Grrl Power #745 – Como llego al banco de sangre?
It may seem a little weird that Sciona is bothering to try to talk to the clerk, but 1) She’s low on power, 2) She’s well aware of the existence of supers, and knows enough to know that they can potentially be a threat to her, 3) She’s unprepared and doesn’t even know where she is. She’s been on Earth a while, at least she had been in her previous incarnation, to guess she’s somewhere in a Latin American country. She know what Spanish is, but never bothered to learn it. (She should be able to tell that she’s in Mexico, however, because the clerk of the corner shop is for some reason dressed like a waitress at a themed TexMex joint.)
BTW: The clerk is supposed to be saying “Escorpia! I don’t want any trouble please!” So I may need to tweak that google translated output there on the page.
This does tell us one thing, at least. When she (or another disembodied Alari) possess a recently deceased body, they don’t learn everything that person knew. The possession process sort of formats the brain to make room for the new consciousness.
It should be noted, since I don’t know when it will come up in the comic, that not all Alari are capable of this. They’re a highly hierarchical society, and one of a surprisingly small number of high tech races that continues to use magic. Only some of the mages can do this, and the soul battery Sciona found on her homeworld was one particular coven trying to get offworld. They might have been crazy survivalist mages, which is why they had their own private escape pod.
That’s a scary thought. Crazy survivalist mages. They’re all prepared for the zombie apocalypse… that they’re going to start!
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My bad! That would be “donde esta do banco de wanted?”
I am begging to hate Google auto correct! Dude esta do banco de sangre.
I already figured that she was weak and wanted to keep a low profile, but I was sure that the two guys were going to become involuntary blood donors to help her regain some strength. I mean that who would miss what appears to be two criminals in a small town.
They are probably going to be more missed than your typical anonymous person. These guys have a crime lord looking for them to return property of his, after all, and probably have a lot of other interactions with people they prey on (note that Scorpia seems to be well known to some random book store owner) and other criminals.
I partially mend in terms of reporting to authorities and archon.
It would be funny if, after a short time, she walks back the gutter language statement and acknowledges that Spanish is more consistent than English in spelling/pronunciation. I’m assuming she’s not so superior feeling that she never learned any other language and that’s there’s a reasonable chance she’s learned some that conjugate the verbs (ie Spanish) if not also declining the nouns/adjectives (Latin, Russian). And, although I haven’t done so, I think Spanish would be easier to learn than English.
Gutter language did not refer to Spanish. It refered to phrasing constructed of profanity, obscenity, and vulgarity, just as the description “gutter language has for over ninety years.
“I don’t speak your language” is not a way to respond to profanity. It’s a way to respond to someone speaking a completely different tongue. There’s no need to whitewash a psychopath like Sciona.
Oh but it was.
In a time when a concept called “civility” was known and practiced.
Exactly that response was not only given, it was as a matter of fact the standard response.
The mouth being washed out with soap thing in a Christmas Story.
That’s not made up and it was standard practice.
If you don’t speak a language it’s hard to tell if you are hearing profanity.
No, it is not. The inflection, and facial expressions make it clear.
I have lived on three continents and numerous Pacific Islands. Telling when someone is cussing isn’t a problem.
Telling when someone is obviously cussing is sometimes not a problem. That doesn’t cover all times someone is cussing, (as a teen, my aunt would swear at her teachers in politely toned Polish), nor all the times it sounds like someone is, (“fsck” is simply a file system maintenance utility¹, no matter how nasty that sysadmin just made it sound).
1: File System ChecK
I want to have a beer with your aunt.
From what I understand, most languages are easier to learn than english.
English is one of the easiest languages to pick up, it’s just annoyingly inconsistent. Try learning German, Japanese, Russian, Chinese, or Arabic and tell me they’re easier.
English is officially one of the worst to learn as a second language. We’re not first place, but we hang with the big boys.
English has the upside(?) that thanks to its haphazard construction broken English is still very easy to understand by a native speaker. So a partial grasp of the language works better in English than it would in others.
We aren’t the worst and it depends where you are coming from, but we have a long history of phonetic spelling that makes our etymology very accessable. Our spoken language is also pretty fast and loose with rules mostly because it was considered a gutter language for peasants for a long time
Yes English is such an awful language that its the standardized language for both finance and air traffic controllers. It’s also the globally recognized international language (International English) primarily because of how easy it is to get a grasp of, to a passable understanding…. primarily because of how often the rules get fudged. No. English is actually a rather useful language, primarily because it borrows from so many other languages – especially the other Romantic languages, making it easier to learn.. You want difficult languages to learn? Cyrillic languages are more difficult. And pictorial languages are exponentially more difficult than cyrillic or romantic to learn.
