Technically it did come up.
Alternate dialogue for the last panel that I cut because I couldn't see Keisha knowing the reference: "Are you sure she didn't get scared because you always talk like you just launched the bomb thirty-five minutes ago?"
So yeah, we don’t know if Selkie’s lesbian or not because she’s not old enough yet, I worded it the way I did last time because I felt that I didn’t need to explain it everytime. And technically, since Selkie hasn’t developed sexual attraction yet, she doesn’t count as straight or anything.
She made a reference about wanting to marry Green Arrow once I think. Though it was for his arrows to be fair. 😀
I mean it can be argued that arrows ARE kinda phallic….
To adults who spend too much time over-analyzing the things children say and do through their own jaded adult lenses, yes.
If this was a manga, Selkie would grow up with an obsession for Todd, she would also age 15 years in the space of 3 years because “reasons” and it would end with them hooking up…
*dry heaves* thank goodness this is not a manga
Why must you remind me of the tragedy of Bunny Drop? That was the most wholesome feels I have ever gotten from a manga. Just a guy learning how to dad. Daily parenting problems, and nothing suggestive. That plotline is what got Selkie to my notice a few years ago. Then …. Came the dark times….. Then, came the timeskip.
That’s not always true. When I was in 3rd grade, I realized that I had a crush on every single person in my class … including Davey G, who ate paste. (Paste-eaters of the world, rejoice! There is truly someone out there for everyone.) This was in 1973, so I had never heard of gay people, much less bisexuality. I just knew that I was interested in both boys & girls. So Selkie may or may not be aware of her romantic and/or sexual leanings yet. It’s theoretically possible that she could already know, but Dave hasn’t told us yet.
There’s sexual attraction, which doesn’t have a thing to do with how 8-year-olds behave (unless abuse is in the picture), and romantic attraction, which may or may not impact how 8-year-olds behave, and then there’s “I think this person is cool and want to spend time with them,” which is neither.
Except that modern society somehow got the idea that the only reason you would want to spend time with someone you *could* be attracted to (sexually and/or romantically) is due to sexual and/or romantic attraction, and then everything got mixed up.
If you look at the earliest American photographs, you get a bunch of guys sitting on each other’s laps. It’s no big deal, and there’s no sexuality to it. Nowadays, because there *could* be sexuality attached, it’s generally taboo. Men don’t hold hands (in American culture), they try to avoid touching each other except in certain regulated ways (often involving pain), and so on.
This drive to define everything in terms of sex and romance seriously annoys me. It’s pervaded fandom to the point where slash relationships are the default (on Archive of Our Own, at least), and finding highly dramatic tales with deeply intimate, nonsexual and nonromantic relationships is difficult (especially between two guys, because hey, every close relationship ought to involve sex! right? sigh).
Frozen’s Elsa shows no interest in a mate *at all*, and suddenly there’s a drive to make her lesbian (hey, aces get far less representation than lesbians and gays do! why can’t we keep the one Disney Princess who’s shown no interest in romance??). Jughead is THE iconic “not interested in dating” guy who only recently applied the term “asexual” to himself in the comics, and the TV series went and made him a heartthrob dating guy (whyyy).
Rainbow Dash shows all the characteristics of being a tomboy, and people point to all those characteristics and claim they’re signs of being a lesbian. I mean, sure, she could be a lesbian, or she could be straight, or bi/pan, or ace, and argh why are we arguing over the sexual orientation of a pony in a kids’ TV show and why is the explanation with lower statistical likelihood (lesbian) somehow more “reasonable” than the one with higher statistical likelihood (tomboy)?
Is there something wrong with being a tomboy? Is there something wrong or weird about being a girl who’s competitive and into sports? Growing up, I had no interest in Barbies, dresses, makeup, or boys, still don’t wear makeup or shave, but that says nothing at all about my sexual orientation. Nor does the fact that I got on better with guys than with girls — mostly because I didn’t share all the girly interests that my peer group did.
This is what bugs me about this “analyze everything in terms of sex” mindset in our culture. And saying “yeah, she might be queer, and just beginning to sense some of the things that’ll eventually clue her in to her own identity; that’s a thing that happens” is one thing, but quite often it’s pushed to “yeah, see how she positively interacted with another girl in a slightly weird way? TOTAL GAY CODING” and it just makes me want to headdesk. Especially when we’re talking about kids who aren’t even in high school yet.
Please stop using logic, sensible behavior and truth in your comments. You are being reasonable and even headed. I don’t know if your call to reason, calm, and sensibility can gain any traction; but everyday you say stuff like this gives me hope for the future of the planet. O.k. There is no hope for politics, but for the global society and the future, you fill me with hope. I don’t know if the comment section can deal with it. But I enjoy it.
