Grrl Power #930 – Emergency escape lizard
Whoops! Forgot what day of the week it was. :/
In my excuse, 1) that’s only the second or maybe third time I’ve ever done that. Not the worst track record over the ten plus year run so far. If you guys knew me in person, you’d probably think I’d do that once or twice a month. 2) There was a crazy rainstorm that came through north Dallas last night with tornado sirens blaring and weather warnings on our phones telling us to seek shelter immediately, imminent danger, etc, so I took the extreme measure of shutting my computer down even though it’s hooked to a UPS. Once that happened, my whole evening was thrown into disarray. We didn’t even lose power or anything. Oh well, better safe than sorry. On to the comic.
So, is this murder? No. I mean, on Earth, a case could be made, but our legal system isn’t geared to handle corporally independent consciousnesses. In fact, throughout the galaxy, it’s known that those flame head demon-adjacent things (I should really name her race) have kind of disposable bodies. But since they’re on Earth, there’s a chance that Umbrivion Nava here can get away with this and not even be on the hook to buy her a new body. So I guess this was a pretty good vacation for him, anyway.
The new vote incentive is up! 
Maxima won (or lost) the draw this time. There are several clothing/non-clothing variants over at Patreon, including a special version with guest art direction from JJ Abrams. (Yes, there’s a ton of lens flares, hah hah. I amuse myself.) The a-cups will return next month, so please enjoy this offering in the meantime.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like!
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wait, what?
She’s a headmaster transformer!
Or a Trill ( https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Trill_symbiont )
His new name is Garamm Laph.
Trill fits a lot better. :)
Probably a Wisp.
He wanted to be closer to Laptha, but I don’t think he imagined it this way…
I’ve heard of carrying a torch for someone, but this?
You win the internet for today.
:clap: :clap: :clap:
Bravo, very illuminating.
Saved the important bit!
“What’s the matter? Didn’t you want me to get inside you?”
“OTHER WAY AROUND!”
“Maybe think about more before putting the moves on someone, then.”
Haha yeah pretty much this comment.
It would depend on how well he knew her (then current) physiology
well, you got your wish, I now have a tail.
Just on a lark, went back to the beginning of the comic…. the artwork has continued to evolve and improve.. but the tone is night & day… the comic used to be really fun and loony… now it’s more of an ADD examination
See I don’t the art has improved, the style has changed and in that there are some things that seem to have gone down hill. I much prefer the art work from back then… or maybe it’s the coloring/shading.
I wonder if Dave has a novel on Grrl Power…
Yeah, the cartoony nature kind of made some things… better, for lack of a better word? It’s one thing to have cartoony ludicrous gibs. It’s another to draw them in hyper-realistic ways when you’re going for a comedic tone. Some things just didn’t translate very well in the style change.
He’s done the OPM thing with simplified art to take the piss out or convey tone a couple times. Like when Sydney pointed out that they could have tossed a tracking rock through the blood portal.
The hyper detailed florid nightmare works for the horror of a Vorlon’s pitcher plant eating someone. A comedic beat of simplified style to convey the beat of disorientation and relief could have worked here.
The guy exploding into gore was kind of a traumatic event for Sidney to be hammed up though.
Poor Garamm, I think he wanted to be the one to eat her.
Well probably not eat her in this way at least.
-out, that is.
I missed a whole week. Needed to go to the bank, then realized that was a week ago. If you only get lost by a day, you are amateur confused. I have whole sides of my life to that are in a category of maybe next time. Not sure that works but it is the best I got.
You went all the way back to the bank robbery?! That is more than a week; that is more like 9 years. Or even 3 months for Sydney. Mind you, she skipped over about 2 months there in the middle. :)
I just noticed the date on this comment is 2021. What happened to 1999?!? We were going to do dancing!
Ands I still don’t have my damn rocket car.
Were you dreaming when you wrote this? Party’s over, we’re out of time!
That thing actually ate her? That has to be a Galactic crime, right? If not, it sure as fuck as a Dirt crime!!
He has a… liking… for Pinky’s company, he admires her desire to learn Dirty Words, so he commits a Crime of Passion to show his feelings! And Lapha is only an oxygen thief anyway, so what does it matter?
The authors notes under the comic literally cover this exact issue.
So, is this murder? No. I mean, on Earth, a case could be made, but our legal system isn’t geared to handle corporally independent consciousnesses. In fact, throughout the galaxy, it’s known that those flame head demon-adjacent things (I should really name her race) have kind of disposable bodies. But since they’re on Earth, there’s a chance that Umbrivion Nava here can get away with this and not even be on the hook to buy her a new body. So I guess this was a pretty good vacation for him, anyway.
But surely there will be some crime here.
You steal someone’s lunch and eat it, it’s still theft
In this case… Attempted Murder is still a crime.
By definition, “attempted murder” has to have both an intent to kill someone and a method that one seriously believes will do so.
Try to prove both of those factors, using only what has been shown and making no assumptions about the physiology or capabilities of the participants.
We don’t know that Nava wanted to kill anyone; we don’t know that Lapha’s body is dead; we don’t know that Nava would have killed the flame-Lapha if he had consumed it; we don’t know that Nava did not intentionally let her throw herself to Garamm.
Without regard to self-defense and defense of others, each of those factors establishes reasonable doubt wrt “attempted murder”.
if she didn’t toss her core as it seems to be then it would have been eaten too, so yes, attempted murder.
unless Nava can ‘vomit’ things back up and isn’t actually digesting the body-vehicle, I agree. if he IS just trying to ‘hold’ her, he can probably argue it down to ‘(foreign) citizen’s arrest’.
oh that wasn’t my mouth that was a reproduction cavity that holds our native giant insects inside us to get our pollen all over them.
weirdly there is a fungus I believe, on Earth that actually does this with beetles, they crawl inside, it closes up, but its just getting its spores all over the beetle so when it opens back up the beetle is covered in the spores to spread around.
or in fiction terms this scene from the Smruf’s lost village movie which when you look at it from a plant biology view point isn’t predation, the plants are getting their pollen all over the smurfs then throwing them to other plants; its a flower orgy and the smurfs are being used as reproductive sex toys…which makes that Smurfette close up cause an eyebrow raise like…you animators know what you did here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqxptHCHDho
So, where is your evidence that “eating” by an Umbrivion must destroy even the chassis, let alone the flame being?