As an ESL speaker I can confirm that it is pretty easy to pick up very bad English.
But while you are working to refine your English, you will be surprised what curses you can remember / invent in your original language.
Case in point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1edPxKqiptw
Yes I have several relatives that manage to mix in the native languages from where they originally grew up with English, and it seems very natural.
I probably wouldn’t be that surprised that you can add native language swears to English without losing any of the context :) Spanglish is a thing, after all :) Also frequently happens with Yiddish, Chinese (well at least in Firefly it did!), Hebrew, Italian, French, and Russian.
That’s because there is no such thing as good English, only ‘passing’ English or ‘adequate’ English
One can not speak like a ‘native’ English-speaker, because there is no such beastie, there are so many dialects that not even the Queen speaks ‘proper’ English: it does not exist!
Most other languages, have a single way of pronouncing the words, with English? Forget it
Take something simple like ‘fish’, there are at least three ways of pronouncing it depending on what country you are from: the ‘English’ way (fish rhymes with English), the ‘Aussie’ way (feesh), and the ‘Kiwi’ way (fush)
When it comes to speaking English, it’s more a case of “Eh, close enough” :D
Which makes it a perfect international language :)
Yups :D
Because English is kinda a hodgepodge of all the other languages, kinda the modern Rosetta Stone of languages :)
Ghoti.
Gh as in tough.
o as in women
ti as in Nation.
it’s pronounced fɪʃ.
you can also do Ghoti as
gh as in through.
o as in People
t as in ballet
and i as in Business.
and that means a whole word composed of unvoiced letters.
As an Australian, I have never heard anyone pronounce fish that way.
As a Kiwi, have heard plenty of Aussies say ‘feesh’, it’s more of a regional Aussie accent than as the Aussie accent, just like Cockney or Geordie are regional British accents
English is fairly ubiquitous, and the international default in several fields, but that’s due more to the accidents of historical timing than to any inherent advantages of the language itself. Go back a few hundred years, and the default language for scientific collaboration was German; back a few more, and (European) international affairs defaulted to Latin even when none of the participants had it as a primary language.
The need for a default common language in many areas only really came about when they became one globally-intertwined constituency, as opposed to multiple separable national enterprises, in the 1800s or later. Others (aviation, computing, etc.) took a common language effectively by default, as they emerged after that point and the few pioneers needed a common way to exchange experiences.
For the first part of that period, the British Empire was at its height: across much of the globe, English was an official language of government and trade, even though local languages remained intact for local purposes. When some colonies seceded from the Empire, their people kept the language that they’d grown up in, and reinforced its reach as they in turn increased their influence. Britain abandoned its overseas obligations from the 1940s onwards, but by that time English was already well established for international purposes even where it wasn’t kept as an official language. The decline of the European empires in the 20th century was also matched by the rise of the English-speaking American Empire – no less culturally dominant for being undeclared – especially later as the USA tried to ensure that the former colonies fell into its influence rather than that of the USSR.
The end result of this fortuitous linguistic overdominance? We probably couldn’t get an alternative common language to stick if we tried. Many people for whom English is a second language speak it better than many native speakers, and natives of English-speaking countries are generally just plain lazy when it comes to learning other languages.
Written Japanese (well, Hiragana and Katakana at least) is super consistent compared with English, and as for spoken Japanese pronunciation almost entirely follows one simple rule.
Japanese is HARDLY simple to learn. 50 letters and about basic 1000 kanji and over 50,000 total kanji? Japenese primary school students are usually required to learnat least 2136 of the joyo kanji. That’s not simple.
Compare that to learning 26 letters, most of which can either be sounded out phonetically (all the more impressive when you consider that English is technically not a phonetic language, but even when you get the phonetics wrong, a native English speaker usually will be able to grasp what someone is saying rather quickly). Most pictorial languages are actually quite difficult to learn for anyone who are used non-pictorial languages. It’s also not nearly as consistent as you’re claiming it to be. EAch of the several thousand kanji are in regular use, and each has a range of meanings, usually several pronunciations, and the choice of which depends on the context. Not that English doesn’t have letters and sounds that change as well, but the argument here is that Japanese is consistent, whereas English is not. Japanese is NOT consistent. It’s an arduous study ordeal. Plus Japanese also does sometimes use some acronyms from the Latin alphabet simply because there’s no way to describe these acronyms in Japanese as easily.
