Nope, no horse girl is supposed to have those.

At the end of December, the winter iteration of Comiket, Japan’s largest anime/manga convention, was held in Tokyo. Among the exhibitor at the show was Gift, a Japanese company that specializes in anime character plushies.

Among the products Gift brought with them to sell were 20-centimeter (7.9-inch) tall plushies of Vivlos, one of the anthropomorphic horse girls from anime franchise Umamusume: Pretty Derby. At 6,500 yen (US$43), it’s not exorbitantly expensive, so between the cute design and Umamusume’s enduring popularity, Gift found plenty of takers during the two days the company ran its booth at Comiket, and Vivlos was available at the booth of anime retailer AmiAmi too.

Unfortunately, on January 7 Gift had to issue a statement of apology, as it had come to light that there were defects in the plushie’s design. Put simply, Vivlos has parts that she shouldn’t have, and, really, that no horse girl is supposed to have.

Yes, that’s right: She has ears on the side of her head.

Now, at the risk of drawing attention to something that, once you notice it, you might never be able to unsee, there’s a trick to drawing anthropomorphic animal anime girls where the design scale is tipped pretty heavily towards the human aspects of their design, as is the case with Uma Musume. Basically you just draw an ordinary cute human girl, but then you give her the tail and ears of whatever animal they’re mixed with. However, when you do this, you have to make absolutely sure that they have a hairstyle that covers the sides of their head, because otherwise you have to give them a total of four ears or vast patches of flat skin.

This hairstyling quirk isn’t too touch to slip past casual viewers, since in most situations the precise placement of a character’s ears doesn’t make that big a difference in their body language or how onscreen action is directed. Heck, with the hair leaving it a mystery as to exactly what’s underneath, you could even make an argument that all those anthropomorphic anime girls really do have four working ears…unless you’re talking about Uma Musume, which is so committed to its core concept of “These girls are also horses!” that it goes to great lengths (pun not intended but not regretted either) to show that the phones Vivlos and her fellow horse girls use are designed differently than the ones we non-equine humans do, because their only ears really are the ones on top of their heads.

And just to make sure we’re covering all possible angles here, we should establish that while Vivlos, like all the Uma Musume girls, is based on an actual race horse, the real-life Vivlos (seen here with the number 7), didn’t have a set of human ears either.

In light of the discrepancy with the character’s design, Gift is offering buyers a choice of a full refund or a replacement plushie. However, it looks like some buyers have now decided to sell their extra-eared plushies online, with some apparently going for over 42,000 yen, more than six times their original price.

▼ The four-eared Vivlos seems to have become the upside-down biplane stamp of the anime plushie world.

By the way, with Uma Musume having established a global fanbase and Japan being one of the most popular international travel destinations right now, Gift realizes that some of the fans who bought the plushie at Comiket might not be proficient in Japanese, and some of them might not even be in Japan anymore. In a thoughtful move, the company has posted the complete refund/exchange procedure on its website here in both Japanese and English, including information about international shipping.

Source: Gift (1, 2) via Denfami Gamer
Top image: Gift
Insert images: Gift, Wikipedia/Ogiyoshisan
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