Usually she’s just called “Hey lady”
Colorists: Koof, Oniontrain, Raptie
(High-res and textless version available for free over on my Patreon!)
Out-of-Placers
A story of inconvenient changes
Support The OOPs
OOPs now has a Russian translation which updates shortly after the English pages are posted!
Now also in French:
And Ukranian:
And just like zhat, Kalgkur decides zhey like guard duty! Zhough I myself do wonder just how de humani Smith-lady Nell knew Kalgkur’s a male? Pretty sure zhat dere was a article about just how damm hard it was to tell de diffference by sight.
Calling him a gentleman doesn’t necessarily mean she knows he’s male, hell, I don’t think WE don’t know if he’s male.
Male terms also work as gender neutral in English.
Maybe the pitch of the voice? We usually know a male voice from a female voice say on the phone.
One of the old Field Guide pages (I think the one from around the time baxxids first showed up in the story) notes that only baxxid can tell who is male and who is female amongst them. I believe our redsmith here is just assuming Kalgkur is male. From our end, we have both characters who it would make sense to know and the author (in the commentary) referring to Kal as “he” or “him,” so it seems safe to say that Kal is male.
Yes I’m fairly certain we (the readers) know that Kalgkur is male, and Nell can probably be confident she guessed right since he didn’t correct her.
It’s possible they wouldn’t though, culturally speaking, seeing as they lack strong sexual dimorphism. I’ve been writing Fantasy stories with a race of creatures that don’t have obvious sexual dimorphism, and they don’t even have pronouns in their language, and end up using “they” to refer to everyone when they learn Human, because they lack a reference point.
On OOPs 50, Kuldra refers to herself as a “young maiden” in the native Baxxid language, and on OOPs 129-130, both baxxids and humans use gendered pronouns to refer to individual baxxids, which shows that they do recognize and claim both male and female genders. Whether Kalgkur is too shy and super-polite to correct a human who “misgenders” him is a different question, but at least in this case Nell either knew already or guessed right.
And just like that, Kalgkur got a nickname!
I’m curious, and probably only the author can say: is Nell’s hair naturally that striking copper color, or does she dye it to match her trade?
. . . This is the kind of “starcrossed lovers” arc that really gets me going, two individuals so alien to each other that one’s notion of romance might be utterly alien to one or both of them. Romeo and Juliet, but their houses are so different that they might not even realize that the other is a sapient being at first glance.
Yes, I am a sap for “impossible” romance that still somehow manages to work.
heh, “hey lady”. +1 internet point 🙂
AAAAGHHH I FORGOT IT DID THAT CONVERSION
IT IS SUPPOSED TO BE :‌)
to clarify, val wrote “hey lady” in the text below the comic. i found this funny, and thus awarded an internet point