hands, eyes, hair, and your choice or other features
Tobias’ hands are HUGE. Not thick and bulky, like his father’s--instead they are very sleek and elegant like a pianist’s--but they are indeed massive and very good for holding. To give a sense of perspective, see this image of canon Lotor’s hand compared to Allura’s:
In this screenshot you can also clearly see Lotor’s claws coming out of his fingertips--Tobias has the same claws, long, sharp and jet-black. When he takes his gloves off you can also see that he has hand beans, which correspond to the toe beans on his feet. When he was hiding on Earth, he wore gloves to disguise the fact that he had these alien features, even when it was hot during the summer.
Tobias’ icons have brown eyes, but that was because I intended them to be used in multiple verses where he might have brown eyes instead of a supernatural color. (Which…didn’t end up happening but I’m not going to ask the person who INDIVIDUALLY COLORED these icons to redo all the eyes just to make them accurate to this blog.) Instead, Galra Tobias’ eyes are so dark that they look black at first glance but when they catch the light or are seen in strong lighting, you can see that they’re actually an incredibly deep, dark blue. His eyes are soulful and mysterious, especially with that particular color contrasted with his yellow sclera, beautiful and commanding, and bright with an intelligence that holds the entire universe within.
His eyes are also a slim, fox-eye shape similar to Lotor and Zarkon’s canon eyes and also to what I headcanon a lot of Galra have naturally. (When the fox eye trend rolled around, it did give him a confidence boost because he basically had that eye shape already!) His eyes actually look rather Asian, which is something he’s quite self-conscious of--he would much rather have wide doe eyes, like Western beauty standards. But what he fails to appreciate is that his eyes are fine and sleek, their shape just as and alluring as their color, and they help give him his characteristic “hot morally grey anime character with a dark and mysterious past” aesthetic.
Tobias’ hair is actually curly! He just has straight hair in his icons because hair textures that are anything other than straight really aren’t common in anime. My headcanon for his hair texture is that it resembles Lisa Edelstein’s, who is a Jewish actress. As his bio states, he has dark brown-black hair that looks purely black but when it catches the light, it has a purple sheen/undertones which he gets from his Galra lineage. It’s something very unique to him as a hybrid, since Galra don’t have black fur that have this sheen--even melanistic Galra just have plain black fur. And it’s super soft, too! Galra have incredibly thick and soft fur, and so Tobias’ hair is very thick and silky soft as well. You could put your hand into it and the feel is such that you’d think you’d be able to just keep going and pushing your hand down into the big, vast softness forever. (But you can’t actually do this, since Native people don’t let just anyone touch their hair.) Plus did I mention that it’s healthy as heck? Even if someone repeatedly took a baseball bat to that hair it would still come out the other end looking just as shiny and perfect as before.
Tobias has a love-hate relationship with his hair. When he feels good about it, he thinks it’s his only good feature and takes superb care of it--he treats it with essential oils and other moisturizers, he puts it in a ponytail before he sleeps to protect it, heck just like mainverse Lotor he even had shampoo that was custom-made specifically for his hair to keep it extra shiny and voluminous. When he feels bad about it, he gets it straightened (which usually always comes undone after a month or two because thick curly hair is INCREDIBLY stubborn and cannot be dominated by this insignificant little thing you call a “perm.”) His mom scolds the hell out of him every time he straightens his hair because she knows he only does it due to 342 years of internalized antisemitism and quite frankly she’s a strong beautiful woman who doesn’t take it lying down when he tells her that the features he inherited from her are ugly. At least after several decades of unbelievable self-loathing he’s come to a place where he’s not totally convinced that his hair is awful. Progress…?
And of course, where would I be if I didn’t describe Tobias’s pretty, pretty face? Like we know what it looks like from his faceclaim, but since I love him so much I have to wax poetic about just how pretty he is because god damn.
Tobias just doesn’t appreciate the fact that he’s actually quite classically handsome. He has amazing facial symmetry. He has skin as smooth and flawless as the marble statue that he could be. He has a gorgeous V-line jaw and a firm chin that perfectly balances his tall, strong aquiline nose and just as perfectly complements his high, prominent cheekbones. He thinks his face is all angles and points because he’s a good deal more angular than Galra faces usually are, but nowhere is his face overly angular, everything has a sense of balance and harmony to it that makes him very nice to look at. Pidge often tells him that if the Greeks and Romans discovered America they’d be making statues that looked like him and honestly, where is the lie? There’s not a single person in the faceclaim world who looks exactly like him because celebs tend to look like boring white men with the exact same boring white hairstyles and not like hot morally grey anime characters with dark and mysterious pasts, but if I had to pick a RL faceclaim who looked at least mostly like him it would be Haatepah Clearbear (1, 2, 3). I’m kinda hesitant to use him because I have heard some nasty things about him (look in his tag on Tumblr and you’ll see) so Tobias doesn’t have an official faceclaim, but he’s all I got as a ref so there you go.
