I think it depends partially on where it sits on the centaur scale.
this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2025
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Noodle arms
They shoot you with their bow.
This is just another reminder how weird a centaur is as a concept. Vertebrates don't have more than 4 limbs. Land vertebrates mostly have 4 legs, but the structure of their forelegs is very similar to human arms and wrists. Bats have wings, but their wings are basically arms with a membrane of skin between the bones. Even a Naga (human / snake hybrid) makes more sense than a centaur.
Also, think how unbalanced a centaur would be. Instead of a trunk that merely has to support a neck and a head, a centaur has to support a full half-human right at the front of its body. That would shift the centre of mass way forward, so most of the weight would be on the middle limbs. That would affect its ability to gallop, because in a gallop most of the running power of a horse comes from the back legs. If the back legs are almost completely unloaded because all the weight is at the front, the back legs wouldn't be able to push with much force.
A more realistic centaur would have the trunk weight shifted backwards, so instead of having a human torso replacing its neck and head, it would be like a rider on a horse but without the rider's legs or the horse's head.
Fun fact, horse heads/necks weigh about as much as human torsos do. Depending on the horse, and the human.
Modern horses are fuckin huge. It's not unreasonable to think that a horse body could support a human upper body without much additional musculature.
That just raises the question about how big a human torso would be mounted on a modern horse's torso. A huge clydesdale mare with a typical jockey's torso would look pretty ridiculous. But, maybe a clydesdale-type-centaur would have an Andre-the-giant torso, or maybe something even bigger. Maybe it would be a humanoid torso which, if it had legs, would stand 4m tall.
But, even if it is an Andre the Giant head, imagine how much grass he's going to have to eat to keep his body fed. Andre has a big mouth compared to me, but it's still small compared to a horse.
A human torso’s weight would be almost inconsequential compared to a whole ass horse body, not to mention the human part has abs and shit and will be coordinating with the horse part, cause it’s all one creature. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a ridiculous creature, I just think it could theoretically work
They shoot arrows with a bow?!
they clack together two halves of split open coconuts to confuse the enemy
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Maybe they Naruto run while galloping
That is absolute nightmare fuel. This image alone is enough reason to ban ai.
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With the whole upper half bobbing up/down like a horse nodding it's head while it runs.
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I would be holding on to my dick and balls so they don't smack me in the asshole every gallop.
I'd hold my hands like when you stick your hand out of the car window and surfs on the air.
Like the centaurs in fantasia
How do horses solve that problem?
The saddle apparatus has a cock holster to prevent chafing.
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Hmm, humans swing their arms while running to counteract angular movement. Presumably, the horse undercarriage wouldn't have this problem, because there's more legs in an offset motion and just some distance between the pairs of legs to hold the body straight.
But horses nod their heads during gallop, so maybe the centaurs would do a little chug-chug motion with their arms instead.
This is a great anwser, actually
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They cross their arms since they also don't know what to do with them.
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I have visual references
Centaurs (and other *taur types. Looking at you, furries) are overall an incredibly dumb design.
The more you think about them, the more they just don't work. I went from meh, to dislike, to hate for centaurs over the years.
The more you think about them, the more they just don’t work.
Wait till you get into the math of .
A Pegasus, if it were to fly in the same way as a bird, would require extremely large wings relative to its body size, likely much larger than commonly depicted. Calculations suggest a wingspan of at least 30 meters (about 100 feet) for a horse-sized creature. This is due to the constraints of the square-cube law and the need for sufficient lift to support the horse's weight.
A study of dragons from movies and video games suggests they would need to fly much faster or have wings 45 times larger to stay aloft.
Don't even get me started on Sphinxes and Manticores.
Several fantasies just give em required secondary powers. Griffins use wind magic. Dragons use some form of antigravity or flight magic.
Iirc in Stormlight, the ... gigafauna?(Googles and finds it has been cooked for how I want to use it...huh) have gems in them that allows em to sorta reduce gravity in order for them to be able to survive at such a size (the planet also has lower gravity than earth,at 0.7G)
Sure sure sure. But if we're running back to the "shut up, it's magic" premise, centaurs (and mermaids and owlbears) don't seem so weird, either
That is why I like unicorns. when they fly, nobody starts calculating. Everybody just accepts the magic
I'm a sci-fi guy. I can accept that whatever force is causing the unicorn to fly is one that I haven't measured or studied yet.
Any sufficiently understood magic is indistinguishable from science.
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They hold the reins.
One hand scrolls through tiktok and the other holds an iced coffee, just like humans do while driving a car.
they actually just bend down and use the human arms to help walk (more legs = faster, since less time without touching ground, more time propelling themselves forward)
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