Posted In: comic
– This one is a little late. Sorry! The weekend was difficult, busy and hot. Friday’s strip should be on time.
– If you live in Texas (I know a lot of you do) I hope you’re safe and secure.
– I’ll be at Rose City Comiccon in Portland on Sunday September 10th only. I’ll be sharing a booth with my friend Becky Hawkins!
If a girl hydra has boy hair, does she count as a different gender to a girl hydra with girl hair?
I don’t think the Hydra see it that way. I think they all see each other as the same gender. Probably there was a point in the distant past before they started interacting with gendered species that they didn’t see any difference at all. Or maybe the distinction between hydra that become snakes and those that don’t was more important in the past. It’s also kind of hard to tell based just on what we’ve seen,since the Gorgon is the only Hydra we’ve seen so far that was raised traditionally. Naga lived with a Fairy family in a mixed species village. The girls have had all kinds of weird experiences and met all kinds of people. So the idea of “boy” and “girl” might have a meaning closer to “us” and “everyone else” for them.
Anyway, I suspect that for the most part all Hydra see all other Hydra as the same gender, and the actual difference in the sexes has a different significance than it does for humans.
So then how do they mate if they are of the same gender, you said they can mate with males of other species but didn’t mention females which leads me to believe that all hydras are female
Also howwww did they knowwwwwwwwwww (this is sort of a joke comment as I’m guessing you will cover that in the next few pages, but if not I’m going to go with the others are just smarter than modest until proven wrong :D)
I’m not going to cover it to a great extent. The joke here is that we don’t know and that the differences aren’t obvious to us (or to Modest), but thats because we’re outsiders/not from Yeld/not Hydra or used to being around them. To Modest’s sisters the differences are obvious even if they can’t really explain them (in the same way Modest has trouble telling them apart but her sisters don’t). This goes all the way back to strips in Season 1 where people aren’t sure if Modest is a girl or a boy and strips in Season 4 where we find out that Modest had always thought Charles was a girl.
To be honest, I thought Charles was a girl for a while. It was the hairstyle, I think.
Well duh, Charles has girl hair.
Ha.
We don’t know exactly how they mate (and we probably never will). All Hydra identify as female and look like human females (in fact, all hydra are exact copies and look exactly the same). The species’ reproductive organs are in the hair. Most Hydra have female reproductive organs and can’t conceive until they shed their humanoid body and transform into their adult form. The Hydra whose hair has male reproductive organs doesn’t need to go through that transformation and will not shed their humanoid form. Instead their humanoid form will age at a normal rate and eventually resemble an adult human female. As an adult a Hydra with male reproductive organs (who will still have their humanoid form) can mate with an adult Hydra with female reproductive organs (who will have shed their humanoid form to take on their adult form as a giant snake).
So then modest herself (well himself) is technically male since he has male reproductive organs.
Modest is a male of the Hydra species. The Hydra’s humanoid body is pretty clearly gendered female though,and it’s unclear if it has sexual organs of it’s own. In the case of female Hydra (which would be most Hydra) it wouldn’t matter since by the time they were old enough for sex (for reproductive purposes or otherwise) they’d have shed their humanoid bodies. Since male Hydra don’t shed their humanoid bodies as they age it’s a more relevant question. It may be that the humanoid body does have it’s own sex organs. I’m not sure. Anyway, Modest’s hair has male reproductive organs. Her entire species identifies as female. It’s all pretty complicated, but it means Modest won’t turn into a giant snake.
Sure makes going to the right bathroom problematic.
>It’s all pretty complicated
Well…if you happen to be a fairly rare, if widespread, talking, non-human…non-mundane-mammal even, completely inhuman scaled multi-headed magical beast (even one that might reproduce with human shaped vampires or maybe former humans or you-haven’t-even-shown-us-yet or whatever) trying to force your self into societal roles designed by and for humans (and, let’s be frank, that sort of role has typically varied a lot more, from society to society, and time to time than we like to admit, and even for humans, quite a few people find those roles a poor fit)…yeah, that would be complicated, I guess.
On the other hand, you explained it very clearly, for the purposes relevant to the story, Jake, both here, in the comment section, and to Modest, where we can overhear, and it is considerably more human-like (biologically), and much less complicated and weird than several lizards, fishes, amphibians…even birds, heck, even some primates, to say nothing of things that are even further from non-magical humans, like plants, fungi…
It might look complicated to explain, from a human perspective (but you made it simple to understand) like someone might “look very snakey” to a human, and still be a normal and natural amount of snakiness for them.
On a related note, I can’t help but mention some of the words for these issues actually did change meaning, with no real precident, in the past few decades, and sometimes, in an effort to not accept intolerant or incorrect, hurtful language we can come off as rudely and pushily attempting to enforce an arbitrary and incorrect argot…which, to someone from a more common background seems very (literally) bigoted and cliquish. We can’t see how the other person could be so wrong, and hurtful, but it is really us who is doing the equivalent of going to a foreign country and trying to “correct” their language, or “correcting” our grandparents about history we’ve been misinformed of, that they lived.
I only mention that, because I fear, in these charged and sensitive times, it is very normal to want to correct people about trends in language that are much more recent, or more isolated, than we realize, and for the people being corrected to react in a manner that seems like an unprovoked rude attack. I assumed the generally cordial and pleasant tone here was due to moderation, but now that you say it is not, I am forced to keep my fingers crossed that it will continue, because it has recently seemed, on this archive crawl, in several spots, like people were on the edge of flamewars, that neither of them intended to start, where they both were trying to be polite but felt like they were being attacked by ignorance and intollerance…I’ve wished I could reach back in time and explain where the other was coming from (the second part being even more impossible than the first). Even when I am right there in the room…the stories I could tell you regarding just the word “gay,” for instance, from just last century, and about people assuming that their generation’s regional dialect was ubiquitous and eternal and that anything else was some form of…to use the current term “hatespeach.”
Separating EVERY comment from the spam, by yourself? That seems Herculean.
I appreciate it, but is it really worth it? Don’t wear yourself out, Jake, you have much more important and appreciated things to do (like making more episodes of Modest Medusa)!
You are totally right. It’s sometimes hard to parse whether someone is just using terms they are familiar with or if they’re purposely using terms that they know will cause harm. And it doesn’t help that some people do that later and then pretend that they just didn’t know any better. But I’ve caught myself being overly condescending before, and I know I’ve misinterpreted people’s remarks before too. So I try hard to carefully listen to what people say here, and I think most of the readers do the same. I’m very lucky that I’ve never had to do moderation here and that for the most part the comments have been very civil.
“He never does.”
Do they ask Jaimie if he has bacon every time he visits?
It’s the only way to be sure
it was obvious cause your hair kept oggling our tails. yep, boy snakes are perverts!
As a reference to a comment in hot blooded she might be somewhere between warm and cold blooded
They might reproduce using a virus that targets sperm cells that changes them to become fertilized hydra cells but might not override the Y chromosome sometimes resulting in a boy hair and when they run out of the virus they’d die
What’s the drawing in the background of the comment section?
I’m not sure. I think it might be the Yeld illustration from the Modest Medusa coloring book, but I can barely make it out.
I saved it and changed it to black and white: http://i.imgur.com/ThYiA5m.png
Oh! Yeah, it’s that Yeld illustration I did for the coloring book. I guess when jaPoshi was doing the site he decided to use it as a background. I either didn’t know taht or forgot about it. It’s so light on my screen that I don’t think I ever noticed it.
Didn’t you put it in?
I didn’t. Some readers may remember that the site used to look like a steaming pile of garbage. jaPoshi gave it a huge overhaul a few years ago.
Plz add a option so we can choose if we see comments awaiting moderation
Also grammar snobs:
ME NO CARES ABOUT PERFECT GRAMMER!
I don’t think I have the ability to do that. But even if I did, a LOT of them are spam. So you’d be seeing a lot of big spam ads about buying jewelry and purses and Russian wifes.
So i take it you can see them, does that mean you read all the comments or is there some form of program used to determine what is and isn’t appropriate?
I do run an anti-spam program, but it’s not so great and misses a lot of stuff. Otherwise I read every comment. And as I said before, I don’t moderate comments at all and except for a single instance where one user was attacking another I’ve approved every comment ever posted here.
…Russian wives?
Yeah. A lot of the spam is for like mail order brides from Russia. It’s not great.
I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that you get spam. How hard would it be to add a challenge system to keep the bots out? Or, can you set it so that trusted users skip the moderation step?
For awhile I had it so trusted users skipped the moderation step, and that actually worked fine. But I discovered that I was missing lots of posts. People will often comment on comics that are years old and I would just never see their comments. So approving everything became the easiest way for me to keep up on comments. Most of the time I approve comments within a few hours of being posted, and often within a few minutes. If it takes longer it’s because I’m asleep or out of town. Also, more recently some “trusted users” have been posting spam. I assume that means that their accounts were somehow compromised, and when it happens I’ve notified them to let them know.
P.S. in there and back again part 52 the house has no door
It does. It’s under the canopy. But I guess its not very clear?
.
I don’t understand what these “.” posts that several of you are doing are.
It usually means that someone had double-posted by mistake, or posted a stupid comment, and then decided to modify their post to just “.” so that you know that nothing important was there and that there’s no point approving this comment at all
Thanks. I’ve seen it pop up several times recently.
Did you realize that you have been drawing modest’s snakes as venomous snakes? Only venomous snakes have fangs!
I didn’t actually know that, but they are venomous.
Well they can turn people to stone
Here is the names and descriptions of 4 gen 1 Pokémon you probably didn’t know about:
…. (the L type Pokémon )
Missingno. (a bird/normal type duplication Pokémon)
M (the basic stage for kangaskan a duplication Pokémon)
Female sign (name actually the symbol it looks like a smear of blood has a infinitely long call)
I did not know about any of those.
They are all glitch Pokémon
Missingno is the most famous of them
The first 3 dots in ….’s name are actually one symbol
Wasn’t missingno suppose to be a corrupted tangala
Nope it is when the game tries to generate a Pokémon that doesn’t exist.
I just noticed Glados’ snakebag is not colored in panels 2-4.
Someone else pointed that out too. I think I was probably in the middle of coloring them and got distracted, then just moved on to something else.
How are some of them able to keep their smakes short
Theres no real official answer. Just try not to think about it.