Your comment made my morning ^_^
I forget, were you the one who had at one point asked after my fanfics? Because I’m in the middle of Creepyfest, writing fics in both the Person of Interest and Marvel Cinematic Universe fandoms, and it’s a good time to drop by. I’ve even made an Avengers-themed crossword puzzle and some Sims 3 characters (from the POI cast), and recently updated my vampire Elias fic…
…though my most popular fic at present is my version of Loki in a thrall collar, dropped off with Tony. (Unlike in most such scenarios, mine isn’t headed for romance. Readers are enthusiastic about it anyway.)
Amen and amen! A while ago one of my favorite comics had two close female friends develop a relationship, and while most of the fandom’s response was somewhere along the lines of ‘finally!’, I was deeply disappointed, to the point that I almost quit reading the comic. Why? Because intimate platonic relationships are both essential to the human psyche and vanishingly rare in modern fiction, particularly webcomics. Everything is about the ship, creating an environment that is both unrealistic and unhealthy. ‘It’s just entertainment!’ people say. Yes, but where do you think we get the stories we tell ourselves to determine what our lives are supposed to look like? The obsession with turning everything into a romantic/sexual relationship is doing terrible things to our ability to relate to each other on a non-romantic/sexual level. We are lonelier than ever and it has a lot to do with the expectations popular entertainment has ingrained into us over the past 50 years.
I haven’t thought too much about the interplay between fictional relationship expectations and real-life disappointment (though obviously I’ve thought about it to some degree), but you make some good points. Makes me even more pleased to have become a purveyor of deeply intimate Platonic relationships.
(I swear, the thing that bugs me most about the everything-is-sex mindset is that, by obvious implication, it’s a claim that asexuals either don’t exist, or are also asocial. As if you can’t possibly get close to someone unless you want to get in their pants. And as if anyone trying to get close to you automatically wants to get in your pants.)
Not to mention the worrisome mindsets that have come to the forefront in recent years: “Friendzone,” “Nice Guy,” “Incel” and so on. Otherwise amounting to some combination of these claims: “There’s something deficient about mere friendship; all ‘true’ friend relationships should level up to romance/sex eventually.” “I would never befriend someone if I couldn’t see wanting to get in their pants.” “Put enough nice points in and sex pops out” (women as vending machines). “There is no possible flaw with me that would make so many women reject me; clearly there is something wrong with women as a species” (aka “women aren’t fooled by my pretending to be a nice guy”).
But anyway.
If you like fanfics that are intensely dramatic yet slash- and smut-free (a rarity on the internet, and it took me years to appreciate that designation), The Mellon Chronicles showcases the relationship between Aragorn and Legolas in between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. It can get quite dark (including rape), but sometimes quite endearing (it plays up Aragorn “raised in the house of Elrond” as being very close to Elrond’s sons and to Elrond himself as well). I think it cemented my love of torment fics, back in college. The original site is down but someone archived them on AO3 (link in my name there).
I can also recommend a Loki series called “Housemates,” by Coneycat, which does include a little relationship stuff, but is hugely focused on friendship and family. It starts with Loki falling from the Bifrost to Bristol and joining the cast of Being Human (a vampire, a werewolf, and a ghost), who teach him that being a monster doesn’t mean you have to be a bad guy. They slowly dismantle his emotional issues, he eventually starts to reconcile with his family (they’re not let off the hook, but also not horrible people), befriends the Avengers, and so forth.
All the while he’s being frequently captured/kidnapped and having to save the day in various over-the-top ways. While just wanting to go back to his mundane job of a school janitor. Oh, and he develops a love for rhinoceroses that is more endearing and awesome than it sounds. I loved the series and now I’ve got my mom hooked on it as well (I’m tickled that I’ve totally turned her into a Loki fan).
In an alternate universe, Saturday Morning Watchmen is the real version!
This is nice. It’s an interesting take on the “Aborted Arc” where the characters deliberately decide “No, let’s cut this out” rather than the plot just quietly vanishing because the writer either forgot or just didn’t want to deal with the narrative cleanup. It’s also endlessly fascinating how realistic this comic feels despite being about fish-people with magic lasers.
It’s weird thinking that if it was 30 years ago, there would have been a Saturday Morning Watchmen (I mean, we actually got kid friendly Rambo AND Robocop shortly after they were out, Watchmen wouldn’t have been that much more of a stretch)
Now I’m trying to think of what other grossly inappropriate for kids properties got turned into kid friendly cartoons (I know there are more out there)
Little Shop of Horrors.
Beetlejuice?
Sometime I’d like to see a kid-friendly version of Lord of the Flies.
Beetlejuice was totally a kids’ Saturday morning cartoon. I remember liking it quite a bit.
Beetlejuice was an awesome cartoon, but Brad’s right that it’s weird that someone saw that movie — with its sexually charged, highly uncomfortable titular character — and said “let’s make a weird, selfish, cowardly, but ultimately friendly guy who uses word play as a superpower! and also the gothy teen he tried to force into marriage is now his best friend!”
