Basic Trope: A normally tailed animal is tailless.
- Straight: Alice's pet dog doesn't have a tail.
- Exaggerated:
- Every animal on the planet does not have a tail.
- An animal that is known for having a very large and/or noticeable tail (such as a peacock) does not have one.
- Downplayed:
- The dog's tail is trimmed short.
- The animal doesn't have a tail, but it's a species with a very stubby tail anyway.
- Justified:
- The dog lost his tail.
- The dog had his tail docked.
- The dog was born without a tail because of a birth defect.
- The dog is a breed without a tail.
- Inverted:
- A naturally bob-tailed dog has a very long tail.
- Animals that are naturally tailless (apes, frogs, koalas, etc.) are drawn with tails.
- Subverted:
- Alice's dog looks like it doesn't have a tail... but it was covered up by a mirror. It actually has a tail.
- A monkey is shown without a tail. However, it turns out that it's actually an ape, or a Barbary macaque, which do not have tails in real life.
- Double Subverted:
- That was a sculpture of a tail. The dog was just standing in front of it.
- However, there's another monkey which is of a species that's supposed to have a tail, yet it doesn't have one.
- Parodied: The dog has a fake tail (because it feels self-conscious about lacking a real one).
- Zig-Zagged: Some of the dogs have tails, while the others don't.
- Averted: Alice's pet dog has a tail.
- Enforced:
- The dog had its tail docked before filming.
- Tails are very hard to animate, so the creators had to remove it.
- Human Furniture Is a Pain in the Tail
- Lampshaded: "Hey, why does Alice's dog not have a tail?"
- Invoked: The dog's tail is cut off.
- Exploited: An animal wears pants to make up for (or hide) their lack of a tail.
- Defied: Alice decides to buy it a prosthetic tail.
- Discussed: "This dog has no tail to wag, so how would they know how it's feeling?"
- Conversed: "Sometimes when I see animals in fiction, they don't have tails for whatever reason."
Back to Inexplicably Tailless
