As cross-dresser, he’s being a little oblivious. The majority will never magically love the minority and make them social equals, and it’s demeaning to expect the minority to do the exact right things to “earn their love” and get equal rights.
It works if the minority is racial, sexual preference, different species, different level of cybernetic enhancement, different level of ability, anything.
Also because Tip has enough dominant-group cards(*) that he can easily buy off the penalties of cross-dressing. (“So secure in his masculinity…”, “he’s bishy”, etc.)
(*) Offhand, I get at least: white, male, straight (getting seduced by Artie does not count), beautiful, educated, Armed & Dangerous. Religion unknown, but he hasn’t shown any visible “marks” for that.
No, it’s perfectly reasonable to expect a minority to try to fit in with everyone else. There’s a huge difference between ostracising people just because they’re different and ostracising them because they refuse to play nice with everyone else.
As a terminally white cishet dude I am going to posit that there’s a pretty significant difference between expecting people to play nice and expecting minorities to conform to the culture of the majority.
Tip is, honestly, oblivious about alot of things. He’s actually very smart, but he tends to be highly focused and, if you haven’t managed to get his attention properly, he tends to default to focusing on himself.
That said, Artie does have a tendency to explain things poorly, so Tip isn’t entirely to blame here. Just mostly.
Artie is so smart he has a tendency to lap people conversationally.
Tip’s self-absorption seems to have gotten worse being surrounded by the experiences of Skin Horse – possibly with more exotic things being interested in him?
Which would also explain why he doesn’t see the darker implications of the story, there.
Back in Narbonic, Artie had the occasional introspective moment where even *he* wondered at why he did the things he did; it’s the pitfall that comes along with brilliance– it’s blinding. And, of course, he gets boooooored. http://narbonic.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2002/12/021226.jpg
Well, technically, Unity is black nano-goo that animates a body stitched together of (mostly) human parts. Presumably, she could replace all, or at least most, of her current parts with animal parts, and yet still be herself. (Not sure if any particular parts, such as the head/brain, or heart, are strictly necessary for her to, for lack of a better word, attach herself to.)
That same comic also establishes that her “primary body” is enhanced to hold the goo without rejection, so presumably she can’t replace too much of her core body too fast. Huh, have we found an actual vulnerability? Naaaah, no way that ever becomes relevant.
Zombies are at least posthuman. Whether to call Unity a posthuman or a construct is nitpicking; her superhuman strength and appetites, not to mention the body-part swapping, are clearly not part of the human condition.
People continue talking about the rabbit having to earn the Boy’s love, but I really can’t see what the rabbit does to do so aside from being cute and fluffy. [1] Wait a mo: is this a religious analogy? The rabbit is saved by his faith in the love of the boy (Jesus), not by any works…
To be fair, Jesus was a pretty swell dude. Just ignore all the glamorization the bible and die-hard religious folk heap on and the words they twist for their own convenience.
The problem with this situation is that Tip isn’t the one trying to treat a 20th century children’s story like it’s an instructional guide on how to handle human / non-human sapient relations.
Artie is being wildly condescending and over-simplistic about this, trying to shoehorn a complicated and nuanced issue into a nonsensical comparison to an utterly irrelevant piece of children’s literature.
It’s like if Nick decided that Frankenstein should be the entire foundation for his worldview and personal identity, and was agonizing over that fact. Sure, you can draw some interesting comparisons and notice certain general parallels – but you can’t try to literally match every detail of a 200 year old piece of fiction to your own real world situation.
Artie is being so incredibly self-righteous and full of shit right now. The truth is, at this point they’re both non-human sapients, created by mad science.
Artie has no more claim to being a “real” non-human than Tip does. He’s built from a combination of gerbil and human DNA, and if not for all the human bits, he’d quite literally be dead right now. He’s more than happy to benefit wildly from his human elements, but he wants to deny his own humanity and distance himself from humans? Hypocrisy of the highest order.
