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Out-of-Placers
A story of inconvenient changes
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OOPs now has a Russian translation which updates shortly after the English pages are posted!
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I knew it!
HUUUUUUGGGG I was hoping so much for that! ❤️❤️❤️
Tough bravado will only take you so far little Kass. PTSD is not something you can just, power through. It will worm its way out in some manner, rarely in a positive way.
Zhat face in zhe final panel. Kassie is breaking a little. I hope in a good way.
I feel that like most guys, Kass wants to be vulnerable and emotional, but feels like they wouldn’t be respected if they were. It’s not a matter of a lack of desire to process trauma, it’s a fear of what will come of doing so.
Zometimes… zometimes you has to pulls za splinter outs before it can festerz an hurts evens more laters.
*blink blinks*
I’ll just… leaves zhis bucket of clammies outside za door… for zomeying tos comedically trips overs laters. Yesyes.
I don’t think Kass is used to getting empathy from anyone but Elim. Possibly not even then. When you’re used to everyone not caring about you, you develop different coping methods. Having people genuinely worry about how you feel is a strange new feeling.
Very. The thought “what do they get out of this?” keeps rattling inside of your skull, and you keep trying to find where’s the edge…
Kass might be having fantasies of becoming a human, and more importantly to him, male again some day. There’s no proof for or against the possibility, so he keeps on hoping … and denying the feminine nature that’s trying to assert itself.
There’s nothing inherently masculine or feminine about showing emotions and accepting help. Being emotionally isolated and closed off is just unhealthy no matter your gender, but men are often taught to be that way and punished for showing vulnerability. It’s a learned behavior, not an innate trait.
Okay, I’m gonna go ahead and say this… You are so completely wrong it’s kind of insulting.
Emotional vulnerability is a failure to manage oneself effectively. That doesn’t mean that some things aren’t perfectly reasonable to go to pieces over. It is however a still failure. It is VULNERABILITY. The whole concept of men within this DIMORPHIC species Homo Sapiens Sapiens is a lionized kamikaze warrior gathering as many mates as is reasonably successful and fighting and dying to protect them and more importantly any offspring at the drop of a hat.
Emotional vulnerability is not part of that model. Emotional STABILITY is.
Let’s be properly blunt for a second. Human women compared to men are by their biological nature extremely emotional. Their hormones, for the purposes of reproduction, go haywire at HOPEFULLY regular intervals. This is to say nothing of all the mental programming that goes into a pregnancy. We’re just talking about a menstrual cycle and all it’s wonderful loop-de-loops.
Men don’t have that. Of the four F’s of survival our testosterone aims us fairly strongly at Fighting and Mating. We can harangue all day about the nuance between the sexes but anyone who has gone through hormone “therapy” will tell you that testosterone is like a a red light of rage tinting everything and estrogen makes your emotions spiral.
Emotional “control”, burying, or careful management is ABSOLUTELY a learned skill and an important one. But it’s not some lodestone around men’s necks weighing them down in “toxic masculinity”. It’s a necessary ability taken on for the purpose of safeguarding that which matters most. Your emotions cannot rule you. You can cry later. Right now it’s time to keep your loved ones alive.
That’s what Kass has been doing.
Women do that too. They just do it different… and they also usually don’t do much hand-to-hand combat. Their bones break easier. Sometimes that matters… A lot of the time that matters.
you’re not wrong that they’re different. I think you’re probably right that the difference is ingrained. Different rules for survival are going to result in different behaviors.
But I don’t know that I’d categorize women as more emotional. Violent outbursts and going completely psycho are definitely emotion driven, more prevalent in men, and have to weight the average somewhat.
I highly recommend this. It might help you get a good handle on positive masculinity. (“Toxic masculinity” isn’t calling masculinity itself toxic—it’s referring to a type of masculinity. It’s an adjective)
https://youtu.be/emkDwRTBSX0
good link. i think it probably covers something this comic’s fans implicitly understand, but it’s cool to hear it said.
