please draw captain vul realistic birdman next

piece of cake. captain on deck!

a comment left by @chickenpeep77 on my post about my "realistic penguin" dedede redesigns which i thought was so interesting and compelling i wanted to give a longer reply to! hope that's okay!!

this grew much longer than i even originally expected, so under the read more it goes. i'll also break it up into some kind of sections to make it easier

topics: the joy of the unfamiliar, bird features and the Snood, is dedede officially A Penguin?, and why i like to think he is. (also i have a small meltdown about galacta knight's fkn awful canon wings.)

hard sci-fi spec bio & the joy of the unfamiliar

i'm actually super into speculative biology, and have a lot of gripes with the way aliens in soooooo many fictions or fanons or whichever are always assumed to have a firm set of recognisably familiar traits. must they be made of meat; must they have skeletons; must they pick the most difficult and dangerous method of reproduction possible in the cosmos; just because it's familiar to us? must they be stand ins for humans and animals only? i think that the real fun of speculative hard sci-fi in particular is found in doing a jaunty little dance around the unfamiliar, around all the absolutely infinite and wonderful impossible possibilities out there. so all that to say that i absolutely agree with you about this in general.

the bird "beak skin" topic

i looovvve the idea of using the skin from a bird's mask to form an entirely functional and movable feature like a beak. that would presumably make it a caruncle (and it would share space with one of the best named thing in birds, the "snood"), some of which- like the snood- are indeed movable! many birds also already have caruncles that stretch over the beak, but to have the structure made entirely from it and stretched over teeth instead is very interesting and creative! it perhaps makes it more like skin and lips over a jaw, which is a fun and bizzare visual for a birdlike. i actually think that this kind of specbio could be a fun take for captain vul, who i also just did an earth-bird redesign for. vul has no species identified; for all we know he's a bird-like alien that just happens to look much like an anthromorphic eagle. i also headcanon magolor as a bird-like alien; though he shares few visual similarities with any earth birds.

is dedede a penguin officially or just in our hearts?

(please note that i'm informed on this only from english knowledge and various wikis. if anyone has other info here i'd gladly hear otherwise!) for king dedede in particular, while he's never been officially confirmed to be a penguin there's no shortage of canon references to penguins for him across franchises and he is mistaken for a penguin by snake in smash bros brawl. now i dunno what kind of penguins mr solid snake might have seen in his adventurous life, but while i could look at dedede and think "bird-like alien" i'm not sure i would think "damn that's a penguin for sure." so i personally think that dedede is not necessarily meant to be an unfamiliar alien, or even an alien that looks a bit like a generic bird or an alien that looks like a penguin. i think he is meant to be a penguin, or at least something that was a penguin at some point. and perhaps if there were not an abundance of actual genuine honest to god unidentified and delightfully weird aliens on Popstar and in Kirby games already, i would also be more interested in seeing dedede as a more bizzare bird-like creature than a penguin. you'll note in my designs i also drew him with some dense teeth (not found in earth penguins) and- this wasn't visible- my design also has dexterous talons extended from the wrists of his flippers. if he is a penguin, he doesn't seem to be a very water bound or piscivorous one. so maybe he's a bit distanced from penguins as we know them. several steps of evolution away. but i think because i can satisfy my specbio with the others (please know i have a whole host of unnecessarily complicated and fun waddle dee biology headcanons if anyone is ever interested... and don't get me started on celestials, hahah hahaha!-) for me the most interesting speculative question for king Dedede is not "what could he be if not a penguin like we know them" but actually "how the hell did a penguin get there??". and i think forgotten land gave us some extremely cool stuff to chew on wrt that! kind of like you mentioned with your wormhole theory!

why i personally like to bring Earth Birds into my kirby work

ALL of that said... i'm just doing designs for fun! i like birds, and i like earth birds in particular. they're sadly my only exposure thus far (alien birds though, if you're out there... 👋 ) so when i get the opportunity to utilise both my interest and my knowledge on birds and the way they function here in my fanwork, i take that chance! i had the skill to draw an earth-penguin-accurate dedede so i did, for fun! i also use my knowledge of wing structures for both birds and bats (and butterflies even) to tweak how i draw the various knight's wings to be "more realistic", as if that's a metric in space. but galacta's canon styled wings are.......................... i mean i have some capital t Thoughts about that One Long Feather. and i think most people understand this to be stylisation, but maybe it is just that he's an alien! maybe they're not even feathers, maybe it's just silly putty that looks like feathers! the world is your oyster tbh.

and the wrap up.

lastly, i can see you're into specbio too and that's super exciting, and i absolutely hope none of this sounds like... negative or remotely critical at all? i completely agree with you and love what you're doing with your stuff!! i'm just excited to engage with this topic you brought up and it made me thoughtful about the way i conceptualise dedede as less alien rather than more, when my preference is indeed usually more!

these are just my personal thoughts/preferences/headcanons and i guess like... why i think HCing dedede as a relatively normal penguin is actually perhaps the most interesting (and funniest) take for me and my own enjoyment! 😂 but everybody- including yourself- should always do what is the most fun and enjoyable for you; especially in a space like creativity and fandom!

anyway.. uhm.. hwahaha wow okay. well, anyone, if you read this far, thank you! sorry for accidentally opening this can of worms i'm sure it'll happen again