It may be so, but there is zero evidence whether that is true, at this point. You are engaging in “guilt by analogy”.
the last page’s blurb said this how his kind hunt their prey.
prey implies death.
Also it is a safe assumption seeing as how nothing known eats something without the intent of digesting it as nourishment. There are no “this is my safe passenger containment sack” known in nature…and no cheek pouches don’t count that is still just in the mouth. So I am basically using Occam’s razer here, simplest most likely explanation for seeing something engulf something else and told this is how it hunts its prey, the most likely conclusion, death and digestion is intended.
Kangaroo pouches?
Many birds temporarily hold food in their stomach which they later feed to their young.
Honey is bee vomit.
There must be more, this was just what popped into my mind immediately.
he is clearly not using a pouch, which are for their young, and generally don’t take up a massive body cavity.
and everything else you mentioned is FOOD, not a safe passenger container.
“Many birds temporarily hold food in their stomach which they later feed to their young.”
Are you suggesting that the food in the bird’s stomach is still pre-vomiting? :)
Re Pander: I’m not sure what you mean.
What I’m saying is that birds do eat food without any intention of digesting it as nourishment, since they indent it to feed their young. Which was in response to Rhuen saying, above:
And the same goes for bees and honey production.
One might argue that the intent is to eat the honey later during winter months. But since any particular bee, and certainly not the drones who are typically jettisoned to die before winter comes since they are just useless mouths at that point, isn’t guaranteed to be re-eating any particular bit of honey they they contributed, I’d say that this does not count.
still not a safe passenger cavity, which was the crux of the discussion that he was trying to safely detain her. Which clearly he is not.
Maybe, depending on how galactic law works, it might be considered acceptable force in response to a threat. Or lethal force might be something acceptable on violent criminals. Otherwise Cora might have had to go to jail back in Nexus.
and thats all assuming this is something lethal. who is to say that was “eating” and not just “capturing” he ,it, they what ever the gender term could very well be able to control if the chassis was destroyed or digested. like the good old fantasy slime capture. slime catches something and just holds it over eating it.
unless he turns out to be a soft vore fetish creature with a containment cavity that a mate would normally be crawled into for safety while mating….
I’d say the Occam’s razer is going to fall more towards consume to kill.
Umbrivion Rava chose a male human disguise, so “he” is the default gender until we are told to use something else.
More than that, the other aliens referred to Umbrivion Rava as “he” and “him”.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-868-going-native/
“So, is this murder? No. I mean, on Earth, a case could be made, but our legal system isn’t geared to handle corporally independent consciousnesses.”
It doesn’t actually matter here. He tried to eat her WITH the flame as well. He tried to eat her AND her consciousness. That’s still attempted murder. The fact that he did not succeed is the only reason it’s not murder itself.
You shoot someone in the head. But somehow they survive. You did not commit murder. But you did commit attempted murder.
Lets take it one step further. You chop off someone’s arm in the near future where medical prosthetics have advanced a bit. The victim gets a prosthetic arm which is just as fully functional as their original arm. You are still guilty of a crime, despite the victim having had their arm replaced.
“In fact, throughout the galaxy, it’s known that those flame head demon-adjacent things (I should really name her race) have kind of disposable bodies.”
It doesn’t matter, because he tried to eat her flame heat consciousness as well. It was only at the very last second that she managed to throw her consciousness to Garamm. Not for lack of trying on the part of the Umbrivian’s murder attempt.
The only way this would not be the case, as far as I can discern, would be if he wasnt actually eating her – just containing her. But considering his body is not all stretched out as a result, and the ‘burp’…. no, it looks like he ate her body.
I really hope Lapha and Garamm get away.
Btw…. I find it a little weird that some of the same people who were shunning Cora’s killing of the human who was literally about to shoot Sydney in the head seem to be on the exact other side with this. :) Just seems odd to me. It’s not okay to kill someone who is about to murder the main character, but it’s fine to murder someone who pushed your friend? It’s just a really odd set of morality rules on display there. One would expect that it’s more logical to say ‘do not kill someone for just pushing a person, but if that same someone is trying to murder your friend, then killing is acceptable.’ And you can’t even argue that the reason you’re against what Cora did was because of how violent the death was… because what… being eaten alive as the very life is going out of your eyes (panel 4) is not also ultra-violent?
ALSO – just my personal preference that I’m realizing – I’m finding I’m not a huge fan of the whole ‘patron put in the comic being pretty much unstoppable’ thing that has been happening during this arc, but hey – to each their own. Maybe the patrons are paying to have their comic avatars be unbeatable, and that’s just capitalism in action. :) They’re definitely getting their money’s worth, I’d say.
Fully agreed, before reading this on the next page I brought up the Core hypocrisy, all that talk about the legalities and damning her and yet this here is just brushed aside?
we don’t even know if this group which left the area in a van before Archon even showed up, even saw the altercation other than the Pink one calling Lapha a criminal that is, but either way this was attempted murder, in a much more horrific way than what Cora did on multiple accounts of brutality and suffering intended on the victim.
You covered every big point, but I want to add on that last part, yeah on one hand the patreon thing is like, neat in a comic, I mean the demon hunter at least got caught. but maybe a disclaimer, for story telling purposes your character may not be untouchable or get away unscathed, But of all the patreon characters so far this is the only one so far who has done something that in an in-universe sense paints them as a dangerous sociopath who needs to be dealt with. I mean if you got a guest character into Game of Thrones or Attack on Titan you could expect them to die, and its not like this is a character creation contest with like one winner every few months.