Also, was anyone else around for the switch from Q13 to ABC, and the corresponding Bowdlerizing? Because I remember feeling that it had really lost a good part of its charm and became quite tame and uninteresting.
All that said:
Though I know I should be wary
Still I venture someplace scary;
Ghostly haunting I turn loose:
Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice!
Yeah, I remember those ones (I hadn’t seen Little Shop of Horrors, or even heard much about it before the cartoon, so my introduction to all of that; Beetlejuice I had seen the movie first, and just missed some of the darker/more adult bits when younger, so the cartoon didn’t feel too out of place to me)
I almost forgot about The Toxic Avenger (cartoon of Toxic Crusader, which was insane) and hadn’t known Swamp Thing had a movie prior to the cartoon.
Quick, what other old pop-culture stuff can I use to show my age?
Little Shop of Horrors got one; (entitled; “Little Shop”) with Seymour and Audrey as kids! https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0120982/?ref_=fn_al_tt_0
There are also plenty of not-at-all child friendly franchises that got toy lines: Alien and Terminator come to mind.
I remember a SNL parody of this theme, with a commercial for action figures based on the Tom Hanks film Philadelphia.
Yeah, I never really got how a bunch of violent, gory R-rated franchises pushed on toy production so hard (well, money, but that’s true of every venture)
If I had to venture a guess, I’d have to think that since the franchises resulted in a number of video games & other media (comics being a big one) they figured there’d be enough appeal to a wider audience, even if they hadn’t seen the source material.
A couple other really notable ones were Rambo (again, he was everywhere) and Predator (if Arnie was associated with it, if there was any chance of making money on it, it got the toy/other media treatment). Heck, the series’ that got made into cartoons got toys too (toxic avenger, swamp thing, Conan (which I omitted from my response about other movies that really shouldn’t have gotten kids cartoons) Robocop, plus everything that wasn’t directly marketed at kids, but was still toy/action figures)
Not animated, but Mortal Kombat was inexplicably turned into a PG-13 kinda film, instead of R like it should have been. I have no idea if the people making that decision had ever even played the game.
“Gasp! We can’t possibly make it too gory! The teens wouldn’t be able to enjoy it!” or whatever.
Oh, there were also 2 tv series, one of which was animated (Mortal Kombat: Defenders of the Realm) and neither of which had anything close to the violence of the source materials (game or movie)
I wouldn’t expect animation of that era to be capable of conveying gore, let alone animation showed on regular TV. It took us a while to push past the Animation Age Ghetto.
Incidentally, I’d like to plug Mutant Ninja Turtles Gaiden, a webcomic that goes pretty dark but was quite compelling. I recently had some trouble with their site while looking it up (like someone had hacked the site or something), so be careful, but if you can find the right stuff, I can recommend giving the story a look.
…I would watch this.
For those who haven’t seen Saturday Morning Watchmen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDDHHrt6l4w
…I retract my statement. Though I’m tickled that that parody exists, and glad that I’ve seen it.
“I’m nutty!” — Rorschach (in a silly voice)
Yeah, that seems entirely in keeping with the guy who got introduced as The Punisher minus his fun side, or Batman if he murdered informants.
Regarding “aborted arc”, a part of me sort of hoped it wouldn’t be that obvious but… yeah, kind of.
Basically, the original intent involved a lot more of George and Te Fahn both being mad at Selkie. At some point though I was looking over everything and I thought, “…Is dramamongering over a misunderstanding of intentions really all that interesting?”
There’s a bit more fallout to go through still but, yeah, there is a bit of an “aborted arc” going on, in the sense that I opted to cut short the “we’re not friends anymore!!!!” drama.
Honestly? I think it’s refreshing to see it play out that way, with the drama cut short. Selkie learns a lesson, bonds are strengthened, we learn more about Echoes.
In my opinion, it was for the best that arc was aborted. Personally, I find the whole “fallout-over-a-misunderstanding” trope to be draining to watch. I blame the infamous straight to video Disney sequels I watched as a kid for that.
I honestly thought you’d meant it to play out this way from the beginning. You seem to have a thing for deconstruction, and this seems much more like how a “misunderstanding drama” would play out in real life. It works very well.
One of my favorite moments in Girl Genius is when it looks like Gil (separated from the main group) is going to get Entirely the Wrong Idea about what’s going on with Agatha and the group, and it totally looks like it’s about to play up the tropes involving Miscommunication Kills or whatever, like the comic didn’t have enough drama…
…and then Zeetha pops in like a ninja to inform Gil of what’s really going on, and thus Gil is at least aware that his lady love is not being a horrible monster, and the drama shifts to be from another angle entirely.
Kinda like in Tailsteak’s “Leftover Soup” where Ellen realizes that her first impulse to hide a problem would’ve resulted in sitcom shenanigans, and so she just calls her friend and mans up. (Link in my name there.)
So Selkie often sounds like she’s about to go “Ghandi discovers democracy” on the world?
Selkie would be the Civ version of Ghandi.
That is the joke, aye.