(Final colors will be a bit more delayed than usual.)
I think toys that stimulate sensory input would be even more important than usual considering she’s confined to a tank for a while.
And yes, to those that asked but I didn’t yet answer on the last strip, Tai Li can’t breathe air at this development stage. She’s tankbound until her respiratory system develops further.
Some of the toys new and some of them are Suko's hand-me-downs. Non-toxic plastic infant toys that won't leech bad things into water if submerged. More fun for her than a bubble-clam would be, anyway.
random question: Would the Sarnothi (sorry if misspelling) be teaching about the fish and the crabs instead of the birds and the bees?
do sarnothi get crabs?
Usually for breakfast.
They’re here all week, folks.
The toys may be more fun than the bubble clam in the long run, but in my experience, kids love bubbles.
Selkie seems pretty freaked out over this and it seems like it’s really setting in on Todd that her daughter is an entirely different species than he is. I hope he asks Pohl about things that Selkie maybe needs in her life. Remember how she flipped out at the river? I hope Todd has a realization that Selkie IS NOT HUMAN and has needs and urges that he doesn’t and takes steps to ensure she’s happy and healthy.
I’m with Selkie though, that baby still freaks me out!
His daughter. Mobile is hard.
Sarnothi seem to go through some kind of awakening… presumably that’s when they get the glowy green stuff powers, that’s certainly going to be fun for all involved.
It’s a blessing they know the other Sarnothi family. It’s horrible the government felt fit to give Sarnothi orphans to people without any information about the species. You’d have to be a fool not to know they are not human.
Yeah, I imagine the orphanage figured out Selkie wasn’t human fairly quickly, but that still leaves a LOT of things unsaid. (Like, I dunno, “obligate carnivore”? MIGHT HAVE BEEN GOOD INFORMATION TO HAVE.) Gotta imagine adolescence would have been its own special kind of torture if they didn’t know the De’Madeias.
Selkie was left at the orphanage by her mother who, apparently, didn’t speak english. The orphanage DID tell Todd of course, among other things. I’m not sure when the government got involved.
She spoke it, just not very well. It’s questionable how much she’d be able to communicate of things like that.
But it’s not on her shoulders. It’s on the government group that has placed Selkie in the situation and been “watching out” for her all these years — without providing necessary medical information. Imagine if all Sarnothi had peanut allergies, like not just puking weird colors but actually life-threatening anaphylactic shock, and the government just held back and went “No, wait, we want to see how they handle this.”
This is so friggin precious. I can hardly stand it! :3
I just realized something. Is there a reason all the male Sarnothi we’ve met have single first names (Pohl, Suko), and the female ones have dual names (Nei Li, Sai Fen, and now Tai Li)? Is it a gender indicator in Sarnothi naming, or is it a coincidence?
THAT’S A VERY GOOD QUESTION
Good questions demand answers just based on their truthiness. And what is more true than a birth to a family?
In tensei (the sarnothi language), single first names are masculine and two-word first names are feminine. So yes, it’s a gender indicator in the language.
I’m curious: why did you call it “tensei”? If only because I’m a gamer and see it all over Japanese titles and am wondering if you pulled it from Japanese…
It’s been pointed out to me by a couple people that “tensei” means “heavenly voice” in Japanese, but it’s honestly just a very pleasant coincidence. I made the term “tensei” the same way I made other words in the language, by sounding out syllables until I found something that hit my ear right.
I look really silly when I’m coming up with new sarnothi words because I talk out loud in gibberish to myself to find nice word-sounds. XD
*big grins* You and I need to parlay some time:) Me in my five or six and you in yours! Eeeee!~!! Come over anytime, Dave:)
Yeah! I’d love to visit again sometime. đŸ˜€
Tolkien did the same thing for elvish names and words.
I’ve always loved conlanging. Tried my hand at a dozen proto-languages and never got all that far, but really hope to put more time into it someday.
My favorite word I invented was “niffa,” meaning roughly “so light that if it’s in your hand you don’t even feel the weight” — the descriptor for, say, dandelion fluff.
Actually, come to think of it, the Sarnothi living underwater probably means they think of weight quite differently from us. More of a “hard to change direction quickly” than a “being difficult to lift.” More focused on mass/momentum and less on gravity per se.
T’ahway no-theh, irih-tani ta’kwey, ina? Maku’ah, maku-troh de han.
Ina’troh avanwei’chu, Davit’e. -_n
Vaporware> Hah’bei, hah’bei:) Boh-aihy-lee shyao na’ik! Ta’ohpei, dyunta! Hah’bei:) Cho, ko’mah’diehs hhehsa, LOL.
But if I really wanna get into weird languages, I start typing with the added characters of ^ and ^^ to simulate the sounds I personally cannot make but they can.
Ah, nothing like witnessing the miracle of birth to disillusion any preconceived (I see what I did there) notions about it and/or babies.
I guess nobody mentioned that Sarnothi start off looking a bit different than just smaller versions of the adults đŸ˜€
Still, once the freak out subsides things should get really good.
The freak-out subsides?
OH GOOD PULSE STILL RACING
Still laughing twenty min.s later. Not only see did I see what you did there, I Saw what you did last summer, on Elm street, with the children of the corn, in the ring.
I wonder if a large castle would work. You know, the kind you’d see in an aquarium.
For that matter, maybe a pirate-chest aerator…
Isn’t anyone going to question why they can hear the baby underwater?
They hear ‘REEEOHHH’. Water muffles sounds, not shuts them out.
Also, lots of aquatic species orient themselves by echolocation, so, you know.
Sarnothi are capable of speaking intelligibly in both water and air. I don’t really have a researched plausibly explainable reason for that being the case, it’s just kind of handwaved.
It is possible they have both the normal vocals and also vocal chords like a dolphin or some such, because I sure as heck can hear those whistles and clicks when I am out of the tank and they are in it. I can hear bats very well, too.
Water actually carries sound exceedingly well, the real difficulty lies in generating a strong enough signal to be intelligible in the first place. For humans, apart from the obvious difficulties presented by a flooded vocal tract, it would likely be very difficult to speak using water simply because human vocal cords aren’t really developed for a medium of that viscosity, and since we are reliant on air compression from the lungs to ‘push’ media through our vocal tract for shaping into a signal that presents a challenge as well.
Cetaceans cheat a bit by being air breathers themselves, and using their ‘melon’ (at least among toothed cetaceans) as a sort of drum to propagate and amplify their voices efficiently out into the water around them. Their actual vocal apparatus, whether the phonic lips of toothed whales or the vocal cords of the mysticete, are still running on and shaping gaseous air for the actual signal generation though.
As amphibious lifeforms capable of breathing and processing water, and being structurally similar to humans in most basic respects, the simplest answer lies in the novel lungs partially described way back in November of 2010.
Hybrid lungs are very odd, but if they can process either medium in the same chamber then they can use the same vocal tract to shape either. The real trick for human-like speech likely lies in the Sarnothi being able to ‘close’ their lungs to speak, essentially stopping a breath short of the gill slits and projecting it back out as a signal shaped by the vocal tract in their throat. This also gives an additional purpose to the phlegm secretions in the gills (helping seal the airway for gas-speaking since gaseous atmosphere is much more likely to try to escape while you’re talking, which would also explain coughing and sputtering as it grew dry and cracked, allowing the lungs to leak erratically) and gives rise to the potential Sarnothi expression ‘Talking out your gills’ (which would probably /not/ be /quite/ the same in meaning as the human expression ‘talking out your butt’, but there you are. Probably something along the lines of a fast-talker and/or a mumbler…someone who, for some reason, is compelled to speak but doesn’t actually want you to hear what they’re saying…).
Beyond that necessity, there isn’t really a need to hand-wave much of anything. The Sarnothi would just need to have good, strong diaphragms (possibly adapted for and primarily used for speaking rather than breathing, since normal breathing flow is a one-way trip for them), which would give them good, strong voices…something already well supported by what we’ve seen.
Or, rather than a conventional mammalian diaphragm, theirs might have wrapped around/become part of the structure of the lungs themselves, allowing them to pump medium in either direction for breathing or speaking as needed or for contending with situations where they can’t adequately expose their gills for normal the normal breath cycles (e.g., Selkie being all heavily bundled up for the winter).
Same basic net result either way, I think? Looking at the anatomical diagram, the latter structure seems plausible enough…a sort of well developed and valved ‘accordion’ lung.
Anyway, that’s probably more than enough armchair biology from me for today. >_>
Remember how loud Selkie can scream when she wants to? Also, imagine how loud human babies can scream. The real surprise is how /happy/ the baby looks (but that might just be a human response to a facial expression which means something entirely different to the newborn and her family).
as one of the loudest human beings on the planet (scientifically measured with a Decibel meter at 123db) I can be heard OUT side of the tank when I bellow (scared the HELL out of a tech doing that dropping a 60 pound piece of steel on your foot hurts even under water having scuba gear on allowed my to bellow air out my lungs then suck in new air while Yelling profanity At something that needed to be cursed appropriately) INSIDE the tank under the water and can be heard CLEARLY at 20 feet away and 20 feet down at a medium yell if you are in the tank with me.
Aaaand I’ve had a terrible thought.
Last page, someone commented that Selkie must really be a fish and has no grounds to yell at Amanda when she calls her that.
That’s bullshit on so many levels, but… is that what she’s going to think?
Don’t know how this might weigh in, but I just found that “allergic to pretty much all plants” is an actual existing condition (in humans), apparently: https://notalwayslearning.com/i-have-beef-with-the-plants/43084
She may be a little young for all of the birds and bees, but I was about her age when I got to see the Natural History Museum in New York, and see how embryos develop into people. And we look a lot like tadpoles or fishies at one stage or another. Might help her understand that at heart, we were all fishies once. Well, …. Except for demon spawn, …. But maybe them, too. Not too sure about elves, dwarves, and unicorns, but pretty sure about people.
“She may be a little young for all of the birds and bees.” Huh? What is wrong teaching kids about reproduction when they are younger. You hide it until they are older it makes it harder to tell them, seem like a dirty secret, and sets them up find out myths from other kids *and* are less likely to tell an adult if they are molested. There are lots of child-geared books that help explain it. My daughter was told as soon as she asked about babies when she was 3.
She’s 7 and has been told (and read on her own) about puberty. It’s stupid people wait until kids are in the throes of puberty to tell them what’s going on with their bodies. Equally stupid people don’t talk about details of menopause or pregnancy. It makes those times all the more terrible for women (and the people close to them) than they should be.
Just like you don’t try to teach linear algebra to kids before they understand counting, there’s no point in trying to teach human reproduction to kids who are too young to understand.
For example, when my mother first tried to explain it to me when I was around 4 or 5, I didn’t get it. At all. Even a few years later it was all “Here’s the pancreas, it does stuff you don’t understand. Here’s the spleen. It does other stuff you don’t understand. Here’s dozens more internal organs that females have that contain all sorts of fluids and we haven’t even adequately explained to you what spleens and pancreases do. Also, tomorrow is piano lessons. Also, East Germany is just west of West Germany which is Communist because the Russians took over in World War II. By the way, there’s a World War II now. Also, have you finished memorizing the 8 times table yet? What’s the capital of Missouri? What atoms is water made out of?”
So I probably could have understood human reproduction around 8 or so, but I didn’t really understand until I was 10 because Jefferson City is the capital of Missouri and 8 times 7 is 56 and WHO CARES WHAT A FALLOPIAN TUBE DOES MY SIBLINGS CAME OUT WITH NO PROBLEMS.
But also, just because a kid won’t fully understand an explanation doesn’t mean you shouldn’t explain. I always freely offer information to kids, as much as they will listen to. I’ll pitch it to a developmentally appropriate level of complexity and detail and I won’t pressure them to follow more than they want to follow, but I’ll also give them a little more than I estimate they’re at the level for. That both avoids talking down to them and gives them an opportunity to rise to the challenge and learn more than average.
Also, there’s no law against explaining the same thing more than once. Hearing about the same thing multiple times is a good way to learn; you absorb more each time you hear it.
Bravo, Jil! You explained better than I did in 1/4 the type. đŸ˜€
It’s important to know when things go over a child’s head (you can always taper back or re-approach a talk later in language that is easier for a kid to understand), but it’s also important to give them information—especially when they ask for it, and not hide things that are about them (names of genitals, reproduction, death, etc…).
Kids who learn about reproduction at an earlier age are actually less likely to have sex too early (and less likely to have an accidental pregnancy) and are better equipped to inform adults if they (or a friend) are sexually abused.
