Manga and anime have given us the concept of super-deformed or chibi,1 where anime, manga, vid game, etc characters are en-smallened in some aspects and embiggened in others say for the purpose of expressing some extreme emo. Go ask the Google if your inquiring mind needs to know more than that. The upshot is there’s an original character and its super-deformed counterpart – which if nothing else leads to the latter being super-adorable.
Let us provide you some examples!
Street Fighter Chun-Li – normal and super-deformed:
Harry Potter et al – normal and super-deformed:
Well, Nature doesn’t want to be all smug or whatever, but she would like to point out that she’s been doing the whole super-deformed thing since before anime and Japan even existed. We introduce you to the…uh, well it doesn’t have a name yet, but it might MIGHT possibly get to be named Opisthoteuthis adorabilis. Yes you read that right – adorabilis.
Octopus Adorabilis?
Octopus, normal and super-deformed.
And no that side-by-side is totally not to scale – but you get the idea.
By way of Discover Blogs and Science Friday’s Cephalopod week, we came across this cuddly little cephalopod that has apparently been known of for some time, but is only now poised to be christened with a name. The naming rights have been awarded to the awesome Stephanie Bush of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute for all of her work on the how-is-this-even-real critter.2
And really you should check out the Science Friday vid to see this chibi-licious octopus in all its adorable glory.
yes geek folk, we know – there’s some fine point of distinction between SD and chibi, but it’s our party and for simplicity sake we’re going to conflate the two if we want to ↩
If only sportsball stadiums (stadia?) could be named so awesomely in lieu of the Verizon Wireless Stadiums or Target Fields. ↩