Skin Horse

By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
By Shaenon K. Garrity & Jeffrey C. Wells
Color by Pancha Diaz
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2017-09-21
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2017-09-21

by shaenon on September 21, 2017 at 12:01 am
Chapter: Sure as You're Born
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Discussion (38) ¬

  1. Robert Nowall
    September 21, 2017, 12:02 am | # | Reply

    Continental breakfast?

    • jdreyfuss
      January 30, 2020, 4:31 pm | # | Reply

      He’s a tiger, so it’s a subcontinental breakfast.

  2. Candace
    September 21, 2017, 12:08 am | # | Reply

    H.T. looks a bit…deflated.

    • Towering Barbarian
      September 21, 2017, 12:40 am | # | Reply

      It’s likely that this was a guy he had started feeling friendship for. So I don’t blame him for being sad. T_T

      • Classic Steve
        September 21, 2017, 11:10 am | # | Reply

        Friendship? He plans to eat everybody.

        • Frank Hightower
          September 21, 2017, 11:29 am | # | Reply

          Friends are food, not fish!

          • bitflipper
            September 21, 2017, 11:24 pm | #

            No, no; fish are food, too. Bruce told me so.
            ;-p

        • Author X
          September 21, 2017, 11:41 am | # | Reply

          At the very least, he wants them to understand the breadth of his genius as his plans come to fruition – not to be thinking, “oh no! A scary tiger!”

          • s854
            September 21, 2017, 1:01 pm | #

            HT came down here in the belief that he could sort things out, but it turns out that he may not even be able to walk the streets safely. Of course he’s feeling a bit deflated.

        • wizard4169
          August 3, 2021, 10:01 am | # | Reply

          HT’s definition of “friendship” is “I’ll eat you last.”

      • awgiedawgie
        September 21, 2017, 5:28 pm | # | Reply

        Well, H.T. did say they were on the City Council together.

        • awgiedawgie
          September 21, 2017, 5:37 pm | # | Reply

          Oops… Chamber of Commerce.

    • Pharmakeus Ubik
      September 21, 2017, 3:41 pm | # | Reply

      He had his heart set on bacon waffles.

    • Anson
      September 21, 2017, 10:18 pm | # | Reply

      He found himself in a situation he couldn’t think his way out of, and they got upstaged by Unity.

    • Knuckles
      February 3, 2022, 3:32 pm | # | Reply

      You would be too if the link to the top of the food chain broke out from under your paw.

      Also the lack of waffles is devastating

  3. shenhibiki
    September 21, 2017, 12:18 am | # | Reply

    “He fears me for all the wrong reasons…”

  4. Ogden Wernstrom
    September 21, 2017, 12:32 am | # | Reply

    Sweetheart’s personal Hell continues to bleed into reality. All the world’s underspecified rules and mutually unsatisfiable protocols redound to her detriment, and etiquette has the logic and mortal stakes of Catch 22. On the bright side, it proves she had her priorities straight and was always right to worry.

    • Shadowmehr
      September 21, 2017, 8:49 pm | # | Reply

      Knowing you were right to be paranoid is cold comfort at best, but sometimes that’s all you got.

  5. EvilMidnightLurker
    September 21, 2017, 3:19 am | # | Reply

    Asking the reality-blind what they see when they look at Unity would make an interesting social experiment. Black? White? One of those words from New Orleans we don’t use anymore? Woman with vitiligo?

    …Harley Quinn?

    • EvilMidnightLurker
      September 21, 2017, 3:21 am | # | Reply

      I probably should have just said “interracial” there, but that bumps up against the subtly horrible American perception that if you have _any_ degree of African ancestry, you’re just plain black.

      • Carl Fishman
        September 21, 2017, 4:51 am | # | Reply

        Yeah; just think of all those horrible racists who call Barack Obama, Halle Berry and Tiger Woods “Black”.

        • EvilMidnightLurker
          September 21, 2017, 5:53 am | # | Reply

          Okay that was not the most well thought out statement. My sincere apologies. 🙁

      • gyrre
        September 21, 2017, 8:32 pm | # | Reply

        Thankfully, there’s only two states where that’s actually in the law (Illinois and Alabama).
        Yes, your racial classification can change simply by entering a different state.

      • bitflipper
        September 21, 2017, 11:27 pm | # | Reply

        “Subtly” horrible?

        • bitflipper
          September 21, 2017, 11:34 pm | # | Reply

          I love countering the “not one drop” mindset by pointing out that all H.sapiens are African planes apes. ‘Course, I get out-of-context biblical nonsense quoted at me a lot as a result, but it’s still fun just to watch all the interesting colors such a person turns when I make that observation.