Eh, Artie has *some* point. He’s not picking an utterly irrelevant story with parallels and making it his be-all end-all (as would be the case with Nick and Frankenstein). He’s picking the metaphor that the U.S. government *specifically chose* for their non-human sapient relationships, and he’s finding it problematic. And if the U.S. government intended the metaphor the way Artie’s reading it (which is plausible), it’s downright chilling and rightfully so. Do you have to become something conformist to have full value? Does your value depend on earning the love of some higher order of sapient? At best, the government is behaving like Tip at his worst: self-centered and oblivious to their effect on others.
AND… this is the second time he has alluded to this particular issue… AND… we have the interrupted reveal (should be some kind of Latin phrase for that).
“Do you have to become something conformist to have full value? ”
Depends what it is you’re expected to conform to, no? For example should we really expect “Don’t be a casual murderer and don’t do mass murders!” too high a bar for nonhumans to reach? o_O
“Does your value depend on earning the love of some higher order of sapient?”
I’d say a life without being loved by *someone* is going to suck and that you are more likely to be loved if there’s a reason then if there is not. @_@
I know it’s not at all relevant to this situation, but FWIW, that book is not 200 years old. It’s only 96.
Tip and Artie are both horribly narcissistic and therefore have a very narrow view of the world. They think of everything only as it relates to themselves, rather than how it relates to others. I don’t know what Tip’s IQ is, but Artie’s ultra-high intelligence makes it difficult to relate to those who are significantly less intelligent. Even my brother, with an IQ around 180, has difficulty relating to most people. For Artie, everyone is significantly less intelligent.
Sorry, my mistake. I was mistaking the “200 year old” comment as applying to “The Velveteen Rabbit”. I must have been pretty tired when I read it this morning.
He’s not quite “regular” any more. Remember he still has werewolf DNA and Unity’s DNA inside him. And that’s just what we know of. Who knows what else he’s been exposed to (e.g. radiation) working for SH?
Artie isn’t the one who made the comparison. Whomever originally named Project Skin Horse is the one who did. Artie is examining the nature of the story as it relates to greater acceptance of NHS’s into American society because the agency was formed around that model of NHS acceptance.
For what it’s worth my take on this for many months is that the trans human community are analogous to the toys from Velveteen Rabbit. They are all created by humanity. Skin Horse is analogous to….well…the Skin Horse in the book, trying to get the toys to love humanity (the boy). But our trans human friends aren’t toys, they are under no obligation to love their creators…but Skin Horse is trying to do just that…to get them shoehorned into human society and accepted by same – to be loved. But on another plane, that’s just wrong. To love humans is to accept their dominance. Skin Horse seems to be an organization devoted to helping the trans humans, but in reality appears to be more focused on pacifying them. In my interpretation of Skin Horse, they are as offensive to trans human rights as Uncle Tom would be to civil rights. I get it, Artie…I get it.
This analysis has been brought to you by an otherwise thoroughly useless English degree.
It may create a bias toward love and respect, but free will and free agency dictate that no one is obligated to love their creator. To suggest otherwise would run counter to one of the most basic tenets of at least the Abrahamic religions.
Another side of that analogy is that humans tend to preemptively try to destroy anything that they even think might be a threat (even when that’s cutting off their nose to spite their face). (In the story: contagion and fire.) The point of SH-the-organization was specifically to avoid that, by hooking the nonhumans into human society. I note that in SH-the-story, the rabbit (only) is saved by the equivalent of a deus ex machina.
Yes, Skin Horse wants to help non-humans integrate into human society. And you somehow think that’s a bad thing. Presumably you would prefer them to refuse to integrate and remain on the edges of society, until the friction between the two separate segregated societies builds to the point that they end up at war with each other.
Lots of good points people are making about the flaws in the metaphor, but it seems like another flaw in the metaphor is that Tip stopped before the part of book where the Velveteen Rabbit is taken away to be burned after comforting the Boy during his scarlet fever. (And then gets rescued by the Nursery Magic Fairy and turned into a real rabbit in the forest.)
Okay, the current odds are 5 to 1 for the last panel joke being relevant to current story arc, and 10 to 1 that it’ll be directly involved with the mythology of the comic as a whole. Line up single file, folks. Do I have any takers?
…You know, comics lamenting humans not trusting non-humans kind of lose some of their impact when the non-humans go around clearly demonstrating that they shouldn’t be trusted. Yes, some humans are stupid too, but it seems like most non-humans are grossly irresponsible. It seems like far more of the myriad threats that they’ve had to deal with over the years have been caused by non-humans being a menace to everything around them than have been caused by humans being a threat to non-humans.
As cross-dresser, he’s being a little oblivious. The majority will never magically love the minority and make them social equals, and it’s demeaning to expect the minority to do the exact right things to “earn their love” and get equal rights.
It works if the minority is racial, sexual preference, different species, different level of cybernetic enhancement, different level of ability, anything.
Except it did work that way for him due to his massive charisma (which has taken a bit off damage lately)
Also because Tip has enough dominant-group cards(*) that he can easily buy off the penalties of cross-dressing. (“So secure in his masculinity…”, “he’s bishy”, etc.)
(*) Offhand, I get at least: white, male, straight (getting seduced by Artie does not count), beautiful, educated, Armed & Dangerous. Religion unknown, but he hasn’t shown any visible “marks” for that.
I’m pretty sure he’s slept with other men besides Artie.
No, it’s perfectly reasonable to expect a minority to try to fit in with everyone else. There’s a huge difference between ostracising people just because they’re different and ostracising them because they refuse to play nice with everyone else.
As a terminally white cishet dude I am going to posit that there’s a pretty significant difference between expecting people to play nice and expecting minorities to conform to the culture of the majority.
So…. ‘what people crave isn’t always what they need’?
Tip is, honestly, oblivious about alot of things. He’s actually very smart, but he tends to be highly focused and, if you haven’t managed to get his attention properly, he tends to default to focusing on himself.
That said, Artie does have a tendency to explain things poorly, so Tip isn’t entirely to blame here. Just mostly.
Artie is so smart he has a tendency to lap people conversationally.
Tip’s self-absorption seems to have gotten worse being surrounded by the experiences of Skin Horse – possibly with more exotic things being interested in him?
Which would also explain why he doesn’t see the darker implications of the story, there.
Back in Narbonic, Artie had the occasional introspective moment where even *he* wondered at why he did the things he did; it’s the pitfall that comes along with brilliance– it’s blinding. And, of course, he gets boooooored. http://narbonic.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2002/12/021226.jpg
Yikes, that story must burn Artie like fire. Has Tip not read his file?
He might not have access
Are you sure K. T. and Unity are nonhumans? They are made of people parts…
I think for their purposes, “nonhumans” is just short for “non-humans and non-living humans”.
Well, technically, Unity is black nano-goo that animates a body stitched together of (mostly) human parts. Presumably, she could replace all, or at least most, of her current parts with animal parts, and yet still be herself. (Not sure if any particular parts, such as the head/brain, or heart, are strictly necessary for her to, for lack of a better word, attach herself to.)
” Presumably, she could replace all, or at least most, of her current parts with animal parts, and yet still be herself.”
She in fact inhabits several animal bodies in an earlier storyline while remaining herself.
She just suffers rejection after a bit.
That same comic also establishes that her “primary body” is enhanced to hold the goo without rejection, so presumably she can’t replace too much of her core body too fast. Huh, have we found an actual vulnerability? Naaaah, no way that ever becomes relevant.
IIRC, her brain is the only part of her that is technically “alive”. How it actually stays alive, only Virginia knows.
So it seems that while the black goo is Unity – full stop – she needs a living brain to be able to function.
Zombies are at least posthuman. Whether to call Unity a posthuman or a construct is nitpicking; her superhuman strength and appetites, not to mention the body-part swapping, are clearly not part of the human condition.
People continue talking about the rabbit having to earn the Boy’s love, but I really can’t see what the rabbit does to do so aside from being cute and fluffy. [1] Wait a mo: is this a religious analogy? The rabbit is saved by his faith in the love of the boy (Jesus), not by any works…
[1] Like, say, a cat.
If it is a religious analogy, it’s a strange one. Jesus loves everyone equally, but the boy initially didn’t care about the rabbit at all.
“Jesus loves everyone equally,”
Aside from those who end up going to hell. (Cast _into the fire_ and all. 😀 )
You are very confused, please read the Bible and talk to one or more of your local pastors.
Some of them think I’m going to hell already.
To be fair, Jesus was a pretty swell dude. Just ignore all the glamorization the bible and die-hard religious folk heap on and the words they twist for their own convenience.
The problem with this situation is that Tip isn’t the one trying to treat a 20th century children’s story like it’s an instructional guide on how to handle human / non-human sapient relations.
Artie is being wildly condescending and over-simplistic about this, trying to shoehorn a complicated and nuanced issue into a nonsensical comparison to an utterly irrelevant piece of children’s literature.
It’s like if Nick decided that Frankenstein should be the entire foundation for his worldview and personal identity, and was agonizing over that fact. Sure, you can draw some interesting comparisons and notice certain general parallels – but you can’t try to literally match every detail of a 200 year old piece of fiction to your own real world situation.
Artie is being so incredibly self-righteous and full of shit right now. The truth is, at this point they’re both non-human sapients, created by mad science.
Artie has no more claim to being a “real” non-human than Tip does. He’s built from a combination of gerbil and human DNA, and if not for all the human bits, he’d quite literally be dead right now. He’s more than happy to benefit wildly from his human elements, but he wants to deny his own humanity and distance himself from humans? Hypocrisy of the highest order.
Eh, Artie has *some* point. He’s not picking an utterly irrelevant story with parallels and making it his be-all end-all (as would be the case with Nick and Frankenstein). He’s picking the metaphor that the U.S. government *specifically chose* for their non-human sapient relationships, and he’s finding it problematic. And if the U.S. government intended the metaphor the way Artie’s reading it (which is plausible), it’s downright chilling and rightfully so. Do you have to become something conformist to have full value? Does your value depend on earning the love of some higher order of sapient? At best, the government is behaving like Tip at his worst: self-centered and oblivious to their effect on others.
AND… this is the second time he has alluded to this particular issue… AND… we have the interrupted reveal (should be some kind of Latin phrase for that).
Narratus interruptus?
“Do you have to become something conformist to have full value? ”
Depends what it is you’re expected to conform to, no? For example should we really expect “Don’t be a casual murderer and don’t do mass murders!” too high a bar for nonhumans to reach? o_O
“Does your value depend on earning the love of some higher order of sapient?”
I’d say a life without being loved by *someone* is going to suck and that you are more likely to be loved if there’s a reason then if there is not. @_@
I know it’s not at all relevant to this situation, but FWIW, that book is not 200 years old. It’s only 96.
Tip and Artie are both horribly narcissistic and therefore have a very narrow view of the world. They think of everything only as it relates to themselves, rather than how it relates to others. I don’t know what Tip’s IQ is, but Artie’s ultra-high intelligence makes it difficult to relate to those who are significantly less intelligent. Even my brother, with an IQ around 180, has difficulty relating to most people. For Artie, everyone is significantly less intelligent.
@ awgiedawgie: Sorry, but D. Walker is correct. It was first published (anonymously) in London in 1818.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein
Sorry, my mistake. I was mistaking the “200 year old” comment as applying to “The Velveteen Rabbit”. I must have been pretty tired when I read it this morning.
But Tip isn’t any of those things—he’s just a regular human man. A sexy, cross-dressing one, but still just a dude.
He’s not quite “regular” any more. Remember he still has werewolf DNA and Unity’s DNA inside him. And that’s just what we know of. Who knows what else he’s been exposed to (e.g. radiation) working for SH?
