Only a very small proportion of Nick has genetic sex, let alone biological. This makes him essentially asexual in a physical sense, which renders the orientation question – if the answer is to be couched in such terms – difficult at best.
Not really. If a heterosexual man were to lose his genitals in an accident, would that change his gender and/or orientation? Nick is a hetro male brain with a helicopter bod piloting a fem form drone.
Yeah, but “asexual” has two meanings. There’s the orientation, but there’s also the sense in which it’s used in biology: to mean without sex (as in, “asexual reproduction”). In the latter sense, Nick has been asexual for most of the comic (his brain cells presumably contain Y chromosomes, though it’s possible they don’t, but that’s largely irrelevant, and the idea that neurology differs by sex in humans is largely debunked at this point. By gender, too, actually). The gynoid body he’s piloting right now has sex characteristics, though, so he might not be bio-sense-asexual at this moment. The thing about loss of genitalia is largely a red herring, because the biological things that together comprise “sex” are way beyond that, but Nick lost pretty much all of them when his brain was removed and put in an airframe.
I don’t think anyone’s arguing that Nick is or has been agender or orientation-sense-asexual, because while it’s not entirely impossible the evidence does indeed suggest he would, if pressed, describe himself as a straight, male tiltrotor aircraft.
Darael Draconis, it was known back in 2012 that literal _brain volume_ differs between sexes…
(Yes, I know that brain volume isn’t known to really do anything in particular as far as function is concerned, but it’s about as inarguable a difference as I can imagine.)
Okay, so Nick still definitely identifies as male. (And I believe he still has his machismo. To me, Nick will always be a manly disembodied-brain-in-a-helicopter-and-female-drone. The most manly disembodied-brain-in-a-helicopter-and-female-drone that I’ve ever met. Ever.)
In the same news, we have a comic strip with a being that identifies as a male non-human intelligence, with one female and one black helicopter body.
And Tip is the gender-bender one.
… Actually, as of Violet!Nick, fully half of the main cast has worn the opposite gender’s clothes (and two thirds of them were in the opposite gender’s body as well).
I can’t visualize how Gavotte would cross-dress, so that leaves Sweetheart (unless she already has? I can’t remember anything…) and Moustachio.
Oh-my-gosh-I-wanna-see-Moustachio-crossdressing. He’d probably get help from Tigerlily, and that would just make it even more awesome.
Well, presumably, Gavotte is both the queen bee and the worker bees at the same time. Maybe that counts as being androgynous?
(Yes, I am grasping at straws.)
Worker bees are only “female” in the sense that “female” is the default setting. Given that they don’t mate, they probably wouldn’t identify as gendered even if identity meant anything to them.
Actually if you read the url stories, Tip shows some signs of questioning his gender identity at first. But if you define ‘gender bending’ as deviating significantly from prescribed gender roles, he fits the part. Also he’s had breasts while going ‘full drag’ for Marcy. Wearing breasts for aesthetic purposes without presenting as female has some element of gender bending, surely.
Sweetheart is a closet crossdresser. When U.N.I.T.Y. has gone to bed, she experiments by putting on a blue collar instead of her usual pink one. It’s her darkest secret.
Oooooh fan-dom’s bigger
It’s bigger than you
And you are not me
The character names I know too-
The judgment in your eyes
Oh no, I’ve said too much
I set it up
That’s me in the ‘copter
That’s me in the android
Losing my machismo
Trying to keep up with you
And I know too much WhimsyCorp lore
Oh no I’ve said too much
I haven’t said enough
I wanted you to see me gaming
I thought I’d pilot this thing
I think I know I’m still a guy
I’m not so sure it’s Nick’s machismo here so much as his adolescence. I’ve seen young girls inveigh against the kawaii they secretly adored in the past as much or more as any boy. But I always figured that this was a matter of “fitting in” and “demonstrating adulthood” (For a certain definition of “adulthood”), and that nerds were immune to this sort of thing by virtue of our having given up on the concept of fitting in. @_@
(TUNE: “I Feel Pretty” from West Side Story, Sondheim & Bernstein)
He hates Whimsy!
Stupid Whimsy!
Watching Whimsy has him seeing red!
Plots are flimsy,
And that song is running through his head!
He hates Mary,
Whimsy Fairy,
Bear and Gussie, he’ll cuss, he can’t bear!
Kinda scary,
How he knows the names of all them there!
From the Little House, there in Illinois,
Came a multi-national firm!
When he was a boy,
He had ev’ry toy!
Now his friends annoy!
How they make him squirm!
Now he’s macho!
Oh, so macho!
Yes, he’s macho, he’s not joking, see?
WhimsyCorp,
Well, he hates them, obviously!
I wondered if anyone else would pick up the parallels.
Considering Jeff is a brony, it was only a matter of time…
But that’s good, because I am too! 😀
But raging against the saccharine in obsessive detail is longstanding nerd tradition! Or have we forgotten all the Barney-killing freeware games and DOOM WADs of the ’90s?
