Enough with the dead butterflies (2017)

https://www.emilydamstra.com/please-enough-dead-butterflies/

by punnerud • 2 years ago

324 94 2 years ago

tomrod• 2 years ago

{2017}

cowsup• 2 years ago

Great post. I've drawn butterflies before (both professionally and as a hobby) and never once realized I was drawing their "dead" state. Nice tidbit that I'll keep in mind for the future.

ajmurmann• 2 years ago

So many previous discussion. Here is the one with the most comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27948008

dang• 2 years ago

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Please, Enough with the Dead Butterflies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37341159 - Aug 2023 (3 comments)

Please, enough with the dead butterflies (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27948008 - July 2021 (210 comments)

Enough with the Dead Butterflies (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21788356 - Dec 2019 (28 comments)

Enough with the dead butterflies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14460013 - June 2017 (163 comments)

geor9e• 2 years ago

Saved You A Click: Butterflies are often drawn by illustrators like dead specimens, with their wings pinned far above their head, when living butterflies do not hold their forewings very far forward of their head.

xanderlewis• 2 years ago

Interesting article. I think (to take it perhaps too seriously) the butterfly used in designs of cushions, earrings, etc. is more a cultural icon than it is an attempt at accurate biological description — it's something analogous to ♡ vs. a realistic depiction of an actual heart.

For whatever reason, we've come to think of butterflies as looking the way they do in insect collections, and I don't think even knowledge of what the dead and alive specimens look like would make me want to draw it any other way. A 'dead' one just looks more butterflyish!

I also have a feeling that it has something to do with the (more cultural than biological) distinction between moths and butterflies. For some reason, the latter are considered examples of exquisite beauty and the former usually an ugly (even fear-inducing) nuisance. Drawing butterflies in the classic 'butterfly' shape is a way to make this difference clearer — even if it's entirely inaccurate.

UniverseHacker• 2 years ago

Interesting take. The “over round crescent moon” has also come to be a symbol for the moon that isn’t representative of how the moon actually looks.

CUViper• 2 years ago

The crescent moon is often depicted with the dark part transparent too, e.g. with stars in that space.

makeitdouble2• 2 years ago

That should be the right take, if it had no other connotations.

For instance heart becoming ♡ is fine I think because we otherwise don't deal with raw hearts and they're only part of whole.

It would be another issue if used the equivalent of the zombie emoji for "human" or a steak image for "cow"

I guess it comes down to how much we care about butterflies, how often we see them, and how much we don't want them dead. I can see why people looking more at butterflies in their daily lives could be bothered, and also how that's probably a lost cause as 10x more people massively never leave cities.

lisper• 2 years ago

zombie emoji for "human" or a steak image for "cow"

I think a better analogy is Vetruvian Man [1]. In fact, I think it's a pretty good analogy because it shows a human splayed out in almost exactly the same unnatural way that canonical dead butterflies are. Personally, I don't find either one particularly disturbing. Each serves a purpose IMHO.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitruvian_Man

lukan3• 2 years ago

"I guess it comes down to how much we care about butterflies, how often we see them, and how much we don't want them dead."

For me it comes down to how much we care about reality, vs. catering to our fantasy conception of what reality is.

Fantasy in general is awesome - if you are aware that is is fantasy. But too many people mixed both concepts and this is bothering me, not particular butterflies.

I think nobody thinks, a real heart looks like ♡. But people do think, butterflies look in real life, like when they are dead. It is a quite trivial thing here, but the same happens with much more important things as well.

andrewflnr2• 2 years ago

I don't think this is a great analogy. The popular "heart" is rather abstract and does not directly depict anything biological. The popular "butterfly" is very concrete and precisely depicts something biological, namely a dead butterfly.

Taking the article, again, perhaps too seriously: Just because a symbol has gained cultural currency doesn't mean we need to accept it as is. We can change. We can fight our immediate symbol associations. Personally I think we should.

bawolff2• 2 years ago

The popular "heart" is rather abstract and does not directly depict anything biological.

My understanding is it depicts the leaves of the plant Silphium, which in the ancient world was used as birth control.

ssnri• 2 years ago

The popular "heart" is rather abstract and does not directly depict anything biological

Just gotta think lower down

Waterluvian• 2 years ago

I wish we didn’t have to stain those beautiful illustrations with a giant watermark.

stavros3• 2 years ago

And that's exactly why the watermark is there, so your wish can come true (for money).

kragen6• 2 years ago

in spanish i've adopted the portmanteau word muertiposa for this phenomenon, from muerto/muerta 'dead' and mariposa 'butterfly'. if you're gothy you might prefer that the butterflies embroidered on your backpack be dead

the underground high school newspaper i wrote for was called 'the crucified butterfly'

franciscop2• 2 years ago

I think this must be a local sub-culture word, as a Spaniard I've never heard "muertiposa" and google search for "muertiposa" literally returns me no results.

stavros3• 2 years ago

The GP does say "_I've_ adopted", seems pretty specific to them.

kragen6• 2 years ago

it's very, very local. my wife made it up, and this is probably the first time it's been posted to the web

quickthrower2• 2 years ago

What other things are there that exhibit this phenomenon? I am curious, I bet there are quite a few.

