows people as disproportionately tall and skinny.
• Odd Organ Up Top: A different part of the body is where the head would normally be.
• Only a Flesh Wound: Even if you get injured in what seems like a non-essential bodypart or only take what seems like superficial damage, there's still a high chance that it'll impede your functionality in some way and/or you'll bleed out or at very least get an infection.
• Open the Iris: The iris doesn't change size in real life.
• Organ Theft: It takes a lot of skill and resources to remove an organ without damaging it.
• Overdrawn at the Blood Bank: Your body has only so much blood at one time.
• Overnight Age-Up: Rapid aging is impossible, with the exception of some genetic conditions.
• Rubber-Hose Limbs: Limb movement is normally limited to the joints.
• Rubber Orifice: Bodily holes and cavities can only stretch so far without injury.
• Shrunken Organ: In real life, this would cause serious complications.
• Skintone Sclerae: The whites of a cartoon character's eyes are the same color as the rest of their face.
• Silly Brain Diagram: The brain does not have certain areas with specific options like "giant robots", although it does have parts dedicated to more general areas like motor skills.
• Steel Ear Drums: Characters don't suffer hearing loss from being too close to something loud like they would in real life.
• Sudden Anatomy: New body parts and/or organs don't come out from nothing.
• Surrealism: If an artwork of this style features people, their proportions will be impossible in real life.
• Symbol Face: The biological variant where a character somehow has a symbol for a face and suffers no consequences, even though they usually lack basic things required to live like the ability to eat, drink, and breathe. Or being able to do those things despite their face.
• Technicolour Eyes: While there are several different eye colours in real life, the colour spectrum isn't as wide as it is in fiction.
• Temporary Bulk Change: Changing size or body shape takes time and effort.
• Through a Face Full of Fur: In reality, blushing does not cause fur or feathers to change colour.
• Top-Heavy Guy: The legs are too small relative to the rest of the body.
• Unexplained Recovery: While people can survive things that would seemingly guarantee their death, it happens far less often than in fiction and they usually sustain massive injuries in the process.
• Useless Spleen: The spleen is involved in the immune and lymphatic systems.
• Vertebrate with Extra Limbs: Animals have a set number of limbs for a reason and any benefits from having any extra ones will generally be outweighed by negatives such as increased energy consumption, having more things to injure or being forced to redo your entire wardrobe.
• Weight Taller: An increase in fat and/or muscle might make somebody heavier, but they'll stay the same height.
• We Will Not Have Appendixes in the Future: It is unlikely that "useless" organs and body parts will be completely absent in a species in the future.
• Worst Aid: Things you shouldn't do when administering First Aid. Misconceptions could be caused by the other tropes on this page.
• X-Ray of Pain: It is not possible to instantly see what body parts are damaged by an injury.
• You Have Researched Breathing: Vital functions are carried out unconsciously. You're paying attention to your breathing right now because of this trope.

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The following examples do not fit any sub-tropes:

Advertising

• Adverts generally edit images to make their product more appealing. However, their tendency to edit human bodies to sometimes unrealistic extents has been linked to Appearance Angst. As a result, some countries have drafted laws that force these companies to declare any image editing.
• In the late 2000s, fashion brand Ralph Lauren attracted controversy after blatantly photoshopping their models. The model was edited to have an Impossible Hourglass Figure, unnaturally thin legs, and differently-sized hands.

Anime & Manga

• Gravion features characters whose boobs can move independently of each other and move while the character is still. While boobs do move, they don't bounce around like that.

Arts

• The Birth of Venus (Botticelli): Venus' neck is unnaturally long and bends at an improbable angle.
• Michelangelo Buonarroti is normally strict about adhering to human anatomy, but he deliberately made the hands and head of the David overly large, most likely so that people viewing it from far away in a chapel could distinguish these important elements easily. It was originally placed on a rooftop.
• Dante and Virgil in Hell: Gianni Schicchi's torso bends at an unnatural angle, which reinforces his inhumanity as he bites Capocchio's neck.
• Grande Odalisque: Various art critics have pointed out that by the woman's design, she has five more vertebrae in her back than any real human woman would have.
• The Nude Maja: Her feet are abnormally small in comparison to the rest of the body, which may have been done to emphasise the midsection.
• Pablo Picasso:
  • The cubist art style popularised by him uses geometric shapes to capture the human form. They don't necessarily have to be in the right order.
  • Guernica: Like many Picasso paintings, people are depicted as geometric shapes. However, this piece uses to emphasise the chaos that befell Guernica.
• The Rape of Proserpina (Bernini): While the sculpture was well-received, Jerome de la Lande famously commented on the inaccuracies in its anatomy, particularly, the unnatural way Pluto's back bends and the gaudiness in the details of his head.
• Seven Virtues: Justified Trope. The reason all the depicted women have a larger lower part of their body compared to the smaller upper part is one of perspective: the panels were hung high on the walls of the Palazzo della Signoria, so the onlooker could have a more even view of them from below.
• Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time: The way Cupid's back bends is borderline painful to look at. Considering the Mannerist movement is known for depicting human posing in figura serpentinata, or "serpentine figure", to give it an otherworldly quality, this was likely deliberate.

Comic Books

• Comics illustrated by Rob Liefeld are distinguishable by their incredibly stylised anatomy. This typically manifests as excessive muscles on the men and impossible hourglass figures for the women.

Fan Works

• Blood Raining Night: In the first chapter, Reicheru's breasts are described as "delecately [sic] bouncing in the wind". In real life, breasts are too heavy to be moved by the wind.

Literature

• Animorphs has the alien Yeerks taking over human hosts by slithering into the brain via the ear. In real life, though, there is no real connection between the two that they could use. The ear canal area is extremely tight and although it's stated Yeerks can flatten themselves very thin, it's still a stretch. Plus, there's the matter of the eardrum being in the way.
• Hoot: To explain how scary Beatrice is, Garrett mentions a past incident where a football player slapped her butt and she chased him down and shoved him into the water fountain, breaking three of his collarbones. Humans only have two collarbones.

Music

• The children's nursery rhyme Dem Bones sings about what bones are connected to each other. There are many variants with differing degrees of accuracy, one of the less accurate ones provides the page quote.
• The cover art for Sabaton's album Heroes depicts an Allied soldier Megaton Punching a German soldier in a way that would've required him to dislocate his shoulder to extend the arm that far.

Toys

• The Barbie and Ken dolls have been the centre of controversies regarding their stylised body proportions, especially as they are marketed towards children. In response to this criticism, Mattel added curvy, petite, and tall dolls to their line in 2016.
• The Bratz dolls are known for their stylistically larger heads and fuller lips than a normal human.

Video Games

• The Mortal Kombat series has several fatalities that don't make any anatomical sense. This is done on purpose in later games so said fatalities couldn't be replicated in real life.

Web Animation

• In Red vs. Blue, Tex rips out someone's skull and beats them to death with it. The victim even questions how Tex was able to do that while she's beating them.

Web Original

• Tumblr user thebibliosphere recounts a book she edited, which she simply calls Crucifix Nail Nipples. The story ends with the Purity Sue protagonist being attacked by a vampire, and is saved when her boyfriend rips out the vampire's heart by cutting off her breasts.
  thebibliosphere: i screamed “THAT’S NOT HOW YOU REACH THE HEART” and my brain short circuited completely

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