Grrl Power #873 – Pyrrhic matchmaking
You’ve all been waiting for it. Ray and Maxima will meet soon.
Sydney isn’t a lazy person necessarily, but it’s probably easy to imagine that when confronted with a frustrating job, she might gradually start putting less and less effort into it. Aster was an extreme example of how Earth is truly not ready for alien immigration, but there aren’t any languages on Earth that use the “Extended Galactic” alphabet, which accounts for the linguistic needs of about 85% of known space faring races. The difference between that and what Sydney can input into her tablet is like the difference between ASCII and UTF-8. Which is to say 128 characters vs. 1,112,064.
That’s the long winded way of saying that even the aliens who communicate in phonetic languages might have funky names. Sure, Glurbglorb might be easy to almost spell correctly in English, even if it’s really pronounced Ǫ̈lᴞrbglӛrb̈. But if the alien walks up and says, “My name is Glurb(click)glorb, Sydney probably doesn’t know how to get to the ǂ key on the tablet, so she’s going to start coming up with nicknames. Not out of spite, she just has a line of twenty aliens to get through.
The same thing when she asked someone their gender, and they said “quintflim,” and Sydney was like, “Come again?” and then the alien explained that “xers” race has five biological sexes. Sydney then discovered that none of the 58 genders available to pick from on her tablet really dialed in on quint-sexuals, so she started picking “pangender” for everyone who wasn’t obviously male or female. Again, not out of spite. She just wasn’t given the right tools for the job.
She also knows that while accurately cataloging all these tourist would be an unbelievable gold mine for scientists in a number of professions, she’s smart enough to know that’s probably not what the motivation behind all this cataloging is, and she’s happy to half-ass those results the same way her tools were half-assed.
I’m mad at myself for not thinking to name the previous comic “Scent of an alien woman” but, eh. I post these late at night and sometimes the brain isn’t firing on all cylinders.
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Oh man, I was really hoping the F-sharp Green Lantern would be referenced here… If only she had said “G flat” instead of “G minor”…
Ha! I thought I was the only person who remembered that issue! That was the best! Well… third best. After Jack T. Chance and Mogo.
The author of With This Ring (a self-insert Orange Lantern fanfic set in the Young Justice universe) actually does reference him while mentioning some of the really odd Green Lanterns to show why he’s not that odd of a lantern.
Wow, the women in this comic need like, no justification at all for violence, as long as the target has the right plumbing.
Sometime the glimpse we get of the author’s internal world really makes one long for a hot shower.
I’m sure some people would find your internal world just as horrifying.
How much violence do you excuse in other contexts? What makes those situations different?
For that matter, what violence is occurring here, and how is it unjustified?
It’s more like “we know he’s a scumbag. And we’d so enjoy seeing him get what he deserves.”
There is a certain pleasure, regardless of gender, in seeing a scumbag get what they truly deserve. Because we see too many of them in our lives, and there’s just something that makes you smile when the scumbag gets what is coming to him. Especially if they get their due because of one of their nasty personality flaws.
I mean, anyone remember the scumbag lawyer hiding in the outdoors bathroom to get away from the dinosaur in Jurassic Park? While him dying was obviously horrific, people still smiled (and no doubt, some laughed), because he deserved it.
You can literally see the sarcasm dripping off Cora’s speech bubble in panel 2.
Whelp, it was nice knowing you Ray.
The funniest, most unexpected move in the next comic would be for her to think he’s charming as fuck and for her to go for it.
Doooo It
Plot twist: his species actually feeds off the withering disdain of others and everyone is being really helpful to him right now.
How to scare the heroes. Give them a masochist regenerating villain. Yes, no matter what they do, he’ll win at some level. Bonus points if Dabbler says something to the equivalent of “Ok, now that’s wrong.”
OK, Place your bets:
1.5 to 1: Maxima punches him into orbit.
2 to 1: Maxima ties him into a purple pretzel (and he enjoys it)
5 to 1: Maxima Stares him down and repeats her “Impress me with your silence” bit.
10 to 1: Maxima realizes the poor guy has been set up and lets him leave in one piece.
1000 to 1: He realizes he’s being set up and actually somehow manages to act polite, shocking both Dabbler and Cora.
100,000 to 1 – He cranks up the charisma and etiquette and actually charms Maxima who starts acting like a blushing schoolgirl
(okay, the odds of that one may be a bit low… a billion to one maybe?)
I want that one, if ONLY for the hilarity.
Was it not Sydney that actually shot it down single handed?
She arrived late and was disappointed they had a press conference without her.
Max fired up through Corras ships shield at it. Needed to focus it to penetrate the shield of the target ship.
