#natural is older it involves a human making a negotiated pact with an adult harpy who then fucks off when they get bored

[ranticore]

i actually drew these last year for my own self-reference and today i wanted to draw something in sai, found that sai was having a rough day, so instead i dug these up in procreate and coloured them. some kings and their fun faces

the winglets/ear wings/whatevers are not lift generating surfaces they're mostly for communication. they can hide their whole face under those things.

some of these expressions are inborn but some must be taught (i.e flinching, hiding the face, etc probably looks the same no matter what, but the more complex expressions conveying social dominance are copied from older harpies). human-raised harpies struggle to express themselves and are considered (ironically) very dangerous to be around because they won't give proper warning when they're about to be violent. and they are often violent; a major struggle of working with an imprinted harpy is their food aggression and resource guarding behaviour. most falconers in the classic tradition [taking and raising eggs] are missing at least one fingertip.