OK, y’all know I’m all about xenoergonomics around here. Let’s point out everything wrong with what Fox James is wearing in this picture and what I would do instead.
Minor caveat: I’m extrapolating some of this from what I know of dog anatomy and behavior, so I could be wrong.
First, his helmet. What is it covering? I’ve already ranted about exposed ears on animal characters, namely that they themselves would never design a piece of protective headgear that leaves the ears unprotected. However, there’s another tidbit to consider. The bones of a fox’s skull do not protect the tops of the eyeballs, so he’s extra vulnerable.
It’s also not clear if that mic boom brushes against his whiskers. Whiskers are very sensitive, and touching them typically results in a reflexive movement away from the stimulus. It’s also not clear how he’s getting sound output from the headset. There may be an earpiece in his left ear, but I doubt the interior of an arwing is quiet enough to just have a loudspeaker on the helmet or integrated into the cockpit.
Next, those aviator glasses. Setting aside the crappy helmet design, it was smart to depict the glasses attached to the helmet. Yinrih HUD specs have a broad bridge that friction fits against the muzzle, though they wouldn’t wear them in a situation like this where they could get easily knocked off. Instead a doggles-like visor is worn.
The last thing I’ll complain about is the zipper on his jacket. I have to wonder if the teeth get caught in his neck fur. Yinrih go nekkid where possible, but clothing fasteners, such as on rain gear or cold weather gear would probably use snaps, magnets, laces, or velcro St. Starlight’s Fabric[1].
named for its inventor, Saint Starlight, a research monk, botanist, and healer who lived during the yinrih’s age of aviation. She was inspired by the plant burs that would stick to her fur. ↩︎
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helmet
That’s not a helmet.
Addendum: I’ll also point out that this sort of hyperrealistic anthropomorphism gives me the willies. The yinrih were originally your standard bipedal animal characters, but I “devolved” the more anthropomorphic characteristics to arrive at a more simian body plan, arriving at the current monkey fox design.
Also, seeing other screenshots from the game, It’s interesting that they made Falco barefoot, or at least have open-toed footwear, as he’s a bird with prehensile feet. While this is extremely useful, I wonder how they could be acccounted for ergonomically, like foot-actuated buttons and switches. Though non-avian pilots don’t have prehensile feet. So are arwing cockpits modular to fit different body plans?
Fox’s gloves also have claws. A more natural way to do that would be to have his natural claws emerging from the gloves or have hard caps on the end of each finger. However, canine claws are thick and blunt, used for traction when running or climbing, and less for combat as cat claws are. Theoretically they would be less useful on paws that have converged to be more hand-like for grasping.
Foxes aren’t canines, they’re vulpines.
The only thing I’ll say is the zipper is there to look cool and it does. Jackets always look cooler with open zipper fastenings. The rest is infuriating, especially because that headpiece has been fitted to his head shape in the past so Idk why they have to make it worse. Faults aside, I do think we should have way more Star Fox and crew than we do.
I feel like zippered clothing would be a nightmare for creatures with fur. Agreed that they look cool though. Especially the big chunky ones, I just like them :)
Its Kingdom Hearts’ fault honestly
You’re wrong. That’s James McCloud, Fox’s father.
OIC, The glasses should have tipped me off.
I keep thinking of more examples. What about Slippy’s permeable skin? His clothing should account for that. Speaking of clothes and dermal coverings, or lack thereof, just on the star fox team you have feathers, fur, and the aforementioned amphibian skin. Scaled reptiles also exist. Do different fabrics exist to accommodate these integumentary features? What’s too warm for one species will be too cold for another. Some species have tails and others don’t. There are (or should be) fairly wide differences in size and weight as well.
This is what I mean when I say worldbuilding and story are different. If you just want to tell a story, you can leave out stuff that’s unimportant. Nobody ever does their taxes or brushes their teeth unless it’s important to the plot. But that’s the sort of stuff I live for.
Armies and militarized groups have an obsession with uniformity that I imagine would extend to, well, uniforms. For a multi-species fighting force like the Star Fox team, or Halo’s Covenant, I bet there would be constant and very difficult tension between the needs of individuals of minority species and the desire for uniformity from the ruling / command class that would probably make uniforms very unpleasant if not downright dangerous for some members.
At least in terms of Star Fox, I think there are answers. The Cornerian military appears to consist mostly or solely of dogs. General Pepper is a bloodhound, Bill is some sort of bully breed, the soldiers you see in Assault are all GSDs. Lore implications abound, but in terms of xenoergonomics you can make some safe assumptions, fur, a muzzle with whiskers and a rhinarium, usually a tail, dichromatic vision, etc.
