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I'm sorry I'm going into perhaps too much detail about this lion thing. Using animal analogies for people is not something I like to do most of the time. But in this discussion, we're all trying to find out the root causes of gender differentiation in society. And then there's the question of whether gender ever was necessary, or if it still is now, or if society should be this or that, and in this case the lion pride is good because it gives a distancing effect. We are not lions, we are humans, but exploring the mechanics of lion society can still offer some interesting questions about our own.

I start with a quick, and rather generalised, sketch of what a young male lion does as he reaches maturity.



Pride lions, in this case, seem rather parasitic. The most important role a pride lion must do is to stop a different male from coming in and killing all the cubs (which is what he did on his first day). In return he gets first dibs on every meal - he eats his fill before the cubs do or even any of the lionesses who actually hunted it. He has become huge and heavy, and he is puffed out when he tries to run, because his body is mostly geared to scare/fight off rivals. He's not too well suited to the running and herding tactics of the lionesses; because of his size he mostly tends to stalk and grab (if he has to hunt something).

But it is very interesting to examine sexual dimorphism in lions. It's hard to see if it's even that necessary, or if lions would be better of without a big fat tyrant. Because if a male lion was built more like a lioness, the way wolves are sort of similar between the sexes, it would enable him to take part in the hunt more often and he'd increase the hunting party's size by one member. I'm assuming here that more helpers = more food = better result overall.

However, since there are males who have developed more imposing features, NOT having a male lion who is at least as fierce as the roaming loners means that all your cubs are going to be killed. So, you start wanting bigger, lazier, greedier lions. You want your lion to be the biggest, laziest, greediest one, to scare all the other ones away. In a world tainted with intra-species violence, you want your male to be the fiercest and most agressive one of them all. It's simply a matter of keeping up with the competition.

(And as an aside: It makes me feel sad how extreme the competition is for some people who feel they need to "prove" their gender. I see it happening each time I go to put up the magazines in my newsagency - meaty, muscly men, and skinny, tanned women. They seem like more or less the only types of people that men- and women-oriented magazines want to portray. Although I think some of the men's magazines are much worse than the women's - they get titles like "fighters only", "men only"; women's magazines are hardly ever that openly exclusive)

My input here is that yes, male lions can and do hunt alone. But it depends on the context. And even then, they don't often hunt the same way that team-lionesses do. And I can't say how conscious they are of their own "roles". But many of these intra-species behaviours are reinforced by the reactions and responses of other members of the species. A lion who kills cubs is rewarded with sex. A scrawny loner who punches above his weight is punished and driven away. We may never be able to read what animals are thinking, but how the lion society maintains its own set of "rules" seems pretty apparent and real.

And then what can we say about necessity. Do lionesses really need a big lazy male to feed? Or does this only happen because in an imperfect world, the lionesses need an agressive jerk to fend away all the other agressive suitors?

I don't know what to say. I almost feel like saying that if there was a society that had no need for gender differentiation, then in that society there would be no gender differentiation. Which would be the same thing as saying that every society, including our own, has needed gender differentiation. But that feels problematic to me because the issue of necessity is rather complicated and convoluted at times. And the argument is circular: Without necessity, there is nothing; x exists, therefore, x is necessary.

So anyway, I'd say that gender role differentiation is real in the sense that it is reinforced by the way society rewards adherents and punishes rebels. "Should it be retained" and "is it necessary" are harder questions. It becomes difficult to separate what we are and what we should be, and whether being a certain way is wrong. The problem applies equally to a person and a society. Can being the way it is justify itself?

I wonder if there's anything special going on at that time other than the 500th issue? *checks the calendar* Hm, all I can see is that June 24th lies between Kau and Acara day. I'm not sure if there might be other site events around that time.

And I'm still halfway through my design, and I'm stuck on whether to call him Winking Walloper or Blindside Bandit. The missing eye seems to be his defining feature xD

Komori and Fish, I think you guys have got it summed up all right. ^_^ Joey will be another one of the super-incompetent-heroes but be kind of prone to doing the opposite of his supposed job. Well, kinda like the rest of them. xD Only he gets slightly more of "do it for the evulz" than "do it for the lulz" and "oops"...

He's a nitwit regardless of what side he falls into, and he falls in among the good guys most of the time, but I think he's more attracted to sheer awesomeness than morality, and villains can appeal to his vanity for wanting to be among the awesomest.

And The Me Guy, I don't think we do have any set theme for anything yet, so there won't be any harm in throwing in your suggestion for a villain. ^_^ If/when we do decide on a theme for this year, we could always give a sort of reworking to idea. But in the end it'll come down to the writers to find a way to make it shine, and I don't guarantee that it will happen. But still, if you have an idea of yours, feel free to suggest it here.

Yeah, it would be really cool to have Joey all costumed-up, because in his old original design (as in, from 2005) he had actually been meant to be a little villain. Not a grand villain, more like a wannabe which totally fails at his byzantine plots, or unknowingly foils the plot of the real villain, or gets trampled along the way. =D

"Crossed tails"? I'm confused here... are we talking about:



I really don't like that kind of crossing tail. I mean, if I have to mentally trace my finger over the tangled net of speech bubble tails to work out who's saying what, it definitely pulls me out of the story. It's really not intuitive.

Or are we talking about this?



That's not bad. I sometimes use this for short bursts of quick dialogue between two characters. It's useful for condensing what could have been several panels of idle banter into just one.

But of course, even this can be implemented badly if you don't follow the simple left-to-right rules for placing speech bubbles well enough.



This layout confuses me because I already started to read the longer text in the bigger bubble on the left, but the smaller one on the right doesn't quite register with me until my eye has already started scanning the second bubble.

So yeah. Plan your speech bubble placement, because there's so much scope to do the wrong thing when it comes to shuffling these bubbles around. At the same time there's a lot of freedom to get things flowing really nicely, too, but it only works out like that if you're aware of the reader's experience.

I'm sorry to be dredging up a point of discussion which has been long dropped, but I couldn't help myself. Every single time I come across an unusual English word (or even a common one that makes me wonder) I like to plug it into the Online Etymology Dictionary. And it turns out, this word is not the invention of various fantasy writers, but is actually attested to the 1520s I love being surprised at a word's longevity.

Scry
1520s, “to see images in a crystal, water, etc., which reveal the past or forebode the future;" aphetic of descry (1). Related: Scried; scrying.

The older form descry ("to see, discern,") in turn came into English through Old French from the Latin verb describere, which is the same root which gave us the more familiar English word describe. Which we happen to talk about a lot on this thread. ;D

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Now, what I can't stand is when a writer tries to take on a serious issue, but it falls flat. It can be any issue, but when an author treats it so heavy-handedly and assumes his/her readers are so thick they can't see allegory when it's screaming in their face, then it gets really sickening. And these kinds of books enjoy a greater-than-average chance of being included in a high school English class readings list. *headdesk*.

Oh yeah, and the other thing that peeves me is how to decide which words to capitalise in a title. I know "the", "and", "in" and "of" should probably be left the way they are, but when the little words outnumber and overwhelm the few capitalised main words, I feel sorry for those main words. I worry that people might entirely overlook that the whole phrase was meant to be capitalised and get confused if it almost merges into the sentence. Maybe I'm just being crazy.

Eg. I worry that titles like In the House or out the Door are hard to pick out and separate from the syntax of the sentence...