Grrl Power #1326 – Conniption of the lepus
Just admit you’re a furry, Sydney! Your current boyfriend is covered in the stuff, and not because you’re dating Dan Hedaya or still-alive Robin Williams.
Is a were-reptile in hybrid form room-temperature-blooded? And what would that mean for their metabolism?
I like to think Kat goes to a “Lame Weres Anonymous” meeting. A support group for people bummed out by their animal… uh. Not their animal form so much, but their… spirit animal? No. Their therio-genus I guess. You know what I mean. The bunny rabbits, the naked mole-rats, the Proboscis monkeys, the Aye Aye (unless you already looked like Bobcat Goldthwait or Father Jack, then it wouldn’t feel like a downgrade), the furless Sphynx Cat. No matter what you personally think of those wrinkly gargoyles, if you could turn into a hybrid one and had to stand there next to an actual fucking were-tiger or were-ocelot or panther or something, you would feel robbed. And probably cold.
Kat especially, since she was an accidental were. Or, not accidental, but it wasn’t something she chose. I’m sure there’s some line of were-Sphynx Cats who tell themselves it’s a proud and noble legacy. That might mitigate some of the bum-out factor. The Twilight Council and the Weres in particular try to prevent a bunch of uninformed and/or accidental propagation. The first few transformations can cause disorientation and aggression, especially if they don’t know what’s going on, and that makes for incidents that then have to be covered up at best, and a propagation cascade at worst.
The new vote incentive is up! (Finally.)
I’m revisiting a panel from a recent page, but I included some comic reactions and a few outfit swaps, so hopefully you all enjoy it. I also plussed up the art from the comic version a bit, though I suspect that despite the time I spent on that, not a whole lot of people would immediately notice that, so I’m gratuitously pointing it out here.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
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So… Kat just kicked a LOADED cement mixer a considerable distance…
Ok so rough eyeballing here and being generous with the numbers, figure that’s probably about a 5 cu.ft. mixer, so looking at around 100 lbs there for the hardware. Add in the weight of the concrete at 150 lbs/cu.ft. gets 850 lbs. Distance is unknown, so I’ll just go with a long WAG of 50 yards, and probably covered that in something like 1.25 sec. Chuck all that in some calculators and Kat just blasted that mixer with something like 22.563 kN of force, or about 2.5 tons of force.
Um, no offence, but I think you forgot 1 additional detail – she kicked the barrel part OFF the rest of the mixer! Breaking metal like that isn’t easy, so there’s a noteworthy bit of extra power to factor in….
Yeah, I’d rather avoid taking 1 of those hits….
Especially since it was enough force to sheer the drive shaft and leave the rest of the mixer more or less in place instead of just launching the whole unit.
Some napkin math on hare size/weight and maximum jumping distance and the force it needs to jump that distance upscaled to an average human female size it would mean that without additional superpowers she would be able to roughly put out 10kN of force (completely disregarding cube squared of course but who has the time.). Which probably means that here were factor enhances her base strength by 2.5 times?
What formula did you use? I don’t see how to get to your result from your starting numbers.
You can’t calculate a force from just those numbers to begin with, they just give you the momentum or energy. You’d need to know the time (or distance) over which the force operated, i.e. how long her leg was in contact with the mixer during the kick, to calculate the average force.
If we were to take your estimated numbers and assume 0.5m kick connection distance (it’s unlikely to be significantly more, but could be less, which would increase the force), I’m coming out to 500kN or 50 tons.
That would put her punches on a level where the likes of Stalwart would start to feel it.
It’s difficult to estimate time and distance from the imagery in the comic, so it could plausibly be a bit less though. Maybe half the speed (a quarter the force), but probably not significantly less. That would still be a 10 ton punch.
Not knowing/doing the math, I’m thinking of a kangaroo as a sort of scaled up rabbit. They can kill a strong human with a single kick (not sure if that’s both feet hitting or just one). That implies a substantial amount of acceleration hitting the human, enough to crush bones, burst organs, what-have-you. Multiply that by (at least) a couple of digits, and I can see a cement mixer flying through the air.
Also, that must be a VERY solidly built shed in P4.
Yeah… I’m NOT going to piss that lady off! A kick to the junk will make ME junk! lol.
Dude, if she kicks your junk it will be turned to mist.
You make it sound like Saitama kicking someone in the unmentionables at drastically reduced power.
A kick that powerful would definitely damage internal organs as well as exterior ones.
Saitama’s power isn’t kicking. And he already had someone land on his rock hard… fist… inapproiately.
hanging out on furaffinity, huh Sydney?
Hey now, plenty of folks who can… appreciate a strong pair of legs, fur notwithstanding.
That seems quite a powerful kick, even for a hare. Might she have some additional powers / abilities? Maybe like Pixil who is a super but only in her were and full animal forms?
I mean, weres are just naturally extremely strong, and presumably their individual traits are particularly enhanced. In a superhero setting, it absolutely makes sense for a werehare to have superpowered kicks, and by superhero standards that’s like a 4/10 for power tbh
I thought it was common knowledge by now that Dinosaurs weren’t actually reptiles but a new classification of essentially proto-birds.
Still reptiles. You can not evolve out of a clade.
The modern take on this is that “reptile” is a paraphyletic group and not a clade. Not specifically because of dinosaurs, but because otherwise birds would be reptiles. And they’re not.
Of course, you *can* go the other direction and say that birds are in fact reptiles. But common usage of the word “reptile” would disagree with that defition, so I’m partial to the former option.
I take the “paraphyletic group”. As far as I know definitions in biology are not that strict anyways and subject to change. Back then when I was in school (A long long time ago) we learned a definition of life itself, of which the teacher had to admit that it is very suboptimal. Not sure if you learn a better definition if you study biology. But the one I learned had huge holes in it.
So I guess reptiles, birds, and mammals are actually all amphibians, since you can’t evolve out of a clade. And all of those are actually lobe-finned fish.
Also, boobs on any of those birds are now acceptable, since they’re all of the same clade as humans.
It is a matter of definition.
As far as I know a clade contains all life forms that share a common ancestor. So you are right with that.
Clint of Clint’s reptiles makes a point of the clade thing as kind of a running gag/point about evolution but it drives me nuts because A) Common language meaning is not the same as scientific terminology, B) Even in Scientific terminology cladistics is not the only marker and C) You may as well give up and call everything a Prokaryote.
Amphibians aren’t the ancestors of other tetrapods, but rather a group that split off from a common ancestor of amphibians and amniota (all other tetrapods). And, as someone else mentioned, we are all lobe-finned fish.
Especially these birds: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tit_(bird)
If you wanna get reductionist and literal about it, a clade is all the descendants of some common ancestor. Depending on what ancestor you wanna pick, I am a member of the same clade as all prokaryotes, all eukaryotes, all fish, all reptiles, all mammals, all apes, all hominids, aall H.Erectus, all H.Sapiens Neandertal, all H.Sapiens Sapiens, and all descendants of a particular German Blacksmith who got knighted for that one time when he was captured by the English and tied to a tree but then became enraged, ripped it out of the ground and beat a half-dozen of them to death with it. (Yes, the family coat of arms is a tree stump, en bande, on a field of red….)
Dinosaurs didn’t evolve from reptiles though, dinosaurs and reptiles both evolved in different directions from earlier sauropsids.
And as others have pointed out “clade” is basically a useless distinction for anything outside of paleontology. Virtually all defining qualities of the parent species will eventually be lost – as you can tell by the fact that we’re basically bacteria that evolved skeletons, complex brains, and, yes, breasts.
“You cannot evolve out of a clade”. True, as currently defined.
As has been recently posted on SciShow, that means that whales (and all other [current and former] land vertebrates) are fish, since we all evolved from Tiktaalik (or something similar), a lobed-finned fish.
I suspect the experts are trying to think their way out of that particular conundrum.
The comic is nebulously set in roughly 2009ish.
Possibly more to the point, and avoiding the cladistic arguments: There’s increasing evidence that dinosaurs were warm-blooded, and that in fact that might have helped them come out ahead in the Triassic extinctions (before which the crocodile-like branch of the archosaurs had been winning).
Wait, why does Kat look so different compared to when she first appeared?
I was wondering the same thing
Artistic evolution. Dave has been slowly changing his art style consistently for almost 15 years now.
But her fur isn’t the same color. That’s not art evolution, that’s selecting different RGB values. Her first shift was gray and blonde, and this one is somewhere in chocolate. I’d guess winter/summer coat coloration shifts, but if so she’s got something seriously off, getting a summer coat in winter conditions.