I have a handle on positive masculinity. What I’m trying to GIVE here is a grasp on REALITY.
Anyone who unironcally celebrates pride month, an excuse for grown men to parade around in public in front of children in various stages of sexual undress, is not ANYONE I would accuse of understanding positive masculinity.
The REALITY is that women are built from millions of years of evolution to be readily willing to burn the world for their children. Men are built across the same time scale to sacrifice THEMSELVES for their children and the world they will live in.
It’s biological imperative. Women are hypergamous and men are polygamous. When children are a massive resource dump you need the best ones you can make and it would help if the donor stuck around and helped with food and defense. When you can spend 20 minutes at 12 different houses in the village every couple of years and wind up with a few dozen offspring it really behooves you to make sure that in 20 years that village will still be standing. Whether or not you are is of little importance.
I’m all for the family unit. I LIKE monogamy. It’s great for stabilizing society and raising people up to feel like they actually matter to someone and could maybe do some good in the world. Involved fathers are VITAL to that. It’s even better if they are emotionally AVAILABLE. They can TEACH their children those skills so that they don’t SCREW IT UP.
That is NOT the same as vulnerable. An emotionally vulnerable father is a failure. It’s not what he’s for. The world cuckhold comes to mind. It is a male who is incapable of properly managing his emotions and therefore himself and therefore defending his charges. He needs someone else to do it for him which is what cuckholdry is all about.
There’s a saying, “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.” Burying your emotions is managing them badly. It is the biggest way to screw up and still not fail. That’s the job. You don’t get to fail. The consequences are too high. They always have been. They always will be. Managing yourself and your emotions is a skill that ALL PEOPLE need to learn, but for men there is no allowance for failure. That really is it.
Meh. I’ve seen people wearing MUCH less at the pool. The rainbow feather boas cover up a LOT more than a speedo (Just aren’t as recommended for swimming). So if we get second mardi gras in june who gives a fek?
I don’t think burn the world for your children is a viable survival strategy. The worlds where you’re keeping your children. For humans, you need your children to be in a large functional social unit like a tribe. Because if they’re not, they can’t farm, hunt, or defend against the neighbors with a functional tribe and sharp pointy objects.
I wouldn’t call an emotionally vulnerable father a failure either. A tendency between the genders is just that: a trend. Its not necessarily 100% applicable towards every member of the group. Nature produces a wonderful variety of individuals for a reason: to try different things and see what works. Especially as times change. Rambo may be ideal for stalking saber toothed tigers , but as soon as you hit agriculture a more emotionally open Father say like, Blueys dad may provide a better cost/benefit in being more open and better able to help with the kids even if hunting or war would shred their brain. For a population you ideally want BOTH of them around, just in case things change.
To me, it looks like you’re mistaking the is (we are the products of evolution and a dimorphic species) for the ought (we should use that model for our civilization). Knowing where you are and what you are provides a basis for knowing HOW to get to what you want, but doesn’t provide any justification for it being right. What worked in the past is not guaranteed to work in the present or society that’s changing MUCH faster than our DNA.
I’m not mistaking anything. I’m not implying “ought”. They’re suggesting “aint” and I’m confirming “is”.
You can’t actually change THAT much faster than your DNA or else your genetics are gonna get washed out from societal stress as per the NIMH rat experiments and Universe 25.
I don’t think you really got what I mean with the “burn the world” comment so I’ll try again. Cersei Lannister would have set the world on fire for her children. She would wage wars and burn kingdoms. The value is that all the other mother’s offspring that would harm her line would, if she were successful, be dead and hers would be alive.
She merely failed.
As far as Rambo goes, I’ve only seen the first one and according to that story he’s not okay on ANY level. Really good movie. Really felt for him.
This is what our genetics IS, what our species IS. We can try to change all kinds of things, but to suggest that what has been done for millions of years is just “stupid and wrong and has no basis in reality” is not just a lie. It’s taking a huge crap on everyone who ever sacrificed everything so that we could be here because that’s what it takes in that situation.