English gets an unfairly bad rap, considering how it’s the closest thing we have to ‘Common’ as a language on Earth.
Oberon specified Hiragana and Katakana. And, yes, you brought up Romagi.
You are pretty much supporting my point that Japanese is not a remotely simple language to learn :)
As someone who has taken French, Spanish, and Japanese I learned Japanese more quickly and have retained it far better despite having very little opportunity to use it. Good enough that, a solid decade+ after my last Japanese class (2 semesters in college) I was able to speak it well enough (if haltingly and poorly) to ask two Japanese girls we ran into in Paris if they were Japanese, and perform introductions, and then to ask if they spoke English, which they did very well so we swapped to that to my relief.
Vacationing with the wife we often have pictures of one of us or the other, so I commonly offer to take pictures of people we meet together to open up the reverse favor from them. We were alone in a bricked pathway within view of the Eiffel Tower when these two gals wandered by. After only a few seconds of suspicion (probably that I was going to steal their cell phone) we got some really nice pics of the two of us with trees well behind us and the Eiffel Tower standing tall behind the trees. And the gal who was taking the pic of us got real low to put it in the best perspective, while I had just snapped my pic of them while standing straight, so I got their cell again and took the same perspective shot, which was pretty amazing.
Can confirm.
I lived in Okinawa for two years, and even with immersion it’s difficult.
Certainly, Spanish would be easier to pronounce intelligibly after speed-reading a dictionary like she seems to be about to do – English? pfeh – I don’t think that would happen
Also as I see pointed out elsewhere, this does look like a shop that might have employees with some English skills
That looks like a shop that caters to tourists.
“Hables inglese?”
“Si.”
Looks up ‘si’.
Throws book at somethig breakable.
“Speak to me in English,!!”
:’-DD ^_^
So, getting back her original body previously required stealing a super powerful artifact, and now she can replace a body with Alari bits piecemeal. Did something change, or am I missing something?
It is a different effect. That artifact transmorphed her then-current body mass into her original form, presumably with her original genetics, organs, etc. This time, she is occupying a recently deceased human and filling in the gaps. This is not a complete transformation. Mind you, she may have learned stuff in the previous transformation and since that event.
The only difference between what we’re seeing so far and a full transformation is degrees, as far as I can tell from here. You could make a case about organ mismatches being a problem but if so the holes in the chest should have been a problem. With the hand patch it’s clearly not *just* the holes the body had when inhabited. Given some time and a enough hapless blood sources for power this seems like it could be extended to be a near total transformation at the least.
The only thing I can think of is that the troll body’s natural regeneration could have gotten in the way, but if she can just hop into a dead body like this that’s a stumbling block, not a hard wall.
It wasn’t a troll body. I don’t think the body’s race was ever mentioned, but Sciona needed troll blood to get regenerative powers, and if it were a troll body you’d think that the blood and that capability would have come with the body. Orc or ogre have been speculated, but again I don’t think we have anything in canon or as Word of God to confirm the host species.
Yeah, Guesticus actually explained this to me on another strip. Apparently she was using troll bood, but the body she was in was probably more like an orc or ogre. I had assumed when she said ‘troll blood does a body good’ she meant because she had troll blood coursing through her… well… troll body. But Guesticus and your take on it does seem to make more sense.
Presumably, the part of her orc head that was blue had been regenerated.
No the top half of her head was from her original Alari body
Since it is Sciona’s healing at work, will they all end up fully female?
She also basically just came back from the dead. When Gandalf did that he got more powerful, so there might be woo woo at work here.
Gandalf was an Angel who had taken a human body for so long he forgot what he was. When the body died he remembered.
Tom Bombadil was an Archangel , and could probably have unmade the one ring had anyone known to ask.
…okay so I’m not a huge LotR nerd (though I do enjoy it), but I’ve heard quite a few discussions on it and have never, ever heard either of these theories before. Is this common fanon and I just totally missed it?
The fact that Gandalf is an “Angel” is canon, not fanon. Most of that is discussed in The Silmarillion, but to make a long story short, Gandalf existed before the creation of the universe, and was what we would call an angel, a subordinate being to the supreme god Eru.
Most of the other ‘wizards’ were also “Angels”
All of them were. Maiar was their in-universe classification, which was sort of a subordinate or less powerful angel than the Valar, the ‘full’ angels. Amongst the maiar selected to become wizards (a disguise of sorts) and guide the races of Middle Earth, Gandalf was the least powerful and the most meek. At least at first and when he was in Valenor.