Artie isn’t the one who made the comparison. Whomever originally named Project Skin Horse is the one who did. Artie is examining the nature of the story as it relates to greater acceptance of NHS’s into American society because the agency was formed around that model of NHS acceptance.
What Unity an K.T. are planning won’t end well.
Meh, what could possibly go wrong?!
“In some secluded rendezvous…that overlooks the avenue…with someone sharing a delightful chat, of this and that, and cocktails for two.”
For what it’s worth my take on this for many months is that the trans human community are analogous to the toys from Velveteen Rabbit. They are all created by humanity. Skin Horse is analogous to….well…the Skin Horse in the book, trying to get the toys to love humanity (the boy). But our trans human friends aren’t toys, they are under no obligation to love their creators…but Skin Horse is trying to do just that…to get them shoehorned into human society and accepted by same – to be loved. But on another plane, that’s just wrong. To love humans is to accept their dominance. Skin Horse seems to be an organization devoted to helping the trans humans, but in reality appears to be more focused on pacifying them. In my interpretation of Skin Horse, they are as offensive to trans human rights as Uncle Tom would be to civil rights. I get it, Artie…I get it.
This analysis has been brought to you by an otherwise thoroughly useless English degree.
“But our trans human friends aren’t toys, they are under no obligation to love their creators…”
Their creators gave them life. That would seem to be a pretty potent reason for love and respect right there. ^_^
Let’s hope the emergent AIs agree with you!
It may create a bias toward love and respect, but free will and free agency dictate that no one is obligated to love their creator. To suggest otherwise would run counter to one of the most basic tenets of at least the Abrahamic religions.
To be fair, no one is under any obligation to love anyone. Love is, by its very definition, voluntary.
I’d argue that anyone who chooses to become a parent should be obligated to love the child(ren) for a (developmentally-relevant unit of time).
Another side of that analogy is that humans tend to preemptively try to destroy anything that they even think might be a threat (even when that’s cutting off their nose to spite their face). (In the story: contagion and fire.) The point of SH-the-organization was specifically to avoid that, by hooking the nonhumans into human society. I note that in SH-the-story, the rabbit (only) is saved by the equivalent of a deus ex machina.
Yes, Skin Horse wants to help non-humans integrate into human society. And you somehow think that’s a bad thing. Presumably you would prefer them to refuse to integrate and remain on the edges of society, until the friction between the two separate segregated societies builds to the point that they end up at war with each other.
Toxic waste in the swamp? This could become a thing.
I see what you did there.
I hope Wilkins and Wontkins finish their conversation. I also hope for a classic “Wilkins and Wontkins” conclusion…
Lots of good points people are making about the flaws in the metaphor, but it seems like another flaw in the metaphor is that Tip stopped before the part of book where the Velveteen Rabbit is taken away to be burned after comforting the Boy during his scarlet fever. (And then gets rescued by the Nursery Magic Fairy and turned into a real rabbit in the forest.)
Darth Vader said, “No, I am your father.” ❤️The end.
Hours of entertainment could be had that way.
I don’t see Shaenon nor Jeff on the list of Seattle Comic Con celebrities? Going incognito?
Okay, the current odds are 5 to 1 for the last panel joke being relevant to current story arc, and 10 to 1 that it’ll be directly involved with the mythology of the comic as a whole. Line up single file, folks. Do I have any takers?
…You know, comics lamenting humans not trusting non-humans kind of lose some of their impact when the non-humans go around clearly demonstrating that they shouldn’t be trusted. Yes, some humans are stupid too, but it seems like most non-humans are grossly irresponsible. It seems like far more of the myriad threats that they’ve had to deal with over the years have been caused by non-humans being a menace to everything around them than have been caused by humans being a threat to non-humans.
And thus we get to the moral lesson of the comic, perhaps the hardest one to swallow but also the most important.
Living beings are not toys. They do not need to “earn” the right to exist.
This is true for the ugly ones. The undesirable ones. The dangerous ones all alike.
We are all born into this world with that right. And we all deserve it.
Cutting it down any further damages us all.