Consider for a moment what makes a Navy Seal or a Spetsnaz. Think about the grueling training and psychological hell they go through to weed out the ones who aren’t capable of doing the job. It hurts people. On occasion people die. It’s horrible.
And if you lower the bar, if you make it safer, if you don’t put them through hell you won’t get the same kind of soldier that can do the same kind of job.
“Being a man” in the traditional way DOES require self sacrifice and if “Bluey’s dad” suddenly had to pick up a rifle and man the trenches so that his two kids and wife wouldn’t be lined up and shot in the street I figure he’d do it. He’d never be the same person again. And it would be worth it. He wouldn’t come home and tell his daughter about the kids, not much bigger than her, hiding in the bushes with automatic rifles that he had to kill with a an incendiary grenade. He wouldn’t tell his wife.
He would sacrifice himself for them.
The times make the man, but being the man is a job and the rules are old stone. They don’t change. You’re talking the foundations of our psyche. It’s not going anywhere. I don’t know that it should or shouldn’t. It is NOT. And even so, the job will still be there because violence is as certain as death and whether you carry the egg, the sperm, the residual fatty lump that is your mate, or the secondary gestation sack SOMEONE is going to have to fight to protect and someone is going to have to be protected.
And doing that is going to look basically the same and have the same problems because we are made of meat and hormones and babies don’t fight back when you kill them.
But your options aren’t navy seal and failure. The entire male half of society doesn’t have to go to every war. Even in war you need soldiers that aren’t navy seals: not just because you don’t HAVE them. But because a lot of soldiering is digging a trench sitting in it and getting very. very bored. Having someone LESS amped up for a fight helps that. Your tribe can use the guy who goes to war at the drop of a hat…but can also use the guy who DOESN”T get himself killed when a fight can be avoided.
So you don’t have ONE standard of manliness. You have a bunch of different flavors, archetypes, or .. I guess character classes would be a good analogy… for exactly HOW you go about it. Rambo certainly is one way (although as you noticed… not without its price). But there’s also a leader, a builder, a provider, an inventor, blue collar worker, a trickster, the Merlin/obiwan….. I think the trick is to find a positive version of what you are and lean into that.
That’s going to give you differences between men and women as a groups, but without many (any?) Hard boundaries. Since as a society we’re not in a 100% fight or be wiped out war, we have more than enough room for individuals to go “off model” without recrimination. Most of society has been that way since at least the agricultural revolution.
I keep trying to tell you and you keep missing it.
The job is still the same. The programming is still the same. Let’s say you’re a manager at a fast food restaurant. Your job is to maintain an adequate number of reasonable quality employees to cover all shifts. Let’s imagine that you get 20 people early on that always come to work and cover all the shifts and do their jobs well. This goes on for 40 years. No one moved up or moved around because everyone like where they were at.
It’s still your job to make sure all the shifts are covered. Your job being easy does not change the responsibilities you hold.
In your analogy, there is no “adequate number”. There is no shut off switch or “ok goal met , slow down/ stop”. Thats not how evolution works. Genetics works on the individual and gene level. A gene that says enough would only get out propagated by one that says “more more more more!”
The instructions from your DNA/Management are Recruit/reproduce as much as possible. Do it or you’re fired and be replaced with someone who can/will. Those instructions have worked since the Dawn of time, because you lose employees to attrition/old age/ being eaten by the dumpster raccoon or dipped head first into the fryer as fast as you can recruit them no matter how hard you try to recruit them. If you manage to get enough employees, they just take over another franchise in the next town over and you get a bonus. There isn’t an “enough” sensor because enough has never been a problem.
So when life gets a lot safer, osha has you put railings around the deep fryer and wildlife control shoos out the radioactive dumpers raccoons etc so you stop losing employees quite so fast, but the instructions to “recruit recruit recruit!” DON”T change you wind up with a massive overpopulation problem.
