Skin Horse
By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
Skin Horse by Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at http://www.skin-horse.com.
©2007-2018 Skin Horse Powered by WordPress with ComicPress
I thought it was *cute* animal helpers? o_O
Give it a bath and a haircut (or in this case, a few edits to his model) and it can be cute.
Strange, nobody seemed to have these kinds of objections with Ratatouille…
But rats -are- cute!
Seriously, the world has things backwards. Rats are typically clean, intelligent, affectionate, social animals overall, but so many people revile them for some reason. In contrast, mice are filthy, brainless, sadistic, selfish little wretches, but people think they’re cute and sweet for some reason.
The same goes for crows and their relatives vs songbirds. Corvids are tidy, smart, and intensely loyal and reasonable creatures. Most passerines are messy, stupid, and utterly chaotic and destructive birds. But people prefer the one that “sings”, rather than the one that caws. How very shallow.
Longstanding gripes about rats: Bubonic Plague, ruining food stores, destroying other species (i.e. 99 percent loss of seabirds on South Georgia island), wrecking home insulation and wiring, and even though I mentioned plague let’s not forget Salmonellosis, Tuberculosis, Leptospirosis, Lyme Disease, Relapsing Fever, Campylobacteriosis, Melioidosis, Tularemia, Rat Bite Fever, Pasteurellosis, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, Rickettsial Pox, Murine Typhus, Dermatophytosis, Hantavirus, LaCrosse Encephalitis, ticks, fleas, Trypanosomiasis… the list goes on. On a “moral” level, they routinely eat their infants, with a particularly high rate of infanticide if the babies show some kind of disability, and sex selective infanticide against male pups. Rats also tend to attack children when sleeping, with most urban rat bites occurring on the face or hands during bed time, here’s a passage from the journal Pediatrics. “Rat bites
primarily affected children 5 years of age and younger.
The majority of bites were inflicted on the face and
hands and occurred in the bedroom between midnight
and 8 AM.”
Plague was the fleas, not the rats, and fleas are carried by many creatures, including mice. Food stores are much more easily ruined by mice than by rats, as mice are smaller and get in smaller gaps, and they breed much more rapidly. Mice also are more damaging to insulation and wiring, because they make messier nests and are less selective about materials. Diseases beyond plague are also pretty much the same across rats and mice, so no improvement there. “Morals” don’t really apply to animals, and most rodents exhibit infanticide, including mice – and it’s not as if this behavior affects humans in any immediate way. As for bites, obviously the larger species of rodent is going to be more willing and able to engage in aggressive territorial behaviors – but even still, rat bites are actually quite rare, and are largely insignificant. Compare to dogs and cats, which bite much more frequently. As for possible infected bites, again, rat diseases are almost entirely a product of human filth, and mice are just as capable of carrying such pathogens and better at spreading them.
Basically everything “bad” that rats do is the product of their living amidst human filth and urban poverty, and mice do all that same stuff in the same conditions, but often even worse. We demonize rats far more than they deserve, and we bizarrely excuse mice despite their frequently being worse.
Rats, mice, whatever. Kill them all and let God sort them out, I’m not having them running around in my house.
Thought it was because we KNOW rats are our closest competitors and share most of our traits.
(and they’re one of the few things we Can’t kill off. The little buggers!)
Heck, the same goes for cockroaches; touch one and it’s response is to go “ew, mammalian skin oils” and immediately and fervently clean itself. The reason we associate them with disgustingness is the fact that they turn up in a human’s house when that human is disgusting.
Cockroaches, though.
Obligatory Pratchett Reference: The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents. All of it, basically, but especially the bit where Keith the Rat Piper is told the theory that a Rat King is formed when their tails get matted together from the filth in their nests and asks “Have these people ever seen a rat?”
Humans prefer the disgusting, mean mice to the clean intelligent rats because the mice remind them of themselves.
Now, there is no need for cultural baggage.. Whimsey–err, Disney, already addressed this.
youtube.com/watch?v=Pb2si7fClqA
You’ve never watched Enchanted, have you?
Nevermind. Didn’t see Thenardyr’s comment
“Cute” can only get you so far. Rats are, above all else, survivors. Nick and Lovelace need to get out of a tight space, so it makes sense to call upon a species that makes a living getting into and out of tight spaces. This being Whimsy, the rats might even do it with style.
…and a cheesy song and dance routine.
Rats? Wonder if they’ll need help versus some scorpions and snakes or something.
Depends on scale. Could be an opossum.
Or a moldy aardvark?
Pretty clearly an opossum.
You just don’t get rats that are half the size of a dude’s torso.
Gambian pouched rats! Rats the size of half a dude’s torso! https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/enhanced/terminal05/2012/3/27/10/enhanced-buzz-11115-1332858595-49.jpg
Opossums are usually have a white face
and a lighter body color
Help? Or perhaps they only need someone to advise them?
That’s very close-minded of you, Lovelace.
Although she’s intuitively inferring his time as a Whimsy Princess in the Bubbles chassis, which is actually pretty impressive.
It’s obvious that Nick’s a princess – if he wasn’t a princess, that wouldn’t have worked.
Oh, sure, but you definitely only put up a token refusal of the call, Nick.
Once a Whimsey princess, always a Whimsey princess, I guess.
Oh he did do a short stint as a princess in the android body for a short while, didn’t he? Completely for got about that, but I guess that makes his credentials valid. Lovelace doesn’t know about that particular episode does she.
Yeah, for all his protesting, I think he’s pretty happy with his princess status (when it doesn’t involve admitting it to anyone else.) http://skin-horse.com/comic/hard-to-understand/
…said Adam Jensen in his ballgown.
And of course the rat sounds like Lurch (Addams Family) when he says that.
UH-H-H-H-H-H-H-H-UH!
He did occasionally have other lines.
Yeah, but “I’m a wallflower” isn’t yet appropriate.
Meaning this is Lurch the Mouse and not a rat.
I wonder, does he like to play the harpsichord?
Whenever an Animal Helpers musical number breaks out, I imagine.
Unity had to bind them to her will with her zombie throwup goo…
Yes, but that was reality. This is Whimsy’s VR.
You don’t choose the princess life. The princess life chooses you.