“But of all the patreon characters so far this is the only one so far who has done something that in an in-universe sense paints them as a dangerous sociopath who needs to be dealt with.”
Yeah, I didnt think anything could top Hench Wench for dangerous psychopath. I should have waited a few dozen strips before assuming that. :)
I want to add as well, I’d love if the next page showed Garamm’s reptilian second eyelid can block the psionic light and he has gone completely nuts and is just ripping those petals apart and gets Lapha’s body out.
and hey, for the patreon gets to survive this, sure, have the Umbrivion be like a plant that can survive serious damage to its body so its just some shredded bits and a pair of legs walking away.
I would love that as well. But I don’t think it’s going to happen. So the most I’m hoping for is Garamm gets away, with Lapha’s consciousness, so they can escape. Those crazy mercenary kids. :)
The police can still arrest him/it on reasonable suspicion of murder, and hold him/it in jail until trial without bail due to extreme flight risk.
Of course, the charges will be suddenly dropped within 24 hours, but if it *did* go to trial, the burden would be on him/it to prove that this doesn’t meet the legal definition of murder (as there is no dispute as to the facts of the case).
you may be thinking of it the wrong way …. he may have been detaining her …… she did not want to get in trouble with what ever authorities and so made her escape via getting out of that body ….. remember with aliens this divers A LOT of alternate possibilities open up ……. soooo ….. try to keep an open mind ….
Next panel:
Nava: Hello Max. I have the body of the person who put you in the stasis field. Do you want it?
Max: Oh, where is she?
Nava: You should cover your eyes. [ Opens up and dumps Lapha’s body at Max’s feet. ] There. You can look again.
Max: What happened to her? How did she die?
Nava: When I grabbed her, she threw her … soul(?) to that lizard man.
Of course, this all wholly depends on whether that burp was just the release of gas trapped during her capture, or the release of gas generated during her digestion. XD
Or just a pressure vent as the suit re-sealed.
Also why is he not any bigger if he has her in his body-suit now? He’s the same size. That implies digestion. Bleh.
Naw, his suit’s just bigger on the inside.
add the burp which is removing gas, which means air; there is clearly no intention for his victim to survive this.
and yeah its not like he reached for the flame first and held it while eating the body, the flame almost went down too, so if he knew, then he KNEW and was trying to kill her.
Yeah. I’m… having very little sympathy for the patreon-based characters, I’m finding:) Mainly because they’ve been pretty unsympathetic.
It’s weird because, technically speaking, Lapha started all this by trying to capture Maxima. Which isnt something you’d think is sympathetic. But she wasnt trying to kill. And she wasnt a raving psychopath who was extremely annoying. Which puts her several steps above both the Umbrivilon and Hench Wench. Plus her relationship to Garamm just makes me love both characters. Admittedly mainly because of Garamm, but still.
I reallly really like Garamm as a character. Sweet big ol’ lizard who loves love. Who is all about protecting his captain above all else. Who keeps his eye on survival and doesnt get blinded by ‘what if’ (except for the ‘what if she’d want to date me’ question. :) I mean… what’s not to like about Garamm? :)
yes, Lapha was given “humanizing” characteristics, which creates sympathy for a character. Having them offed *even if its in the same fashion as “don’t worry my robot head survived even though the scraplets ate the rest of me” kind of way; being taken out by a random background character who had one line before alone can be frustrating to see. and Garamm has even more humanizing development. if they were both killed when they first showed up I wouldn’t care, but now, time to care, especially over one line cameo background character who turns out to be a voracious space monster…hell if this were a joke anime in the next shot he’d explode from within while Lapha’s consciousness laughs “my body is set to self destruct if I’m forced to escape”. go all Yuatja on him.
… I would love that to happen as well.:)
Doubt it will, but I’d love if it did.
Prison cells dont increase in size when somone enters.
So in other words, you’re admitting she’s dead.
Prison cells also tend to be significantly bigger than the prisoner and have room for the prisoner to not be crushed when shoved into said prison cell.
When a python eats a large animal, you can tell it’s been eaten.
and the vibe I got last comic turned out to be true.
not that the blurb didn’t spell it out.
but yes a sapient being eating another sapient being, especially whole and still alive to die a horrific slow agonizing death wandering if suffocation, constriction, or liquidation by acidic enzymes will kill them first, all of which are horrific ways to die by themselves.
Thing is: did he know she had an escape plan to avoid being consumed?
Even then, he still fucking ate her!! It don’t matter if that is fine where he comes from, it’s not fucking fine on Dirt!
And all she did was push Pinky out of the way!!
Bu-u-tttt, thinking it over, which part is Lapha? The Flame, or the humanoid? If the Flame, was the humanoid even sentient?
What if Lapha had been less quick? What if Umbrivion ingested the Flame? Would Lapha have been able to take command of Umbrivion?
Stay tuned!!!!!!!!!!!!
Doesn’t matter – he was trying to eat her flame as well.
I’m pretty sure Dirt doesn’t have laws covering the intentional destruction of a disposable body.
“there’s a chance that Umbrivion Nava here can get away with this and not even be on the hook to buy her a new body”
Destruction of private property.
I think the courts would be out of their depth here – the defendant and accused are tourists with no officially recognisable identity – they don’t have passports or permission to be in the country; the legal ambiguity of the “body” and whether it is considered property, her body (which would be assault at the very least) or neither – they would need an “expert witness” to address the whole nature of where the body comes from to begin with (are they a separate lifeform that is co-opted or killed to be a shell for the consciousness – would a court recognise the legality of that? Can a flaming torch appear in court as a defendant – imagine the case of the murder of the flaming torch by the sentient bucket of water…
But on a more direct point, the Umbrivion could well have figured out Lapha was up to no good, and as such is not likely to be pursuing in the courts for a lost body
Agreed.
