#revretch

Back in episode 2 of Humans-B-Gone, Gregorsa had this to say in his notes about crustaceans.

And I can't believe it took this long for it to remind of this one scene from an Arthur episode.

@revretch I just binge-watched all available content for @humansbgone and adored every second of it! The voice-acting is great, the educational elements are a fantastic addition, and I’ve been thoroughly absorbed into the story and worldbuilding. You’re knocking this out of the park!

The appearance of the Cows was a great twist, and I’m wondering what both the Humans and the Ants are plotting…

And regarding the Gregorsa’s Notes minigame, I achieved a perfect score so far!

Keep up the good work, you might as well catch me and drop me into Sophodra’s collection because I’m hooked!

The reveal of primal malzeno as sunbreak’s final boss ended up postponing the malzeno vid, so UHC will be waiting till the last title update to continue working on it.

Instead we got a seltas vid, and while I didn’t have a part in this one since I’m mostly the phylogenetics and anatomy guy, @krmoaten-blog made art for the video so go give her a follow. And also I prompted an interesting conversation between my fellow poopenshitters about the pincers on seltas queen.

Seltas are obviously meant to be rhinoceros beetles since Capcom modeled the male’s anatomy as closely to Dynastinae as they could with 3DS graphics (and rhinoceros beetles are kinda big in Japan so it was only a matter of time till we got a monster of one), and they even gave him an aedeagus! The insect equivalent of a penis. The mantid-like claws aren’t really indicative of evolutionary relation since raptorial appendages are a pretty easy thing to evolve in arthropods.

The queens are pretty odd though and are almost larviform in anatomy. And while she also matches up with beetle anatomy pretty well, her pincers threw me for a loop since beetles don’t have abdomen pincers. At first I thought they were derived from parts of the vagina but after bugging @revretch about it it seems that there isn’t a part of the vagina that can be modified into pincers. So the theory I came up with and shared is that it’s a modified forked aedeagus.

My theory is that seltas queens don’t face too much pressure to retain normal reproductive systems since they’re making 100% of the decisions when it comes to reproduction, and eventually became intersex like moles but with weird aedeaguses. Eventually they evolved to actually put those aedeaguses to use by giving them joints to hold onto mates during reproduction and it just kinda went from there.

So tldr, there are no female seltas. Only males and hulking cannibalistic “queens”.

As far as my thoughts on them go I think they’re amazing and seltas is definitely the best beginner monster. I also love their designs and seltas queen is a giant arthropod done right, with her massive columnar legs that don’t end in points. Whenever I design giant arthropods I actually reference her.