“Just like you don’t try to teach linear algebra to kids before they understand counting, there’s no point in trying to teach human reproduction to kids who are too young to understand.”
Goodness save those who equate reproduction with advanced math. Many children can understand it just fine at an early age. I did and my daughter even understands more than I did. Some of her little friends have wanted to be midwives since they were preschoolers. I teach and I am a Girl Scout leader. It is always a surprise seeing how much some adults underestimate children—and fail to understand how to communicate with them.
Sounds like your mom had difficulty discussing it. Maybe you weren’t interested at the time (and she was too busy to keep trying to teach) or she didn’t have good books or she was too embarrassed to actually use proper terminology and show pictures? Who knows. But it’s not rocket science though teaching kids, “Here’s your penis and testicles. Girls have vulvas, vaginas and uteruses. Babies are made by….”
When my daughter was 2-3, we started with a great book called “How Babies Are Made.” I read it as a little kid myself and “got it.” It’s illustrated in cut out paper art (but not a pop up book). It tells that all living things come from eggs and something else. It first discussed reproduction of plants (egg + pollen = seed). Then it discussion reproduction of chickens (egg+sperm = chick). Then it discusses reproduction of dogs (eggs + sperms = puppies). All of these show the reproductive parts in detail and the acts of reproduction in cross sections. Finally it gets to humans. Body parts are shown. Sex is only shown as a mom and dad hugging under blankets so the kids can piece it together (since dogs were shown having sex in the previous “chapter”), but it isn’t heavily detailed.
Then we have a couple great books from a series called “It’s Not the Stork.” There’s other books that are good, too—as well as printable worksheets. My daughter knows what will happen when she hits puberty. It will not be a freaky shock. She knows all the real names to her body parts (and male body part names). She knows what sex is. Has no interest in having sex nor does she go around telling her friends about her (we’ve discussed that talking about beginnings and ends to life are very personal for different families depending on their beliefs).
Well there’s a certain amount that I did understand even at age four. But I didn’t understand everything she tried to explain, simply because I didn’t have the vocabulary yet. Somewhere between 4 and 8 I conflated understanding human reproduction with understanding human anatomy, as if sexual reproduction required college-level education or something like that. My parents and most of the adult couples I knew all met in college, after all.
But, of course, it all made sense in the end.
Not all boys, but may develop vocabulary late. One of my best friends kids is four and talks in brief mumbles and sees a speech therapist… But he can read and do math on a 1st grade level. This is why books (with good pictures) are really useful for these things. It also takes some of the embarrassment factor out of it for the parent. Even when you are raised by parents who talked to you early about this stuff it can be a little odd talking about the biology of reproduction (and using names genitals) for the first time. All the better reason to start early.
My mom got around the vocabulary issue by describing the things.
“That thing your brother has that you don’t” became shortened to “thing” when talking about men in general later. “Between your pee-hold and poop-hole is a third hole” became shortened to “third hole” later.
The average child understands gender differences by ages 3-4 and has a gender self-concept around age 5. They notice genital differences if they encounter them, which is not uncommon if they are near smaller children or accidentally see someone else naked. I knew the basics of sexual reproduction at around 4 thanks to a child’s book of anatomy.
Good parents and the presence of pregnant animals and/or people make for a pretty easy discussion. “Baby humans grown in a special place in a woman’s body call the uterus. The come from special cells called sperm and eggs. Not the same egg as from a chicken…” etc. etc.
Lying about it makes people ashamed.
Yeah, I started developing by the time I was 8. It was a good thing I’d had a few birds and bees general talks. It helps if you have younger siblings – you ask the question and hopefully get a developmentally appropriate answer.
I am slowly telling my daughter. Why slowly? Even at seven, she has the attention span of a squirrel. I’d explain the whole thing but it goes right out her ears and I’m in the middle of explaining parts and off she goes outside. Eh. I keep trying. She’ll sit still for youtube videos. She actually asked me the other day, “Mom, which one do males have, egg or sperm?” and I looked at her and blinked, cuz it was out of the blue. I asked her about it and she said she’d seen a program on Youtube called “Top 10 Men The World Doesn’t Know About” and proceeded to argue with me that men CAN have eggs and I tried to explain hermaphrodites, transgender, etc. etc. Yeah. That lasted two minutes. Off she went again. LOL. Eh. I’m here when she really wants to know:) Been trying to talk to her about this stuff for 3 years.