First, if Lapha attempted to sue him in our courts, she would have to first accept “personal jurisdiction”, meaning she would be subject to all our laws and torts. Not a good idea for her, since she may be able to skate on some criminal transgressions by not being subject to them.
Second, the question of whether the sentient flame Lapha counted as the same person as Lapha + that body, and therefore had any prosecutable rights, would need to be decided. If it WAS so, then both murder and assault are off the table. The body is a vehicle, so it’s at most a property crime. Lapha had just engaged in vehicular assault, so Nava’s destruction of the offending vehicle (if it was destroyed) is unlikely to be actionable.
Third, the same personal jurisdiction issue applies to civil defendant Umbrivion Nava, and he wouldn’t want to waive jurisdiction. (One can argue that they are subject to NY law due to the nexus of all this stuff happening there, but it’s not clear how long it would take to get that decided, given the number of issues involved. Most likely, the Supreme Court would have to rule on it, and they typically don’t do that until after all appeals are exhausted.)
Fourth, criminal cases generally take precedence over civil ones, so any such action is likely to be abated until all criminal issues were dealt with.
All in all, any civil cases proceeding from this would take 10-20 years to work themselves out.
Earth has enough of an alien presence that even destroying a temporary body is considered very insensitive, given how much it stings. Irradon and Arianna are going to have a lot to talk about after this event wraps up.
…and now that I think of them commiserating over cleaning up everyone else’s messes, I’m kinda ‘shipping those two.
A person is an entity that has either rights or duties (or both) [Black’s Law Dictionary – I hosted a lecture on that subject yesterday].
Lapham is unquestionably an entity of some sort, the exact sort does not matter.
It is very likely that an American court would find that she has obligations, such as “don’t kidnap people”; to find otherwise would lead to insanity.
She appears to be self aware and intelligent, so it’s very likely such a court would accept that she has rights; whether they are co-extensive with the rights of noncitizen humans seems almost certain. While there is a conceivable argument under statutory law that the legislators did not intend to cover nonhuman intelligent entities within the meaning of “person”, it is equally arguable that nonhuman intelligences were not deliberately excluded and were simply not thought of.
Note also that the Human governments of the GP universe have known for centuries that non-Human intelligences exist, even if that knowledge was restricted to those whose duties impinge directly on keeping the general Veil intact. In our universe, the question in your last sentence remains arguable; in theirs, the ambiguity may be entirely deliberate. There may even already be a clarification note that explicitly includes non-Humans of equivalent self-awareness/intelligence, if it’s possible to have that visible in the ‘official’ version and not in the version published to those without security clearance.
It is certainly *possible* that a human government could by statute decide that non-human intelligent entities were not human “persons”, so long as those entities were much weaker than that government. Once we become aware of our place in the galaxy (and various other dimensions) the advantages of recognizing nonhuman personhood should be dispositive.
The common law is another matter; assuming that the judiciary is not read into the SuperSecretProtocol, an elementary analysis of personhood would recognize that nonhuman intelligences can assume duties (e.g. tourists can buy tickets from Ray) and therefore are persons – not necessarily human persons, but persons nonetheless. It’s worth noting that in some jurisdictions entities that most of us would call “things” are “persons”, e.g. corporations, the River Ganges (in India).
There’s actually already precedent in the Grrlpower universe that non-humans are still legal persons, although not ‘human’ persons. Because the US has a treaty with the Council, which is composed of non-humans. If non-humans were not legal persons, that treaty would not be valid.
Just yesterday I was browsing the U.S. legal code and it specifically stated that a person “shall include every infant member of the species homo sapiens who is born alive at any stage of development.” (C1S8)
I can understand how the law might apply to any entity who has duties or rights, but where is that stated in the U.S.C.? All I could find was the above definition plus the one stating corporations as a “person.” I am aware C1S8 says “infant” but it also says “at any stage of development” which then does cover a grown adult according to another legal dictionary. So it appears to be a more strict way of saying “from birth to any later stage.”
Additionally, the U.S.C does contain a definition for entity: “The term “entity” includes person, estate, trust, governmental unit, and United States trustee.” (C11S101) Any law involving criminal conduct of the physical sort appears to use the term ‘person’ as opposed to ‘entity.’ So trying to shove an alien into the law still doesn’t work because entity as defined by the legal code only includes several legal fictions plus ‘person’ which, as stated above, explicitly specifies homo sapiens.
Thus all I have is a reference to homo sapiens + corporations being covered under “person” and no valid way of inserting “entity” where “person” is found in law. Unless this is some kind of inherited common law from England. However, I must again note that your given definition would make non-sentient robots a “person” since it is an entity which has duties though not rights. Or a flight of stairs, since that too is an entity with the duty of allowing humans access to a floor.
This is reducto ad absurdum of the highest order. ‘Entity’ other than as defined by the U.S.C. can be stretched quite easily. More importantly, if entity were the valid term and the use of infant above strictly codified only babies, why bother specifically mentioning them or corporations in the definitions section seeing as both are broadly covered under ‘entity?’ This would only make sense if these definitions were provided in their relevant section to ensure specific laws only applied to those specific forms of entity (despite the law stating ‘person’).
Finally, uhh. I can’t fathom how a law dictionary would supersede what the law actually says.
So, human genetic code and live birth are sufficient conditions to establish personhood.
However, that quote does not state that those are NECESSARY conditions for being a person. Per the original writing, all “natural persons” would have been human, and they would not have thought of anything else, but as you noticed, corporations have also long been deemed as persons in US law.
Understand, though, that the moment the government uses a law or procedure for aliens that explicitly applies to “persons”, and the moment an alien accepts the shelter of a law that calls them a person, then they are a person. Jurisdiction has been established.
