size of birds

THEY'RE NOT SMALL !!!

sorry for yelling. i'm not actually mad about it. a lot of people really want to die on the hill that the birds in hatoful are the size of pugs and it bugs me just a little. it feels unserious. the objective truth is that there is no strictly established size for birds, there are multiple depictions that all show slight or massive differences. but if i had it my way, i would like the birds to be as human-sized as possible. because you see. there is this writing technique called... the rule... of cool...
making the birds large, but no larger than a golden retriever, i feel like it opens more plot holes, and makes more scenes difficult to imagine in your mind. behold, my list of arguments!

      The Turkey Counter-Argument
The first thing everyone argues back with is the fact that Hiyoko mistook Yuuya's corpse for a turkey, so it means that doves are the size of turkeys. That makes sense at first glance, but let's look at it very insightfully.

      Factory-farmed turkeys are always becoming bigger and bigger. they're already huge as of 2023. by the time the sumatra flu takes over, in 2062, we can imagine that GMO turkeys were even more obscenely big.

      Hiyoko states that she doesn't celebrate christmas, so she's not familiar with it, and by her tone, seems to not have seen many roasted turkeys irl before. She may have met an uplifted turkey before, but since an uplifted turkey would be larger than a feral turkey, she can't use them as a point of reference for a roasted turkey!

      I have (tried to) highlight the approximate shape of the birds bodies when they're plucked and decapitated for cooking... when you compare a turkey's body shape to a dove, you'll notice that doves have much longer necks, and their heads are more proportional to their body. A feral turkey, socially acceptable for eating, seems to be the same shape and size as Yuuya... Eeep!

      "In particular, the brain underwent a large change."

I think a great way to estimate the size of ANY bird in the game, of any species, is by making their heads the same size as humans. It seems logical to create this rule; uplifted bird's brain eventually came to be like the man's.

Scale up a pigeon so that the head is the same size as a humans → Accurate Hatoful Boyfriend.

^ when you apply that rule to birds like cranes, flamingoes, and pelicans, you can shit yourself instantly!
I think it's fine if some bird species are somewhat shorter or taller, thier heads somewhat smaller or bigger.
rule of cool: if the birds in hatoful are huge, then they're basically like sentient dinosaurs, and that's badass
it's also #deep because raptorkind returned to it's roots. more powerful, when it comes to physical prowess, but developing sentience made them prone to existentialism, grief, mental illness, and capitalism. in becoming the apex race, adopting human-made cultures and government styles, it becomes clearer than ever that "man" isn't fated to be anything. it's the systems that trap us...
Remember kazuaki-kun...?... He is tired of being alive, wants to die, but it's not because of life itself-- it's because he was born in our merciless world, where you're expected to spend your entire life working for someone else's approval, to earn money, to pay bills, to not die. i almost started going on a tangent and analysis of kazuaki-kun but i stopped myself. you're safe for now.