That’s the problem with our DNA. Or Business people that are “deader than me” What worked great in the past isn’t guaranteed to work very well as conditions change. There’s also some suggestions like Shanghaiing sailors for example that..well it WORKED but it’s not exactly the place to look for moral guidance.
Excellent, excellent summary. Probably the best explanation I’ve seen yet. And the most relevant given Kass’ background as a soldier. On a battlefield, letting emotions get the better of you will kill you.
You literally could not be more wrong here if you tried.
I’m trans, so have run on both sets of hormones, but also have a degree in bio, and did my first few years at uni in a neuroscience program before switching out on account of how much I hatted it.
Literally none of what you just wrote even remotely resembles reality.
Please stop running your mouth at strangers on the internet when you don’t have any god damn idea what you’re talking about.
It’s patronizing and embarrassing.
Okay data point. I’m just gonna ignore trend for you. You dropped out. Your opinion has not been vetted. I’ve been studying this since the friggin 90’s before the politics was shoved into the DSM and all the books changed.
And by the way, since we’re here, if you’re on lupron for any reason GET OFF THAT CRAP! They downsell the risks to hormone replacement patients. It’s bad stuff.
You really think the old versions of the DSM were not political? You think the decision to consider homosexuality a disorder/disease, for example, had nothing to do with the political norms of the time? That’s just science to you, is it?
Homosexuality IS a “disorder”.
It’s an interesting byproduct of several genetic and developmental forces acting on “sexuality”. It’s also common among basically all mammals and even some bird and reptile species. The funny thing is that with the bird and reptile species sometime it results in more children overall because there’o just more sex going on and sometimes guys turn into girls and vice-versa.
In mammals that doesn’t happen. HOWEVER there’s nothing wrong with those individuals pursuing monogamous relationships with their preference. All the better for their health. It still DOES negatively impact their lives. They won’t normally have children which IS a part of our developmental psyche. Most exceptions to that case have to do with people conforming to social standards in a way we currently realize is unhealthy to their general mental health.
So… it’s actually accurate to call it a disorder. There’s just little or no reason to attach a stigma to it. It’s a bit like having a fascinating with programming. You rarely engage in long term relationships. You’re slightly more prone to indulge in unhealthy behavior because you lack the responsibilities of taking care of a family. Also you tend to reach climax in a way that has no chance of ever producing offspring. In a butt or in a hand, those swimmers are going nowhere productive. And if it’s two women the aggressive bits are all made of rubber.
That IS disordered. I sincerely hope people find happiness… but that IS psychological disorder. It IS disconnect with reality that predisposes one to suffer. We just mitigate it.
By that definition the rationality of “Hey i really can’t afford kids honey pass the birth control” is also a disorder.
Yes, actually.
Our whole society is disordered by birth control. It’s getting to be our whole species. Abstinence is a joke because evolution only works if you keep having children… Or rather you only get to participate if you do.
Let’s get some metaphors rolling here. LIFE, kinda like a creator, has started up the program and we little bits all compete against each other and with each other to KEEP GOING. Most of the big players are single celled. E.coli as a cohort is EVERYWHERE. You go up a few ranks in complexity and flies, mosquitos, and beetles are FLOURISHING. After that, rats and mice are a solid crew. We’re completely ignoring the oceans because that’s a tsunami of species that don’t even need to change.
And then humans were trending to be the alpha predator for the whole freaking planet until they focused in on mating behaviour that provided NO OFFSPRING and funnily enough now the birth rates on THE WHOLE PLANET are dropping so fast it’s reasonable to suggest that in just 40-60 years there might not be enough fertile females to propagate the species.
IN FACT, tho new technology is in the form of a pill that pollutes the water LITERALLY CAUSING GENDER CHANGES IN AMPHIBIANS, yeah no A. Jones was CORRECT about that, it’s real, and some are suggesting that it’s not being filtered by extant systems meaning that women AND MEN are being feminized by the excess hormones remaining in womens urine that is then passedvi sewage through the water cycle unabetted and then consumed by anyone and everyone.