When ARC started filling out the paperwork for the tourists, they became “persons” under federal law. (It was not a mistake, it was an intentional act.)
It’s like the whole stupid “Data is a toaster” episode. While that argument might have needed to happen before he was first admitted to Star Fleet Academy, by the time of the show, Data was a Lieutenant, an officer, a decorated hero, and so on. The only necessary argument to have would have been
ATTORNEY: Computer, identify the being on the stand.
COMPUTER: The being on the stand is Lieutenant Commander Data.
ATTORNEY: Let the record show that the Computer has identified Lt Commander Data as a being, which under Federation law is fully equivalent to a person. Your honor, I move to dismiss the case.
JUDGE: Denied.
ATTORNEY: Computer, are you able to access personnel records for Lieutenant Commander Data?
COMPUTER: Affirmative
ATTORNEY: Let the record show that there are personnel records for Lt Commander Data. Computer, what is the penalty for entering false records into Federal personnel database?
COMPUTER Falsification of personnel records carries a penalty of three to five years upon conviction.
ATTORNEY: Let the record show that according to official Star Fleet records, Lt Commander Data has been determined to be a person, or someone has committed a crime to pretend he was. There is no evidence of such crime.
JUDGE: Such entry may have been made in error.
ATTORNEY: There is no evidence of any such error, but let’s go one step further. Computer, what is the rank of the witness?
COMPUTER: Lt Commander Data is a Lieutenant Commander.
ATTORNEY: An officer. Computer, in Star Fleet, are there any officers who are not persons?
COMPUTER: Negative.
ATTORNEY: Again, Star Fleet affirms Commander Data is a person. Computer, list the medals and awards awarded to Lt Commander Data.
COMPUTER begins listing…
ATTORNEY: STOP.. Computer, what is the definition of the medal for conspicuous gallantry?
COMPUTER: The medal for conspicuous gallantry is awarded to a being who…
ATTORNEY STOP. Computer, what is the procedure for ensuring qualification of candidates for that medal.
COMPUTER: The candidate and circumstances are reviewed by a committee of five senior fleet officers to ensure that the candidate is qualified and the circumstances do merit the award of the medal.
ATTORNEY: Computer, was this procedure followed in the case of Lt Commander Data for that medal?
COMPUTER: Affirmative.
ATTORNEY: Senior fleet officers have repeatedly determined that Lt Commander Data is a being and a person. This hearing is illegal and contrary to Fleet protocols and to Federation Law. He is being ordered into slavery for medical experimentation purposes. This is beneath us, illegal, immoral, and without basis in Federation law.
I rest my case.
Define ‘birth’. Currently humans have vaginal and caesarean, but what about when artificial wombs*, which can already sustain life & development for the several weeks after fertilization, become advanced enough to gestate an infant to term? Does ‘decanting’ count as birth, and if so at what stage? Current medical tech can help rescue infants as young as 22 weeks, and with some reliability at 24.
If being vat-grown counts, then clones must have legal personhood. If it doesn’t count, in-vitro births can’t be counted either (without some weird new rules around surrogacy). Either way, it’s going to raise some interesting problems, even as it solves others.
* Yes, I am enjoying the Vorkosigan series, thanks for the mass recommendation a few pages back. :)
Your analysis is very good.
I write only to add that the USC does not control the law of NY, which would have jurisdiction over the (assumed) murder so we have to look to NY statutes (assuming Congress hasn’t passed a relevant federal murder statute … which would not eliminate NY’s). Also statutory personhood is not quite the same as common law personhood, so even if there were no statute governing conduct over a nonhuman alien persons, it is possible NY might prosecute under the tattered remnants of NY criminal common law – but I don’t know – it’s a long way from the fields I know.
While I find your argument compelling… It’s also not based on U.S. jurisprudence.
In actual court cases, a crime or legal finding cannot be derived merely because the government decides it so. Laws must be interpreted by juries and judges as intended by their author. This was indeed a landmark finding by the Supreme Court in response to a particular case of legalism.
For example, even though the Second Amendment states “bear arms” it doesn’t mean arms from a dead bear. So, this rigor remains even when the law is stated. To then take another step past that and add new clauses just because it seems similar? Well, that’s simply not law anymore.
There’s a reason why those definitions exist and it’s not to act as a guideline. It’s to provide a very specific (to the point of being hard to parse, sometimes) definition by which decisions can be made. Perhaps someone can refute my point about “infant at any stage of development” but other than that I still don’t see any reasonable way to disregard the otherwise clear intent of these laws.
+1
A single EO would cover them, in absence of a court ruling or congressional bill covering the subject.
Possibly Assault and Battery. Maybe even “with Intent to Cause Grievous Harm”. IF she was eaten. If not, the worst it gets is excessive force during a citizen’s arrest.
And NONE of them are here legally…
Which also leads to jurisdiction / extradition tedium… As Earth isn’t even in contact with any galactic law enforcement / judicial authority, getting them off-planet and letting those authorities handle the mess is the likely outcome… unless the ‘rule of funny’ is involved somewhere.
OH, one other thought… Is the unnamed flame-headed demon species considered natural prey for Umbrivions? In which case its ‘wrong time – wrong place’ no fault.
just as a side, I have an odd dislike of those vore stories, where there is a natural prey that is also sapient and just accepts being prey; even when the story results in death *not just..oh the body melts but they have an indestructible core that regenerates*, but actual death…it just..rubs me the wrong way, like a slave race brainwashed into accepting they can die at any time for their masters and its a good thing.
seems like an odd fantasy to have dynamic wise. Vore like any fantasy fetish has so many variant check boxes that you really can’t dump it all under one banner and one aspect that squicks one person won’t another, but some slight variation and its okay. like…oh Android 21 turns people into snack cakes and eats them…but then actual gore against an unwilling victim feels “too real” so despite both being eats person and they die, the later is a no on the check boxes while the former is a yes.
but back to the no fault thing, that dynamic just feels like abuse fantasy painted over. the I can do whatever, treat them however, even kill them, and they all still love me…just…ick.
Sounds like a power fetish to me. Abuse is common in power dynamics and of course that dynamic will be fetishized.
People who actually relish in abuse don’t typically bother to hide the real intent from what I’ve witnessed (and suffered from personally.) Basically if they have another motive the abuse just becomes a simpler means to the desired end. Like slavery versus spending the time and money to invest or invent a better factory system. Intellectual laziness, or perhaps devolution, I suppose.
The fact they’re ending ‘non-existent’ lives is another part. It’s just drawn art so there’s no real consequence. Or, perhaps the character is accepting of their fate because it’s non-canon or their canon doesn’t expect permanent death despite not explaining resurrection. Or perhaps they do resurrect and the commissioner couldn’t afford to pay the artist to get that part rendered (heh).
I am no stranger to the power dynamic version, I’ve written stories where the humans are pets to some giant alien, or more on this topic, souls in Hell being treated as prey or regenerating food stuffs to demons. The idea being the demon is the dominant party and almost indifferent yet oddly concerned about their prey, but at the end of the day the human soul is at the bottom of the food chain to the consuming demon…basically just a fantasized out version of extreme S&M.
like I said on another page, these things are like a really complex check list, where for one person that one thing changes so much.
I’ve known people who loved S&M…but the cussing and put downs part turned them off, they wanted the physical part only, not the “verbal abuse” part.
I mean heck, there is a special fetish called consenticals for people who love the visual side of tentacle sex but are turned off by how rapey it usually is and want everyone involved to be involved consensually.
Dude the stuff you come up with is just amazing.
I don’t want to link directly to anything on Hentai Foundry in the comments section of a comic that isn’t rated M.
but to get an idea of the two extremes in this genre I will touch on, you can search for
(My Pet Slime)
-much to my surprise this is apparently my most popular work…of course I threw almost every kind of fetish into this as an experiment so…
-also its about a guy who buys a pet slime that evolves into a slime girl.
and the other extreme end on the *this seems pretty messed up*…but less gorey than some older stuff.
(Josh’s Incredible Adventure)
-demons power fetish based series *still in progress when i get around or in the mood to write the next part of it*
Hmm, do you happen to hang out on the Hentai Foundry (aka ‘The Hentai Reserve’) discord?
No, never been on discord, and I had given up on most forums a while back. I was updating when I was writing new things in the hentai foundry forum but got out of the habit, I am somewhat random on updates, so many outlines of different on-going stories and short story ideas.
You really should check it out at least, some great people there, writers and artists and just plain degenerates :P
I do not know of any earthly jurisdiction that has a “natural prey” exception in criminal law. Much of the point of human-made law is to overcome nature red in tooth and claw.
Intentional theft/destruction of a prosthetic limb or wheelchair is probably some sort of specially defined crime.
I believe that in a health care context, depriving an elderly patient of the tools necessary to sit up is considered a type of unlawful restraint.
That could probably be stretched to cover this.
Teksura:
Yes and no.
Yes, they do have laws on destruction of a body. Specifically ‘Unlawful Destruction or Disposal of a Corpse.’ In New York, it’s known as ‘Amanda Lynn’s Law.’ It’s punishable by 4 years in prison. Before that law, it was only considered a misdemeanor, and I believe a $5000 fine. There’s also ‘Concealment of a human corpse.’ (Penal Code Art.195 Sec 195.02) – but that specifies ‘human’ corpse. So that one wouldnt apply here.
She knew about him, so he almost certainly knew about her race. No point in getting mad about a non-murder just because if it had been a human it would have been a murder. We don’t even know whether him eating the chassis would have harmed the flame, had he not let it throw the flame to a new chassis.
I have to say, this is a much better GRRL “ship” than anything that the comments might have come up with.
that is not a given, just because you know about someone doesn’t automatically mean they know about you.
Its like saying because you studied Japanese culture, that every single person in Japan has studied your culture.
okay reading the blurb that is excused, its not on panel though. So reading it as a comic, it looks like attempted murder and nothing else, especially as no attempt was made to separate the core from the body first. Its not like removing a Cybertronian’s spark or some other memory chip or golem core from comparable species and then destroying the body to keep them from escaping, this was straight up trying to destroy the entire being.
Again, you are taking preemptive offense at something which is not explained (yet) on a single page of action.
Also, it’s not about studying. It’s about awareness that Japanese vs Americans exist. We’ve seen Laphra’s people twice, one of which was a media star. They are not a secret category.
So, if Umbrivions eat/destroy animals (or sentients), then they presumably know what is edible and what isn’t, what’s harmful and what isn’t.
Honestly, given Pinkie’s attitude, I’m betting Pinkie and Rava are vacationing Star Cops, and Lapha’s chassis will be (largely) preserved as evidence.
you are aware you are making bigger leaps of logic based on even less evidence than I am.
Is it cannibalism if they’re a different species? We need a new word for eating a sentient species – sapiovore? Sapiovorism isn’t currently illegal on Earth – it’s only illegal for a human to eat another human, presently.
Earth’s legal system is gonna be VERY busy the next couple of… centuries. It’s gonna take that long, easy. Each nation’s gonna have their own take on aliens, and may respond differently to different types of aliens. And then there’s working out international differences. Can a ‘Laphan’ become an American citizen? Can a Grammian become a Russian citizen? How would extradition work? Centuries, I tell ya.
