I've got to hand it to you, I think you perfected the legs and hips. I will try to get mine to match yours. On the other hand, since you gave me an artist to artist shout out, let me give you one in return. We all have different ideas, tastes and preferences. I understand that going the whole speculative biology route isn't your preferred route for re-imagining Godzilla, but it is for a lot of people, including myself. I am more than willing to take some of your tips and guidelines, but other creative decisions I'm going to stand by. Allow me to quote fellow user Gomi on the stance of applying speculative biology to kaiju. The following is a response he made towards LSD Jellyfish on my Synapsid Godzilla thread and the following words reflect how I feel :Executive Hamster wrote: ↑Tue Dec 07, 2021 9:25 pm I think there is plenty of potential for a good design, if you just drop the silly "this is biologically accurate" type stuff. Its unnecessary. These creatures could never exist anyway.
I feel that he made a meritorious argument. Like you said, It all comes down to preference. Kaneko's idea for GMK Goji being used as vessel for pissed off souls of WWII casualties was never my cup of tea, but Kaneko went along with it anyway. It worked for the masses because it operated well enough within the context and setting of the story he wanted to tell. Would you make you feel any better if Toho actually did something along my proposal so long as the same factors applied?Gomi: Ninja Monster wrote: ↑Sun Jan 17, 2021 5:03 pm
As a science enthusiast since birth, giving Godzilla and co. some halfway decent attempts at a scientific underpinnings has the opposite effect for me as it does you. Anyone can go "oh it's a giant monster that can't be explained by science," and indeed most media does, or gives it some vague radiation- or nuclear-based origin. Trying to make your monster a believably functioning organism is a huge undertaking, and I appreciate the stuff that does try to do that most because that work is hard, and if done right the result is a creature that feels like it could really jump off the screen and exist in our world. Real life animals are incredibly complex and we're discovering new things about them constantly, we just found out platypuses glow blue under UV light for crying out loud! The more we learn, the more amazing even the creatures most people disregard as "boring" prove to be, and I don't mind a bit of that getting in my Godzilla.
As a matter of fact, I'm often disappointed when I see a new creature or monster in fiction and all I get is "it's a mysterious being," because it comes off as a missed opportunity for worldbuilding at best and lazy at worst. The artbook for King Kong 2005 is still one of my favorite pieces of monster media because it takes such an expansive and detailed look at the environment and inhabitants of Skull Island, and it's all stuff they didn't strictly have to do but they did. The MonsterVerse isn't quite as good at believable monster biology(Why in the heck did they have to say the Mire Squid has rotating fan blade jaws? Rotors aren't biomechanically possible in large organisms), but it gets close enough, and closer than anything else in the movies I can think of.
Being a Synapsid just means (most notably) that the animal has a temporal fenestra, a big hole in the back of the skull that might have served as the anchor point for jaw muscles. All mammals and things like Dimetrodon are synapsids, not just things that walk on four legs or have fur, so there's really a lot of wiggle room to work with under that classification.
TL;DR: Applying speculative biology to Godzilla is fine by me because real life animals are incredibly complex creatures and I find that complexity endlessly fascinating. Godzilla movies can swing both ways and I'm fine with anything, but that's the angle I personally enjoy most.
No, hard feelings, but I just wanted to clarify my point of view.