Anything where the image we associate with X is not the real X for some historical reason.

Or more generally it could extend to prose, art etc.

kragen6• 2 years ago

literally everything in the world

everything you have been taught is a lie

literally nothing is the way you think it is, because only extreme oversimplifications of reality fit in our heads

jachee2• 2 years ago

Aaaaand now I have a new pet peeve to put next to Flag Code, driving norms, and the Oxford comma.

ethbr1• 2 years ago

Flag Code, driving norms, the Oxford comma and dead butterflies?

steanne• 2 years ago

:shakefist:

bee_rider• 2 years ago

Commas and dead butterflies seems like an odd combination for a department, but the Oxford journal of entolinguistics makes it work.

jachee2• 2 years ago

For, for, for, and against, respectively.

rzzzt• 2 years ago

Frankenstein's monster?

marshray• 2 years ago

The monster's name was Frankenstein.

His birthright identity was the central theme of the story.

Terr_3• 2 years ago

Another annoyance of "fiction tropes taken for reality" happens in movies and games, where people have become so accustomed to seeing camera flaws that some start to believe the presence of those flaws indicates "realism"... Even when the truth is the exact opposite--unless the player-avatar is supposed to have inferior mechanical eyes.

For example, Depth of field, lens flares, chromatic aberration without wearing glasses, etc.

thfuran2• 2 years ago

Depth of field is a human eyes thing too. Though I'm with you on lens flare and film grain added just as stylistic flourishes rather than to convey "this scene is camera footage". It's like deliberately adding simulated compression artifacts.

Terr_3• 2 years ago

Depth of field is a human eyes thing too.

Not in in the dumb way games do it: You don't need to turn your entire head to make something come into focus, or aim it with with a gun.

strogonoff5• 2 years ago

Imagine you record audio with perfect fidelity and extreme dynamic range. Now, you have the tiniest and the loudest sounds captured; how do you go about conveying this work?

The answer is compression, equalization, all those tricks. And yes, that lowers fidelity, and yes, you will have to make choices as to what’s more important to focus perceptive attention.

Similarly with video: many fidelity-lowering tricks serve a purpose. Film grain, aside from conveying a mood, can mask excess detail in shadows and highlights, the detail that would detract from the story you’re telling. A headlight flare can bring attention to the coming car; if your hero or villain is in that car, that’s useful. Panning over a fleeting sun flare, you momentarily focus on the environment and can use it to bridge attention between subjects or scenes.

It’s all a complicated dance, and it all exists in time, inseparably from both the immediately preceding material and the larger current cultural context.

strogonoff5• 2 years ago

Unless the fidelity of the material (be it visual or audial) exactly matches that of the real world[0], there is no truly accurate depiction of reality you can convey to the observer—and with any lossy representation you have to make choices as to how to represent it. You will have adopted a “look” whether you want it or not; it is very much part of your creative effort (the less of it, the more work and creative choices are left up to the observer to filter). Basing your look on the preexisting and familiar is good because your work does not exist in vacuum; your observers carry common cultural baggage in context of which it is perceived.

The look furthers your creative goals—conveys a mood or a feeling, focuses observer’s attention on what you consider important, etc. Here, fidelity works against you. All the figurative flare—be it compressing dynamic range, selecting your color palette, artificially lowering the frame rate, adding motion blur, film grain, lens artifacts and literal flares, etc.—lowers it selectively.

That particular kind of flare can absolutely be misplaced, sure. For example, cartoon animation styles is an example of another extreme but quite well-established look, and arguably incompatible (the fidelity is already very selective from the get-go). Less extreme is 3D animation, where lens flare and the like can sometimes look uncanny.

The case of dead butterflies, similarly, exists in cultural context. In some (most?) cultures, the symbol of the butterfly would represent something very far from death. However, once the awareness of the difference between a dead and alive butterfly is widespread enough, then one simply must adapt and adopt that new context because you are risking the dead butterfly to be interpreted as an intentional statement.

[0] Which is not going to be technically possible for some time, and likely not at all even in theory due to the good old map-territory conflict.

Terr_3• 2 years ago

there is no truly accurate depiction of reality

A bit of a nirvana fallacy there. This isn't about limitations in technology, nor (directly) about artistic choices to set a mood.

