*sighs* Alaria will have been gorgonized, or some such, knowing the Rannites. I hope Runt survives all this to learn from his mistakes, and I hope they do eventually manage to free Alaria (and restore her, if they did anything to her). She looked like she would be a good queen, and he needs a stabilizing influence. Taking on the whole castle by himself though… not a great idea. Even if he does have the advantage of knowing the castle really well. Hopefully, there is a network of secret passages, or something, that the Rannites haven’t discovered yet.
Better yet, hopefully there’s a network of secret passages they HAVE discovered, to distract them from the network of SECRET secret passages that Runt will use.
I like the way you think, but keep in mind that there’s a finite number of secret passages that you can incorporate in a structure. And before you say magic, "it’s bigger on the inside" kind of stuff, that degrades over time and can blow the whole building apart when it fails.
or he comes to her rescue and finds that she is totally fine and has al the rannites loyal to her lol. I just have the impression there is more to Alaria then we really know.
For the Rannites…the problem is that they are losing a lot of held ground now. they have lost one city and still have others forming and running groups to take them out. Short term they won, long term…they will lose
But the places they have lost — Greyfort, Tempul, now bits of the Goblin Lands — are minor holdings compared to the nations and capitols they still hold. And of vastly more importance than any shifting lines on a battle map is the fact that they serve the world’s one remaining fully armed and operational goddess.
The few losses that Ranna has suffered do serve as proof in principle that she, like most of the setting’s deities, is neither omnipotent, omniscient, nor frankly all that bright. (Terry Pratchett would be proud.) There is hope for the good guys, but if they don’t strike now and pull of an overwhelming upset, the Rannites could easily roll back over those annoying bits of lost ground.
Ah, that’s it! It’s because Awl’s a teenager! "Awwww, this is just plain, old, evil. I thought this was going to be party evil! Where are the hot dudes and babes? Dad told me about a buddy of his named Glon who used to find all kinds of hot evil to fool around with!"
Having a minotaur as a father and a sphynx as a mother sure does create interesting and unusual looks, as we have seen on Turg’s children. So, the question that always popped up in my mind, but I think I didn’t ask yet: How comes Awl looks like a giant bird? I get the wings. But the rest? My guesses were until now the "you never know with the magical mixture of (partly at least) magical beings" and "why not?". But now I really had to ask.
Great question and -as has been pointed out in the past- it’s a subject I could ramble on and on and on about. I have oddly strong views about how genetic mixing in fantasy and sci-fi universe happen.
So… in my Sci-fi, scientific realism should be considered when trying to create hybrids. I don’t like the way Star Trek has gone off the rails wildly mixing their aliens. Spock was supposed to be this unique thing. His unscreened backstory included many years of experimenting and failed attempts by his parents to create a hybrid Vulcan/Human.
Once TNG got started alien species mixed like skittles, m&ms and smarties in a sadistic DM’s snack bowl (I may never forgive you for this, David McBride.) Vulcans, Humans, Andorians, Romulans, Klingons, Vacuum cleaners…. anyone could just thrust their seed into anyone else and a perfectly gene-blended hybrid would just pop out with no health problems or genetic defects. I call BULLSHIT. That doesn’t work among species here on Earth and most of us even have the same chemical makeup! This is why we don’t have Chick-leop-popottomi-diles running around all over the fucking place.
No, in sci-fi, you’ve got to dial it down for it to even remotely resemble realism.
FANTASY on the other hand, is a world of magic and monsters and splintered souls and demons and…. it’s totally different. The rules go out the window. I like to put SOME limitation on it to keep track if nothing else, but…
So, in Turg and the Sphynx’s case I basically considered how they would copulate to begin with (I’m not saying this something I think about often…. much) and decided that they would use magic from the Sphynx’s treasure hoard to take turns transforming themselves into varoius compatible forms. So, Turg turns into a giant Sphynx, the Sphynx turns into a Minotaur, then they got creative….
Then I tallied up their various characteristics. We’ve got 2 part Human, 1 part bull, 1 part eagle, 1 part lion. I put them into a little randomizer chart with various %’s considered for likeliness and then rolled up what their kids would look like. Most of them got mixes of bull/lion/human but Awl pulled an incredible straw and got all eagle. Pretty cool?
