'WALL OF TEXT' PROTOCOL IS IN ACTION NOW! EVERYONE BRACE YOURSELF FOR THE WALL OF TEXT!
This is true, but I mean it in the sense that you have just one tail so things you can do with it are more limited than if you had two limbs. With a pair of legs, you can do lots of poses, now imagine if you had just one - sure there's lots of ways to bend yourself, similar to how a snake can wrap itself around somebody, but it feels more limiting. Imagine how dancing would work having just a tail, there are just fewer gestures you can make, ballet wouldn't have the same elegance to it, you can't do the splits, etc.
To a point, yes, but tail is one heck of a flexible and long limb. It has its own huge range of motions, though they would probably differ in more subtle ways. Two legs could go two separate ways, like one on the shoulder and the other around waist, which makes some poses stand apart from one another very sharply. Also, no snuggling between legs when tail is involved, though it may wrap around, which is also very cool and snuggly in its own way!
As for the dancing... (pardon for the choice of words in advance, but I want the full might of expression to shine here)
BITCH, PLEASE!
We here grew up watching this. You aren't convincing anyone Post-Soviet that tails suck with fine motions. Your legs don't have moves like that old coiler has. They have too few bones for that.
Also, holy shit that old gentlesnake is legit DREADFUL. Not scary, dreadful. Even as little-little child you clearly understand what will happen off-screen. That guy is powerful and that's not the kind of power you want to be on the bad side of. You aren't escaping that old serpent if he wants you dead. No one does.
And those ruins are now short of inhabitants. That's how you get backstory for some spooky abandoned place. Someone came, did something, now there is no one left. Only stones that cry on windy nights on what they witnessed that day.
Kaa is dread.
Also also - holy shit animators went ham with his moves. I mean, doesn't look impressive by modern standards, but, a) that cartoon was made in parts between 1967 and 1971; b) Soviet cartoons had, I think, budget of between a shoestring and a foodcard for free borsch in local public dining, which gives the animation great budget-to-quality ratio in my Book of Jungles. Sorry for the low-hanging fruit there.
I feel like that comes more from conventions, what do we expect rattling to mean? When a dog wags its tail, thats often a sign of happiness, but in a cat, it might be irritation. In a human, when you "rattle" or shake your legs, that is usually indicative of anxiety, it just doesn't make the same noise, but the action is similar, we just prescribe a different meaning to it. You could imagine a humanoid species where trembling legs mean something different, like arousal, but it's rarely seen because there are no parallels to it in real life that we can empathize with.
The more mystique the merrier, no? Half the charm of xeno girls is learning what their body language means. Same vibe as exploration, I guess.
Hey, that's basically what it is - social-cultural exploration. Building bridges between people, civilizations and species, like the Sci-Fi of its Golden Age intended!
Aren't it just great as a concept? I mean, next few paragraphs will be a massive horn-dog nonsense-burger, so I want to put more serious note beforehand - or, rather, before you lose your faith in me as a decent and not insane human being, lol.
It's actually a pretty interesting topic. Tails, tongues and all that xeno stuff have their own range of emotions, yes. Me personally? I find tails to be extremely cute. Horny stuff is less relevant. Tails are just cute, that's it. They are very cuddly, have decent amount of movements, scales have cool texture (pun intended, they are cool in both senses of the word) and they just go on and on, and on. It's not about fitting lamia onto a regular bed - she can be the bed! Endless coils upon endless coils of slightly cool but still unmistakably warm flesh. Probably won't be too soft, yes - the tail is just endless muscle. Most likely very powerful too.
But isn't it just cool and cute? And just imagine how much of intimate (not in the sexual meaning - not primarily, at least) potential the tail has in-species. It's like with snakes, only more careful, sensual and inventive, since it's two sentient beings being together. Two very long limbs with near-endless potential to coil around themselves and other body parts, assisted by other body parts in the process. Even beyond the matter of sex, it just has so much potential!
Also, you can thank this gal for my lamia-related tangents:
Ah, Alice! Hooked me on slithery girls all right! Spelled almost like Malice, but she is the OG. As much as I like our cute naga daughter, Alipheese Fateburn the XVIth was there for years before. Not even Malice is that cute - shocking, I know!
She's too sweet. Even this picture gives me diabetes!
Or I should have put less sugar in my tea, lol.
While I feel you can also just stick a foot up someone's ass, I concede that they have superior tongues, definitely the best thing about them in my opinion. I find the emphasis they put on saying words with an elongated "s" to be a little silly, but the length enables a diverse range of motion that a normal tongue can't do, so the appeal is very understandable.
