self-righteous and sacriligeous

thats it! all 8 pages! i had a lot of fun drawing this, thank you for everybodys kind words on the preview post.

Apple season

to start off, let me highlight a couple ways that Annihilation gets biology wrong

- the way Lena describes all the flowers growing near the hut, “To look at them you wouldn’t say that they are the same species… but they’re growing from the same branch structure… so it *has* to be the same species. It’s the same plant! It’s like they’re stuck in a continuous mutation.” ‘same species’ is, uh, not the conclusion I would first come to in that situation! if anything, I’d go for extreme symbiosis (like lichen-level) first, maybe some radiation-induced grafting of plants together (as this is something that can actually be done to certain plants irl, depending on compatibility). plant physiology/ecology is *notoriously* easy to fuck with without even going so far as the gene level to do so

- when Lena is analyzing the gator-shark, she says, “you can’t cross-breed between different species,” which is blatantly false lmao. I’m willing to believe she simply meant something like “between broad clades” and was just simplifying the idea for her non-bio teammates, but in context with all the other weird bio assumptions she makes, idk…

- the scene w/ the human-shaped plants, where Josie explains that the HOX genes were mutated to reflect those of humans…. that’s not how HOX genes work? 

see, on a basic level, HOX genes function like gene->part, NOT gene->shape. like, look at this diagram of fly HOX genes

each gene corresponds to a part/section of the fly, not any particular shape. thus, if a plant were to turn “human” (or vis-versa in Josie’s case) via *specifically* HOX mutation, the mutations would occur as parts reflecting parts. say, something like the stalk specifically forming the torso, the leaves specifically forming the fingers, the apical meristem forming the head, etc. (idk exact plant or human genetics, so don’t quote me on those *specific* reflections, but u get the gist), which might then be arranged into an approximate human shape

(and this isn’t even to *mention* the fact that genes end up coding for different things over time, so the exact same codes are simply going to *mean* something different when applied to the genes of different organisms. tho I’m far more willing to assume alien radiation interference on that front)

New OC alert 👀