What I'm annoyed at is the combination of (A) things which are not technological limitations that are deliberately simulated and (B) how I've seen them tie into factually false beliefs about "realism" among the audience.

Consider: "Oh, I got one of those new e-books, and it's about Romeo and Juliet. Some of the text contains ink that is blotted or runny, which makes their relationship extra-realistic."

Anotheroneagain• 2 years ago

Something similar happens with loudpeakers. Some people got so used to the distorted, boomy bass that was ubiquitous until recently, that they insist that speakers that don't distort have "no bass".

reidacdc3• 2 years ago

I love this, it's got that "technical correctness is the best correctness" vibe going on big-time, and it will probably change the way I see that slice of the world.

Butterflies loom weirdly large in my life, at one point many years ago my grandmother decided that butterflies were my wife's "thing" (they aren't, we're not sure how this happened), and so for many years we got butterfly-themed gifts from her. It was merely odd, so we just rolled with it, but now we have various butterfly tchochkes around, all of which, a brief survey reveals, are in the dead pose.

ffsm8• 2 years ago

Can confirm, I could never forget this article since I read it a long time ago and have developed a habit of always checking every butterfly depiction I see if its in a dead pose.

pooper• 2 years ago

at one point many years ago my grandmother decided that butterflies were my wife's "thing" (they aren't, we're not sure how this happened),

This is a wild shot in the dark but do you:

1. Live near Westminster, Colorado 2. Have had your grandmother visit you several times 3. And each time your wife took her to visit the butterfly pavilion?

reidacdc3• 2 years ago

Sorry for the late reply, but no to all three. We lived in Chicago when this became a thing. My grandmother did live in Denver (well, Aurora) though.

contr-error• 2 years ago

I see dead butterflies.

yazzku• 2 years ago

Maybe it would help if your illustrations where CC-licensed instead of copyrighted.

https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/

pengaru• 2 years ago

This is one of those things where now that I know about it, I see it everywhere. People stick butterfly images on all sorts of things, and 99% of the time they're in the dead and mounted style.

reidacdc3• 2 years ago

First hit for me is the Bluesky social media logo.

NavinF• 2 years ago

Good on them. A live butterfly logo would look like a moth

refulgentis• 2 years ago

That is an utterly depressing brainworm, Roko's Basilisk

notRobot• 2 years ago

I remember reading this through HN a long time ago, and finding that it made solid points, and sharing it with several people over the years. However, I have wisened over the years and feel that I better understand what is worthwhile being pedantic about. Visual cultural representations of things don't have to look like the thing they are showing (the heart symbol doesn't look like a real heart, emoji don't look like real people or things).

That only dead butterflies have their wings in the orientation most commonly represented is a fun piece of trivia, but IMO not worth caring about beyond that.

Jensson5• 2 years ago

Natural usually looks better than obviously fake, so it is worth pointing it out if you want quality. It is like how fake round drawn breasts doesn't look as good as more realistically drawn ones, but it is much easier to draw round balls than the more nicer real shapes.

So for these butterfly images they would look a ton better just by not having perfectly angled T-pose wings. Just varying that a bit and never having perfect angles would get you almost the same pictures but looking much more natural.

bawolff2• 2 years ago

I feel like the objectionable part is not that its unrealistic, its that its dead, which is kind of morbid.

the heart symbol doesn't look like a real heart,

As a fun trivia fact, it might not look like the organ but it does look like an acient form of contraception (Silphium) which seems more symbolically correct anyways.

Kaijo• 2 years ago

It isn't just a question of their visual representation in culture. Many major taxonomic works on Lepidoptera only provide illustrations of species in the pinned-out format. This is even more of an issue with moths than butterflies as moths show such a huge diversity of distinctive postures and wing configurations -- tucked up and folded away and overlapped in all kinds of unlikely and bizarre morphologies. I can think of so many weird examples, but to take one, check out this lasiocampid moth I found in Borneo some years back: https://i.imgur.com/auo2t9l.jpeg

If you manage to find that species in the standard work to consult, the eighteen-volume Moths of Borneo[1], you'll only see images of a pinned-out specimen, which makes it look like all the others. The motivation for this was to provide a standardized format for the formal visual depiction moth and butterfly anatomy, principally for taxonomists who will be working with dead specimens, and where the actual delimitation and description of taxa is done mostly using microscopic characters. But how moths hold their wings gives very valuable diagnostic information for both field ID and broader questions of classification, that would be very useful to see in a standard reference. This is increasingly recognized and I know of several recent large monographs and ongoing surveys that emphasize including photographs or illustrations of the in situ appearance.