Uniforms don’t have to be literally uniform. They could incorporate common elements like colors or heraldry while accommodating different species. I think any friction would arise more out of logistics. Different species probably prefer different fabrics due to having different dermal coverings and thermoregulation strategies, but you get what the lowest bidder can offer, so compromises must be made in the name of economy. That’s where I see interspecies tensions bubbling to the surface. The most numerous species would probably get favored, even if only unconsciously. So it’s less about “We gotta put those dirty chihuahuas in their place” and more “60% of our troops are Alsatians, so we had to design around them.” The result is the same, though.
Star Fox itself is an independent private military contractor, not part of the military proper (at the end of SF 64, General Pepper gets a bill based on how many enemies you down). The SF team can do whatever they want regarding uniforms
What is this from?
Star Fox 64 remake
It’s also not clear how he’s getting sound output from the headset.
Not that it makes it much better, it could actually be one of those things that project sound through bone (you can buy headphones with the tech and all, so it’s not that futuristic even). Though I don’t know would it work positioned like that, since it needs certain place on the skull for it to work and who knows where that would be on a foxes head… I guess you could just claim they’ve made the tech better in the setting or something
I don’t think a bone conduction speaker would work through fur. Yinrih wear a more conventional earpiece that loops around the base of the ear. Because they speak quietly by human standards they’ve put a lot of effort into making their machines operate with very little noise, so huge isolating can-style earphones aren’t typically needed.
Yeah, it would probably have to fit very tightly and/or the fur should be really short. I guess they could shave the area - but that goes deeply into cultural stuff around it, which clearly has not been thought by the designers of that thing. I doubt they actually thought about bone conduction either, really. Looks more like “ehh cool enough” -type of designing that’s pretty typical for games and movies (and which rightly deserves critique).
Anyway I like the ear hoops! That allows a lot of designs that wouldn’t work with human-like shapes. I guess a species with inhuman hearing wouldn’t necessary even need to have the speakers near their ears, though that’s inconvenient in different way because background noise etc. could interfere. It would allow interesting versions of how a speaker could be, something like in a necklace, or glasses - maybe even in ear piercings with small enough tech…
Regarding exposed ear helmets: It seems pretty dangerous to me to have exposed ears in a fighter pilot’s helmet, but I could see animals with sensitive and/or prominent ears (like foxes) being keen to keep them unencumbered, even at the expense of exposing them to damage. For creatures that communicate visually with their ears (like cats and, I think, foxes) there may be a strong incentive to keep them visible and with a full range of motion over video comms that outweighs the possibility of injuring them. It could be that they’re easy enough to regrow that it suffices to protect the cranium / brain and just repair any damage that happens to the ears after the mission.
That’s not to say that the helmet here is well-designed, it seems like on the whole a not-very-useful helmet for any circumstance. But I would understand a species wanting to trade off protecting their ears for being able to communicate with them more effectively.
It depends on whether the visual communication is paralinguistic or not. Humans communicate a lot nonverbally, but it’s not language in the linguistic sense. Facial expressions carry a lot of weight, but that doesn’t stop people from wearing visors when necessary, even in situations where communication is critical.
Something a bit more on point to consider would be how comfortable it is to have your ears confined when you’re used to having them free and motile. I’ve spent a fair amount of effort coming up with solutions to this problem for yinrih.
My earliest solution was rigid ear guards. The ears are protected but can’t move. There are also colored retroreflective chevrons on the back of the ear guards that indicate rank or role. The downside other than the lack of motility is they make a handy grabbing point when in melee combat.
This is more or less the same idea used in a different context. For cultural reasons, healers shed their fur, and are thus the only yinrih to regularly wear clothes, to protect their now exposed skin from sun and cold. In this case, cloth draped over the ears would weigh them down and be uncomfortable. These rigid form-fitting ear guards keep the cloth away from the ears but present the same restricted movement problem as the helmet above.
So the question now becomes, do yinrih find it more uncomfortable to have their ears confined? More to the point is it so uncomfortable that they’d rather risk damage to the ears? I’ve already established they’ll go to pretty extreme lengths to avoid wearing shoes, though even there they’ll acquiesce if there’s a risk of their paws getting lacerated or their digits crushed.
My solution for the confinement issue is to have more space above the head for ears to freely move. In the picture above–a healer’s cloak–there’s a cardboard or plastic band that holds the cloth above the ears and allows them to move. Helmets wouldn’t need the band, and just have extra space above the ears.
prescript: I notice that I have written a lot, mostly about ears. I wrote it quickly and feel that the tone might venture into pushy, or “trying to tell your story for you”. I have never been good at telling whether my writing sounds that way, so if it does, sorry, I just started thinking and then wrote it all down. Ok, onward.
