I'd say there's a difference to toned and very muscular!
Totally. But the kind of muscle stuff you often seen drawn by furries tends to be hyper fetishistic and not much else. It ignores everything about how the body actually functions (which is usually a requirement when dealing with fetish artwork, unless the fetish is to be accurate, but that's a total edge-case scenario).
As shown below, there is a huge difference between form vs function in terms of muscles. The type where the muscles buldge, almost to the point of breaking the axis on which limbs rotate, is entirely showy with zero use beyond impressing judges. The functional types of muscles tend not to show bulging on top of the skin, but you can still clearly see them in how the various muscle groups combine.
Don't misunderstand. I'm all for bara - huge fan. And I'm not trying to say your tastes in images are wrong or anything - just discussing how things look from the other side of the fence. Fighting games tend to go for showy muscle structure because they're impressive at a distance, and help with reading the silhouettes of characters. But it's easy to spot art that does hyper-muscle for a *reason*, and art that does it just to impress with surface detail, or to get a rise (lol) out of people who fetish over it without caring how it actually *works*.
Now if a person doesn't care one lick about how muscles, or even body structure, actually functions - sure, I could see how hyperinflated muscles could do it for them. But that to me just says fetish. Which is fine. Nothing wrong with fetish, I got plenty of my own.
Tell me about it. Hnng.
Anyway, the above image comes from the artist of Manly Guys doing Manly Things (
http://thepunchlineismachismo.com/), and is part of a set. If you're at all interested in art/drawing, I recommend giving them a peek:
