Grrl Power #719 – Idiomatic, planetary…
I think if aliens really did show up, most countries would freak the fuck out, but then the one country who was all “Come on down” and the aliens are like “Thanks, here’s the technology for optical circuitry that’s ten orders of magnitude faster than anything else on your world,” all the xenophobic countries would be all “Oh… shit.”
Ah, alien idioms. To watch just about every show and read every book ever, one might get the impression that English is the only language with idiomatic expressions, because aliens are always stumbling over them, no matter how intelligent they’re supposed to be, and no matter how obvious the meaning is from context. Well, except for those “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” aliens who are the cartoonish counter example. Seriously, how did that race invent integrated circuitry or crack warp travel talking like that?
“Jablus and Forbgyte… used silicon to channel electrons into this XOR gate? Guys, can we lay off the metaphors for like, one hour so we can get some work done?”
“Dornius, at noon, knows only hunger.”
“Yes, Phil, I ate your sandwich, because you never label anything.”
God, imagine just trying to order a ham on rye on that world. “No, no, I don’t want yellow mustard, I want the dijon… gah, I mean, Fligbus, his senses filled with spice! No! Not the red pepper flakes! Who puts red pepper flakes on a ham sandwich!?”
It always bugged me when Spock or Data’s IQ would suddenly drop to 70 when someone said something like “Hit the sack” “Beat around the bush” and they’re all, “Why would you attack the area around foliage?” Based on context, those things should be pretty easy to figure out. If you’re dealing with a language that replaces every third word with “smurf” or “squanch” then it can get a little more challenging, but those aren’t really idioms.
Aren’t all news excerpts in movies/TV/comics/etc really just exposition vehicles? I think they’re better than two informed characters saying to each other “As you know…” then going on to explain something they both know for the audience’s benefit, and both options beat the hell out of a boring preamble. At least Star Wars had John William’s music blaring overtop of it.
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I can’t watch that movie about alien shrimp people at all, because the idea that anyone would let apartheid-era South Africa keep custody of the aliens doesn’t so much break my ability to suspend disbelief as shatter it into a gazillion pieces, dump a steaming hot turd on the pile, and then set it on fire.
Mental image: a giant flaming pile of shrimp turds.
I need more coffee.
Wasn’t that set in the future? After the end of Apartheid? o_O
I had to look it up to be sure because that is how I remembered it too, but while it plays in the current year (2009-2010 at the time) it is mentioned the alien ship appeared in 1982.
Apartheid was from 1948 up till 1994, so the aliens first appeared when apartheid was still ongoing.
Thank you for looking it up, only saw it once, and, like a lot of things, have trouble remembering details :(
Wasn’t it less ‘keep custody’ and more ‘nobody, not even the aliens themselves, know how to move the alien ship and they wouldn’t want to be too far away from the ship’?
Hmm – maybe those were what Freefall’s Sam Starfall actually looked like…
Let’s just say if you’re still reading this comic six years in you’re not going to be disappointed with how District 9 deals with its premise. ;)
It occurs to me given the whole aliens landed and have been here long enough that some people have begun to get used to it…should probably be setting off the trope alarms in Sydney regarding common problems with unstable wormhole travel…also shouldn’t that news report have a displayed date and time somewhere for her to notice?
Not sure about the news where you are from, butt over here, they only display the date at the start, most TVs have a function to bring up the time (and date) at the press of the button
Well given what has been shown about Cora thus far, I would actually expect her to say that for the idom, instead of the usual phrase. given that it does seem on her ship often when those things are unveiled they aren’t going to be put back for a while.
Called it!
I think the country that would freak out the most would be the USA, given that some areas are already xenophobic just against any human that are different. Russia and china would very likely be the most welcoming probably due to wanting to get their foot in the door first from a technological point of view.
The thing that I am confused about is exactly how long has Sydney been away? From what I can see it basically has been about a day and a half or two days total, yet in that time an alien ship has arrived, USA didn’t nuke it out of orbit, they landed and are integrating. This should be setting off trope warning bells for Sydney as given the calmness it “appears” to have been a while. I still want to know what Harem was on about by there being too many of her.
