#ask dragonslander

So not only they justify a groomer with the most embarrasing excuse wrapped on cheap messages of love and forgiveness that not even a fuking Care Bear would buy (and all of this behind a paywall).

But they also lack the spine to publicly support their own bullshit argument.

Imagine being a holier-than-thou asshole who prefers to lick the boots of a groomer and encourage your young audience to forgive such a monster, and not even be strong enough to stand your shit-filled ground.

Talk about being pathetic.

I've tried to read What Lurks Beneath at least twice, but I always get bored and lose track of what's happening. The only thing I remember is that there's a cat princess named Trout, wich is so silly and cute.

I've been told it's pretty good though and apparently based on Game of Thrones? Wich means I should have liked it more, but I didn't stick to it. Maybe next time.

As for The Exiled, I haven't read it because don't read Warrior Cats fanfics. Sorry, they're not really my thing.

If we're talking surrogate wombs, then yes.

Barring some minimal exceptions, like a sibling willingly offering herself to carry for another sibling, we shouldn't normalize using wombs as rental incubators and babies as products.

People who resort to surrogates don't do it because they don't have any other option, but because they can afford relying the harsh part on another person. Another person who doesn't have those resources, and has to physically exploit their body to have food on the plate. Nine months of scarring their body and risking their life only to give away the baby the moment they're out.

Meanwhile, there are thousands, and I mean THOUSANDS of orphaned children who would do much better in an average home with a supporting family waiting for someone to adopt them. Why not give them a chance?

Because again, too many people don't want a child, they want a baby doll that belongs to them, by blood. And allow me to be extremely harsh, but I don't think people who see their children as their property/legacy deserve to have kids at all.

In the context of xenofiction, I get that those situations are different, they don't have economies or social classes. But there are still situations where the surrogacy is normalized and taken too lightly, often used as a cheap way to let the gay couple raise babies. And I think that's terrible.

Yeah, you're right about that.

Also, now that you say it, for a long time I had in mind a female villain who is strong by herself while also having a battalion of lovers and/or sons and daughters, kinda like Hercules had. I probably saw that concept somewhere but I don't remember where.

what has she done that has been of her own volition? the romance + whatnot was just dapple being possessive of her. she couldn't even outright choose dapple over cricket/say no, dapple had to do that for her. in the investigation that resulted in the dapple-as-leader-of-the-cannibal-cats reveal, goose had to convince her to go along with him, sort of. why doesn't she have agency in her own story

there's one chapter left and all the character development she had is becoming 1% less of a doormat when she yelled "go to hell"?? that's what I think nitteh was going for, at least (tangential: nice recall to pebble's lines against nettle. I guess. funny that both she and pebble are granted just about the same agency. hahaa...).

and the way the plot of the comic is going, there may be a "payoff" where something something she kills dapple/does something critical in stopping her by gaining free will out of nowhere with no prior indications. that won't be satisfying to me, though, since in my eyes she would not have earned this sudden characterization upgrade.

imagine if honey made decisions. as a newcomer, her lack of context of the colony's history could be utilized more fully: what does she notice about this weird, seemingly cheery trashcat colony that seems to have slight off-vibes? does she go about digging for answers, actively interviewing cats about their history? are her attempts to uncover the truth? uncovering up cat bones below layers of trash that behold teeth marks and/or emptied marrow? why doesn't she ask about who that "nettle" guy was that pebble mistook her for?

or hell, maybe I'm giving the story too much credit for what it's worth and I'm attempting to polish a pile of dirt. even if the protag wasn't a doormat, there would still be a myriad of problems with the lore, worldbuilding, pacing, obvious character favoritism, cooke-cutter characterization, one-dimensional "good cat, evil cat" morality, no interesting exploration of cannibalism except for the shock value...

rough. all around rough.

I don't think Honey should have jumped right into the overused detective role, but she definetely should have been more proactive and asked more questions, specially about who the fuck was Nettle. I believe that the only real action Honey took on her own was to try and make ammends with Pebble, but frankly that scene feels more like an excuse to trigger the flashback rather than to show her kindness towards the elderly cat.

This is personal bias, but I feel like most of the stories that don't let you see the protagonist's inner thoughts makes them less interesting. As you said, you can have the character go through a lot of significant events, but if they don't reflect on them and grow, what's the point?

An example with Honey. In the comic, when she finds Goose next to Cricket's corpse, she puts her own complicated feelings about the latter behind and consoles her friend. But what if we saw more about her thoughts? Was a part of her relieved that her stalker was gone? Does she feel guilty about it? Or about indirectly causing his death? Does she has any suspicion for who the killer might be? She already saw Goose physically attacking Cricket.

And Honey's backstory had so much potential, yet most of that we learnt isn't in the actual comic, but on the QnA (wich isn't even available anymore).

Sidenote: I find it funny how in one of the comments, Nitteh says something about not being a megacorporation that milks her properties to death, yet she essentially cut out a good chunk of backstory from the protagonist and put it on a separate document that probably won't be available in the physical release (if there is one), wich is something most corps do to sell more products with "exclusive lore". I don't think she did that on purpose, but it's funny.