Yeah, it’s a disorder.
You have definitely gone off the deep end of the appeal to nature fallacy. It’s not that I don’t understand you, it’s that you don’t understand the subject matter. It’s really annoying that I can’t start a conversation with the idea that we’re an evolved species without people expecting your brand of coocoo coming next.
World population is at 8 billion. We have barely started to slow the rate of increase. Much less caused a decline back down to the 5 million or so that we had as a viable population way back when. The idea that we’re going to go extinct from birth control and gay people is NVTS nuts.
Sorry, I didn’t think to check back here until this latest update.
I didn’t drop out. I was lucky enough to have the resources to fuck about in uni before finding what I actually cared about. I still even got a degree in Bio, because I found developmental biology, physiology, and CMMB to be much more interesting and mature fields.
Anyway, you haven’t studied shit, my guy. You’re quoting the DSM as if it where literature. A document designed to streamline the insurance billing process? Clearly your scholarship runs deep.
Ultimately our backgrounds doesn’t matter regarding pharmacology though, just the facts.
Lupron is just a brand name GNRH agonist, you twit. It’s functionally identical to the GNRH your own body produces, and it’s perfectly safe. I’m not sure which of the popsci articles you read, and I don’t actually much care. There’s been meta-analysis of this entire class of drugs over something like a hundred thousand patient years and we know exactly how safe it is.
Also, studying this since the 90’s? Would you care to share some of the authors or papers from the decade you’re basing your opinions on? I think it might help establish where you’re coming from here.
They are smol, fragile, and were assaulted by a group that had the drop on them for reasons that he is not accustomed. It is a shock, it is sexual assault, and it is a special kind of trauma that buries itself deep into the pride of one’s self like a rotten seed that will bear exceptionally poisonous fruit unless confronted. It is less about nature, and more about coming to terms that it happened.
I think that triple negative in the first panel (great error… ever doubted… did not used…) ends up meaning the opposite of what you intended. :/
A pet peeve of mine about fantasy involving nonhuman races is that so often it ends up reinforcing stereotypes — all orcs are evil, all elves are good, male dwarves all have the same over-the-top avoidance of emotions that Kass is displaying here. We New York Jews, who’ve all been in therapy since childhood (yeah I know that’s a stereotype too; I’m sorta joking, but sorta not) don’t have trouble expressing emotions.
With respect to Kass’s supposed hardwired femininity in his new body, it’s a little complicated, isn’t it, because he *didn’t* altogether turn into a Yinglet; he retains his (traumatic) memories and quite a lot of his human personality. If he had turned 100% Yinglet, he wouldn’t be so useful to Ran and Viracroix. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that he still has the human tendency to hide emotions.
Beyond complicated. *IF* its hardwired there, its competing with a lifetime of software that says “don’t be vulnerable you are dragging your family down/showing weakness/will be made fun of/will lose status/will be punched in the face”
vislet is good people.
Yesyes! Za Bestest of Matriarchs!
But… dont’z tells her I saids zhat. O_o
I can’t see any reason to think it’s learned as opposed to innate when it’s seen across so many different cultures across the planet, as well as in our closest relatives. If men have been hiding emotions so they don’t show weakness to possible rivals for millions of years, its going to sink into the gene pool if it keeps you alive even if it torments you until you die later.
Note: That does NOT mean that the idea is a good one. This isn’t an appeal to nature. Nature just cares about what works and that includes some morally messed up stuff as well as things that are absolutely brutally wrong for the individuals involved.
It’s not innate. At least, not in humans (and it certainly doesn’t look like it for Yinglets). There is just WAY, WAY too much evidence to the contrary. It’s cultural. There are plenty of cultures where stoicism in men is not expected. And, every single day, Western cis men are getting therapy and learning that they can healthfully unlearn it. And, on top of that, trans people prove innateness wrong constantly, before and after transition.
