Mix-and-Match Critters/Playing With

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Basic trope: An animal has the combined physical appearance of two or more species.

  • Straight: June has an otter's body with bat wings, a long, pointed tongue and Cute Little Fangs.
  • Exaggerated: June has an otter's body, the forelegs of a canine, the rear legs of a horse, rabbit ears, a beak, a tongue that's forked and raspy, a rat's tail, a pouch, an udder, gills, tentacles, antennae, four eyes (two of which are on stalks) and the wings of a wasp. She breathes fire and can lay eggs.
  • Justified: June is from another planet where otterlike creatures have the aforementioned bat-like traits.
    • Alternatively, June is a commonly-accepted mashup with a long history of use in fiction, such as a gryphon or jackalope.
    • Also alternatively, June is a mashup that's possible in Real Life, such as a liger or goat/sheep hybrid.
    • Also alternatively, the creature is entirely new and unprecedented, but June has to describe it in terms the common layperson can understand, which means referencing the morphological traits of established species.
  • Inverted: June is all-otter on a planet where everyone else is a mix-and-match critter.
  • Subverted: The wings, tongue and fangs are part of a disguise...
  • Double Subverted: ...which conceals a much more elaborate chimera.
  • Parodied: June contains so many composite, mismatched animal character traits that she looks like a crazy quilt (for instance, one leg is a tentacle, one leg is a duck's foot, one leg ends in a hoof and one leg is a human's). Basically like exaggerated, only more random.
  • Deconstructed: Finding that she is the last wild bat-otter, scientists capture June and closely analyze her to discover how she became that way.
  • Reconstructed: Over time, they successfully get her to breed with both bats and otters and thus save bat-otters from extinction.
  • Zig Zagged: June's parents are an otter and a bat. She has three other siblings: a normal otter, a normal bat, and a bat with webbed toes, whiskers and a long, thick tail. The bat with otter traits marries a kangaroo, and they have a kangaroo-bat child and an otter child.
  • Averted: A bat and an otter have kids, but the kid is either a bat or an otter.
  • Enforced: The writer was told to make all of the characters composites of at least two animals.
  • Lampshaded: "It's like I'm half-bat or something."
  • Invoked: June undergoes surgery to attach the aforementioned bat traits.
  • Defied: A scientist tries to get a bat and an otter to breed, but doesn't consider the experiment a success until the offspring are "normal" animals.
  • Discussed: "Apparently, June's parents are an otter and a bat."
  • Conversed: "You gotta love science. We can mix any two animals together now."
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