#spaths

So, what am I even talkin about? Spaths are these lads

and they've got long flippy-floppy tails with manipulationy-bits at the end called folia

and they're super fun! I like their design a lot. But one question that I have when visualizing them in my mind (which I do a lot thanks to a certain someone) is: how does the tail rest?

The folium has two distinct sides, one with the "spathe" (the wide flat bit), and the other with what is simply called the "thumb". Assuming bilateral symmetry, the question becomes: Is the spathe naturally resting on the dorsal (top) side of the tail, or is it the thumb? This question is actually pretty easy to decide looking at the evidence.

Across all spath posts, six have the natural orientation completely unclear (in that I could imagine the twist going either way),

three have the thumb clearly oriented on top (accounting for the twirling of the tail),

and a whopping nine have the spathe on the top

in that I think it'd be very unnatural for the tail to curve that way if it were the thumb on top. So, spathe wins! Insert relevant Palpatine quote here.

But we're still left with questions. How do we account for the three images in which the orientation seems reversed? More importantly, can we arrange things so spaths can actually like, navigate the world with comparable ease to the humanoids that live alongside them?

The best (and coolest) answer I found to both of these was to remove all the bones from the tail. More specifically, we're going to imagine spath tails as a kind of cross between an elephant's trunk and an octopus arm, but with even more fidelity than either. (There's also visual evidence for this in the panel where they crash into the cabinet; those sharp angles would probably be pretty detrimental to a spine.)

What does this mean for our questions? Well, in the latter two of the dorsal-thumb images, the spaths are all clearly posing as if to be photographed. With a squishy tentacle-tail it'd be easy to add an extra 180-degree twist to make the pose more interesting, or (as in the final image) to better show off the cool gear you're carrying.

As for everyday life, with a high-fidelity tail a spath can loop around objects that are sufficiently bumpy/textured (or that have holes built into their handles) to hold them still, and it wouldn't be too difficult to do this again and again with more objects! I imagine spaths as actually more dexterous than humanoids in most contexts; I can easily picture a spath with its tail looped around a frying pan (through the little hole at the end) and then around a spatula (grooved for better anchor points) that they're using in tandem, while also looking at a cookbook held by the folium, turning the pages with the thumb. Y'all skeletals could never.

Addenda:

To make these complicated maneuvers work as described in that last paragraph, I think it'd be neat for the tail to have its own brain, like an octopus arm. The head-brain (the one that speaks) can task the tail to do things, and the tail figures out the specifics live on-site without having to communicate across the body. Yes this is how octopus arms work; it's really cool.

Despite their boneless tails, I do think spaths have bones. They definitely seem to have knees and feet, and I think their necks make sense as a sort of snake arrangement, with a spine that has a great deal of vertebrae providing structural support for a bunch of organs that are packed in there. So, practically speaking it's more of a thin torso than a neck (it is, for example, the part that distends after a big meal), but visually it still looks like a neck.

The one thing I haven't been able to figure out is keyboards. A flat plane covered in buttons can be navigated pretty easily by a creature with several digits to poke with, but I don't think the looping trick would get a spath very far in this specific context. Would spaths be doomed to hunt-and-peck whenever interfacing with a computer? Honestly it wouldn't be that bad if so (plenty of humans make do with it) but I wonder if there's some sort of alternative interface that would make things easier for them.