In what culture are men expected to show more emotion than women on a regular basis? Particularly the cry out the mushy feelings part. Europe, greece, china, africa, north america, south america. And the chimps because we should invite them to the party (every party is better with chimps)
Aside from manly violent rampages that is. Because that’s not considered an emotion. For reasons.
Note: The idea of absolute strict gender roles with gender roles are not the same thing. Romans may have had a 99.99999 percent male army, with Polyanaius with the suspiciously slender calves as the only female and the Celts had a 90% male army with Burnhilde zipping around on the chariot getting cheers from HER troops. There is an important cultural difference there, but they both have soldier as a male gender role. No society every kept the men home and sent a 100% woman army (or if they did. That probably didn’t work out well enough to make the historical record….)
I don’t see how trans people are anything but a proof of the idea that gender is not entirely a social construct. Every society has socialized people towards their plumbing to some extent. The fact that it doesn’t work with everyone (whether that society has a third option people can take or not) shows there is something important there besides the socialization. If your society will kill your for taking up a different role but you insist on doing it anyway, that bespeaks a powerful internal drive that is coming from the person. I cannot think of a source of a drive that complicated except the inherent structure of the brain.
Brain scans can show someone’s gender orientation about as reliably as looking at a person. Trans persons only show that platonic groupings aren’t real in biology which… its Biology. The lines are blurry to say the least. Arguments over the exact definition of a species can get pretty heated, and are honestly mostly subjective.
We are an evolved species of ape. For that species, fall in love with women, hide your weaknesses, form a group of bros for life that you ride or die with and kill the people different than you, take their stuff and take their women! Are all very obvious survival enhancement strategies that provide disproportionately better cost/benefit ratios for men than women. I don’t see any evidence, or any proposed mechanism, that we at any point became luminous beings free from our evolutionary baggage (and some HORRIFICLY bad behaviors encoded in there)
Your use of the word mushy to describe feelings of the traumatic or stressful sort tells me that perhaps you yourself need to find more healthy outlets for your internal strife, rather than resorting to stoicism when it is not required.
And rage is an emotion, and is a very powerful one. It is not manly, nor womanly, it is violence in pure emotional form. Everyone is capable of rage.
I think you should consider that softness is acceptable, and that those who do not accept it aren’t worth your time.
Or the word choice is…quoting the comic. Above you. there. The one we’re discussing.
If you can miss something THAT obvious I’m going to maintain my skepticism of your ability to propagate deep psychological insights. Things like that are exactly why psychology and literary interpretation get stuffed into the same bin.
It’s NOT innate. There is just way, WAY to much evidence to the contrary. From entire cultures where men are not expected to be stoic, to cis men going to therapy and learning to unlearning every day.
This kind of thing isn’t universal to the entirety of humanity, and it’s really not the kind of thing that gets “genetically encoded”.
Innate and 100% accurate aren’t the same thing.
Men being taller than women is innate to our biology for example, its not because men eat all the food or men decide they need to be bigger: its just how our DNA and biology makes men and women, as a dimorphic species with different bell curves of height. There is some overlap, but that doesn’t make the different distributions go away.
Ah, we want Vislet hugs!
Well zomes of us can gets by wizh soft (non-shoutings) wordies an head-pats… *happy yinglet sounds*
Thing is, it’s not a feminine thing to allow emotions to flow, and to have vulnerability after a severe moment. What’s tragic is that this knowledge remains arcane wisdom not just in medieval inspired fantasy worlds couched in ‘man = warrior’, but in modern day as well.
Allow me to say it clearly: There is not, and will never be, any shame or ‘girliness’ in being vulnerable, be that by crying or not.
Very very correct. You get the message here. <3
This comment section is practically an explosion of “men are so naturally stoic and feel feelings oh so differntly” it’s kinda funny. Also sad. Seems like a lot of people need a Vizlet in their lives.