Foot won't be nearly as... Well-suited? Yeah, won't be nearly as well-suited for the task as a tail is. It has perfect shape, after all - tapered end and all, to ease the entry. Smooth too, and expands slowly. And flexible, allowing to reach at... places. Though its muscle-movement will pose an extra danger to the guts, but that's not something careful practice won't fix.
It's quite awkward with the foot, I imagine - i mean, the far end is both the widest (especially if the person in question did a lot of barefooting) part and the part that goes in first. And it doesn't become much better further one, given that there are also ankle bones and heels - could be quite big too. And that's not even taking into account how different the size and shape may be. Imagine someone who walked barefoot a lot - a real lot. You know what it does to foot shape? Widens the far end while also allowing for more spread-out and longer toes, for starters. Make the whole thing much bigger and tougher, hardens the sole, give person huge heel that protrudes backwards noticeably. Depending on the lifestyle, size and shape of the foot can vary a lot. Some grippers out there are quite large indeed, now imagine one of those going up the chute.
Ouch! Also, if you wonder the specifics, just look at my left profile picture. I can't tell if ZMSFM used any real person's feet for reference material, but I assure you - I've seen feet like that. And as you can tell, the feet on the left picture are massive.
Yeah, I would probably pick tail over that. On less pervy note, I would like to pick none of that, of course. I prefer my butt as it is over needing butt-mending surgery, thank you very much.
On more related and malifiliacly-heretical note:
YES, DEVS, MAKE MALICE DO IT! TAIL-PEGGING FOR THE WIN! BAD DRAGON GETTING A TASTE OF HIS OWN BUTTFUCK-MEDICINE!
But tails aside, I MUST agree with you on tongues. Oh boy, those are just awesome!
First, they are cute. Just imagine some girl absentmindedly lick her own ear or swatting a fly on her eyebrow with her tongue. The sounds would be cute, yes, wisss sssse consssstant hisssingsss. But the motion... Oof, that would be something.
Second, SEX. NOW! (c) This point needs no further elaboration.
Nothing wrong with it at all personally. Depending on your views, they are either in some sort of an afterlife so they have no reason to care what we think or say about them on Earth, or they just don't exist in which case you can't offend or hurt something that doesn't exist anymore. Reason we are respectful to the dead, the whole ritual and ceremony with burials and graves and so on, is done for respect of the living, people who grieved and cared about them, not the deceased. We do these things for our benefit, and I doubt anyone here is close friends with a Neanderthal.
Doing anything at the cost of people who can't get back at you, be it because they incapable or absent for any reason, is, first and foremost, CRAVEN. And that is something that, I think, is more or less universal cross-humanity. Not condemning such behavior will condemn society for toil under the uncaring and the cruel, after all. So, we universally hate people who do that. Of course, it gets to different length and jokes about extinct people is infinitely less craven than beating someone for fun. But the core principle stays, I think.
And of course, there are no better example of people who can't fight you back, than the dead.
That was the societal side. But it also runs deeper and in a less obvious venue.
It's not for the dead. Or the grieving. Well, for all of them too, but I'm taking it into a third venue people oft forgot about.
It's also for you. To keep your head level. For spiritual purity, if you will. To not be shit and be able to look at your reflection. For self-respect. To be the place where fallen angel met the rising ape and to not be just said ape, if you will.
Then again, it comes from the mouth of someone who finds racial slurs to be incredibly humorous. Grain of salt may be useful here, or maybe not.
I like yapping. Blah-blah-blah-blah!
Besides that, like I said we have mixed with them, so even if their species is extinct, some of their genes live on in us. They aren't just this weird distant species that has gone extinct, they are related to us, so we are not really disrespecting them any less than we are disrespecting ourselves. Even if you have 0% of their DNA, chances are you're instead related to another extinct homonid species, many of which we don't know anything about. While most humans are quite reserved and proper, as a species we're pretty freaky, if there's intelligent life out there it's only a matter of time before one of us will try to have sex with it.
As it stands right now, IIRC, Neanderthals are in the DNA of all non-Negroid Sapiens. And Negroids don't have any DNA-extras (on the other hand, have, I think, the greatest genetic diversity among Sapiens). So its either having Neanderthal DNA or having only Sapiens. Or you can be Asian and have Denisovian DNA as well. Though given we all originated from Africa and paleontological records there are, comparatively, thinner, there is non-zero chance Negroids have extra-Sapiens DNA from subspecies we are yet to discover.
An interesting, if complicated topic. Also, that was, like, almost all I know on it! I am not geneticist, so grains of salt may be useful here for sure.
Also, yes - we are a freaky specie. Whoever we will meet in space, we will definitely fuck given the opportunity. Oh, we will fuck them in every way possible before inventing new ways to do so!
Say it with me:
Ugly bastards in space VS space elves.
