Bunny Kaomoji

Ears first, then a face

A kaomoji is easiest to build inward-out: eyes and mouth first, then decoration. Rabbits resist that order. Take the ears off ／(・×・)＼ and what remains is (・×・), a small animal face that could be almost anything. Put a pair of equals signs round that instead and it becomes a cat. The ears are not a garnish on a rabbit face; they are the only part that says rabbit, so they go on first and everything else is fitted between them.

Three cores and three ear forms

Nearly every face in the grid above is one of three cores wearing one of three ear forms. The cores are (・×・), the cleft-nose face; (=∵=), the three-dot face; and (・ｪ・), the snout face. The ear forms are none at all, ／ ＼ upright, and ⌒ ⌒ folded down. Everything else is a substitution into one of those combinations, and each face above is labelled with the core it comes from.

That is how this page is organised: a skeleton with a column of interchangeable parts. Three slots take the substitutions:

• the eye slots, taking ・ or half-width ･, ﾟ for a startled pinpoint, ◕ for a wide stare, or ≧ ≦ pressed shut;
• the accent pair, ´ before the eyes and ｀ after them, which drops the brows and makes any core glum;
• the cheek slots, taking = for a drawn line, * for colour, or ๑ for fullness.

Learn the three cores and the three ear forms and you can write a rabbit that is not on this page at all.

The cleft nose

A rabbit’s nose and upper lip form a Y, a split running down from the nose into the mouth. × carries the whole thing in one character, which is why (・×・) needs nothing else in the middle of the face. ∵ does it with three dots instead, two above and one below, so the nostrils and the mouth stay separate marks. ｪ is the unspecific one: the same snout carries bear faces and the dog faces on the Japanese dog page, so a rabbit built on it depends entirely on its ears.

Upright and lop

／ and ＼ are used at full width deliberately. They are tall enough to read as ears rather than as the arms the ASCII slashes make in a face like ＼(^o^)／, and position separates the two readings: arms sit level with the face, ears sit above it because the character leans. ⌒ is an arc curving downward, so swapping it in gives a lop rather than an upright rabbit — the same construction with the direction reversed.

Where they break

Ears are the part that goes wrong in transit. Full-width ／ and ＼ occupy a whole cell each; if a system substitutes ASCII slashes on one side only, the head sits off centre. In a proportional font the ears drift away from the face, which is why these read best in monospaced text. Which fields do the substituting, and which leave a face alone, is set out in the copy-and-paste notes.

One face repays a second look. In ／(＾×＾)＼ the circumflexes are shut eyes, not ears, because the ear positions outside the brackets are already occupied. That is the same position rule at work as on the cat page, where a circumflex moved to the outer edge stops being an eye and becomes an ear — one rule, two results, not an exception. The accent pair that makes several of these glum is covered on the sad page, and the kaomoji index has the shared vocabulary.