[warning for discussion of animal abuse, and spoilers for Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom]
Anonymous:
What do you think about the theory that the Indoraptor's mainly quadrupedal stance is a result of him growing up being stuck in a too small enclosure, VS it just being his more natural stance?
It’s possible, too! I mostly think it’s a result of his head and arms combined being too heavy for him to comfortably maintain a bipedal stance for long at a time, as a consequence of his in-universe designing involving more attention to more-teeth-more-claws than to the resulting animal’s health. But even if that’s the cause, the living conditions definitely didn’t help.
He looks to me even more imbalanced than the Indominus, whom we see drop onto four limbs a couple times, but it’s only for a moment, and for things like catching herself on her arms when she falls over and steadying herself when she bends forward to roar. She’s more sturdily built and capable of supporting the weight of her also big head and arms, while the Indoraptor is pretty skin-and-bones anywhere but his limbs (but that could also be a result of living conditions), and also has proportionally bigger arms and a longer neck that puts the weight of his head further forward.
I guess it’s natural for him as much as anything about his existence is natural, but his forelimbs are arms, not forelegs, so they’re not built for walking, either. I kind of cringe in sympathy every time I see the Indoraptors’ roaring animation in Jurassic World Evolution, which has them stand up almost upright and then drop forward to stand on four limbs as they roar, and I just think someday that poor dinosaur is going to dislocate its shoulders or break its wrists doing that.
Basically Indoraptors are dinosaur pugs but at the other extreme on the scale of cutesy vs. scary traits impractically maximized.
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(In reply to a post about wondering whether the Indoraptor's habit of tapping his sickle claws to the floor is a bored tic he developed because he was isolated, or an example of using echolocation as a hunting tactic:)
It could be both! Understimulated captive animals still try to express their natural behaviors, a lot of which for the Indoraptor would be hunting and practicing skills surrounding that. Maybe it started as a bored, meaningless motion, but he noticed he can use it to explore the space he’s kept in beyond what he sees from the cage.
I bet he developed a lot of skills like this that his handlers had no idea of. Like the Indominus quietly discovered she can camoflage and mess with her body temperature, and kept that to herself until those skills would be useful for her escape.
It might still not be voluntary or conscious all the time, especially if it’s something he’s learned to make useful rather than something he started doing for that purpose. Could be a nervous tic. Could be raptor equivalent of stimming. He doesn’t exactly need echolocation to know where Maisie is when entering her room, but we see him doing the claw-tapping anyway.
In any case it’s probably something he’s done a lot already before escaping, considering how for a sickle claw the claw tip doesn’t actually look very sharp. I don’t think we see him use the sickle claws for cutting at all.
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Some notes on using game footage from Jurassic World Evolution as reference for drawing the Indoraptor prototype seen in the movie:
There are some distinct differences in how the Indos in the game move and how the Indo in the movie does.
There’s of course an explanation for this in both the doylist and watsonian sense. The game’s JWFK update came out at about the same time the movie did, or actually even a bit before the movie, so the people making the game had limited reference for animating their new dinos, especially one that’s as legitimately weird as the Indoraptor is, though obviously they had access to some movie footage etc. in advance. And also, it can be assumed that different individuals just move a little differently, and the Indos in JWE would probably be a more advanced version since they’re apparently mass-produced now in the AU that JWE takes place in, while the prototype is the first and at the time only one. There’s bound to have been some debugging between Mistake: The Dinosaur and something they’d be willing to put on display in a theme-park.
Some of the differences I’ve noticed include:
- The JWE Indoraptors’ animations have them walk on four limbs and run on two. We see the prototype use both stances for both walking and running and often switch back and forth between them, and obviously a movie creature is going to have more varied movement than an AI in a video game, but in general the prototype seems to prefer the other way around from what’s default in JWE.
- The JWE Indoraptors move digitigrade on all four limbs, meaning even when quadrupedal they don’t put the heel of the palm to the ground as they walk. The prototype at least sometimes does. Which I think means the JWE Indoraptor is an animal meant for both bipedal and quadrupedal stance, while the prototype Indoraptor is a bipedal animal that for some reason has adapted to also move on four limbs. He places his hands on the ground the way a human would.
And it is possible that having him look uncanny-valley creepy in general is what they’re going for more than that he is literally part human genetically, but I think the way he’s animated achieves the goal of looking unsettling in any case. There are some moments where he moves more like a human in a raptor suit than the JP1 raptors that were sometimes actually played by humans in raptor suits did. Like,
coming out of my cage and I’ve been moving like a proper dinosaur~
wait what
what the fuck??
So in conclusion JWE is really useful for seeing the dinosaurs in good lighting and such, but as ridiculous as the Indoraptors in the game already are, they’re still not half as weird as the prototype.
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