I feel misled. Knowing what we now know, “daughter” feels like the wrong sort of label for Pavane.
Okay, so let’s compare to the Narbons. Helen (“Beta”) is a clone of the original Helen Narbon, but they refer to each other as mother and daughter. But the thing is, while the are not literally parent and child, they certainly mirrored such a relationship – Beta was literally a child, was treated as such by the adult Helen Narbon, and would have been treated that was by society at large based on basic assumptions of cultural norms. “Daughter” makes sense there.
But Pavane and Gavotte don’t have the same sort of relationship. They aren’t humans, and don’t operate under human societal norms. Bees don’t have mother/daughter relationships. Where did they adopt that terminology from? Is it something they use just out of convenience when interacting with other beings (specifically humans and human-related non-human sapients)? They don’t think of themselves as mother and daughter, but they use those terms when talking to other people to make things simpler?
~~~
Gavotte also isn’t “older” than Pavane in any meaningful sense, since they are both comprised of individual insects that only are alive for roughly a month, and have clearly both wholly replaced all their constituent bees many, many times over.
It’s true that we humans have a similar situation, in that we literally replace all the cells in our body roughly every seven years, so we’re quite literally not the same people we previously were in that sense… but that fails to account for the realities of the human developmental cycle. The difference between is a newborn and a seven year old child is much different than the difference between a 21 year old and a 28 year old. The difference is even smaller with bees.
That said, it’s worth noting that when a hive of bees splits, the second hive does in fact develop a second queen. So in that sense, one might argue Pavane is literally the offspring of Gavotte. Except, since even the queens die off every two to three years, it’s really more akin to splitting a dynastic tree into two families…
But, of course, the wrinkle is that we’re discussing bee hives that have a mysterious form of collective consciousness, somehow. The queen of either hive is no more “Pavane” or “Gavotte” than our cells are us.
…but then, what is? In we humans, the ultimate vital organ is the brain, but only because it (somehow) houses our consciousness, presumably in the form of bioelectrics. That electrical pattern, that constantly ongoing and changing process – much like the flame of a candle – is ultimately what we are. It’s not the cells of our brain that define us, because we lose and replace those along with all our other cells every seven or so years – it’s the bioelectrical arrangement that relies upon such cells which defines and constitutes us.
We are Theseus’ ship – replace all the pieces, and the arrangement remains, despite none of the original physical material remaining. We are data and programming. And presumably, so are Gavotte and Pavane, somehow.
It’s unclear exactly how they maintain their bioelectic patterns, so I’ll set that aside as this is already a long post, but even if it is somehow comparable to human existence, I do still have to question the “mother / daughter” comparison.
When a human gives birth, they are not splitting their consciousness – they are creating a vessel in which a new consciousness is able to form. Human children are not born with the knowledge or personality elements of their parents – they are blank slates, and must develop their own.
But Pavane clearly was NOT a blank slate – she clearly retained the knowledge and opinion that her half of the hive possessed prior to the split!
…which only raises further questions. How can one half of a hive want something, and the other half want something else? How can the individual bees have opinions and desires if they are only constituent parts of the larger collective organism? Our cells don’t have opinions and desires – they simply function.
Again, I feel like the better comparison is to dynasties, or other organizational groupings composed of many individuals with shared attributes / views.
Gavotte isn’t really a single entity who is “mother” to another single entity that is Pavane as a “daughter” – Pavane is a cadet branch of the Gavotte dynasty.
So why don’t they describe themselves that way? It makes more sense from the viewpoint of bees and their “society”, and it also makes more sense from our own viewpoint as humans – most of human history has been dominated by dynastic matters.
Maybe Gavotte was the half with the original queen, and Pavane had to develop one? That would make Gavotte the “senior” hive, and therefore “mother”, leaving Pavane as the “junior” or “daughter” hive.
The hive isn’t a collective consciousness – like us, it’s holographic but singular. Each worker bee carries a tiny portion. When it dies that fragment is lost but that doesn’t matter because other workers were created and imprinted with similar (evolving) fragments, analogous to our brain cells.
The swarm impulse can be triggered by many tensions, in this case conflicting desires (coexistence vs escape, tea vs coffee). Pavane did start with the advantage of Gavotte’s accumulated experience but from from the moment of separation was a new individual, analogous to birth. She never thought of herself as Gavotte or “Gavotte II”. And from Gavotte’s perspective the ripping away of the portion of the colony following the new queen may well have been traumatic, like childbirth.
Gavotte regularly hides information. If you say that you split yourself in half, then you’d have to explain why, and she didn’t want to. Easier to just come up with a quick device that shows a relationship and move on.
“It’s not the cells of our brain that define us, because we lose and replace those along with all our other cells every seven or so years”
My understanding is that nerve cells mostly last a lifetime. Replacement is rare enough that it was for a long time thought not to happen
We’ve already seen “daughter” used in precisely this way, though — with the Cypress.
I disagree that dynastic terms are necessarily a better way to describe this than familial ones — I don’t think they’re necessarily WORSE, but I think your terms are missing both the familial relationship and sense of care and responsibility we’ve seen towards their split, both from Gavotte and from the Cypress. This is in contrast to dynastic politics, where it’s more like more distant relations who are definitely going to put themselves first and feel comfortable cutting them off emotionally/rhetorically.
It’s possible Pavane feels different than Gavotte — have we seen her refer to Gavotte as her mother? — but I’m pretty sure the sense we’ve gotten of Gavotte’s opinion of Pavane is that she’s more immature — which would have her see her as a daughter as opposed to, say, a sister.
And it could easily be the case that “half” isn’t exactly half — Gavotte split off a smaller group, which necessarily contained less biomass and therefore less capability of housing the collected experiences and personality of the gestalt intelligence, and so would indeed be the “less mature” and “less experienced” and “younger” of the two, and it would make sense to consider the one who held on to the much larger part of the collected experience as the “mother” of the other one!
—–
Separately, “overthinking it?”. Awgiedawgie, my dear — this is Skin Horse. As long as it’s fun, there’s no such thing.
They are mother and daughter in the sense that the Gavotte queen laid the egg that lead to the Pavane queen. They may be group intellects, but Gavotte is still the elder.
Oh, and when a hive grows too big, often new queens are hatched and the workers “split” between the queens. Thus you get swarms.
I’ve kept bees for a few years, and as a rule, it is the older (mated) queen that leaves the hive, taking roughly half the workers (& drones? not sure) present at the time. (They also eat up / internally store a bunch of the honey reserves to help build wherever they end up…) This “prime” swarm leaves (typically) roughly concurrently with the new queen emerging from her cell. That virgin queen gathers herself for a couple days, then takes her (one and only) maiden flight, returning with fertilized eggs to lay for the rest of her life. [If the colony was particularly crowded beforehand, they may also produce one or more “cast” or “caste” swarms – instead of going around and killing any rival queens in their cells (since the colony usually grows more than one at a time), the first virgin queen that emerges decides to also leave, taking again roughly half the remaining bees and energy reserves.]
If this comic is analogous, Gavotte raised a new queen to take up the local consciousness and the “Gavotte” label, then split her old queen and a contingent of the colony off as “Pavane”, to go (back) to Lovetron.
But this isn’t as simple as a hive splitting into 2 swarms as usual. This is a schism over philosophical issues. It seems to be more analogous of a church splitting into 2 churches because of theological disagreements.
It could become a big problem if you think of it as an option. Every time you disagreed with yourself, you’d keep splitting into two disagreeing parts, instead of working out a real solution.
I read a campaign chronicle once where one character had the “brilliant” idea (over and over) to split themselves so that one could go off and do the exciting stuff while the other stuck around and did the boring stuff. You can probably imagine how that turned out.
As Lady E and jdreyfuss point out and you acknowledge, DanD, the Gavotte and Pavane queens of the generation which swarmed can easily be recognized as mother and daughter. Particularly since we can assume Gavotte made a conscious decision to feed Pavane royal jelly.
Since their individual consciousnesses persist in the colony gestalt across generations, it’s reasonable to infer the mother/daughter relationship would, too.
That actually makes a lot of sense. I don’t mean her logic tracks, but given how eusocial insects work, it makes sense that if a sapient hive found itself mired in a conundrum with no clear answer, regarding something it considered that important, that it would split and try both possible solutions.
No, Gavotte had made reference to Pavane long before that. After meeting the Cypress, Sweetheart made the connection that Gavotte had been referring to her daughter.
This explains so much!
Except where Tigerlilly fits in…
I also have to remark on how well framed and focused panel 1 is. It manages to convey horror, pathos and poignancy simultaneously.
I thought the same thing! Its amazing what they manage to convey in such a short form on an everyday basis.
It made me seriously consider watching a double feature of Creature from the Black Lagoon with The Shape of Water….yet again.
Ah, this is where her daughter comes in.
I feel misled. Knowing what we now know, “daughter” feels like the wrong sort of label for Pavane.
Okay, so let’s compare to the Narbons. Helen (“Beta”) is a clone of the original Helen Narbon, but they refer to each other as mother and daughter. But the thing is, while the are not literally parent and child, they certainly mirrored such a relationship – Beta was literally a child, was treated as such by the adult Helen Narbon, and would have been treated that was by society at large based on basic assumptions of cultural norms. “Daughter” makes sense there.
But Pavane and Gavotte don’t have the same sort of relationship. They aren’t humans, and don’t operate under human societal norms. Bees don’t have mother/daughter relationships. Where did they adopt that terminology from? Is it something they use just out of convenience when interacting with other beings (specifically humans and human-related non-human sapients)? They don’t think of themselves as mother and daughter, but they use those terms when talking to other people to make things simpler?
~~~
Gavotte also isn’t “older” than Pavane in any meaningful sense, since they are both comprised of individual insects that only are alive for roughly a month, and have clearly both wholly replaced all their constituent bees many, many times over.
It’s true that we humans have a similar situation, in that we literally replace all the cells in our body roughly every seven years, so we’re quite literally not the same people we previously were in that sense… but that fails to account for the realities of the human developmental cycle. The difference between is a newborn and a seven year old child is much different than the difference between a 21 year old and a 28 year old. The difference is even smaller with bees.
That said, it’s worth noting that when a hive of bees splits, the second hive does in fact develop a second queen. So in that sense, one might argue Pavane is literally the offspring of Gavotte. Except, since even the queens die off every two to three years, it’s really more akin to splitting a dynastic tree into two families…
But, of course, the wrinkle is that we’re discussing bee hives that have a mysterious form of collective consciousness, somehow. The queen of either hive is no more “Pavane” or “Gavotte” than our cells are us.
…but then, what is? In we humans, the ultimate vital organ is the brain, but only because it (somehow) houses our consciousness, presumably in the form of bioelectrics. That electrical pattern, that constantly ongoing and changing process – much like the flame of a candle – is ultimately what we are. It’s not the cells of our brain that define us, because we lose and replace those along with all our other cells every seven or so years – it’s the bioelectrical arrangement that relies upon such cells which defines and constitutes us.
We are Theseus’ ship – replace all the pieces, and the arrangement remains, despite none of the original physical material remaining. We are data and programming. And presumably, so are Gavotte and Pavane, somehow.
It’s unclear exactly how they maintain their bioelectic patterns, so I’ll set that aside as this is already a long post, but even if it is somehow comparable to human existence, I do still have to question the “mother / daughter” comparison.
When a human gives birth, they are not splitting their consciousness – they are creating a vessel in which a new consciousness is able to form. Human children are not born with the knowledge or personality elements of their parents – they are blank slates, and must develop their own.
But Pavane clearly was NOT a blank slate – she clearly retained the knowledge and opinion that her half of the hive possessed prior to the split!
…which only raises further questions. How can one half of a hive want something, and the other half want something else? How can the individual bees have opinions and desires if they are only constituent parts of the larger collective organism? Our cells don’t have opinions and desires – they simply function.
Again, I feel like the better comparison is to dynasties, or other organizational groupings composed of many individuals with shared attributes / views.
Gavotte isn’t really a single entity who is “mother” to another single entity that is Pavane as a “daughter” – Pavane is a cadet branch of the Gavotte dynasty.
So why don’t they describe themselves that way? It makes more sense from the viewpoint of bees and their “society”, and it also makes more sense from our own viewpoint as humans – most of human history has been dominated by dynastic matters.
In short: you’re overthinking it.
Maybe Gavotte was the half with the original queen, and Pavane had to develop one? That would make Gavotte the “senior” hive, and therefore “mother”, leaving Pavane as the “junior” or “daughter” hive.
The hive isn’t a collective consciousness – like us, it’s holographic but singular. Each worker bee carries a tiny portion. When it dies that fragment is lost but that doesn’t matter because other workers were created and imprinted with similar (evolving) fragments, analogous to our brain cells.
The swarm impulse can be triggered by many tensions, in this case conflicting desires (coexistence vs escape, tea vs coffee). Pavane did start with the advantage of Gavotte’s accumulated experience but from from the moment of separation was a new individual, analogous to birth. She never thought of herself as Gavotte or “Gavotte II”. And from Gavotte’s perspective the ripping away of the portion of the colony following the new queen may well have been traumatic, like childbirth.
Gavotte regularly hides information. If you say that you split yourself in half, then you’d have to explain why, and she didn’t want to. Easier to just come up with a quick device that shows a relationship and move on.
“It’s not the cells of our brain that define us, because we lose and replace those along with all our other cells every seven or so years”
My understanding is that nerve cells mostly last a lifetime. Replacement is rare enough that it was for a long time thought not to happen
We’ve already seen “daughter” used in precisely this way, though — with the Cypress.
I disagree that dynastic terms are necessarily a better way to describe this than familial ones — I don’t think they’re necessarily WORSE, but I think your terms are missing both the familial relationship and sense of care and responsibility we’ve seen towards their split, both from Gavotte and from the Cypress. This is in contrast to dynastic politics, where it’s more like more distant relations who are definitely going to put themselves first and feel comfortable cutting them off emotionally/rhetorically.
It’s possible Pavane feels different than Gavotte — have we seen her refer to Gavotte as her mother? — but I’m pretty sure the sense we’ve gotten of Gavotte’s opinion of Pavane is that she’s more immature — which would have her see her as a daughter as opposed to, say, a sister.
And it could easily be the case that “half” isn’t exactly half — Gavotte split off a smaller group, which necessarily contained less biomass and therefore less capability of housing the collected experiences and personality of the gestalt intelligence, and so would indeed be the “less mature” and “less experienced” and “younger” of the two, and it would make sense to consider the one who held on to the much larger part of the collected experience as the “mother” of the other one!
—–
Separately, “overthinking it?”. Awgiedawgie, my dear — this is Skin Horse. As long as it’s fun, there’s no such thing.
Au contraire. There is such a thing as overthinking. I never said it was a bad thing.
They are mother and daughter in the sense that the Gavotte queen laid the egg that lead to the Pavane queen. They may be group intellects, but Gavotte is still the elder.
Oh, and when a hive grows too big, often new queens are hatched and the workers “split” between the queens. Thus you get swarms.
I’ve kept bees for a few years, and as a rule, it is the older (mated) queen that leaves the hive, taking roughly half the workers (& drones? not sure) present at the time. (They also eat up / internally store a bunch of the honey reserves to help build wherever they end up…) This “prime” swarm leaves (typically) roughly concurrently with the new queen emerging from her cell. That virgin queen gathers herself for a couple days, then takes her (one and only) maiden flight, returning with fertilized eggs to lay for the rest of her life. [If the colony was particularly crowded beforehand, they may also produce one or more “cast” or “caste” swarms – instead of going around and killing any rival queens in their cells (since the colony usually grows more than one at a time), the first virgin queen that emerges decides to also leave, taking again roughly half the remaining bees and energy reserves.]
If this comic is analogous, Gavotte raised a new queen to take up the local consciousness and the “Gavotte” label, then split her old queen and a contingent of the colony off as “Pavane”, to go (back) to Lovetron.
Thanks, matteo! I appreciate your insight.
I’m constantly learning new things in this forum 🙂
But this isn’t as simple as a hive splitting into 2 swarms as usual. This is a schism over philosophical issues. It seems to be more analogous of a church splitting into 2 churches because of theological disagreements.
Who wouldn’t do that when it’s an option? ^_^
It could become a big problem if you think of it as an option. Every time you disagreed with yourself, you’d keep splitting into two disagreeing parts, instead of working out a real solution.
I read a Dilbert cartoon once where Wally was going to reproduce by cellular division. It was in the book under “hygiene issues.”
I read a campaign chronicle once where one character had the “brilliant” idea (over and over) to split themselves so that one could go off and do the exciting stuff while the other stuck around and did the boring stuff. You can probably imagine how that turned out.
That was also the basic plot of an arc in Calvin & Hobbes.
And the 1996 Michael Keaton movie, Multiplicity.
“Sometimes I wish, Often I wish, That I never knew some of those secrets of yours.” Carly Simon, “We Have No Secrets”
Seems to be a touchy subject, given that two of her bees in panel 2 have their stingers out. 🙂
“Two divided by love can only be one,and one is a lonely number.” —the Grass Roots.
“Two can be as bad as one. It’s the loneliest number since the number one.” – Harry Nilsson
The Lovetron is a little old place where bees don’t stay together…
When an amoeba splits. both parts are considered daughter cells.
When a hive splits, the one with the original queen is the mother and the one with the new queen is the daughter.
But queen bees only live a couple of years, but the hive still has continuity. So neither hive has the queen who made the original decision.
Hive of Theseus??
As Lady E and jdreyfuss point out and you acknowledge, DanD, the Gavotte and Pavane queens of the generation which swarmed can easily be recognized as mother and daughter. Particularly since we can assume Gavotte made a conscious decision to feed Pavane royal jelly.
Since their individual consciousnesses persist in the colony gestalt across generations, it’s reasonable to infer the mother/daughter relationship would, too.
How many amoebas does it take to change a lightbulb?
One!
No, two!
Four!
Eight!
Sixteen!
–Bill Bailey
That actually makes a lot of sense. I don’t mean her logic tracks, but given how eusocial insects work, it makes sense that if a sapient hive found itself mired in a conundrum with no clear answer, regarding something it considered that important, that it would split and try both possible solutions.
The bees didn’t know what to do. Each side had a different view. In taking positions about the conditions, they split up their swarm into two.
You’ve been making me chuckle a lot, Robert! 🙂
I started it as a lark. Now I think I’ll carry on to the bitter end. Unless I get bored with it before then.
Jo Walton : “What Makes This Book Great”, Chapter (post) #95 – SF Reading Protocols.
Sweetheart should have learned to just roll with it when things get this deeply weird by now.
As the proud owner of a dog with zero chill, I can reassure you this will never happen.
lovetron, n.: 1. the vector particle of the agapic force. 2. a possibly mythical planet named after (1).
doesn’t “ag” mean “to do” and “apic” mean “that of the bees”?
I was thinking of the Greek agapē, but I like your interpretation better.
So, the bees of Lovetron often do things by halves.
-deep bow-
So… pavane wasn’t born of that time when Gavotte “sexed herself stupid”?
No, Gavotte had made reference to Pavane long before that. After meeting the Cypress, Sweetheart made the connection that Gavotte had been referring to her daughter.
Seems more reasonable than how we solve most differences.