Well… zhere is zhis…
https://store.vilous.net/collections/dakimakura-covers/products/vizlet-dakimakura
;p
There appear to be negative quantities available for pre-order. Doesn’t just keep taking orders regardless of stock on order? Maybe a bug, like two has it in the basket at once so it went below 0?
Well, it doesn’t work for boys either, Kass.
“it is so blindly obvious you were a guy”
“Why is it my reliance and assertiveness?”
” No, its your general neglect of your mental health!”
We also would have accepted “Blithering idiocy” 🙂
Is a fact ofs life zhat males are zometimes clueless…
What? O_o
We know. Being crap at anything is the first step to being kinda sorta good at it.
Emotions are hard and you cant beat them until they work right. We just muddle through.
Very relevant video. https://youtu.be/emkDwRTBSX0
Pretty much this.
Not a fan of her projecting her own feelings onto Kassen, nor the author legitimizing it. He is mentally a man, men are NOT simply emotionally stunted women with dicks. We deal with things differently. Please don’t womansplain my gender to me.
Well… we don’t know how mentally Kass is a man at this point. Kass mentally thinks of themselves as a human, but if they try to stay awake for 16 hours straight that yinglet brain is going to melt.
It’s entirely possible the big old softie is just wrong: Remember characters are allowed to have their own opinions without being the authors.
It’s entirely possible That Viz IS right, but Kass WOULD be right… if their brain was still a male human. That whatever configuration or testosterone bath that would have let Male Kass use his Shovel and shut up strategy is not going to work on a brain primed for more complex emotions and a swingier endocrine system. On the deepest level you ARE your brain. And Kass’ brain has changed just as their body has.
It’s also possible that there’s a difference in species change. Its been repeatedly shown that yinglets have the self control and something of the mentality of an 8 year old. What Kass is trying to do may be doable for a human, but out of the levels of self control for a yinglet.
Pretty sure that the word “male” in the first panel is supposed to be “female.”
Wait no I’m crazy. Never mind.
There was an error there, he fixed it this morning.
No, it’s correct as is. Vizlet used to doubt that Kass had been a male human. She was convinced a while back that Kass used to be human by talking about sleep patterns. Now she finally believes that Kass had been male.
Kass’s problem here much runs deeper now than it did before the attempted rape. Saying the female body parts “aren’t really mine” is Kass trying to make the case that “what happened to this body didn’t really happen to me.” But it really did happen to Kass, in a shocking, personal way. As a man, he probably thought it could never happen to him, but from now on it’s always going to be something that very nearly did happen. Male or not, human or not, no matter what any of our theories are about what “being a man” is, by nature or nuture, in this case, denial is NOT a reasonable solution. And it’s understandable that Vizlet wanted to do a little woman-splaining, but going in for that hug was the only right answer, so brava to her for realizing that, and for doing it where nobody else was watching. Vizlet really is good people, and she’s probably Kass’s best hope to get through this particular trauma.
Devil’s advocate. Context matters. Every time you get close to a moving car you very nearly lost your life or maybe just a few toes. It did not happen.
I work with machines. I nearly lost a finger. The scar is still healing. I worry about the next time. I redouble my safety efforts and my attention. There is something there that sits in my mind here and there.
The car is just as dangerous. The nearest barking dog can be a rabies factory. I can LITERALLY walk into my yard and be gunned down by a few crackheads looking for some tools, a few tv’s, and some copper. I’m not scared of those. They don’t worry me.
That machine which can’t move and isn’t turned on sits in the back of my mind somewhere with the things that hurt me, damaged me in a way I can’t fix.
Kass was up to “her” tatas in an attempt on both her life and her dignity. It stopped at groping and one her friend’s nearly died and there was nothing she could do. Honestly the term Helpless is the core shattering theme here. It’s not the specific act. It’s like the issue is that there’s NOTHING you can do to stop any of it. It’s not the event, but the lingering scar of hurt… that may end up being a physical person that seems to be worse.