“Nuke it out of orbit?” With what? Our ICBMs are suborbital, and if we could easily convert them into missiles that could hit something in orbit the dinosaur killer asteroid folks would be sleeping more soundly at night.
Technically, low earth orbit, but we could hit things in mid-earth orbit with a modified ICBM. That is, if it doesn’t shoot back.
And the killer asteroid folks have different reasons for not sleeping well. The range pretty much means we’d have to wait on the asteroid to actually be closeby, we don’t really have good interception tech, it’d take a direct strike, the asteroid may actually just break up a bit, with large enough pieces to survive re-entry (leading to two or more smaller strikes)…
It seems like the easiest way to make the asteroid miss would be to land a space probe of some sort (equipped with plenty of reserve fuel) on the far side and have it push. Even a slight increase in speed would make the asteroid intersect Earth’s orbit before Earth gets to the same set of coordinates. Then, if you want to nuke the heck out of it, shoot it from behind. Given the vastness of space, though, it would probably be best to just let it go on its merry way, having missed the one solar orbit out of billions were it would be likely to hit the Earth.
USA isn’t the only xenophobic nation
This is one of those inane comments that could only be made by some suburban white idiot who’s never left their mom’s basement and never read a book with more than a hundred pages. Please just don’t.
‘Tiny African nation offered them a place to land…’
‘Potential Economic and Technological boons…’
Wakanda Forever?
(but without the mountain of magical bullshit metal that does watever the writers need it to do)
And without the laws of economics and knowledge diffusion being suspended either! (“We have this amazing technology that we developed all by ourselves… that is, the 200 of us did that aren’t farming rhinoceri in order to provide a cover story for the rest of the world.”)
It was simple, really. Their great inventor Gulthok just held up a bit of silicon and said “Krislos, as lightning fell” and everyone went “Ah, of course! Just like Boomron playing with his Legos, but better!”
When I first saw that episode, my personal pet theory was that they have some sort of race memory so they’re just /born/ knowing all those stories, so to each other the context seems obvious.
My theory is that those guys are a subculture… like those monks that take a vow of silence. Or monks who take a vow of celibacy. In this case they would be story/metaphor/history obsessives.
More likely, there is a storytelling language that mothers speak to their children… but adults have trained themselves not to use the baby talk.
Now that they’re returning to Earth if a newly emboldened Sydney can convince Pixel to a 3 way “fur brushing” we can refer to the event as the Frixel.
and Arianna is definitely going to push for alien toys like action figures so on capitalize on it XD
I like the story of grrl power more than the comic itself. I would pay good money to get book series based off this comic.
Halo ant team are in a book already. It’s listed over there>>> go buy it. And The other wearing the cape books. There very good even if the have too many references to Masanori Ota….ok who am I kidding there can not be enough references to him in anything…
And team …
Typo
Just checking the tags, and it’s been four years (and one month, give or take) since we last saw Suzie (giving Ari the stink eye :P)
+1 if Cora steps out first in something suitably imposing and deadpans ‘Take me to your leader’
Also really hoping for an aliens exist version of this page..
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-186-fingers-to-maximum-steepleage/
I just can’t get past the fact that Deus pretty much prevented world panic.
The G-20 types being especially upset by not getting dibs on exploiting the stranded aliens.
No county is so xenophobic that they won’t make a deal with an unknown alien power. The ones that have the least to lose will make a deal soonest, and the rest of the world won’t say “Oh, shit”. They’ll say, “Let’s see how THAT works out,” then get back to the negotiation table while stalling and watching.
Ah yes… refugees.
How topical.
The Alari refugees were outright mentioned, not just hinted at, more than three years before this comic was made. And as Suzie News implies in this comic, the idea of extraterrestrial refugees goes back in popular culture at least to 1988. Arguably, it goes back much further than that, at least as far back as Stranger In a Strange Land.