That’s why didn’t mention cannibalism
Why can’t a ‘Laphan’ become and American citizen and another a North Korean? Just like it’s possible for every other nationality on Dirt (as long as they meet the requirements of course)
Because each country will have its own opinions about which aliens can be citizens, informed by centuries of culture. And religion – don’t get me started about religion! Will Catholic nations be okay with aliens who glow, have wings, or are unearthly beautiful? Will Americans be okay with citizens who don’t have bones, or who mate in swarms, or eat petrochemicals? Humanity has just barely gotten to the point where we acknowledge all humans as being equally deserving of fair treatment. If you think it’s a simple matter to simply extend fair treatment to all possible sapients in the universe, you don’t know humanity all that well.
Dude.
At least some American citizens do in fact mate in swarms (every weekend, in fact). And given where our fertilizers come from, pretty much all of us eat petrochemicals.
So, no, I don’t think we’d have a problem with it.
Not really. A citizen of another nation doesn’t have to be a human for the various treaties to have force. The US must treat all Mexican citizens, for example, as per the relevant treaty.
They would not need to adjust much at first… any being found sentient by any Nation or State is de facto a noncitizen “person” with all the rights and duties thereto in all nations on Earth.
Of course, all the special cases as to what constitutes what crime would take centuries of refinement.
.
I think it would be safe to say any being both motivated to and capable of arguing its own sapience in court is probably sapient for our purposes.
Hey Dave, not to nitpick (love GP), but isn’t the shirt pattern missing in panels 2-4?
Whoops.
ewww vore, I thought this might be a containment thing at first, but the burp…
I wondered how long it would take for someone to make note of that.
I did last page, or I may have avoided using the term directly given its fetish rounds, but I definitely picked up given his appearance and the tentacles and mouth like structure that he was trying to eat her.
Well…she DID look like a snack. Guess the guy took it literally. XD
Yah, same storm woke me up…well I should say the DOG work me up because of the thunder and lightning [very very frightning]. Big marshmallow fraidy dog trying to crawl into my armpit “daddy save me from the booms!”
Galileo, Galileo
Galileo, Galileo
Galileo, Figaro – magnificoo
The noise, hurts a dog’s ears!
Yep, my youngest fur child is not totally afraid of thunder, but it makes him nervous. He came and sat next to my pillow for comfort, then, since I was not bothered in the least by the thunder, went under the covers to sleep in my lap. As long as the thunder isn’t sharp enough to make me jump, he’s okay.
This was not what he meant when he wanted them to intertwine.
Arrests, arrests all around for ALL the interstellar tourists, even if they are not currently hostile!
Seriously, I would think eating other sentients live would be the level of cannibalism for any somewhat developed society.
Well, other than maybe species who eat their mate as part of the reproduction cycle. But this can’t be a regular occurrence in ‘civilization’.
…. Is this guy and the tentacled trench coat guy going to compare notes about living among bipeds? :P
Cannibalism is the act of consuming another individual of the same species as food.
So this isn’t cannibalism. Though it might be considered the same as eating someone’s prized pet…
and that’s if it is eating. like someone posts have commented could just be detaining the body over eating it
As we don’t have any other ‘intelligent’ species on the planet, we’ve never needed a separate word for eating them. It’s an area where law would need to be expanded or clarified.
By intent at least, it seems reasonable to treat eating alien tourists as cannibalism regardless of species difference.
We eat every species that isn’t us, and many of them are close enough to sentient that the difference is purely racist. Our closest relatives are the rough equivalent of 2-5 year olds in sentience. Then there are dolphins and such, which are hard to quantify relative to ourselves.
Confirmed sapient beings of the same comprehensive level as one another. Should qualify as murder.
Even in my own universe those species that regard humans as only clever animals only go as far as to have humans as pets…except the Builders who feed humans to their own pets…but the Builders are ideological assholes…and then the demons who eat soul bodies…but those people are already dead, regenerate or respawn, and besides they’re in Hell…
this is attempted murder of a fellow sapient being.
I said I’d have no problem with these two who enslave others being killed, however another sapient being eating them…just adds a replacement target who needs to be killed.
If the person part of Lapha had died, it would have been “homicide”, but not “murder”. Killing someone in defense of another is not “murder”.
I do not believe this can be justifiably considered in defense of anyone seeing as the assault already took place and Lapha was walking away. He attacked her from behind as she was walking away, and showed no signs of intent to continue her assault.
Lapha also did not use lethal force against the pink alien, or showed any intent to, a low class assault took place, nothing that one can justify using lethal force in retaliation. Which is what this was lethal retaliation.
Dave, that weather was LOUD! Also, I forgot you are local to me, lol. Richardson here.
Dang, we should have a GRRL party some time.
Given the person eaten was a criminal who started a huge fight and was threatening another sentient, I suspect he probably won’t get in trouble for this. Maybe a minor scolding. Maybe.
Except that it is difficult to interrogate someone after they have been eaten. Unless he (it?) is a Cthulhu spawn in which case the eaten entity is interrogated forever.
She didn’t start the fight, Juggernot did
Brüt?
Brut didn’t start the brawl, he just took over when the aliens got spanked by Arc-Light.
Pretty sure that Iapha opened festivities by stasis-gunning Maxima, which caused the heroes to rush to her aid, the mercenary aliens to defend her, & thus everybody started a-brawlin’.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-876-mercs-and-mayhem/
*She* started the fight, by trying to stasis Maxima and make off with her.
Juggernot/Brüt may have thrown the first punch, but there was already a fight in progress at that point.
Didn’t say she didn’t start shit, just that she didn’t start the violence and the fighting
Firing a weapon at someone in an attempt to kidnap them is fighting.
Ordering others to attack people is fighting.
Take the L, Guesticules, your argument is lame.
By the way, it turns out Lapha was right. There will be no corpse.
https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-877-ray-tracing-amputation/
Guesticules isnt actually wrong at all. G’s argument, which is technically correct (and thus the best kind of correct), is that Lapha did not initiate VIOLENCE.