Its not just her fur color and pattern, her face looks completely different now. Just compare it to her picture in the “Who’s who” section on the right.
Yes. Her were form is way off from when we first saw it.
I’m sure the trope is present for all of Kat’s appearances, but if the next exchange isn’t
Slam: Were-rabbit?
Sydney: There rabbit. There dungeon.
Sydney will lose soooo much nerd cred.
Why are you talking that way?
CHEESE, Grommit!
How do people become “wered” in the Grrl-verse? I don’t remember if it was ever explained. The traditional mechanism for becoming a werewolf is being bitten by another werewolf, but I highly doubt another were-hare or were-dinosaur lives around these parts. Plus, the lycanthropes in this setting are fully sapient even in their fully-animal forms, so even if a member of the relevant were-species WAS present, they wouldn’t be all feral and biting random people.
They did explain it in the previous page.
With Kat, it was terrorist accident, if I remember it right. Syringe with infected blood. Still technically “bitten by another were-something”. Plus there is random element. Usually you become same were-type as the one that bit you, but there is small chance of wild result (and as we all know, small chance = practically 100% guarantee it will happen to the hero. So, were-rabbit).
IIRC, the were’s are Magical Virus-Based; Most were’s are the offspring of at least one were, and anyone who isn’t born a were was infected, either (hopefully) knowingly by a were who is deliberately inviting them into the fold, or a… Serial Propagator who infected a water supply or some such. Kat was inducted by a serial propagator who she was actively fighting against. For more details, please refer to Grrl Power #448 – Motivated Gourmet.
Ah, THERE it is. Thanks!
Kat’s arch-rival must now be a were-kangaroo, to match her kicks.
a Nike shoe were-house
To answer DaveB’s question – TECHNICALLY (and we’re in a superhero comic universe, so who knows how much applies), cold-blooded animals are always at room temperature, whatever that might be for the room. Cold-blooded animals don’t regulate their body temperature, warm-blooded ones do.
Which is beside the point anyway, since most paleo biologists believe dinosaurs weren’t cold-blooded! Because THEY WERE NOT REPTILES!
Cold-blooded animals regulate their body temperature by seeking warm spots, sunlight, shade, or water as required.
It’s more efficient in terms of food usage, but definitely not in terms of time and trouble.
What is that thing she just broke with a kick? I can’t figure it out.
Looks like a portable concrete or mortar mixer. The flying part is a spinning drum into which you toss cement powder, aggregate, and water. Its contents are spinning out in panel 4. The stand and motor stayed behind in panel 3.
I…look…forward…to…the…introduction…of…a…were…sloth…
Slowest intro of a patreon toon ever, by the time the Sloth hits base, Syd’s off in another galaxy fighting were-behemoths.
heh. and the powerset would be super-speed
Alternate interpretations of the power set can be gleaned from Fullmetal Alchemist.
Fear the eventual eviscerator!
I believe after this discussion we totally need a co-pinup between these two. You know, for comparative purposes and science and stuff.
mmm, am i the only one who thought about another possible type of best of both world when talking about having breast and full package!, hint; lgbtqia+
Am i the only one whose main though is, that Katrina’s little random tantrum nearly killed 2-3 people?
It almost knocked someones head off. And a 3 meter fall on a hard surface can absolutely break something if unlucky.
You are not. Sydney noticed that “reckless endangerment” too.
Makes me wonder what Maxima does when she’s frustrated and wants to hit or kick something? Punch a few new craters into the moon?
Dave, there’s a distinction between “Furries” and “Monster Fuckers”. One wants to *be* the creature, the other wants to be *with* the creature.
They aren’t mutually exclusive of course, and there is significant overlap – but the two of them are separate independent concepts.
So far Sydney seems to mostly belong to the latter.
Uhh, no, furry does not mean “wants to be an anthropomorphic non-human”.
Furry is a fandom, and like all fandoms being a furry only conveys the very broad information that one has a strong interest of some description in the shared topic – in the case of furries that is anthropomorphic nonhumans. (Arguably in usage it’s even more broad, including those who have a strong interest in any kind of nonhuman person that deviates from human appearance more than some arbitrary amount, and this definition does encompass “monster fuckers” entirely.)