Well, giant eagle, with human intelligence. And yes, very cool. 🙂 And I have to agree, on all those principles. The transformation magic explains a lot, and you did show her as a very pregnant female Minotaur, at one point I remember.
Thank you for the thorough answer! It’s way cooler than I expected. 🙂
Must admit, I never gave much thought of the plausibleness of the species-mixing in the different media. But again, I did miss out on Star Trek, and can’t recall any SciFi stuff I encountered with that did mix the different species. It doesn’t mean there is none, but I can’t recall any. In fantasy I think it’s just so much present almost everywhere, that it would be weird not to have it. Interestingly though, its almost always a half-human-half-something, and if it’s not, than magic is involved.
But I think, if one does start to think about it, it would be extremly difficult to argue against your points. Biology, Chemistry, Physics, they all have their boundaries. Magic is something that bypasses the limits. In a place however, where magic does not exist, one should take them into account. Of course, one could always say, its called fiction for a reason, not everything has to be like in reality, but that can be easily seen as a cheap excuse for not thinking things through…
I’m with Rich on this one. Suppose all those races were seeded by precursors. When did that happen? With Homo erectus? Some 2 million years ago?
After thousands of years of evolution, I don’t think we could interbreed with H. erectus, any Australopithecus, let alone any predecessor of them, and probably none of the offshoots.
Seeded later at H. sapiens or H. sapiens sapiens? That becomes very unconvincing as it would have meant that those precursors would still be active close-by and we would have noticed traces of them and fossil records would indicate a huge discrepancy between what we define as our ancestors and us.
And even in that short timescale, there would have been problems. There have been many couples suffering from infertility that broke up and apparently had no problems bearing children in new relationships.
That said, I don’t really know how does inheriting the species work in real life. I mean, sometimes different species of the same genus can interbreed, but the hybrids are either sterile or their offspring belong to one of the parent species, right? But how exactly are the inherited species determined? Are they carried by the X-chromosome? That would explain Awl being all eagle, but make the male Sphynxetaurs with bull genes something like male tortoiseshell cats, which are XXY rather than XY…
Sorry for my ignorance. How does inheriting species work?
I kind of disagree that magic should make all that much difference from sci-fi for the most part. In the case of Turg and the Sphynx, sure, they deliberately used magic to allow them to have children. Beings that are intensely magical as well maybe, like half-demons or half-dragons. But half-orcs? Orcs aren't exactly brimming over with inherent magic. Generally when magic *isn't* involved, we expect the rules to be the same as in real life.
Re : Star Trek genetic mixing. I believe that this is meant to be down to all the species having been seeded on their various planets by an ancient race who not only did this but designed them to be able to interbreed. There was a Next Generation episode about it I’m sure
Yes, I remember that. The first intelligent race in that area of the galaxy (humanoid) went out to explore… and found they were alone. So they seeded worlds with genetic material with pre-programmed tendencies, and with an encoded message, if you had samples from many of the worlds seeded. Several of the races that thought themselves superior were quite scandalized. 😛
I suppose it does help explain why they didn’t have more variation in their aliens, such as insectoids, Octopi, and other entirely non-humanoid intelligences, such as the Horta.
Yeah okay. But most forms of Terran hybridization between closely related species is rare and weird enough to be noteworthy. Many such hybrids are riddled with genetic problems and lots of them are completely infirtile. Once you get things that are far enough apart they simply can’t interbreed.
I know it’s science FICTION. But I get fed up with blender breeds when I’m trying to immerse.
Like Humans and Chimpanzees. We not only share a planet and environment but we even share relatively recent ancestors even compared to other animals! And yet we can’t hybridize. (At least, that’s what the scientists tell us. I’m not sure I want to find out what they’ve done to prove it.)
I didn’t say it was a good explanation, just the one that they used in Star Trek. Rather a cop-out, in my opinion, to explain them not having the budget for non-humanoid intelligent races.
Yes, we share over 99% of our genes with chimpanzees and bonobos, but they have a different number of chromosomes then we do, which is one of the main things preventing hybridization. We have 23 pairs. Chimpanzees and gorillas, our closest living relatives, have 24. I suppose magic could do something to get around that, but it would be quite a challenge for science.