You know your daughter best and you are at least trying—which puts you worlds ahead of a lot of parents who want to keep their kids in the dark about it until they are hitting puberty.
If it makes you feel better, I think over half of 7 year olds have the attention spans of squirrels—especially when you get them in a group. Mine can be a real spaz when she gets bored.
If you can find it, this is a pretty cool book: http://www.amazon.com/How-Babies-Made-Andrew-Andry/dp/0809408392/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1463837569&sr=8-3&keywords=how+babies+are+made+book
It’s really simple, well-laid out. You can read it to a lot of different ages. We started it with my daughter when she was 2/3, and she still enjoys exploring it. My only issue is they misuse the word “vagina” (they use vagina for vulva—which is not accurate anymore).
But “It’s Not the Stork is a Good” can be a good one for a 7 year old, too. We’re just exploring a couple of the later books in that series (bought “It’s So Amazing” and looking into “It’s Perfectly Normal” for later).
My only issues with it are it is laid out very busy and the little characters in it (“Bird and Bee”) annoy me so I’ve only read sections out loud with my girl. She reads pretty well on her own so she explores the rest (which I’ve read myself), and we talk about what she has read to satisfy her curiosity and also make sure she doesn’t misinterpret things.
Perhaps it would be best if people wrent so quick to assume that what works for child A in situation X is also the most effective or appropriate choice for child B in situation Y. Raising and teaching children is a pretty complex endeavor with a LOT of variation depending both on child and circumstances. Asserting that what worked for or was best for your child is therefore the Right Choice for other children is not a good argument to make.
Life is not a video game, there is not often one singular correct path. Many approaches can be taken that result in good or effective outcomes. It’s well and good to discuss and debate the merits of different approaches, that’s how we learn, but I caution against asserting that ones approach is the Truth, especially when it comes to raising kids.
Lambasting Todd or Andi for their fictional choices Ina fictional world is one thing but remember that the readers here are real people dealing with real life situations. Perhaps it’s best if we all don’t assume each other’s situations are so easily understood or judged?
Bravo! Well said!
There are very very few things that work for 100% of people, and all of them involve killing the person in question.
(I would say reproduction works for everyone, but there are people who can’t carry to term, and people whose eggs/sperm are malformed making them infertile, so… yeah, there’s literally nothing else)
I figured that if I explained everything in pedantic, somewhat boring detail, the kid wouldn’t have any kind of “it’s a mystery so it must be fascinating” attitude when she was old enough. *evil grin* It’d be boring. Worked pretty decently.
I think I started explaining around 3ish, since that’s when she found a little square wrapper in the trash and asked if it was a candy wrapper. ^_^
One of my friends does that. She is Quaker. It shuts down freakouts really fast if someone bonks their head or skins a knee. đŸ™‚
We got the ol’ split-em-up-by-gender-different-classrooms school-mandated birds and bees talk in 5th grade… If that’s anything to go off of, she’s only two years away.
She had the “birds and bees” talk at 3.
I consider the lengthy and not entirely comfortable births of my own three children, the scalpel, forceps, contractions, catheters, epidurals and the c-section…. So, uh, some of you are kind of weirded out by Sarnothi biology? To heck with that! I wanna be a Sarnothi!
Well, there’s no evidence that Sarnothi women can’t have complications that require them to have medical assistance of that general sort.
And if a human pregnancy isn’t in horrible shape (requiring medical assistance), you can do just fine getting by with roughly the contractions part of that list. Many women have done so at home, in the bathtub or a kiddie pool or just kneeling on the floor, assisted by a midwife or doula, and with far less stress and rush than a hospital provides.
Of course, hospitals have (so I hear) come a long way since the days when nurses would sit on your legs to keep you from having the birth before the doctor got there, but still. I will never understand a system that sets the woman up in the least gravity-assisted position possible and thus sets her up to have a longer, more painful delivery that often requires stuff like drugs and actually cutting her open — partly because she’s not allowed to deliver at her own pace.
Or maybe I was just brainwashed by too many home-birth books during my formative years (early college?). They make hospital deliveries sound like insanity. But home deliveries on YouTube look much less stressful.