So, Honey was born in a Maine Coon breeder, probably sold as a kitten, declawed and abandoned to die by her owners. And we never see her think about it past her disability. Does she miss her parents and siblings? What about her past life as a pet? She loved her owners despite them declawing her, until they ditched her. How does that affect how she interacts with other cats? With humans? She must know more things about the trash in the junkyard than anyone else, why not use that as a way to "make herself useful"?

I didn't clocked the clear separation between good and bad characters, but now that you say it, I see it. If you're good, you're the definition of a "cinnamon roll", just a superficial kind character with barely any bite to it that can do no wrong, and if you do, it's excused because you were stressed or something. And if you're bad, you're a childish, cartoonish portrayal of a creep (Cricket) or a cult leader (Nettle), or if you're a background cannibal goon, you don't even have a design, wich I find it beyond lazy. It's not like the author's couldn't ask for some OCs to make cameos like they did on previous pages.

Don't get me started on the cannibal shit. I don't even watch or read about cases that include that specific crime, but even I can tell you that the "addiction" this comic tries to pull off is ridiculous and stupid as shit. Sorry but if you're going to make a crime like this your main plot on your non-parodic comedy, I think the bare minimum effort one should do is read about cases like those to understand the people that commited it and their motives. Of course I'm not saying your kitty cat doomed yuri comic should be a faithful recreation of Fish's case, but you gotta give weight to a heavy subject if you want to include it.

Am I the only one bothered by the fact that many people don't make the slightest effort to write about how being transgender or non-binary impacted their characters? Before you say, 'Hey, there are trans characters on Comic Fury,' I should mention that no one explores how it impacts the lives of their trans characters. The characters don't even have deadnames (some doesn't tell if the character decided to keep it) or explore alternative ways for their characters to transition if HRT isn't available in the settings. How does a FTM feel about getting pregnant? Do they experience postpartum depression? How low or high is their dysphoria? How do they come out as trans to their loved ones? Are they closet or public about it? And many more

The only animal comics that do a great job of representing transgender characters are I Didn't Know, What Lurks Beneath, The Exiled (at least their character has a scene where they come out), Swordbearers (implied or an allegory), Jumalanpelko, Pinepaw and The Forgotten World. Most comics probably only have a trans character if you click on their toyhouse/Tumblr/Instagram profile or visit any websites outside of Media Comic itself. Some of the comics made the character suddenly become trans/non-binary without any foreshadowing, or they've just put a trans flag behind them and that's it. Or they just made the trans men get pregnant for a ship or a trans women impregnate her mate for the same reasons above.

I can't speak much of it because I'm not trans (I think, terminology confuses me), but I agree with this so much.

One of the reasons I loved Miss Maple from IDK is for how her identity clashed so much with the traditional lifestyle of most deers. She wasn't just a trans woman, she had her own personality beyond that, same with her disability. She's a 10/10 to me.

And on the other hand of the spectrum, we have Rowan, who is supposed to be a trans man because he's a tortoishell cat and those are almost always female, when they aren't intersex, but him being trans doesn't affect the plot in the slightest. If you're wondering, him being trans came out in the now missing QnA, were people pointed out how he was a tortoishell and Nitteh made a joke about how it was planned (it probably wasn't).

There's a trend that has been going on for years in fandom spaces that consists on making your characters "diverse" by simply placing a tag on them that doesn't translate to the actual writting.

It hapens with trans characters, as you said, but also with disabilities. You have a character that lost an eye, but they never struggle with depth perception. You have a character with a missing limb, but they have this magic prosthetic that is virtually the same as a human limb, so they don't have any issue. You have a character that has ADHD, but it's only used for comedic or quirky moments, it never affects their life negatively.

We could go on and on with examples. I cannot talk for everyone, but I've seen some characters that supposedly share part of my identity and I lowkey see them as insulting with how reducing and infantilizing they are.

The main point is that people want to be seen as progressive and cool without actually researching about the people they're representing with their characters. Most of those authors are lazy and superficial who want to show off, the type of people who claim to be trans allies, but they aren't going to stop consuming Harry Potter because it's their comfort book.

But there's also people who genuely want to help by making those characters. To those people, please, please, PLEASE, read works written BY the people you want to represent! Understand their experience, listen to their own story! You may want to do good, but unless you put some effort into it, your good will won't be enough!

I mean... I don't think there's much they can do in regard to their audience. They have a pretty big one, and half of online xenofiction readers are either children or childish adults, so how is someone even supposed to herd that disaster? I don't think theyre doing it half bad, although they do have tumbles.

I'm all for RJ and Cat to be bothered about people wishing death on children characters or using ableist slurs, that's fair and it's good that they're discouraging them from doing that.

But then they do a 180º and try to justify using "bitch" to define Rose, a character they established as a child? Like? Did you really didn't have any other adjective to describe her? Insolent, cocky, bully, smug, whiny? Why is she, the child/teenage girl being called a highly gendered insult? I don't get it.

IDK, they seem pretty reasonable people until someone pulls up some innocuous commentary they don't agree with, and then they get really defensive.

True! I also deadass don't get the appeal of making your gritty edgy lion comic with blood and sex directly related to a Disney movie ToT