Weirdly cool bit of terran biology: have you heard of a ring species? In the simplest theoretical example, imagine a population A which has given rise to two offshoot populations B and C which are sufficiently similar to A to interbreed with it, but sufficiently different to each other that B cannot interbreed with C. So if these three populations spanned the world in a ring of the climate that suits them, as in the first noted example of black-backed gulls, the two ends of the ring woild be sufficiently different to be unable to interbreed. (Real world examples tend to be a bit more complicated than this three population model). (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species
Yes they did say that in TNG ("The Chase" IIRC), but it was an idiotic explanation that flies in the face of literally *everything* we know about evolution.
Heck, Turg as much said so when he and the sphinx hooked up, and someone (I believe Glon, but I’m too busy/lazy (blazy?) to look it up right now). (paraphrased): "Our world is magic…Anything is possible."
And, because I didn’t get it in last strip: that was a GNEISS ending to the previous arc. 😉
Darn it. Three or so days’ worth of bingeing from the very start of the comic, spread out over a little less than a week, and now I have to wait for regular updates. Let that be a lesson: that’s what marathon bingeing gets you.
Pick up your copies of YAFGC Volumes 1 - 5 at our online store. Multi-book bundles and sketch editions available.
*sighs* Alaria will have been gorgonized, or some such, knowing the Rannites. I hope Runt survives all this to learn from his mistakes, and I hope they do eventually manage to free Alaria (and restore her, if they did anything to her). She looked like she would be a good queen, and he needs a stabilizing influence. Taking on the whole castle by himself though… not a great idea. Even if he does have the advantage of knowing the castle really well. Hopefully, there is a network of secret passages, or something, that the Rannites haven’t discovered yet.
Better yet, hopefully there’s a network of secret passages they HAVE discovered, to distract them from the network of SECRET secret passages that Runt will use.
I like the way you think, but keep in mind that there’s a finite number of secret passages that you can incorporate in a structure. And before you say magic, "it’s bigger on the inside" kind of stuff, that degrades over time and can blow the whole building apart when it fails.
Alternatively, a network of secret passages they’ve discovered, to distract them while Runt walks totally unchallenged right down the main hallway.
or he comes to her rescue and finds that she is totally fine and has al the rannites loyal to her lol. I just have the impression there is more to Alaria then we really know.
I don't think she's even here. She was kidnapped by Lady Vivay just before the Rannites attacked, wasn't she?
That red text of the title… VERY foreboding.
For the Rannites…the problem is that they are losing a lot of held ground now. they have lost one city and still have others forming and running groups to take them out. Short term they won, long term…they will lose
But the places they have lost — Greyfort, Tempul, now bits of the Goblin Lands — are minor holdings compared to the nations and capitols they still hold. And of vastly more importance than any shifting lines on a battle map is the fact that they serve the world’s one remaining fully armed and operational goddess.
The few losses that Ranna has suffered do serve as proof in principle that she, like most of the setting’s deities, is neither omnipotent, omniscient, nor frankly all that bright. (Terry Pratchett would be proud.) There is hope for the good guys, but if they don’t strike now and pull of an overwhelming upset, the Rannites could easily roll back over those annoying bits of lost ground.
I think it’s time for Ranna to go the way of our old buddy Bhaal.
Wait… Ranna doesn’t have kids, does she?
If I recall correctly… she does.
It’s interesting that Awl, whose father Turg is, or was, considered evil, regards Runt’s castle as looking evil, and not something he wants to visit.
Turg may be Evil, but he’s about as evil as Sweetums.
t!
This is true
Maybe we’re misinterpreting Awl’s objection. Remember, he’s the Sphynxotaur equivalent of a teenager:
"You made this sound like a whole lot more fun than it is now. It’s just some boring Evil place like DAD would visit."
"Just land, Awl."
"But Runt, what if someone SEES me here? I’d never live it down!"
Ah, that’s it! It’s because Awl’s a teenager! "Awwww, this is just plain, old, evil. I thought this was going to be party evil! Where are the hot dudes and babes? Dad told me about a buddy of his named Glon who used to find all kinds of hot evil to fool around with!"
That theory is actually well supported on panel 4: "Yikes!" as "Man, this King Boy just redefined the word boring!"
And Lo, the King LEAPS upon his FLYING MOUNT!
And he RIDES the skies to the CASTLE, astride his PROUD STEED!
… and Lo, said mount realises that actual adventuring is dangerous, and is having second thoughts.
