My Lion King Forum

I was watching SP today, and noticed how odd baby Kovu's ears were. The typical male-cup-ear-stripe was only on the inside. It was strange 'cause EVERY other male cub character has full ear stripes:

Malka's aren't black, but still. these are typical ears.

This one is of Tojo. Sorry it's so small; you wouldn't believe how popular that cub is! EVERYTHING's fanart.

here's simba. Black striped, typical ears.

And here's a... rather large... one of Kovu. And Kiara. Bt you can see his ears, and the stripe is on the inside only. It's odd.

I Hope this is in the right place... I just felt like that needed pointed out.

That's a bit odd. Maybe it's an Outlander trait? There aren't any other male Outlander cubs to compare him with so it's difficult to tell.

That's true. It's something I'm angery with, that there ar no outlander males. At all. Unless it's Kovu. Maybe it is an outlander trait. Maybe Kovu's just weird. I like it either way!

Yeah I know right. It's just Kovu and Nuka. There should be other males as well, not just lionesses.

NUKA! I could try to see if Nuka's got it.

From what I can recall he doesn't, but it's been a while since I watched SP!

He doesn't. I also noticed that Kovu's, like, half his age and had a MUCH fuller mane...

Yeah. But that could be because Nuka was neglected as a cub since he wasn't as important as Kovu. It's pretty sad really.

Yah... The scene of his death was originally going to say, "Well... I finally got your attention..."
It IS sad.

Adolescent Simba has the same narrow ear rims as Kovu in TLK1.5, and that's led some people to theorize that the reason Kovu has thin ear rims is because when he and Kiara first meet, he is older than Simba is when we see him as a cub in TLK.

Alternately, Scar has narrow ear rims as well, but their style is somewhat different than Kovu's -- they're much softer and on the inside of the dark fur in his ears rather than on the outside. The artists may have given Kovu roughly similar ear rims to make him look a tiny bit more Scar-like.

(And not to be a complete nit-picker, but Chumvi is another semi-canon male cub, and he doesn't have any dark rims. I guess there's no real rhyme or reason with this ear rims thing.)