Given that Don Quixote’s madness has been described as an inability to separate fiction from reality, his experience bears especial relevance to Reality Blindness.
Indeed, I sometimes wonder if his perception of reality was more acute than ours…
Most of it, but the way people use it nowadays is just shoving it in your face while religiously using it as a distinct thing, a fundamental truth. They basically act as whimsical as possible about something edgy, so they think whimsy + edgy = incredibly funny, but for me it’s just pure cringe because it’s a perfect example of writers and creators in general simply acting like their funny without actually being funny. But with Looney Tunes it was the opposite, the whole hunting thing was just the plot while they worked in jokes in that were based on creativity. All that stuff was meant to be relatable to real life not cause sentient animal eat other sentient animal was a thing, or even stupider, fully aware human zombie willingly eating living humans. I know Looney Tunes never did zombies I just wanted to express my disdain.
I think David’s point is more to the effect that actual historical chivalry held the opposite view – that it was important to expose children to violence, particularly the children of knights and nobles, since it was such an overwhelming and defining facet of their society.
The portrayal of “chivalry” as Valiant seems to practice it is a gross distortion of reality that only emerged centuries later, largely from the Romantic revival of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It’s a load of Georgian and later Victorian era nonsense – the fanciful imaginings of ignorant socialites and their pretenders.
Real chivalry was all about emphasizing the martial nature of life in a feudal system. It was concerned with the propagation of the feudal contract and the dominance of the warrior elites.
It advocated for early indoctrination of children to violence through apprenticeship – the system of training boys for a life of war through serving as pages and then squires, typically starting at seven years of age, sometimes sooner.
An actual knight of the medieval period would have scoffed at the idea of shielding a child from witnessing violence – they would have thought it cowardly, effeminate, insulting, and destructive to the child’s development. Chivalry demanded blood.
I’m not familiar with their ideas directly, but I seriously doubt they objected to children witnessing violence.
Wikipedia informs me that du Charny wrote his “Book of Chivalry” on “the worthiness” of knights, but that chiefly takes the form of knights maintaining war readiness and honoring their feudal and courtly obligations.
Wikipedia also informs me that de Pizan’s “The Book of Deeds of Arms and of Chivalry” is essentially a treatise on operational command, explaining how to effectively wage war at the time.
Other sources inform me that Llull’s “The Book of the Order of Chivalry” (oddly unmentioned in his Wikipedia entry) is primarily a work of philosophy and theology as applied toward the end of supporting the ideals of the feudal system – using religion and platonic thought to justify the authority of kings and the conventions of feudal law and traditions. It was intended to serve as a primer for young men interested in pursuing knighthood, to teach them the accepted ideas and ways of thinking that would be expected of them in such a lifestyle.
None of that seems relevant, and all of it fits what I said earlier.
~~~
Now, yes – actual chivalry does lay out certain codes of conduct and moral guidelines.
But those are overwhelmingly about topics like courtly etiquette, loyalty and obligations to one’s lord, battlefield conventions and traditions, deference to the church, etc. Not about things like preventing children from witnessing death – which, as I’ve explained, is pretty antithetical the realities of life at that time.
Dogs and cats can both taste sugar. You have the internet at your fingertips, there’s no excuse for not looking this stuff up and confirming old wives’ tales.
I’m seeing a serious scientific article in 2012 asserting that cats were found to exhibit no preference for sweet food and have an apparent loss-of-function mutation in a protein involved it tasting sweetness.
Ahh, my fault for not checking thoroughly. I checked the results for dogs, as that was the “correction” made, and found results discounting the idea for both.
Searching instead specifically for cats, I find the recent studies – perhaps what I found elsewhere was older.
That said, from looking through said findings, I’m led to believe it’s not that they can’t taste sweetness at all, so much as it is that they don’t taste it the same way that we (and other animals) do. They do have a mutation to the Tas1r2 gene, but it’s not that it doesn’t function at all, it just functions differently, because it encodes a different protein. That protein still functions, just not as “intended”.