This is where babies come from.
What a great transition! A sweet warm fuzzy family moment followed by horrified shock. Poor Selkie! XD
I love how Selkie looks even more freaked out than Todd, who looks shocked enough…
Look up “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”. Sarnothi babies get born in an earlier stage of their development than human babies do. They have to, because the egg itself cannot contain enough calories/nutrients to support development of a fetus to human newborn size.
I had been thinking a similar thing, only I would never have phrased it as well as you did. đŸ™‚
I guess it’s a similar concept to amphibians; they hatch from small eggs, so they hatch as tadpoles and that sort of thing and develop from there. Or, I suppose, like a kangaroo, which is born at six weeks, and must make its way from the birth canal to the pouch and continue to develop there.
It makes a lot of sense. Lot of folks just think moms just carry babies, but we actually carry/become their ecosystems, too. Our bodies change—including our blood, respiratory, and skeletal systems. Pretty crazy, disturbing and amazing stuff. Never realized how big of a change it was until reading about the details of it beyond the boring crap taught at SexEd and the incomplete baby books my parents had.
You do know that recapitulation theory is extremely outdated and incorrect, right?
Don’t bother looking it up. It’s an obsolete inaccurate untrue saying
Ok, you know the idea that the baby was hatched with a tail did not bother me in the least but this cutesy babytalk from the parents in freaking me out.
Aw, Tai Li looks so dang cute cuddling up to Mommy and Daddy!
Glad to see Todd is handling the surprise well. Strange that I didn’t think it’d be Selkie being more viably surprised at the tadpole stage, but it makes sense with her growing up around human babies.
That has to be one hell of an amazing tank to even be able to support a preschooler swimming about in it without the danger of cracking/breaking. Looks about 100+ gallons. Poh either makes a fat check or the government had to donate it…or health insurance? XD Of course, it probably costs about the same as a hospital visit for a “normal” birth—maybe even less.
Much less, believe me. “Normal” as in vaginal birth without the C-section go anywhere between 3-17k… A very expensive trip into the world, to be sure:)
dude you can buy a 210 gallon tank NEW from petco/petsmart for 600-800 bucks. Actually thats about the cost of a fancy crib for a baby… infact if you include cost of basinet, crib, diaper bag, acoutrements, and playpen the large fishtank is cheaper… by a good margin. set up a good sized filter system and sump along with a proper benificial bacteria colony… and a deep substrate bed to seed with chemoautotrophs that can handle Nitrates.. (or add sufficient plants/and water changes to handle nitrates. and the fishkid is WAY WAY cheaper. (less work too)
I wonder if she has drawn herself as a baby before and now realizes she got it wrong..
Also, cmon, swim trunks? are we that prudish? even them?
Naw, maybe not, but they DO have guests and I think Pohl may be smart enough to know they’ve shocked them enough as it is. Not gonna go into Sarnothi genitalia at the moment LOL.
And, nobody is commenting on Tai Li having a full head of hair! Fascinating that it grew with her tadpole stage and not later!
Also, this is a family friendly comic. I think Dave is right to be cautious. Never know who might be offended, after all.
And if they’re trying to establish a habit of swim trunks for when the kid goes swimming outside, it’s probably best to keep to the habit in private as well.
It’s also possible that if Sarnothi have dangly bits, they don’t want his little sister trying to bite anything.
Thank you for that disturbing mental image.
It could also be a case of “toddler in the water may make a mess in his sister’s tank” and the trunks could be a cover for a swim diaper. He is only 2, after all, guessing if he’s toilet-trained it’s only happened recently and even trained 2s will still get confused in water. I’d imagine the tank is designed to handle baby waste but I’d think they’d want to avoid having toddler waste added to the mix if it’s avoidable.
you do not want your baby sister to bite your gonapodium.. kids bite ands he looks to have teeth. Id call that smart parrenting.
What’s “prudish” got to do with anything?
One of the things that separates “people” from “animals” is that people wear clothes.
Every time these folks have been shown in this strip, they’ve had clothing on. Not just when interacting with humans, but every time. Selkie and her mother. The arc about the war.
Since they NORMALLY wear clothing, and they NORMALLY reside in water, wearing clothing while in water (swim trunks) would seem to be NORMAL.