Ah, that would explain it – the entire Silmarillion series was just too much to tackle for my level of interest. Plus I discovered a few other great long-form authors around the time I was finishing LotR (e.g. Sanderson) and decided I’d rather expand my horizons than learn to speak Elvish.
As for the Silmarillion, I couldn’t get past the 10th page.
I couldn’t bring myself to entangle the Silmarillion either, I found it far too academic for a piece of fiction meant for entertainment (from my point of view). Looked more like a piece of work to me.
On the other hand, didn’t Tolkien invent the whole middle earth universe as an exercise in language design?
He didn’t feel obliged to entertain at all, I’ve heard somewhere. Also rumor has it that he once insulted avid readers as bloody hippies …[/yellow press funk]
Anyhow, I was quite appalled that they left Tom Bombadil out of the movies, of all characters. That was totally uncalled for!
Tolkien invented middle earth to keep himself sane in the trenches of the First World War. Some of his battle descriptions draw heavily on his experience at The Somme.
I was o0nce told, by a lady from Laos, that english was harder to learn than Mandarin Chinese.
Gandalf as an angel is the best image we have got in popular culture images, though it has inaccuracies.
It’s never revealed exactly what Tom Bombadil is, though clearly powerful. Given there are several of the wisest people in Middleearth who don’t think he could destroy it, I’m inclined to agree with them as there is no evidence otherwise.
All I know is “No comprende Espanol. Yo soy un gringo fueo”
Hablo como si fuera un nino de ochos anos, mas o menos.
Yo quiero Taco Bell
That’s how I describe my Spanish skills too.
I feel like Sciona might have a change of heart about humans when he finds out that Sydney rescued so many of her fellow Alari just out of simple compassion.
Not hardly, people who hate don’t care.
You’re joking, right? Sciona thinks of all others as minions, enemies, or blood supply.
Is she so wrong in that opinion? Have you seen what the hyu-mons have been doing for the last hundred fucking years? o_O
Of course.
But all of it not just the bad stuff.
And most of the bad stuff is done by a small minority of humans who concern themselves with wealth and power. They engage in high finance and politics.
It is just as bad to look at the world through shit coloured glasses as it is to look at the world through rose colored glasses.
And that’s why she’s not slaughtering the whole town
She clearly doesn’t think of everyone in her species as mere minions. She seems utterly distraught when she thought everyone else was dead. Not just ‘damn, my minions are all dead! now I can’t take over any planets!’ She seemed genuinely lost and protective of her people, to the point where she destroyed her own body so she could get all of them in ‘soul form’ or whatever form they were in through the portal back to Earth before it closed. If they were just minions to her, they would be expendable.
Hell, not to mention it’s not unheard of in fiction for that sort of thing to happen. In Star Trek, the peace treaty between the Klingons and Federation happened because the Federations made a compassionate act of mercy to the Klingons when their homeworld was devastated, and it’s not like the Klingon are known for valuing compassion. And in Stargate, even though the Go’a’uld are genetically evil, there’s nevertheless some Go’a’uld who were swayed by compassion to help the humans and fight against the Go’a’uld’s ways (the Tok’Ra).
Even in Star Wars, Darth Vader came back to the light side because of Luke’s unwavering belief that there was some good in him, so that when Luke was about to be killed, Vader turned on the Emperor. If freaking Darth Vader can have a spark of good left in him, Sciona can have the ability to respect or acknowledge when compassion has been showed to her people in a time of great need when they were weak and helpless, and others had taken advantage of them.
If memory serves, the Ga’a’uld aren’t so much genetically evil as they are corrupted. The life-extending technology in their sarcophagus devices restores youth and heals injuries, allowing them to live in a single host body potentially indefinitely (Ra from the movie is explicitly stated to be wearing the same body he had adopted as a host at least 5000 years prior). However, like DC’s Lazarus Pits, repeated use tends to make the user more and more deranged, cruel, and egotistical. The Tok’Ra (literally “Against Ra”) don’t ever use the devices. They can extend the lives of their human hosts, but only to about double a normal human lifespan, although they live much longer than that themselves, if they can join with a new willing host.
The appearance of inherent corruption comes from the fact that the species that the Go’a’uld and Tok’Ra belong to passes on some of its memories to its offspring. Thus, the offspring of a corrupted Go’a’uld will tend toward corruption due to the influence of its inherited memories.
I think so, too. She will have to reconsider for how super-#@$!&ing stupid she takes us.
Considering how she’s been displayed so far, she’s bound to see compassion as a liability she can do without.
