holy fuck holy SHIT i think this is the coolest (and hottest) i have ever looked
comm i got from @/ailensolid on twitter!
yes
anthropomorphic upper
non-anthropomorphic lower. you dont have to have legs to be a taur
merpeople are taurs
Usually "taur" refers to an entire whole-ass body cut off at the neck to replace the human's legs, though, unless you're talking about the specific case of the Minotaur where the human half is on the bottom.
Which is to say a naga and a merperson are not taurs... they're satyrs.
🖤 drew a diagram because this fascinates me
I guess the key difference between the two is indeed where the body is cut
satyrs uses the bottom half of an animal (like the back legs of something), while taurs use the whole body except the head
so most mermaids in art are satyrs, but they could be made into taurs
snakes are harder to define as they don't have much as for things to differentiate between body and tail. a real headscratcher, you could make a religion out of it
The tails of snakes are actually pretty defined!
This is most obvious in flying snakes, who flatten out their ribs to glide in the air, which leaves the tail (which just have shorter ribs) dangling about behind it.
i think that their tails look comically small when they're not more seamless with the snakee
And in looking at satyrs, it looks like the cutoff point is the pelvis??
Like, they'd have a goat's pelvis, but a humanoid torso.
.......Except — most snakes don't have pelvises.
But some have vestigial pelvises!
Pelvic spurs are derived from them, and they're used in courtship.
So, suitably, the pelvis is wherever the cloaca would be, which I think we can presume would be where the pelvis used to be in all other snakes, too!
And so, wherever the cloaca (and, in turn, the pelvic region) would be, the cutoff for a satyr would be.
And that would be..........
..............Oh. Aha.
Well, then.
It would be around the area where the tail begins.
which makes sense since tails ordinarily come out from pelvises in the first place
And so:
