I hope you had a great Thanksgiving. Don’t go nuts buying Black Friday stuff!
– Hi everyone. I’d like to mention that you can support my work on Patreon or Ko-fi (or by ordering stuff from my store). I’m sure you won’t be surprised to find that I don’t make much. Since the pandemic money has been especially tight, and I’ve had to spend more and more time on freelance work and commissions to pay the bills. Which means less time making comics and art for you all to enjoy. Recently things have improved a little due to several very generous readers, but I could still use your support. If you can spare a small monthly contribution through Patreon or a tip through Ko-fi I’d really appreciate. Your support directly help finance both my comics work and pay my living expenses!
Sweet, sweet summer child…
I wouldn’t put that past Yeld. A village that spawns male humans like a game of Gauntlet.
ha.
Just don’t throw rocks at them. Someone could lose an eye.
So it looks like liking boys isn’t just a mermaid thing?
Well… it s a whole bunch of things.
Kid Jenny is feeling left out. She doesn’t understand why she’s not allowed to play with the boys or go with them to their villages. She has no idea why the adults of teh village don’t like her.
She wants to play with the boys because she sees them having fun and it looks fun! Her only friends are likely other Mermaids (possibly juts Deb even). So she wants to be doing fun stuff with the other kids. As we’ll see in the next strip she’s not even aware there are also girls in the village.
I think this is probably a common thing for Mermaid kids in Yeld. In a lot of places they’re ostracized because their mothers were very much war criminals. In other places they’re accepted as part of the community so its not an issue at all. So in some parts of Yeld this kind of scene is very common. Young Mermaids not understanding why everyone hates them and just wanting to fit in.
On top of that, a lot of Mermaids have interest in boys just because they’re different. This is pretty common with human kids in our world too, at least in some instances. Girls who are raised around other girls and not boys are often really curious about boys and want to know everything about them (or have the opposite reaction). Since Most young Mermaids only have other Mermaids to socialize with many end up with a fascination with boys (and non-Mermaids in general). This obviously isn’t universally true. Deb seems pretty indifferent to boys.
On top of that Mermaids are designed to be social and to want to spend time with non-mermaids. So that plays a factor to.
So there’s a lot going on here, and what we have a is a poor kid who is forced to live in a lake by herself (with Deb) because her Mom was a soldier who is either dead or abandoned her and the locals want nothing to do with her and she has no idea why. She’s just super lonely and wants friends and a place to belong to. As we saw in past strips Jenny ended up spending all her life trying to find a place to belong to, joining the army of the Deep, and then Dragul’s army, and then working for the Gorgon. She never found a place for herself until she came to live in our world.
She wants what she can not have. And it sort of imprinted on her.