[1] https://www.mothsofborneo.com/

DonaldFisk2• 2 years ago

There's a good reason for it. Although you can see the hindwings on most (but not all) butterfly species when they're resting, this isn't the case with most moths. So, in collections of lepidoptera (butterflies and moths), entomologists adopted the practice of spreading the wings so that you can see both pairs clearly. It might not be natural but it's more helpful for identification purposes.

Jensson5• 2 years ago

It is like having a collection of human photos were they all T-pose. Makes identification easy, but not very beautiful or natural.

DonaldFisk2• 2 years ago

Yes, it's a bit like those paintings of galloping horses made before the invention of short exposure photography showed how horses really look when they gallop. I suppose it's down to laziness - people could go out and take photographs of butterflies feeding at flowers, but no, they just copy a picture from a field guide and hope most people don't notice.

jojobas2• 2 years ago

Maybe it's conditioning or whatever, but I find butterflies more beautiful when dead.

Maybe it's about more symmetry and balance so not just conditioning.

Izkata• 2 years ago

Butterflies are 3D, this depiction is 2D. Whether it's an accurate depiction depends on the viewing angle in addition to what the butterfly is doing - here's some photography of monarch butterflies, including a few side shots that would have the wings swept forward if it was viewed from behind: https://www.neurotraveler.com/home/2022/9/20/bif-butterflies...

Mostly seems to be when they're trying to land on a flower such as in this one: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5b9bf6c9266c07...

Jensson5• 2 years ago

That butterfly isn't T-posing though. The butterfly T-pose you see in human created images has that black line holding up the wings be perfectly perpendicular to the body.

See this for example, they drew the butterfly as a bunch of T-posing sequences, it doesn't look like that when flying at all, it T-posing in one image would make sense but they do it for every image usually which is really off:

https://media.istockphoto.com/id/185302115/photo/monarch-but...

phyzome• 2 years ago

Posts like this are great because once I know about it, I'll be seeing it everywhere. It'll drive me mildly nuts but it's also like I'm in on a big secret.

w10-1• 2 years ago

I had to laugh out loud.

In the butterfly lifecycle, the caterpillar lives its own life, but then at its end shrouds and digests itself, to the point where only the rudiments of the nervous system persist. Then the butterfly itself grows out of this reduction of self to an egg.

In the face of this astonishing life-death-life-cycle, we're complaining that butterfly wings should be depicted in their natural orientation?

Butterflies are awe-inspiring, frightening and amazing. But not mainly for their pretty wings.

Every living thing dies - yes, even us. But perhaps these words will persist in the internet archive, as dead wings sit in dusty drawers, to one day inspire :)

arealaccount• 2 years ago

This is going to follow me like the post about the person that hates fake window shutters

bombcar2• 2 years ago

Or bad kerning.

darekkay• 2 years ago

Similar, emoji-oriented posts:

- Entomologist rates ant emojis: https://www.boredpanda.com/entomologist-rates-ant-emojis/

- Which emoji scissors close: https://wh0.github.io/2020/01/02/scissors.html

- A thread of rating every horse emoji: https://twitter.com/jelenawoehr/status/1191872816372600832

- Ranking the "Ringed Planet" emojis: https://twitter.com/physicsJ/status/1232662211438370817

- Reviewing Steam Loco Emojis: https://twitter.com/BisTheFairy/status/1192557730709622790

- Talk about Telescope emojis: https://twitter.com/BeckePhysics/status/1233414553607819267

- Snake emoji review: https://anothertiredmonster.tumblr.com/post/156610510939/sna...

- Would you survive a skydive with an emoji parachute? (my own post): https://darekkay.com/blog/parachute-emoji/

KineticLensman• 2 years ago

A similar example is scissor icons and emojis that wouldn’t work in practice (finger holes that would clash if you tried to close the scissors). Don’t have a link now but since I read the article concerned I can’t unsee non-functional scissors.

ghusbands• 2 years ago

This isn't fully accurate. Look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUZmkw6YY0o#t=33s to see a butterfly in flight that does approximately manage the t-pose (the camera isn't at quite the right angle, but it's clear to see that the forewings are very forward and basically in t-pose). So butterflies in flight _do_ get this pose, from certain angles.

tschwimmer• 2 years ago

Thank you, I came here to say this. It seems like in many species of butterflies, the tips of the wings come relatively far in front of the head at the "apex" of the "downstroke" of the wings during flight.

fennecbutt• 2 years ago

"Dead Butterfly" is admittedly a great band or song name

josfredo• 2 years ago

I bet no one at Bluesky is aware of this.

jakebsky• 2 years ago

Haha! Pretty sure most people on the team have seen this post, even prior to the logo choice.

Speaking personally, it just strikes me as very pedantic point with not much substance behind it. I do get why this post is "ackchyually" bait though.

Enough with the dead butterflies (2017)

Related Stories