There are also colored retroreflective chevrons on the back of the ear guards that indicate rank or role.
I really love this, it got me thinking about all the different ways the yinrih might use their ears for social expression. For the purposes of this thought jaunt I’m conjecturing that, since the markings are on the ear armor, yinrih are naturally predisposed to look at each others ears to identify one another. If that’s the case, since there are decorations on the ear armor, are the same decorations applied to the ear? They could tattoo the skin directly if the fur is thin enough, or they might have treatments that can permanently alter the color of their fur. Or, maybe it’s a daily routine to apply one’s ear makeup, and being seen without it is akin to a human seeing another human naked.
Some ear markings could also be family marks, some could indicate association with religious or social groups. Perhaps historically the yinrih designated individuals as in bondage by clipping their ears, so a tattoo in the area that would have been clipped is a declaration of freedom, perhaps one associated with anarchic beliefs that are not looked kindly upon by members of a military.
Ok, I have more thoughts about the ears but I also want to talk helmets. I really like the high domes that allow freedom of movement. Since the wearer wants to minimize hearing loss, I imagine that they would come up with a variety of solutions across a spectrum of cost and balance between hearing and protection. For stealth operators in a breathable environment they might wear a light rigid weave with excellent acoustic properties but minimal defense, while a stormtrooper might have a steel pot on their head with no regard for hearing. Fancier gear might have complicated directional microphones with corresponding speaker systems that simulate directional hearing.
I could see modern tactical gear being just a smooth dome, while ceremonial helms (e.g. something worn by palace guards) could have elaborately styled ear motifs on the dome that indicate certain things about the wearer. Perhaps there are certain ear shapes that are associated with strength, wisdom, nobility, or some other trait the designer wished to express, and the more “ceremonial” the headgear, the more elaborate and exaggerated the design. Now I’m just back on ears again. Well, this next one is kind of both:
I imagine there would be a certain level of distrust of anyone wearing a helm that hides one’s ears. In the context of high-stakes meetings, it might be a show of good faith if one is willing to show their ears. This could mean choosing to wear open-eared (or no) headgear, or ceremonially removing one’s helmet at the start of negotiations. It could also be that yinrih helms are designed to retract to show one’s ears, similar to how some human helms have moveable visors. This would have tactical benefits (being able to switch from “more hearing” to “more protection” quickly) as well as social benefits like indicating that hostilities have ceased and facilitating nonverbal communication with those around you.
A lot of the social stuff you mention is present, but not through the ears. Yinrih rely more heavily on scent to identify individuals and read their mood. Perfumes are used to supplement this. Perfumes fill most of the social niches that clothing does on earth, as a status symbol, means of self expression, indication of occupation, etc. While I haven’t established this canonically, it follows logically that someone might drench themselves in perfume to mask the notes in their musk the communicate emotion, so associations may be drawn between overscenting and being up to no good. Being without perfume in certain circles is akin to being under-dressed, though not completely naked. Yinrih can, through practice or by dint of being sociopaths, completely lack these emotional odors, and Commonthroat has a word that means “scentless” (analogous to “dark” or “quiet” but for olfaction) that also means unemotional, stoic, or having a poker face.
Perfume is used to indicate military rank, and in this thread a Partisan military grunt gets splashed with scent remover to strip him of his “uniform” as a sort of impromptu dishonorable discharge.
Piercings and tattoos don’t exist, but dying the ears is absolutely a thing. It started as a way to retain heat, smearing black insulating paste on the ears. It ended up becoming fashionable to have “bottle black” ears. This is associated with people who are overly concerned with their appearance, and vanity gradually became stupidity. Unfortunately, natural black ears also exist, and black-eared yinrih (who aren’t completely black otherwise) are stereotyped in a similar way, just like the dumb blond stereotype on earth. That’s why in this story Sunbeam insists her ears are “dark gray”. There’s a similar superstition regarding yinrih with red coats being unlucky. Yinrih with a red coat and black ears are often made fun of, that is until humans come along and for some reason keep thinking they’re sly and clever.
As for slavery, it’s a thing, too, but the motivations are economic rather than racial. It comes in two forms depending on the era. Ecclesiastical slavery was practiced during the age of decadence. Both this story and this one feature people pressed into debt slavery for not paying their tithe. At the time of First Contact it occurs as indentured servitude, mostly in the Allied Worlds. A corporation can subsidize your moving expenses, but you’re tied to them for a period of time.