Oh she likely sees compassion as a weakness, but remember most of her life on Earth has been being hunted by the Council. And if her species is naturally aggressive (not that that seems to be true after what we’ve seen with the Alari refugees, who just seemed like ordinary people who have been victimized, and did not seem particularly ‘aggressive’), then she probably has not really experienced seeing her people in NEED of compassion, which she has now seen they are. It -could- change her perspective on compassion for others when the one thing she seems to care about – her people – are rescued and treated well and helped by humans like Sydney, and not for any specific payout, just because of general compassion. She might even respect Deus helping the other Alari refugees, although with him it’s more likely business – but she already respects Deus anyway for his sexual prowess and mysteriousness.
What ever serves the story intended, I guess.
Of course you are right, people are anything but one-dimensional. Fictional characters can’t afford this, too, without looking flat.
On the other hand, when I take a (not even too hard) look at the history of my home country Germany and the entanglements of the people of my own homevillage therein …
I would reject this as very bad fiction on page 2, if I came ever to venture that far into this exceedingly one-dimensional hogwash, weren’t it for being THIS what actually happened.
I just couldn’t help to look up page https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-636-promises-promises/ where Sciona states to the Archon members who followed her: “Prepare yourself to kneel before the might of the Alari Empire.”
At least on earth that kind of thinking proved to be quite toxic to those little niceties as compassion and such.
After I wrote this I realized: Of cource the English-Spanish dictionary stands with the English books.
awesome artwork as usual! (although I think you put tranlated instead of translated)
How do i get to the blood bank?
¿Cómo llego al banco de sangre?
“Escorpia! I don’t want any trouble please!”
¡Escorpia! ¡Porfavor no quiero problemas!
Why is it their wounds look like they were just not colored in? I assume there is a reason to it, but as of right now it just looks completely un-textured, like the artist forgot to add the details to it, however I assume this is intentional. So is there an explanation for this?
Sure. The wounds are all filled in with Alari skin, which is a sort of pastel blue.
Or the wounds are filled in with a standard Alari healing spell, and the mystic bandage is colored to be invisible on Alari.
“Survivalist Mages” I’d actually love to see at least one council reference to having to bust up a group dedicated to that locally and the resulting battle with the compost golem. Seems like it would definitely be a story told to Sydney at some point.
COME ON VOTE FOR GRRL POWER,MOVE IT UP TO 1ST
I think it is time to upgrade Sidney’s power level on the cast page. Right now she should probably be at least a 7 if not 8. Cosmic travel and universal gateways are things that (I think) not even Maxima can do. Plus she defeated enemies that even Maxima ran away from.
Spoilers, Sweetie! (hate the bowtie by the way, and the fez? only if you are a comedian)
Maxi didn’t ‘run away’, she did the sensible thing of getting her people back before they were stranded on an alien planet with no way home, like a responsible leader would, rather than a suicide attack that she might have survived, butt the others wouldn’t (remember how close Mr Buble came to being cracked? one more hit and no more Sydney!!)
Considering that Mr. Bubble BARELY survived the kaiji blast, but easily survived the Super-Mannekiller, which was able to get past Maxima’s armor enough to destroy her clothes at least (the only other time we saw something like that was with Atomic Bombshell’s blast at least hurting Maxima a little and destroying her jacket), and considering her shield was easily able to take Vehemence’s punches without any problem, while Maxima did… not fare so well with those same punches… I’d be willing to bet that the kaiji blast could have seriously hurt Maxima as well, or worse.
Not that she knew that until after she saw the effects from within Sydney’s shield (Maxima tends to be pretty arrogant about how tough she is, albeit justifiably so).
But yeah, I agree that Maxima wasn’t running away so much as she was making a tactical retreat – if not for her own safety, then for the safety of her team. Even if she thought she and Sydney could survive the blast, it was very likely that Hiro could not, and a certainty that Harem and Dabbler would not.
Plus the fact two of her team was out-of-commission (including the other heavy-hitter), staying, even if the portal wasn’t about to close, was out of the question
Was actually counting on Maxi being fast enough to avoid the pesky blasts (or at least a direct hit)
Super speed doesnt help when confusing things catch you off guard. Like fear vomit:)
Hence “or at least a direct hit”
And it probably wouldn’t have helped against the Three Stooges (unless Maxi did a Sydney and reverse direction and head straight down the Tractor)
Interesting developments.
*collapses in exhaustion*
Too tired to say anything more
profound.vote for grrl power
Just want to say I’ve got that book I think. The one on birds. Sweet. Or it’s a supergeneric image Photoshopped in.