Mix-and-Match Critters/Playing With
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.
- 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.
- Alternatively, everything that's living on this planet is a bizarre hybrid, even the plants and technology.
- The hybrid also has a mix and match name that is a Incredibly Lame Pun.
- It is revealed that a mermaid was born when a woman slept with a fish.
- 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.
- The writer wants to make a Shout Out to The Wuzzles, Spliced or any other work with mix-and-match critters.
- 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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