Originally Posted by Aishaddai
Would Elle be better with horns? Would Solid Snake be better as a demon prostitute 900 year old loli?
...Someone thought Solid Snake (therefore Venom Snake) would be better with a horn...
[Linked Image from gamingbolt.com]

Originally Posted by Aishaddai
Your preference might increase your attraction to the character, but what does that have to do with the actual character?
I wrote before about how nonhuman species (and fantasy/sci-fi) in general open the door to philosophical questioins that are more difficult to ask with all the pre-existing biases we have in a story about humans. This is what stories are about -- exploring the limits of the human experience.

But I did skim over the other reason why nonhuman species can be a good time. SaurianDruid is right. Sometimes it's just aesthetically interesting to imagine having a tail and that's as legitimate as any other reason.

Venom Snake has a horn not because of any mechanism for exploring the human condition. He has a horn because it's kind of cool, and because Kojima wanted to use it as a metaphor for a devil's horn -- an external visual representation of the character's inner transformation. That's all just aesthetics.

Yes, when crafting a nonhuman species, we generally start by using humans as a template before we start creating points of biological divergence. And yes, as humans we are aesthetically biased to prefer human standards of beauty. (And thank god for that. The last thing we need is people fetishising actual animals.)

That doesn't undermine anything else we've discussed about the advantages of nonhumans.