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Just to clarify, this is a serious question. I mean it. I'm legitimately wondering and am looking for feedback on this following question:

How close can an intelligent homonid species get to having anime girl proportions? Shoujo and moe girls are often complained about for having "unrealistic body types" and such on twitter. As someone whose studied these art-styles and also real-life human proportions, I'll admit, they can sometimes be a bit absurd. However, with the studies I've gone on the variety of shapes primates in general can be in, I get the feeling it's PLAUSIBLE we could get an uncannily anime-like female bodytype to function in real life physically and biologically.

General changes that would need to be made to the human shape to match these waifu types would include, from my general observations-

  1. A thinly-built, lighter, lankier frame, with skinnier limb bones and narrow ribs. This goes beyond the scope of Marfan Syndrome and extreme ectomorphic body-types, and into the inhumanely thin frame territory. The only exception to this is the thighs and pelvis. If these changes were made to the human form, would the body still be capable of supporting whatever weight it has left? How much strength could a body like this possess? Would the density or structure of the skeleton or twitch-fibres of the muscles need to be altered in some way?
  2. Extremely broad pelvises and hips. To contrast the light, thinly-built remainder of the body, anime girls often have proportionally broad pelvises (compared to a real-life girl of the same size, it can be argued their hips are actually the same. the anime girl simply has a thinner, narrower version of everything else)
  3. Enormous Breasts. This one's kinda obvious, it's what anime girls are best known for. What would these breasts need to be made of to be supported on the thin spindly spines and waists of these hypothetical waifu homonids?
  4. Proportionally large heads. Humans are generally 7 to 7 and a half heads tall, but these anime characters, despite being of similar height, are 5 to 6 heads tall, only occasionally reaching 7 or above. This means they, on average, have bigger heads than us. Combine this with the thinner neck, can such a head be supported at all? What changes would need to be done?
  5. Facial Proportions: Considering that the size of the human brain isn't ENTIRELY decided by size (as people with pituitary disorders would come to prove), would it be possible to shrink the size of the brain (but keep it's neural network structure) to make room for the giant anime eyes? Speaking of which, the eyes of anime girls (or just "Moe" characters in general) have eyes set VERY low on their faces, similar to human infants, which further augments the feeling of their immense size. This, among other things, shrinks the rest of the face down. Can the mouth and nose afford to be shrunken down too? With a dramatically lighter body frame, it could be afforded to breathe in less oxygen.

Overall, the objective of this idea isn't to simply MIMIC the proportions of a Moe anime girl, but to uncannily HAVE them. Can a homonid species possess traits like these?

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  • $\begingroup$ Sure, if you re-arrange the organs in the torso, have slightly thicker bones in the back and neck for that large, heavy head, and update the musculature for the new weight distribution.. $\endgroup$
    – user535733
    Commented Jan 25, 2021 at 3:54
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    $\begingroup$ I don't see why not. However, they would not likely not be able to survive outside of an urban setting in the modern world. You are missing a key trait however: extremely volumous, gravity defying hair that comes in every colour of the rainbow. $\endgroup$
    – DKNguyen
    Commented Jan 25, 2021 at 5:27
  • $\begingroup$ Good news for the body-to-head size... have you looked at children? $\endgroup$
    – Matthew
    Commented Jan 25, 2021 at 13:01
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    $\begingroup$ You're watching the wrong anime if you think that all anime heroines have #3. $\endgroup$
    – NomadMaker
    Commented Jan 25, 2021 at 21:11

2 Answers 2

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We can get pretty close with plastic surgery

Maybe we've watched different anime; but points 1, 2, and 3, we can get pretty close with with existing humans. Thin waists, tiny frame, large breasts, big hips. These characteristics basically exist as a small percentage of the population naturally, and surgeries to reduce the waist and enlage the breasts are among the most common.

The eyes and face are the trickiest, but with a bit of plastic surgery we can get pretty close.

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    $\begingroup$ Worth noting that those pictures are a combo of plastic surgery and makeup trickery, but facial colouration could easily mimic contouring/eye definition tricks on a more permanent basis. $\endgroup$
    – Joe Bloggs
    Commented Jan 25, 2021 at 15:20
  • $\begingroup$ Anime girl is loved not only because of body proportion, it also depends on color and shade. The pictures above matched the proportion, but...it just go into the uncanny valley for me. $\endgroup$
    – Faito Dayo
    Commented Oct 10, 2021 at 0:31
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Tarsiers (Tarsiidae) have what amounts to real-life anime eyes.

Most of the features you are asking about could be accounted for by some kind of neoteny (i.e., retention of juvenile traits into adulthood). Notably, larger heads, larger eyes, smaller noses, and shorter limbs are all symptoms of neoteny. It is also possible to mix neotenic and peramorphic (the opposite of neoteny, where the development of features is accelerated beyond the adult phenotype) traits in a single species, human skulls are heavily neotenic but we have a peramorphic nose and limbs.

Most of what you want with breasts, limbs, etc. could probably be achieved by shrinking the torso. The way in which the postcrania of anime girls differs the most from real people is that they don't have as elongate of a torso, which takes up 50% of our body. In real life the torso is three or more heads tall, but in anime characters it is often closer to two and a half.

Probably the biggest hurdle is going to be the neck. Anime girls typically have a much thinner neck than IRL humans, which will restrict the amount of space available for the windpipe, carotids, etc. Compression of the tissues in this region leads to IRL health problems like sleep apnea. Combined with the reduced jaws that may give your anime girls a population-wide case of sleep apnea.

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