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perijules replied to your photo “No chance, no way, I won’t say it, no, no. It’s too cliche, I won’t…”

I’m so glad I went on an excursion into your cardassians tag to figure out what branched and unchranched filaments look and found this in the meantime lol

Ahaha perfect! That piece is from so long ago now, I can’t remember what sparked it… yet it’s a piece that probably sums up the general levels of goof on this blog!

As for filaments: it’s feathers! Cardassian “hair” is feathers - kind of. Whether it’s straight or fluffy depends on whether they have branched filaments or not. A branched filament means a feather like how you would imagine it: a central stem with the fluffy bits coming off it. Unbranched filament means just the “stem”.

In many species of bird, when they hatch all of their filaments are unbranched, and they’ll turn into full feathers as the bird grows. The same is true of Cardassians, at least to an extent: all Cardassians are born with unbranched filaments - these can grow on the crest of the head, along the neck, spine and tail, as well as on the chin, elbows and ankles. Whether a Cardassian has growth in all these areas depends on their genetics. Similarly, depending on their genetics, as they mature their feathers may grow and fan out, leading to particularly fluffy Cardassians like Jil Orra and Jules. Cardassians with unbranched filaments include Garak and Asha. Some Cardassians have a partially branched filaments, like Seska and Gul Madred. Unbranched filaments are most common, followed by the partial branching. To be covered in fully-formed feathers is fairly rare.

Cardassian scales already take me a lot of time to draw, so I am guilty of oversimplifying their filaments which may cause confusion! A handy visual guide is: straight “hair” = unbranched filaments, curly “hair” = semi-branched and branched filaments.