My rib is thoroughly tickled.
t!
And large portions of the "have an adventure" process are boring.
"The Black Company: We’re very good at cards."
"Also, we fight. Every so often. Briefly."
t!
Having a minotaur as a father and a sphynx as a mother sure does create interesting and unusual looks, as we have seen on Turg’s children. So, the question that always popped up in my mind, but I think I didn’t ask yet: How comes Awl looks like a giant bird? I get the wings. But the rest? My guesses were until now the "you never know with the magical mixture of (partly at least) magical beings" and "why not?". But now I really had to ask.
Great question and -as has been pointed out in the past- it’s a subject I could ramble on and on and on about. I have oddly strong views about how genetic mixing in fantasy and sci-fi universe happen.
So… in my Sci-fi, scientific realism should be considered when trying to create hybrids. I don’t like the way Star Trek has gone off the rails wildly mixing their aliens. Spock was supposed to be this unique thing. His unscreened backstory included many years of experimenting and failed attempts by his parents to create a hybrid Vulcan/Human.
Once TNG got started alien species mixed like skittles, m&ms and smarties in a sadistic DM’s snack bowl (I may never forgive you for this, David McBride.) Vulcans, Humans, Andorians, Romulans, Klingons, Vacuum cleaners…. anyone could just thrust their seed into anyone else and a perfectly gene-blended hybrid would just pop out with no health problems or genetic defects. I call BULLSHIT. That doesn’t work among species here on Earth and most of us even have the same chemical makeup! This is why we don’t have Chick-leop-popottomi-diles running around all over the fucking place.
No, in sci-fi, you’ve got to dial it down for it to even remotely resemble realism.
FANTASY on the other hand, is a world of magic and monsters and splintered souls and demons and…. it’s totally different. The rules go out the window. I like to put SOME limitation on it to keep track if nothing else, but…
So, in Turg and the Sphynx’s case I basically considered how they would copulate to begin with (I’m not saying this something I think about often…. much) and decided that they would use magic from the Sphynx’s treasure hoard to take turns transforming themselves into varoius compatible forms. So, Turg turns into a giant Sphynx, the Sphynx turns into a Minotaur, then they got creative….
Then I tallied up their various characteristics. We’ve got 2 part Human, 1 part bull, 1 part eagle, 1 part lion. I put them into a little randomizer chart with various %’s considered for likeliness and then rolled up what their kids would look like. Most of them got mixes of bull/lion/human but Awl pulled an incredible straw and got all eagle. Pretty cool?
Well, giant eagle, with human intelligence. And yes, very cool. 🙂 And I have to agree, on all those principles. The transformation magic explains a lot, and you did show her as a very pregnant female Minotaur, at one point I remember.
Thank you for the thorough answer! It’s way cooler than I expected. 🙂
Must admit, I never gave much thought of the plausibleness of the species-mixing in the different media. But again, I did miss out on Star Trek, and can’t recall any SciFi stuff I encountered with that did mix the different species. It doesn’t mean there is none, but I can’t recall any. In fantasy I think it’s just so much present almost everywhere, that it would be weird not to have it. Interestingly though, its almost always a half-human-half-something, and if it’s not, than magic is involved.
But I think, if one does start to think about it, it would be extremly difficult to argue against your points. Biology, Chemistry, Physics, they all have their boundaries. Magic is something that bypasses the limits. In a place however, where magic does not exist, one should take them into account. Of course, one could always say, its called fiction for a reason, not everything has to be like in reality, but that can be easily seen as a cheap excuse for not thinking things through…
I’m with Rich on this one. Suppose all those races were seeded by precursors. When did that happen? With Homo erectus? Some 2 million years ago?
After thousands of years of evolution, I don’t think we could interbreed with H. erectus, any Australopithecus, let alone any predecessor of them, and probably none of the offshoots.
Seeded later at H. sapiens or H. sapiens sapiens? That becomes very unconvincing as it would have meant that those precursors would still be active close-by and we would have noticed traces of them and fossil records would indicate a huge discrepancy between what we define as our ancestors and us.
And even in that short timescale, there would have been problems. There have been many couples suffering from infertility that broke up and apparently had no problems bearing children in new relationships.
Really cool!
