coelasquid:

T’be honest I don’t even care about feathers on movie dinosaurs in terms of scientific accuracy all that much because yeah, who knows what these things even looked like, right now we base everything people recognize as “dinosaur” on skin stretched over skeletons like balloon latex. Like everybody loves the little frill dude in the first Jurassic Park and there’s zero evidence to suggest it had frills or acidy spit, that was just a fun thing they made up. I’m mostly just disappointed in them snubbing a whole new dimension of texture and colour they had a carte blanche to work with.

It feels like… if we lived in a world where every movie werewolf was a big hairless snouty dude, and then someone came in and was like “hey you know these are wereWOLVES, we could probably do some cool things with fur and hair” but a handful of nostalgia gluttons were like “ugh you want them to look like DOGS? But dogs are cute and silly, that’s not scary” and the people making the movies were just like “all our marketing data is based on hairless werewolf sales, we don’t know how your hairwolves are gonna sell, we’d rather stick with the sure thing” and then whenever someone was like “wow imagine how much cooler these things could look if you added fur” they had to deal with a bunch of randos coming out of the woodwork to say “Well I LIKE bald werewolves so FIGHT me. They’re just better.” Like imagine every single movie werewolf you’ve ever seen in an alternate reality where Hollywood just decided “bald werewolves only”

There’s a whole new dimension of creature design you can bring to the table with embellishments like feathers, keratinous spines, colours, soft tissue, all that stuff. Everyone I meet who gets riled up about dinosaur feathers thinks you’re demanding they replace t-rex with a giant chicken or something but like dude, no, they could make it even BETTER and MORE intimidating. They can give it red eyes and thorny neck ruff like a bearded vulture, they can give it that iridescent indigo with fleshy crimson flashes like a cassowary, they can invent something completely new with the most flattering accents of feathers they can raise in threatening displays to communicate emotions and spiky overgrown pinfeather spines running down their backs. To say feathers would look “stupid” just betrays a lack of imagination.