He hates the characters. He hates all the cartoons made by the characters. He hates the animated movies. He hates the shorts they made to go in front of the movie. He really hates the amusment parks with their long lines and you can never find the T-shirt in your size . . .
(*ahem*) Nick has some masculine bravado inside his circuits. Somewhere. He’s sure of it.
HMMMMMM. Obviously either the Little House is a further reaching plot than I presumed, or the amusement park is the important bit and everything else just sort of happened, perhaps run by sapient amimatrons from the amusement park or Dr. Collodi’s daughter herself.
Nick hasn’t lost his machismo until Tip talks him into dressing up for a tea party with the wimsy characters. And now I’m trying to remember if we have seen Sweetheart in a dress in any of the Sunday art, because that sounds adorable.
I believe we have actually reached the point where explaining a comic to someone who isn’t a regular reader sounds even more insane than explaining Ellen from EGS.
The odd thing here (well, the oddest thing to me, but your oddness may vary) is that it seems this Disney-analog STARTED with an amusement park, and the park has been all but forgotten in favor of other media featuring its characters.
True, but I’m sure that the Pirates ride still has people lining up to go on it. This place seems to be flat out forgotten.
Probably for good reason, given how things tend to work out in Skin Horse, but still.
Yeah. Between being an asexual being who looks like a woman, and being an asexual being who really is a helicopter…Nick pretty much has machisn’tmo.
Nick is a heterosexual being who identifies as a male helicopter and occasionally has a robotic feminine body.
Oh hell, you made me remember the “my fursona is a helicopter fu fu fu fu fu” meme. Are you happy now?
Only a very small proportion of Nick has genetic sex, let alone biological. This makes him essentially asexual in a physical sense, which renders the orientation question – if the answer is to be couched in such terms – difficult at best.
Not really. If a heterosexual man were to lose his genitals in an accident, would that change his gender and/or orientation? Nick is a hetro male brain with a helicopter bod piloting a fem form drone.
Yeah, but “asexual” has two meanings. There’s the orientation, but there’s also the sense in which it’s used in biology: to mean without sex (as in, “asexual reproduction”). In the latter sense, Nick has been asexual for most of the comic (his brain cells presumably contain Y chromosomes, though it’s possible they don’t, but that’s largely irrelevant, and the idea that neurology differs by sex in humans is largely debunked at this point. By gender, too, actually). The gynoid body he’s piloting right now has sex characteristics, though, so he might not be bio-sense-asexual at this moment. The thing about loss of genitalia is largely a red herring, because the biological things that together comprise “sex” are way beyond that, but Nick lost pretty much all of them when his brain was removed and put in an airframe.
I don’t think anyone’s arguing that Nick is or has been agender or orientation-sense-asexual, because while it’s not entirely impossible the evidence does indeed suggest he would, if pressed, describe himself as a straight, male tiltrotor aircraft.
Darael Draconis, it was known back in 2012 that literal _brain volume_ differs between sexes…
(Yes, I know that brain volume isn’t known to really do anything in particular as far as function is concerned, but it’s about as inarguable a difference as I can imagine.)
Or machinimo.
Okay, so Nick still definitely identifies as male. (And I believe he still has his machismo. To me, Nick will always be a manly disembodied-brain-in-a-helicopter-and-female-drone. The most manly disembodied-brain-in-a-helicopter-and-female-drone that I’ve ever met. Ever.)
In the same news, we have a comic strip with a being that identifies as a male non-human intelligence, with one female and one black helicopter body.
And Tip is the gender-bender one.
… Actually, as of Violet!Nick, fully half of the main cast has worn the opposite gender’s clothes (and two thirds of them were in the opposite gender’s body as well).
I can’t visualize how Gavotte would cross-dress, so that leaves Sweetheart (unless she already has? I can’t remember anything…) and Moustachio.
Oh-my-gosh-I-wanna-see-Moustachio-crossdressing. He’d probably get help from Tigerlily, and that would just make it even more awesome.
Well, presumably, Gavotte is both the queen bee and the worker bees at the same time. Maybe that counts as being androgynous?
(Yes, I am grasping at straws.)
The queen bee and the worker bees are all female.
There’s still the drones, though there’s so few as to make them an infinitesimal male consciousness in the greater collection of the hive.
Curse my ignorance.
Worker bees are only “female” in the sense that “female” is the default setting. Given that they don’t mate, they probably wouldn’t identify as gendered even if identity meant anything to them.
Tip isn’t really a gender bender, just a bi cross-dresser. He never self-identifies as female, nor does he try to fool anyone.
Actually if you read the url stories, Tip shows some signs of questioning his gender identity at first. But if you define ‘gender bending’ as deviating significantly from prescribed gender roles, he fits the part. Also he’s had breasts while going ‘full drag’ for Marcy. Wearing breasts for aesthetic purposes without presenting as female has some element of gender bending, surely.
