Hey, I've already asked this on your main blog and was directed over here so, here goes: if a bird/human mutant has wings, where would they be and what size? Also, if they tried to cut off their wings (not professionally) debt would they need to do. Finally, if the knife slipped what organs could it damage? Sorry for the long post.
The rule of reality applies to any made-up species - you break it, you bought it.
There’s no ‘correct’ position for a bird-human hybrid’s wings to be. You made the mutant, you’re imagination is the limit. Bird wings are analogous to human arms. The simplest place to put wings onto a bird/human mutant is to replace the arms with wings. However if you’re intending for your character to attempt to cut off their own wings I’m assuming this isn’t the answer you were after.
If your mutant is going to have avian wings that they could consider amputating, they need to be entirely separate limbs from their arms. An avian wing is a fairly light appendage, it’s rather scrawny once the feathers are removed. The bulky muscles are at the base, pectorals in particular. If these wings are to be functional enough to provide flight then they need to be secured to the top of the thorax, potentially over the top of the arms, towards the base of the neck.
As for what size they are, again when it comes to reality, if you break it, you bought it. Humans are fairly heavy so they will need a lot of lifting power to get airborne. the size and style of the wings will depend on how functional you intend them to be, but for example a 6.5kg goose has around a 1.8 meter wingspan. Scaling that up, a 65kg creature may need an 18 meter wingspan.
For reference, the largest flying creature on earth was estimated to have an 11 meter wingspan.
Amputating a wing is like amputating an arm. It’s a major surgery needing to go through skin and muscle, transecting blood vessels and nerves, and either cutting through bone or disarticulating joints.
If your bird/human mutant tried to cut off their own wings, they would be in a huge amount of pain. There is a severe risk of blood loss and subsequent death, especially under amateur circumstances. It would also be extremely challenging to amputate your own limb which is attached to your back. I don’t think your character would succeed at self-amputation, not if these are large wings attached to their back. Aside from any other reason, how can you physically tie a suture around a blood vessel that’s coming from the back of your shoulder?
There is so much that could go wrong trying to amputate a wing of a humanoid. Muscles bleed, twitch and contract. Bones bleed when broken. There are big thumping blood vessels running up into the limb and injuring one of them without rapid haemostasis (stopping the bleeding) can result in life threatening blood loss. These blood vessels are fairly superficial in the equivalent of the armpit and elbow region, and very easy to damage there.
While the knife would have to slip pretty far to damage an internal organ, there’s already plenty of damage it could do superficially.
Amputation is more than just ‘cutting off a limb’, you also need to put all these severed muscle ends and skin back together to close the stump. That is also something you can’t effectively do on your own.
In short, I would expect your bird/human mutant to either abandon amputation once they start and feel the pain or see the huge volume of blood, or to potentially die from blood loss.
It’s worth noting that humans can suffer from Body Integrity Identify Disorder and desire amputation of a limb. They may choose to inflict such severe damage to their limb that it becomes necessary to have it amputated by medical professionals. You could potentially talk to @scriptshrink or @scriptmedic about cases like these.
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