And the damage is that you see how frail you really are and are reminded of it c
Dammit, boss, wee what happens when you have the main characters of de story in a comic? *Looks Above*
It appears zhat folks likes it when dey get more Kass(en) no?
I was thinking about Brakka, and what he’s going to be charged with if he’s ever found:
• Conspiracy to abduct a ranking officer
• Premeditated aggravated assault with with a deadly weapon and attempted murder of a ranking officer’s uniformed bodyguard, resulting in severe bodily harm
• Assault and battery, sexual molestation, and attempted rape of a ranking officer
• Conspiracy to disturb the peace
• Evasion of justice
• Trafficking dangerous artifacts
• Intimidating and threatening a street vendor
Narklet is right: Brakka really is going to wish he were dead if he manages to escape the dungeon he’s in. I wonder if the civil justice system in the Teeth or in the local enclave will expect Kass and Elim to testify.
In all honesty, if Brakka is caught, he’s going to just disappear.
Vizlet and Viraxroix will question him, and then no one will ever see him again. It’s unlikely there will be a trial, since they are keeping this quiet.
Vizlet – and thus Viracroix – want him both for interrogation about That Thing (although based on his interaction with Kass, he doesn’t really have any useful intel on it) and to be used as evidence that Narklet is breaking the rules by working with exiles. Permanently disappearing him isn’t going to work for that latter bit. I’d imagine that, at a minimum, he’ll need to be dragged before the Patriarchs to testify (and to legally give Narklet a chance to refute his claims, but I get the feeling that while Narklet is decent at concealing the truth he’s not a good liar). I assume this would result in Narklet being removed from his position as Patriarch, and would give Vizlet leverage to finally get some answers about the artifacts he’s been digging up, as well as give the Val Salia Enclave more independence (after the embarrassment of Narklet committing something akin to treason, the Elders wouldn’t really have the standing to send another representative to keep the Val Salian yinglets under control). Based on her being a Big Softie, I’d imagine Vizlet won’t have Narklet executed; she may even opt to avoid exiling him, settling only for a demotion and a bit of time locked up.
Of course, as for Brakka, I’d say he should be emasculated, drawn, and quartered. In addition to the violations of Val Salian law, he also assaulted a female – given how precious those are to the survival of the species, that’s got to be one of the worst crimes a yinglet can commit.
Okay, touche. You have some very valid points.
This is also a very good case against punishing criminals by exiling them at this particular enclave. Certainly Viracroix doesn’t want any more violent yinglet exiles like Brakka wandering his streets freely. Vizlet will have to persuade the Elders that exiling doesn’t work for her enclave, but they’re not just going to take her word for it, so they might have to send somebody North to hear everyone’s testimony.
*egg cracking sounds in the distance*
Zhat better nots bes a snoots-hugger… I hatez zhose zhings.
O_o
Okay, so I gotta get this off my chest.
This page does not fit.
It doesn’t fit with what we know of yinglet society (males don’t seem particularly taciturn, stoic, or toxically masculine so the matriarch shouldn’t be acting like this is proof he’s a male) and it doesn’t fit with Kass (he’s been vulnerable and accepted emotional support before, such as on page 55 and beyond when he started to have his breakdown over ying-ification and Elim came in and hugged him until he calmed down and received some clams).
Does anyone else see this?
Taciturn, and stoic, no. Stubbornly pushing aside your feelings and refusing to deal with emotional baggage, maybe? Does Kattajak not show these tendencies? Also, Kass did have a bit of a breakdown over it, and then went and gorged on clams, but that’s not the same as being *willing* to deal with the emotions.
I’m not saying Kass’s ridiculous reply in panel 2 didn’t seem a bit out of place, but I suppose that was for laughs, and I’m willing to let it slide. 🙂
The various patriarchs seem to have very human male mindsets As mentioned Kattajak (the patriarch of hunting that was just envisioning gleefully stabbing another patriarch to chunky salsa) has… issues.
It could be convergent evolution, or if the greater yinglet is the descendant of humans affected by zhat zhings turning people into yinglets