If you think it’s normal to wear clothes while immersed in water, you have no knowledge of humanity prior to the invention of nylon.
also yeah Jade, I commented on her hair being pretty impressive at that stage. More than human babbys have!
While it may not have been normal for the fully land based humans to not wear clothes in water before nylon, its was mostly for practical reasons, wet human clothes pretty much suck at doing what human’s need clothing for and are heavy.
For an amphibious predator race, their clothing materials and even functionality probably started much different than we had them. I hypothesize that they started clothing more for superior hunting camouflage than warmth.
Maybe you have missed the point that these people are NOT human, so how could my knowledge, or lack thereof, of humanity have any bearing?
I am highly amused by Pohl and Sai Fen being so utterly clueless to the shocked discomfort of their guests.
If the https://selkiecomic.com/comic/first-anniversary/ “age 1” sketch is accurate, it can’t be too long before the baby starts taking on a humanoid shape.
Okay, yeah. Tai Li is just adorable.
Seeing them stick their hands in made me curious, Dave. How does Sarnothi young know that these giant beings that look nothing like them are their parents, and not just predators? Has any parent had trouble with thier newly hatched baby trying to swim away from them?
Lots of big creatures have tiny babies. Fish especially. I think the only time I’ve seen babies recoil from their own parents was in The Land Before Time, and I cut them slack because it was super cute.
How about this for explaining things to kids?
Every question they ask, give them a truthful answer – as much as you can fit into a single sentence that they can parse at their age, and using words they know.
If they want to know more, they’ll ask a follow-up question.
“Where do babies come from?”
Age 2-ish: “From mommies.”
Age 5-ish: “They grow inside mommies until they’re born.”
The stories here about information overload make me a bit sad. Kids learn best by pulling in facts they’re curious about. If they’re curious about birth or sex or anatomy, tell them as much as they want to know.
Hopefully the parents are able to treat it like any other information. “Why are trees so tall?” “So they can get more sun and wind. If they were small other plants would shadow them.” “How does the baby get out of the mommy?” “She has a hole for babies to come out of and her body pushes the baby out when it’s done growing inside.” “What makes a car go?” ….
DO not say “grow inside mommies”. The kids will get confused and think the baby is growing literally in the mother’s stomach. Say “a special place for babies to grow in a mom’s body”.
I straight up explain. But if she won’t stay in one spot and rushes off without the full explanation, as she is want to do, then I can’t just cram as much as possible. When she really wants to know, I’ll tell her:) If she hasn’t the patience to sit for the answer, I can only answer what I can. And I tell her exactly what the truth is. It’s called facts:)
Why is everyone assuming that the surprise is a tadpole like birth? Couldn’t it be an equal surprise for Selkie and Todd to see a male sarnothi without clothing (i.e., Pohl’s son getting into the tank with new sister)?
Pretty sure it’s not that. His dad just scooped him up to change his clothing to swim trunks. It’s rather implied this is going to happen away from the guests, in Suko’s room.
Is Pohl’s pluralization “hows” a mistake or intentional? I thought he was over that habit.
A lot of people in my area of Indiana at least use the phrase “hows about we do [blah]” when speaking informally to family and/or friends! Not sure where it started, but it’s a regional slang thing. Pohl could have learned English in an area that used the phrase and picked it up there.
That is a thing people say when speaking informally: “Hows about we do [such-and-so]?” More commonly it’s written “How’s about…” but since it’s a thing that only happens in speech or when transcribing very informal speech (as here) there isn’t really one correct spelling.
In any case, it still only means “How about…” Me, I think the ‘s’ just sneaks in there because people think it sounds better, or sounds funny. I discovered the technical grammatical term for this is proparalepsis, so thank you for asking the question — I learned a new word!
This is…a learning day. Very much a learning day.
100 comments? Dang, that’s a good number of comments.
I just had to mention it, since the next page is fast approaching and triple digit comment counts are always neat to see up here.
Okay, carry on with your Sunday evenings (unless it’s already Monday morning, then enjoy that)
I just have to say I ADORE Tai Li’s expression in panel 3; it looks like her eyes and mouth are wide open with glee, like she already knows that Suko is her brother.
Selkie and Sai Fen need to have some girl-talk.