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No. Just NO.

And I really feel like there are parts of fandom that don’t get or don’t believe this, and I think that’s troubling.  I’ve seen arguments that people shouldn’t have dark fantasies, or that bad impulses in themselves make a bad person.  I’ve seen so much shaming over thoughts.

It isn’t meant to be a social commentary unless you create it to be. 

It isn’t meant to be educational unless you create it to be. 

Sometimes a story can be just that, a story. Entertainment. Nothing more, nothing less. 

Literally made an hour long video essay on it babes

Here’s the horror comic I drew for this year’s 24 hour comic day/48 hour comic weekend, called “The Night-Mother”.

Slapping (and sometimes ground spot but it depends on farming practices and season) is the only way to actually find a good melon before cutting into it.

“Gender” isn’t a thing; all melons are grown up ovaries of the flowers, they don’t have a sex let alone a gender.

The stem being dry or green is based on how long ago it was cut, assuming it still has a stem on it when it gets to the store. If you let a melon stay on the vine til the vine dries up, the melon is going to go bad.

Webbing on the melon is the result of inconsistent watering, just like stretch marks and splits on a tomato. It grows really fast when it gets a ton of water after not getting a lot previously. It panics and goes “QUICK BEFORE THE DROUGHT COMES BACK” and puts all that water straight into the melon. It expands too quickly and causes micro cracks in the rind which dry out and become the hard brown webs.

The ground spot is reliable on organic and small-scale farmed melons, including your own backyard-grown melons. It turns yellow as the fruit matures, but in store-bought melons, even a lighter colored spot could still have a nice tasty melon inside because they’re often picked slightly unripe and sprayed with ethylene. They also suck up the ethylene from their ripe buddies and will continue to ripen in the store crate, even if the spot never changes color. So it’s a 50/50 shot in a lot of cases; sometimes, yellow-spot melons in stores are already going mushy and nasty inside because they were already ripe but hung out with their buddies too long and got over-exposed.

But slappin? Accurate all the dang time (except in the field in the middle of the day when all the juices have expanded in the heat). Make a fist. Knock on the middle of the melon (gently, don’t smash him). Sounds kinda metallic and sharp? That puppy ain’t ripe. Sounds hollow and dull? Perfect melon, ready for eatin.

The one exception is if your melons have been on a super long journey, I’m talking been on the shelf for weeks and weeks, then they’re all going to sound hollow regardless of how tasty they are. That’s why early and off-season melons, the ones that get shipped in from other countries, are so hit-and-miss and often not tasty. Because it’s impossible to tell good from bad by slap method at that point, and they were all picked early and ripen off the vine on the journey there, which is never as tasty as if they’re allowed to get ripe before picking/shipping.