It's a bit silly but can you please make a post about many characters' ears? ✿◕ ‿ ◕✿ Thank you
Sorry for my lateness. No, don’t worry, your ask isn’t silly...
...it’s just that, to be honest, when I was researching if Hasegawa and Tsurumi were the same person, I’ve noticed Noda isn’t really strict into how he draws ears, so, even when he draws the same character, he changes their shape slightly, from draw to draw, being slightly bigger or smaller, but overall being all the same for almost all the characters.
It’s not a complain, normally characters are hardly recognized by their ears.
For example, those 3 ears.
Noda draws them rather accurately, when they’re up close he even shadows them.
Can you recognize to whom they belong?
It’s pretty hard to do so even though, if I we look at the characters to whom they belong, one realizes those characters are physically pretty different among them.
In itself it is a mistake to draw ears so similar they all look the same, because ears change from person to person (to the point you can use them to recognize a person from another, almost as if they were fingerprints) but in the manga world ears are hardly used to recognize a character and therefore they are often drawn even more stylized than Noda does, so it’s no surprise that, conventionally, ears are almost always drawn for each character as if they were all the same and Noda merely followed that habit.
However in the middle of ears that look all the same there are some notable differences.
Although to us the ears above are perfectly normal, to Ainu whose ears are not.
They are ‘sinna kisar’ (“strange ears”) because, compared to Japanese, Ainu have thiker earlobe.
Noda isn’t exactly prone to represent Ainu by profile but I think you can see Kiroranke’s ears here well enough, both with his earrings and without.
Also have Asirpa’s ears too.
Overall, up close they don’t seem that different from the previous type, just a bit rounder and yes, with round thicker earlobes...
...but still, especially when the draw isn’t up close, Noda isn’t very careful with giving the characters a precise ear shape, so sometimes Japanese characters’ lobes seem thicker (yeah, even for recurring characters like Sugimoto or Shiraishi or Ogata) and Ainu lobes seem smaller.
So really, it’s hard to tell.
It’s noteworthy though that in the fake Ainu village Sugimoto and Ogata will argue if the fake Ainu are Ainu or not and ears will be brought into the discussion.
If I were to give my two cents, Ekurok seems to have lobes even thicker and bigger than Kiroranke or Makkanakkuru or Asirpa but, supposedly, he’s not an Ainu (if he’s from Hokkaido though maybe he has, unknown to him, some Ainu blood in him, hence the thick lobes).
Lastly there’s another pair of ears which, despite belonging to a Japanese person, are pretty uncommon, even among Japanese.
Those are the Judo ears Ushiyama has.
Ushiyama’s ears are clearly drawn differently no matter if you look at Ushiyama's profile...
...or if you look at him frontally (you can compare his ears with Sugimoto’s and see how they look different).
That’s all for ears, I think, though, of course, I could have forgotten something.
Thanks for the ask, although a bit uncommon it was interesting to answer to it, even if I couldn’t really say much so I hope you aren’t too disappointed!
