I don’t do much creature design. Still trying to iron out various tweaks in their design that I keep changing. Are you immediately wanting to pet any, or what would need to change for that to happen? My main goal is mushroom-cuttlefish vibes in a friendshape.
I also want to define their biology a bit more, but I don’t have much technical knowledge about that stuff. Generally, I imagine their heads are mostly lungs and they tweet like a bird and parrot some sounds. They can hold a note for a painfully long time. They can fit their head and arms into really small spaces as there is little bone in there. And they can temporarily make their heads textured/coloured to look like other things to a degree. They have 5 face tendrils, the centre is the strongest for grappling/holding, the off-centre two are a bit weaker and thinner, used for manipulating, and there are two sensitive ones almost always tucked back and away, used for feeling/sensing details of things they pick up. They often sit/stand on their hind legs like meerkats and prairie dogs because their arms are super weak and their centre of mass is weirdly distributed.
Fuck yes speculative zoology :D
I love learning about people’s critters, gets the creative juices flowing. Not that I know enough about biology to be of any help, unfortunately.
Random questions that pop into my mind: What size are they at different stages in life? How do they make babies? DO they make babies? You mentioned mushrooms, do they produce spores maybe? Are they warm-blooded? What do they eat? They probably use their forearms to do stuff, yeah? How adapt are they? More on a level with hamsters who simply hold their food in their hands while eating or can they do more elaborate stuff? Or wait, do they use their tendrils for all of that? How intelligent are they, enough to possibly some day develop what we might call “civilisation”? Are they furry or what’s their skin like? The last one is probably most important to know if I want to pet them.
Random thoughts specifically about cuddleability: Frogs are cute but I don’t necessarily need to touch them. Cuttlefish seem too fragile in their squishiness that I’d want to actively pet them - I’d probably let them just play with my hand or something. Warm scaly things can definitely be cuddly. Anything with fur is if course easiest in that regard, the more the better.
I’ve never met a naked cat unfortunately but I do wonder what they feel lke. Their owners seem to not mind.
Also, where do they live? What’s it like there?
Abd lastly: how do you feel about other people using them in their work? *eyebrow wiggle* (it’s okay to say no :D)
Edit: shoot, you have a humanoid in one picture, that’s probably for scale, yeah?
These are all great questions, and in trying to answer them I think I’ve found I only want to do that via drawings. All the categorisation in biology I think is why I get bored of reading about it so quick, and being visual-only allows for me to hide my ineptitude and be more suggestive. I’ll use these questions as prompts when I next get the itch to draw more gegeckers!
I was imagining they’d have a frog-ish feel, but would react to pets with octopus-like papillae that makes it less slimy and more scritchy.
And, Of course, use the gegeckers! The more chances I get to see them the better!
And yeah, humans for intended scale (though I would love to see one big enough to level a city):
I know exactly what you mean, I started an entire comic because I couldn’t for the life of me express my weird shipper thoughts about Doctor Who in fanfiction form. So I’ll definitely be watching for more illustrations to learn more about gegeckers :)
(That comic would also be where I’d borrow them, because I’m constantly on the lookout for inspiration for alien fauna. I may have an idea or two but I’ll have to work them out to see what I can do. I’ll credit you, obviously)
So a Borzoi, a salamander and a Chuthulu/Mindflair walk into a bar…
“Lots of variation and anatomical inconsistency” could totally be one of their features as a species.
Maybe some can stand on their rear legs, but others can’t. Maybe some can curl themselves into a ball, but others can’t. Maybe their face tendrils can expand and contract in ways that seem impossible. Maybe their body produces bone as needed, then reabsorbs it later, so sometimes they can fit into small spaces but other times they can’t.
That’s the fun thing about alien biology: it’s alien. It doesn’t need to follow the same rules as animals here on Earth. Just come up with a reason that sounds like it makes logical sense, whether or not an Earth animal could plausibly do it.
True, I should make like a pokedex thing with all the little quirks one can find between the different species of gegecker. Would probably ensure I’ll never get bored of drawing them too!
How do you pronounce it? Is it all hard G’s or is there a soft one in there somewhere?
It is all hard G’s for me. Do you think it’s more fun to say with soft ones? I like the idea of carrying the gif/jif controversy into the gegecker world twofold with constant arguments about it.
Well, I find it quite hard to say actually, so I was wondering if I was saying it wrong!