After seeing this comic, if I ever become a patron and get a Patreon toon, I think I want to be some kind of psychologist specializing in helping new supers, werefolk, and so forth with acceptance and adjustment to the changes in their lives. Like, I’d help Kat understand how awesome it is to be a werehare (and how awesome she is regardless), and that she should stop comparing herself to others. There seems to be a place for that kind of job in this universe — and who knows? Maybe it could help with supervising reform, or to prevent some folks from becoming supervillains in the first place.
I’m sure Doctor Frost could use a similar in-on-it colleague, yes. :)
Okay, we’ve only seen weres from the clade amniota. No were-amphibians yet. How wide is the clade that can be wereanimals? Tetrapod? Vertebrate? Chordata? I’d hate to be a were-sea squirt. They’d definitely be in that support group.
wererabbit? could be worse… In his “What’s New?” strip Phil Foglio pointed out the drawback of being a were-snake: being used to clear plumbing…
besides, if Conan the Barbarian has proved anything turning into a snake never helps…
Okay, it ain’t fair that they are so adorable in their hybrid forms.
I… would prefer the bunny.
…well, I’d prefer a rat, but that’s my personal bias. For… >_> …reasons….
One Punch Man, meet One Kick Hare
I once read somewhere that according to DNA, a rabbit is not a rodent. I don’t recall what it said they were, but I remember the “not a rodent” part.
As I’m sure others have pointed out already, dinosaurs were not reptiles. As a specific example, birds really are modern dinosaurs.
The past couple of pages have been remarkably dark, to the point of backgrounds being almost invisible on my phone. Unless you are doing this deliberately, you may want to correct that.
So, that was Anvil and the vampire chick in the last panel. Was that Achilles in the construction garb getting knocked off the top? Seems like something that would happen to him.
wait, why is her were form have green eyes now, in her pic the “who’s who”she have blue eyes on her were hare form
Hey, Brand New Animal has a furless cat shifter. She’s actually really interesting visually.
Rabbits have very strong, very sharp, triangular shaped claws, fully capable of disembowellinng a dog with one kick. A guy I was hunting with found this out the hard way when he picked one he’d shot up by the ears and the ‘dead’ bunny laid his arm open from elbow to wrist. Luckily he was a paramedic so he could check my work when I dressed his rather deep and profusely bleeding wound :) then got blood all over the inside of my new car on the way to the hospital :(
Always carry a First Aid Kit in the woods, there are hundreds of ways to get yourself hurt or even catch someone else’s stupidly aimed shot from a mile away. Sharp branches fall out of trees on a regular basis too.
Mole rats from Rango are pretty cool… especially the “riding bats with Gatling guns” part
Reptile or not, ‘dinosaurs’ don’t exist today, not in the form usually thought of, while Australia built a giant fence to defend against rabbits….
Propagation cascading…like rabbits?
Nah, “best of both worlds” I think would keep the warm-blooded action. It would suck if you could be thwarted just by playing with the A/C.
Did the were bunny change fur colour?
When they met in the council chambers wasn’t she grey furred?
Kat is one jacked rabbit.
Just eyeballing it, I think she’d have to be capable of a six-ton leg press. Depending on how her muscles work she might only be able to produce that force for a quarter-second at a time, but DAAAAAAMN.
I would like to say…anything and I mean ANYTHING is better than a were-sloth.
Did I accidentally influence this page, or was it just coincidence?
I wonder if were-apes are a thing, like would a human getting bit by a gorilla just get a bit hairier and more muscular? Are there aquatic weres, like a were-orca? Are humans the only animal that can become a lycanthrope or could a mountain goat that gets attacked by an eagle grow wings?
Kickball champion 2030?
The were-sphinx-cats are the ones behind all the Ankha…art.
Also, I’m curious now if were-hairless-creatures WOULD look that cursed, considering that humans are naturally sparsely furred- are the wrinkles brought across? Maybe in the case of the naked mole-rat, because I think the wrinkles allow them to slip and escape enemies easier (like honey badger loose hide), but I wonder if the others would just be like… regular human skin on animal shapes?
Actually, now that I say that, that WOULD be a little cursed, but in a different way.
I dunno, seems to me that “lycanthrope” kinda REQUIRES part-wolf, because, you know, the “lycan” part. So going by the meaning of the word, she isn’t one.