ShneekeyTheLost wrote:So WTF is going on here? Her 'mammal bumps' should be no more or less than vestigial parts of the disguise she created, and should be able to modify them at her leisure. It should be no more difficult for her than changing out of a monkey suit into flannel and jeans.
Paul commented (in response to a question about this on the main site) that her DNA is partly human. Apparently, in canon, that's relevant. She's not just a plant - she's a planimal.
Also, although she's a shape-changer, she's not endlessly protean. Pickle has had a reasonably consistent para-humanoid form ever since she was infant-sized... she's been recognizably Pickle since well before her human-form reached what's often called the "age of reason". She also griped (years ago, her time) about her feet being blocky and that she couldn't affect this. This suggests that her para-human form isn't entirely a matter of voluntary choice - at least some aspects of it are apparently rather "hard-wired" and out of her conscious control. And, the fact that she's been deliberately living in humanoid form (and using glamour to pass as human, much of the time) may have created a pattern or habit that's really hard to override.
She can choose to "unweave", but when she weaves up her para-humanoid shape, she gets what she gets. Possibly she might be able to briefly and consciously suppress her "mammal bumps" now, but as soon as her attention wandered, she might pop right back out.
There's at least some precedent for this, in what happened to Atsali at puberty. Although she's a shape-changer (wings, feet, face, and her very body size and mass can shift) she complained quite bitterly that she was stuck with her newly-busty form both in human-form and in siren-form.