The stump is actually useful for something besides just looking scrappy or resourceful.

Something I needed to try and maybe rough because it's hard to get used to drawing this kind of thing, I'm taking upright character to laying horizontal which requires some leaps of logic that only cartoons can do and gators probably swim a good bit different too.
But you know I gotta actually draw him swimming sometimes or I'll repeat how I never could draw Octive gliding properly, all the way until not doing it became a huge character trait.

And not equally scaled on each attempt, but that is the price for smaller sprite styles and I'm still definitely drastic smaller enough..