Well, Ulzgoroth, scientific studies notwithstanding, I used to have a cat that loved Mrs. Butterworth’s pancake syrup, and would practically fight me for my plate when I was eating pancakes. When I was finished, I would let him lick my plate, and he would lick up as much of the remaining syrup as I would let him. (I learned not to let him have very much, as he would eat enough to make himself ill.) I also couldn’t leave a baked cake out to cool, as he would get on the counter and nibble on that as well. (Not that he was allowed on the kitchen counter, but, of course, that didn’t stop him when I wasn’t looking.)
I also used to have a dog that loved fruit – mandarin oranges were her favorite, but she also loved cherries, apples, strawberries, and even raspberries. She also loved green grapes, which we used to let her have until we found out you’re not supposed to give dogs grapes. (Although she never seemed to suffer any harm from eating grapes.) She also enjoyed pie – pumpkin, apple, and cherry. She loved sweet potatoes and butternut squash, and would even eat those raw. Also baby carrots. (I’m sure I’m forgetting some of the sweet things she used to like.) We didn’t let her have candy, but she probably would have eaten that if she had had an opportunity.
I know this is all anecdotal evidence, but that’s at least one cat and one dog that showed evidence of liking sweet things. Some of our friends have speculated that perhaps there were other flavors in these things that our critters were attracted to, but Mrs. Butterworth’s pancake syrup really is almost entirely made of sugar, so I really don’t see what else it could have contained that was attractive to the cat other than the sugar.
He won’t commit violence in front of a “human child,” but he would run Artie through with his little sword without giving him a sword to defend himself with.
He didn’t challenge him to a duel. He was protecting his innocent love from an aggressor. He wouldn’t consider it dishonorable to kill an unarmed person if he was defending himself or another, because it’s the heat of battle.
What Artie should have done is challenge Valiant to a duel for the drone’s honor in response to Valiant threatening him. Then, Valiant would have been forced to go through protracted negotiations before fighting Artie honorably, stalling the issue long enough for Artie to come up with a plan. Unfortunately, Artie is more smart than clever, so he just tried to explain the situation without getting Valiant’s mind off rescue first.
jdreyfuss: Valiant is talking about revenge here, so I think he’s acknowledged that the object of his affections has already been saved. There’s a need for justice, but I don’t know if striking Artie now would have counted.
I just worry that Rat Valiant isn’t enamored of the values of knighthood as by Percival or Gawain or “The Song of Roland,” but by five seasons of “Game of Thrones.”
One thing everyone is failing to consider – aren’t rats supposed to be nearsighted? They rely more on touch and smell? Some pheromones on a drone and dumpster on a cat and the disguise is better than it seems.
It’s true that he got those clothes from a Goodwill Dumpster, and if the clothes first spent any time inside the Goodwill, they smell strong and bad with whatever that Goodwill smell is (pest control of some kind?).
They can see okay for a couple feet or so, which isn’t bad for a bitty little thing.
So if you put them in a car, it doesn’t matter if they can see out the windows, but they will appreciate you pointing an air vent their way! Or now that I think about it, I really only had one rat who loved car ride smells, but boy did she really love it.
The mind sees what it wants to believe.
I think Cervantes wrote a fairly lengthy book about that.
Given that Don Quixote’s madness has been described as an inability to separate fiction from reality, his experience bears especial relevance to Reality Blindness.
Indeed, I sometimes wonder if his perception of reality was more acute than ours…
I’d argue it’s more accurate to describe Don Quixote’s madness as allegorical authorial critique of the society of his time.
It’s very much like Gulliver’s Travels – Quixote is more the mouthpiece which delivers the satire, than he is a character in his own right.
Weird, I haven’t heard about Cinnamon eating the rats in their own colony yet. That’s good cause I hate the corny sentient eat sentient cliche.
Corny? That’s the entire Looney Tunes franchise!