That said, I don’t really know how does inheriting the species work in real life. I mean, sometimes different species of the same genus can interbreed, but the hybrids are either sterile or their offspring belong to one of the parent species, right? But how exactly are the inherited species determined? Are they carried by the X-chromosome? That would explain Awl being all eagle, but make the male Sphynxetaurs with bull genes something like male tortoiseshell cats, which are XXY rather than XY…
Sorry for my ignorance. How does inheriting species work?
I kind of disagree that magic should make all that much difference from sci-fi for the most part. In the case of Turg and the Sphynx, sure, they deliberately used magic to allow them to have children. Beings that are intensely magical as well maybe, like half-demons or half-dragons. But half-orcs? Orcs aren't exactly brimming over with inherent magic. Generally when magic *isn't* involved, we expect the rules to be the same as in real life.
Re : Star Trek genetic mixing. I believe that this is meant to be down to all the species having been seeded on their various planets by an ancient race who not only did this but designed them to be able to interbreed. There was a Next Generation episode about it I’m sure
Yes, I remember that. The first intelligent race in that area of the galaxy (humanoid) went out to explore… and found they were alone. So they seeded worlds with genetic material with pre-programmed tendencies, and with an encoded message, if you had samples from many of the worlds seeded. Several of the races that thought themselves superior were quite scandalized. 😛
I suppose it does help explain why they didn’t have more variation in their aliens, such as insectoids, Octopi, and other entirely non-humanoid intelligences, such as the Horta.
Yeah okay. But most forms of Terran hybridization between closely related species is rare and weird enough to be noteworthy. Many such hybrids are riddled with genetic problems and lots of them are completely infirtile. Once you get things that are far enough apart they simply can’t interbreed.
I know it’s science FICTION. But I get fed up with blender breeds when I’m trying to immerse.
Like Humans and Chimpanzees. We not only share a planet and environment but we even share relatively recent ancestors even compared to other animals! And yet we can’t hybridize. (At least, that’s what the scientists tell us. I’m not sure I want to find out what they’ve done to prove it.)
I didn’t say it was a good explanation, just the one that they used in Star Trek. Rather a cop-out, in my opinion, to explain them not having the budget for non-humanoid intelligent races.
Yes, we share over 99% of our genes with chimpanzees and bonobos, but they have a different number of chromosomes then we do, which is one of the main things preventing hybridization. We have 23 pairs. Chimpanzees and gorillas, our closest living relatives, have 24. I suppose magic could do something to get around that, but it would be quite a challenge for science.
Weirdly cool bit of terran biology: have you heard of a ring species? In the simplest theoretical example, imagine a population A which has given rise to two offshoot populations B and C which are sufficiently similar to A to interbreed with it, but sufficiently different to each other that B cannot interbreed with C. So if these three populations spanned the world in a ring of the climate that suits them, as in the first noted example of black-backed gulls, the two ends of the ring woild be sufficiently different to be unable to interbreed. (Real world examples tend to be a bit more complicated than this three population model). (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species
Yes they did say that in TNG ("The Chase" IIRC), but it was an idiotic explanation that flies in the face of literally *everything* we know about evolution.
Re: genetic mixing in fantasy vs sci-fi. Agreed.
Heck, Turg as much said so when he and the sphinx hooked up, and someone (I believe Glon, but I’m too busy/lazy (blazy?) to look it up right now). (paraphrased): "Our world is magic…Anything is possible."
And, because I didn’t get it in last strip: that was a GNEISS ending to the previous arc. 😉
This comic here: https://yafgc.net/comic/0484-slongs-n-goodbyes/
And I still love Glon with his young, late teens, "innocence," And Turg’s big, experienced brother assuring Glon it’s possibe.
Your Gneiss one is beautiful.
t!
After a little research (no idea what gneiss was), I agree with t!
Per Wikipedia:
"Gneiss is formed by high temperature and high-pressure metamorphic processes…"
high temperature –> "lovers"
high pressure –> surprise situation
metamorphic processes –> petrification
😀
Thank you for the reference, my fine Pooka friend!
You’re most welcome. 🙂
Darn it. Three or so days’ worth of bingeing from the very start of the comic, spread out over a little less than a week, and now I have to wait for regular updates. Let that be a lesson: that’s what marathon bingeing gets you.
Or fat. Depending on what you’re bingeing.
I’m finally catching these! So awesome.