          • awgiedawgie
            September 22, 2017, 3:20 am | #

            Just curious… How exactly do you conclude that homo sapiens are African plains (not planes) apes?

          • bitflipper
            September 23, 2017, 8:52 pm | #

            I blame autocorrect for that one.

            As for the conclusion, all genus Homo are bipedal apes, as opposed to Pan, Pongo, and Gorilla which are quadripedal apes. Bipedalism suggests a lifestyle adapted to open country such as steppes and plains. And, of course, all of the earliest hominid and pithecine fossils are from Africa.

          • awgiedawgie
            September 24, 2017, 1:02 pm | #

            I’ll give you autocorrect. It even capitalizes “entangled”… because it was a movie.

            So your conclusion is based on circumstantial evidence and speculation, since no humans were actually there to witness the origin of humans. Like any account of man’s beginnings, it must be believed by faith.

          • bitflipper
            September 24, 2017, 11:43 pm | #

            But, unlike other “faith” in our origins, it is backed up by hard evidence — fossils, ancient stone tools and fire-charred remains, genetic similarity with other, modern ape species and genetic sequencing of other hominid remains for species and sub-species that are no longer extant. We don’t have eyewitness accounts, true, but at least there’s more direct and collaborating evidence than “my god told me so.”

            The common misconception of labeling science as “faith” is that, unlike religious faith, science questions itself and corrects itself continuously in the light of new and existing evidence. Religious faith purports to be eternal truth and therefore beyond question. Science may require some belief, but it is belief in our own ability to interpret the evidence before us, not belief in its infallibility; this is a crucial distinguishing factor between science and religion.

    • vincentmuyo
      September 21, 2017, 10:40 am | # | Reply

      My personal guess would be “whatever fits into their preconceptions and the context they assume”.

      So if they default to animal control being dark skinned, then that. If it’s a caucasian and they’re seeing her as an authority figure, most likely caucasian. Possibly male – I’m not sure how far the reality filter stretches.

      But I may be way off here. The resident ants assure me they wouldn’t see her as a walking ant colony, even if it sounds like they’re lying.

      • awgiedawgie
        September 21, 2017, 5:34 pm | # | Reply

        They might not see her as being one or the other, aside from a base guess. Other than that, she could be just any other “ordinary” person with some bizarre hair and makeup. If they see the stitches at all, they probably think they’re just tattoos. As you said, it depends on the severity of their reality blindness.

        And with the stereotype that someone with weird hair and tattoos is only fit for menial jobs, that would explain his immediate assumption that she worked for animal control.

      • gyrre
        September 21, 2017, 8:36 pm | # | Reply

        I know the two Whimsey techs in the’My House is Me’ arc thought she had bad burn scars.

  6. matt w
    September 21, 2017, 7:16 am | # | Reply

    The words you were looking for was “biracial” or “multi-racial,” I think, or maybe “mixed-race.” (“Interracial” refers to things involving more than one person.) Many biracial people have various excellent reasons for emphasizing the different varieties of their identity; however, research (and common experience in the US) shows that mixed-race people who don’t pass for white face much the same kind of discrimination as other non-white people.

    Of course Unity does not look like a mixed-race person.

    • Trivena
      September 21, 2017, 10:53 am | # | Reply

      I think a reality-blind person might find themselves being uncertain as to what race she appears and vacillate between white and black, before finally deciding that since they can’t tell, she must be mixed.

      • Nomi
        September 21, 2017, 12:33 pm | # | Reply

        This is an excellent hypothesis for so many reasons.

      • BRGR
        September 21, 2017, 12:35 pm | # | Reply

        Indonesian. People can never tell where Indonesians are from just from looking at them, but they can always tell that they can’t tell.

      • Midwestmutt
        September 21, 2017, 1:58 pm | # | Reply

        Unity is upper class Cheronian from Star Trek.

  7. This Guy I Know
    September 21, 2017, 12:49 pm | # | Reply

    I was thinking… Can we be sure the Groovitron actually blew up? Mightn’t it still be there, pumping out pink clouds of reality blindness? It was, according to Mercutio, built to attune minds to cosmic forces. Why couldn’t it be re-tuned to do the opposite? It might even have been intended to only edit out Tony and Mercutio’s (perceived) reality, leaving them to do their thing in peace. The general reality blindness could be the result of dialing the settings a little too high–or not, as that might be a desirable side-effect from T&M’s perspective.

    I doubt that’s the way the story is going, but it seems surprisingly plausible in terms of methods and motivations.

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