Most of it, but the way people use it nowadays is just shoving it in your face while religiously using it as a distinct thing, a fundamental truth. They basically act as whimsical as possible about something edgy, so they think whimsy + edgy = incredibly funny, but for me it’s just pure cringe because it’s a perfect example of writers and creators in general simply acting like their funny without actually being funny. But with Looney Tunes it was the opposite, the whole hunting thing was just the plot while they worked in jokes in that were based on creativity. All that stuff was meant to be relatable to real life not cause sentient animal eat other sentient animal was a thing, or even stupider, fully aware human zombie willingly eating living humans. I know Looney Tunes never did zombies I just wanted to express my disdain.
Does panel 3 imply Valiant acquired the tenets of chivalry from children’s literature?
No. It means that, unlike a great many humans, Valiant knows that it’s bad form to expose children to violence.
I think David’s point is more to the effect that actual historical chivalry held the opposite view – that it was important to expose children to violence, particularly the children of knights and nobles, since it was such an overwhelming and defining facet of their society.
The portrayal of “chivalry” as Valiant seems to practice it is a gross distortion of reality that only emerged centuries later, largely from the Romantic revival of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It’s a load of Georgian and later Victorian era nonsense – the fanciful imaginings of ignorant socialites and their pretenders.
Real chivalry was all about emphasizing the martial nature of life in a feudal system. It was concerned with the propagation of the feudal contract and the dominance of the warrior elites.
It advocated for early indoctrination of children to violence through apprenticeship – the system of training boys for a life of war through serving as pages and then squires, typically starting at seven years of age, sometimes sooner.
An actual knight of the medieval period would have scoffed at the idea of shielding a child from witnessing violence – they would have thought it cowardly, effeminate, insulting, and destructive to the child’s development. Chivalry demanded blood.
Hmmm. Where did Geoffroi du Charny, Ramon Lull, and Christine de Pisan get their ideas from?
I’m not familiar with their ideas directly, but I seriously doubt they objected to children witnessing violence.
Wikipedia informs me that du Charny wrote his “Book of Chivalry” on “the worthiness” of knights, but that chiefly takes the form of knights maintaining war readiness and honoring their feudal and courtly obligations.
Wikipedia also informs me that de Pizan’s “The Book of Deeds of Arms and of Chivalry” is essentially a treatise on operational command, explaining how to effectively wage war at the time.
Other sources inform me that Llull’s “The Book of the Order of Chivalry” (oddly unmentioned in his Wikipedia entry) is primarily a work of philosophy and theology as applied toward the end of supporting the ideals of the feudal system – using religion and platonic thought to justify the authority of kings and the conventions of feudal law and traditions. It was intended to serve as a primer for young men interested in pursuing knighthood, to teach them the accepted ideas and ways of thinking that would be expected of them in such a lifestyle.
None of that seems relevant, and all of it fits what I said earlier.
~~~
Now, yes – actual chivalry does lay out certain codes of conduct and moral guidelines.
But those are overwhelmingly about topics like courtly etiquette, loyalty and obligations to one’s lord, battlefield conventions and traditions, deference to the church, etc. Not about things like preventing children from witnessing death – which, as I’ve explained, is pretty antithetical the realities of life at that time.
Or Hollywood movies, which would also be in the public library (which has children/YA books) they met him in.
Or does it mean rat children are not innocent?
It was nice of the mad scientist to give Cinnamon the ability to taste sugar in addition to sapience.
It’s dogs that can’t tase sugar (don’t worry, I’ve made that mistake too)
Including just now.
Absolute twaddle and nonsense.
Dogs and cats can both taste sugar. You have the internet at your fingertips, there’s no excuse for not looking this stuff up and confirming old wives’ tales.
I’m seeing a serious scientific article in 2012 asserting that cats were found to exhibit no preference for sweet food and have an apparent loss-of-function mutation in a protein involved it tasting sweetness.
Ahh, my fault for not checking thoroughly. I checked the results for dogs, as that was the “correction” made, and found results discounting the idea for both.
Searching instead specifically for cats, I find the recent studies – perhaps what I found elsewhere was older.