That is, Maxi didn’t need Cora’s ship defensive shield, but was able to shoot through it due to its directional properties. Then she was using only just enough power to do the job — she wanted to avoid damaging anything beyond the Fel ship — and gradually focussed her beam to a needle of incandescence, similar to how a welder focuses an oxy-acetylene flame for cutting steel by increasing the oxygen flow.
We do not know if Maxima did not need Cora’s ship defensive shield. Maxima was only able to get her beam that powerful because she didnt have to waste any energy on armor or other powers. We do not know how much the Fel weapons would have hurt Maxima – we do know other energy attacks HAVE hurt Maxima,but she just doesn’t show it during those fights (ie, Atomic Bombshell’s attack ‘popped her back and got through her armor’ and Vehemence was able to give her a bloody nose/break her nose even before he got even more powered up)
At the very least, Cora’s shield meant she did not have to hold back on her particle beam energy attack at all.
*BOSUS TILE* on make Maxima say….
“Oh Ray, I love you SO much! Surely you know abot black widows…”
“Will Ray survive this meeting?”
“We sure hope not.”
As for the names, I am reminded of ‘Sam Francisco’ from Alien Nation (movie, 1988). They got a little punchy assigning names the majority of Americans could pronounce to a hundred thousand alien refugees.
Only other old geezers like myself will remember the movie.
Now, you damn kids get off my lawn!
Also Polly Wannacracker.
Other Newcomer names in the show:
Polly Wannacracker. Harley Davidson. Albert Einstein. Lance Lott. Peter Rabbit. Betsy Ross. Buster Keaton. Paul Revere. Thomas Edison. Dallas Ft. Worth. Charlotte Bronte. Dorian Gray. Teddy Roosevelt. Isaac Newton. James Polk. Thor Goddathonda. Johnny Appleseed. Ralph Emerson. John Barrymore. Alva Edison. Les Izmore.
Also, Sykes name, in Tectonese, sounds like the word ss’ai k’ss – which are two words – ss’ai means excrement, and k’ss means cranium.
This reminds me of the American government changing the family last name when my great grandfather emigrated from Norway in the late 1800’s.
Forget the movie, what about the TV show? Where ‘Sam’ became ‘George’
I mentioned a BUNCH of names from the TV show.
You didn’t mention that ‘Sam’ became ‘George’ though
And it was more the fact that it’s easy for people to remember the movie, not so easy to remember the TV show
I’ve mentioned that on a previous page. :)
Sydney didn’t even show up until it was over and all the paperwork was being filled out… Max was definitely the one that shot it down.
Something occurs to me on the name thing.
the Marvel comics character “Beta Ray Bill”, apparently his name is a translation error. His people’s language apparently glitches the translators a little with proper nouns so you get these odd sequences.
Hm kinda like this
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/exploits_of_a_mom.png
I’d do a name joke in Arcanum++, but that would turn the unaware into frogs.
oh wow, it took me till this page to notice his mustache, a mustache that thin makes my hackles rise
What about the mini-soul patch? How does that make you feel?
How do you know it isn’t his natural hair growth pattern? I have one of those things you call a “soul patch”. It just grows like that. It goes well with my also unstyled goatee, which my nephew calls my “Iron Man” (Tony Stark) beard. I confess to being quite pleased about that comparison. It’s curious how heavy grooming in a man is creepy but not in a woman.
I dunno. If a woman was grooming a soul patch, pencil thin moustache, and side burns with a mohawk that turns into an elvis hairdo, I’d be a bit creeped out admittedly. :)
I would expect her to name at least one alien Tarquin Fin-tim-lin-bin-whin-bim-lim-bus-stop-F’tang-F’tang-Olé-Biscuitbarrel during the registration process
I don’t know if anyone has said this already, but I’m imagining the Team Rocket “We’re blasting off again…!” right after Ray meets Max.
And my comment last page is immediately proven wrong. Knew it was too good to last.
I like how their argument acknowledges that there are genuine limitations preventing them from faithfully representing alien names, while also acknowledging that just making up nicknames isn’t an acceptable solution.
I cannot wait to see how this turns out. Good thing I don’t have to!
I think he’s confusing Midas with Pygmalion.
I wouldn’t say so. Pygmalion was said to be so repulsed by women that he turned to sculpture, until one of his carvings was so perfect that he fell in love with it and it was given life. “Putting women on a pedestal” is a bit of an extrapolation from the tale of Midas, but the turning to gold could easily be taken as turning them into statues.
isnt tha one of the aliens sydney tried to talk to before in the background?
Adding Galactic writing systems could probably be done to Unicode. The problem would be all the meetings to define the various, I want to say alphabets but that’s not nearly inclusive enough.
And afterwards there’s likely only about 12 people on Earth who could write correct code to handle it.