Sweetheart is a closet crossdresser. When U.N.I.T.Y. has gone to bed, she experiments by putting on a blue collar instead of her usual pink one. It’s her darkest secret.
That’s just being retro. Before World War 2, blue was associated with girls and pink with boys.
Apologies to R.E.M.
Oooooh fan-dom’s bigger
It’s bigger than you
And you are not me
The character names I know too-
The judgment in your eyes
Oh no, I’ve said too much
I set it up
That’s me in the ‘copter
That’s me in the android
Losing my machismo
Trying to keep up with you
And I know too much WhimsyCorp lore
Oh no I’ve said too much
I haven’t said enough
I wanted you to see me gaming
I thought I’d pilot this thing
I think I know I’m still a guy
*gets out lighter*
*waves it above head*
*hair catches fire*
*runs around screaming with arms flailing wildly*
I’m not so sure it’s Nick’s machismo here so much as his adolescence. I’ve seen young girls inveigh against the kawaii they secretly adored in the past as much or more as any boy. But I always figured that this was a matter of “fitting in” and “demonstrating adulthood” (For a certain definition of “adulthood”), and that nerds were immune to this sort of thing by virtue of our having given up on the concept of fitting in. @_@
Probably my third or fourth archive binge of SH. Spot on assessment, TB, both of Nick and nerds.
Even in Violet’s body, even if it’s, er, fully functional, I’d say Tip is still the more feminine crossdresser than Nick.
(TUNE: “I Feel Pretty” from West Side Story, Sondheim & Bernstein)
He hates Whimsy!
Stupid Whimsy!
Watching Whimsy has him seeing red!
Plots are flimsy,
And that song is running through his head!
He hates Mary,
Whimsy Fairy,
Bear and Gussie, he’ll cuss, he can’t bear!
Kinda scary,
How he knows the names of all them there!
From the Little House, there in Illinois,
Came a multi-national firm!
When he was a boy,
He had ev’ry toy!
Now his friends annoy!
How they make him squirm!
Now he’s macho!
Oh, so macho!
Yes, he’s macho, he’s not joking, see?
WhimsyCorp,
Well, he hates them, obviously!
Nick is one musical number away from becoming a brony.
I wondered if anyone else would pick up the parallels.
Considering Jeff is a brony, it was only a matter of time…
But that’s good, because I am too! 😀
He’s a Himsy.
But raging against the saccharine in obsessive detail is longstanding nerd tradition! Or have we forgotten all the Barney-killing freeware games and DOOM WADs of the ’90s?
You make an excellent point. However, looking at Nick’s “straight face” in panel four, I am firmly convinced of the flimsiness of his hatred.
“Pony!” *Squee* *Shifty eyes* “Ahem. Stupid ponies.”
He hates the characters. He hates all the cartoons made by the characters. He hates the animated movies. He hates the shorts they made to go in front of the movie. He really hates the amusment parks with their long lines and you can never find the T-shirt in your size . . .
(*ahem*) Nick has some masculine bravado inside his circuits. Somewhere. He’s sure of it.
HMMMMMM. Obviously either the Little House is a further reaching plot than I presumed, or the amusement park is the important bit and everything else just sort of happened, perhaps run by sapient amimatrons from the amusement park or Dr. Collodi’s daughter herself.
Nick hasn’t lost his machismo until Tip talks him into dressing up for a tea party with the wimsy characters. And now I’m trying to remember if we have seen Sweetheart in a dress in any of the Sunday art, because that sounds adorable.
well, we don’t know if she’s wearing one here: http://skin-horse.com/2012/todays-comic-895/
So wait is it by Wildlife prairie park, Lincoln old Salem or up by Great America?
The last two days make me think of the constructs at the house of the midget who designed the eyes for the replicants in Blade Runner.
Some sort of creepy-cult of self aware but deteriorating animatronic beings.
I believe we have actually reached the point where explaining a comic to someone who isn’t a regular reader sounds even more insane than explaining Ellen from EGS.
Ellen from EGS is easy to explain.
“Main character’s gender-shifted duplicate, not twin, created by touching a magic artifact.”
There. Done.
I’ve been reading this comic for a while and I still don’t get Tip. No pun intended.
“Mostly heterosexual crossdressing ex-military therapist with a joke superpower of single panel seduction.”
The odd thing here (well, the oddest thing to me, but your oddness may vary) is that it seems this Disney-analog STARTED with an amusement park, and the park has been all but forgotten in favor of other media featuring its characters.
That’s just *weird*.
Pirates of the Caribbean.
True, but I’m sure that the Pirates ride still has people lining up to go on it. This place seems to be flat out forgotten.
Probably for good reason, given how things tend to work out in Skin Horse, but still.