That said, from looking through said findings, I’m led to believe it’s not that they can’t taste sweetness at all, so much as it is that they don’t taste it the same way that we (and other animals) do. They do have a mutation to the Tas1r2 gene, but it’s not that it doesn’t function at all, it just functions differently, because it encodes a different protein. That protein still functions, just not as “intended”.
Well, Ulzgoroth, scientific studies notwithstanding, I used to have a cat that loved Mrs. Butterworth’s pancake syrup, and would practically fight me for my plate when I was eating pancakes. When I was finished, I would let him lick my plate, and he would lick up as much of the remaining syrup as I would let him. (I learned not to let him have very much, as he would eat enough to make himself ill.) I also couldn’t leave a baked cake out to cool, as he would get on the counter and nibble on that as well. (Not that he was allowed on the kitchen counter, but, of course, that didn’t stop him when I wasn’t looking.)
I also used to have a dog that loved fruit – mandarin oranges were her favorite, but she also loved cherries, apples, strawberries, and even raspberries. She also loved green grapes, which we used to let her have until we found out you’re not supposed to give dogs grapes. (Although she never seemed to suffer any harm from eating grapes.) She also enjoyed pie – pumpkin, apple, and cherry. She loved sweet potatoes and butternut squash, and would even eat those raw. Also baby carrots. (I’m sure I’m forgetting some of the sweet things she used to like.) We didn’t let her have candy, but she probably would have eaten that if she had had an opportunity.
I know this is all anecdotal evidence, but that’s at least one cat and one dog that showed evidence of liking sweet things. Some of our friends have speculated that perhaps there were other flavors in these things that our critters were attracted to, but Mrs. Butterworth’s pancake syrup really is almost entirely made of sugar, so I really don’t see what else it could have contained that was attractive to the cat other than the sugar.
You’re wrong. Dogs have sweet receptors. Cats don’t.
Mus quod vult decipi, ergo decipiatur
I think both of those are still less obvious than a bunch of hamsters in a trenchcoat.
With or without the paper plate?
Yes.
I’m pretty sure that little miss Bubbles Mc”Service is my Only Joy” has that disguise beat for lack of veracity…
But then, so did Tip and Sweetheart in the Mandrone, and wasn’t there that one time Unity tried disguising herself as a lagomorph…?
…say, how many terribad disguises are even in this comic?
“Innocent human child”. I think he’s zero for three there.
He won’t commit violence in front of a “human child,” but he would run Artie through with his little sword without giving him a sword to defend himself with.
He didn’t challenge him to a duel. He was protecting his innocent love from an aggressor. He wouldn’t consider it dishonorable to kill an unarmed person if he was defending himself or another, because it’s the heat of battle.
What Artie should have done is challenge Valiant to a duel for the drone’s honor in response to Valiant threatening him. Then, Valiant would have been forced to go through protracted negotiations before fighting Artie honorably, stalling the issue long enough for Artie to come up with a plan. Unfortunately, Artie is more smart than clever, so he just tried to explain the situation without getting Valiant’s mind off rescue first.
jdreyfuss: Valiant is talking about revenge here, so I think he’s acknowledged that the object of his affections has already been saved. There’s a need for justice, but I don’t know if striking Artie now would have counted.
I just worry that Rat Valiant isn’t enamored of the values of knighthood as by Percival or Gawain or “The Song of Roland,” but by five seasons of “Game of Thrones.”
One thing everyone is failing to consider – aren’t rats supposed to be nearsighted? They rely more on touch and smell? Some pheromones on a drone and dumpster on a cat and the disguise is better than it seems.
It’s true that he got those clothes from a Goodwill Dumpster, and if the clothes first spent any time inside the Goodwill, they smell strong and bad with whatever that Goodwill smell is (pest control of some kind?).
They can see okay for a couple feet or so, which isn’t bad for a bitty little thing.
So if you put them in a car, it doesn’t matter if they can see out the windows, but they will appreciate you pointing an air vent their way! Or now that I think about it, I really only had one rat who loved car ride smells, but boy did she really love it.
Is Narbonic.com down for anyone else?
Yup.