Which she did not. She was using a non-violent means of capture before it all went out of hand because she grossly underestimated Maxima, and also underestimated that other Earth supers, like Brut, might have the same idea as her and be powerful enough to get through her shield. Lapha’s actions, while criminal, were not ‘violent.’ Plus it can definitely be argued, at least, that it’s not ‘fighting.’ It’s a reason FOR the fighting afterwards.
Sort of like how if you run up to someone’s door to steal their Amazon package, then the 300 lb musclebound neighbor comes out of his house to see you doing that, chases him down and beats you to a bloody pulp…. you initiated the wrongdoing and the reason there was violence afterwards, but Bruno the Biker initiated the violence.
He initiated the violence, and most people would say he started the fighting…. but you caused ‘the fight’ to happen :)
Yes, she was the reason for the fight, but she didn’t start the
firefightIf Maxi hadn’t been so annoyingly strong and fast, it’s a good chance that Laph and Co would have been in and out before anyone knew what happened, let alone have a fight break out
try to fly that in court,
your honor the attempted kidnapper escaped, I found them, so I ate them…I should rewarded.
Judge: regardless of the intent, the disregard for intelligent life and this being the first action you made, we have no choice but to also consider you a threat to our own people.
Honestly his species may end up with a stigma, one committing murders where there is no body to be found.
tp put it this way.
if someone tries to mug me, and I beat them up and take their money, I can still be arrested for theft.
Maybe that was some sort of egg. So either she is a reall good mother, or its her chance to revive and regenerate after being eaten up like that.
hum… so I wonder if this is recorded, who is going to get in the trouble, i guess both? Earth really have to update the legislation system
“What the hell!”
“Needs garlic.”
Next time – remember: “Never Eat Anything Bigger Than Your Head.”
The question is…
Was she spicy?
Well, I thought of her as a little “tart.”
Definitely hot.
And don’t say “mouth feel!”
So, was that “mouth eat” or the other kind?
I had been wondering what the headflame was/was for. I’d assumed it was some kind of perception boosting tech or magic. This is very interesting. Seriously cool alien designs!
Maybe not murder, but how about battery? Unlawful restraint? Attempted kidnapping? Grand larceny? Destruction of property? Just because someone can surf out of their body doesn’t mean that destroying that body on a whim is ok.
Remember, that chassis had just committed vehicular assault. As defense attorney, one would argue that impounding the chassis can be viewed as the lowest level of force necessary to stop the ongoing assaults, at no harm to the actual driver.
Damn…..I guess Nava reacted badly to his friend being pushed. Then again, at a convention, a very drunk young actor who I will not name pushed me out of the way, and a friend of mine was about ready to throw hands.
So, he responded to the push by making his friend re-taste her last meal?
Lakwava. Call them Lakwava.
I was thinking Eldkåpa. Swedish for fire hood.
I was not expecting vore from the tentacle monster, but in hindsight, I guess it’s not that surprising.
Is it my imagination, or does our intrepid author enjoy having disembodied intelligences & merging of two beings into one?
Cooter & that worm guy.
Sciona & the souls in that soul jar she found.
Vale.
Concretia.
Henchwench (by proxy, since she was borrowing Concretia’s power at the time).
& now Iapha & Garamm.
Was thinking the same thing about Sciona and Cooter, hadn’t made the association with Vale and Concretia though. Now I’m wondering who gets control if they all tangled and ended up merged into a single entity.
How is Vale merged with anyone else?
Believe they meant ‘having disembodied intelligences’ (which covers everyone listed except for Coorm)
ahhhhh
Yes and we have here a whole species that is a possessor(parasitic?) of mobiles.
Looks like someone likes to min/max their builds by taking ZERO Str/Body/Cons points and related quirks.
Nava’s defense: “Sorry, self-defense instinct.”
At what point was he, personally, threatened?
His pollinator-maniple Pinkie was attacked. That’s personal.
And the attack ended with no intent of continuation before he decided to ingest Lapha, so ‘self-defense of others’ is not even on the cards
Remember: vigilantism is still a federal crime
That’s not remotely a defense here.
1) He wasn’t being attacked.
2) Even the one person who was even physically pushed was only pushed because she (Pinky) was the one who intiated anything by preventing Lapha from being able to leave, and the push was hardly something warranting death.
3) Lapha was trying to escape. So even if he HAD been attacked, which I again remind you he had not been, any danger would have already have passed as the ‘attacker’ was already trying to flee the area.
4) Even if you try to say ‘Defense of Others’ – then again, (a) any physical encounter had already ended, (b) the physical encounter was not deadly and could not be responded to with deadly force, (c) Pinky initiated, and (d) Lapha was already trying to get away – the danger had already passed, if there was any danger in the first place, which there was not.
Here we all (or most of us) were thinking Lapha was that cute space demon body wearing a flame – when it was really a flame wearing a cute space demon body. Well played!
(And R.I.P. my theory that Umbrivions live off off the Vomit Of Ecstasy. “The great tragedy of science is the slaying of a beautiful theory by an ugly fact”. — Huxley)
Maybe it just needs to be adjusted as to WHERE the Vomit of Ecstasy is deposited.
IN fact, there may be more ecstasy involved in the current location. And more vomiting.
The term ‘Vomit of Ecstasy’ makes me think this may lead to some weird cult following around the location of the Umbrivion’s debut on Earth, perhaps with such mandates as “Leave My Elevator Alone”.
I suppose it would be more efficient for Umbrovians to swallow the containers of Nourishing Vomit so less is wasted on the floor … and rather thoughtful of them to offer Ecstasy rather than mere paralysis. Hey, they aren’t tarantula hawk wasps!
I’m going to speculate that Lapha’s species generally uses android bodies rather than biological frames. The first member of Lapha’s species that we met had obvious seams on her body. Close examination of Lapha’s body shows that she also had seams. Now that we know the bodies are interchangeable it is even possible that both of these aliens we’ve seen so far are the same individual. Lapha may have multiple bodies she selects from depending on what she’s planning on doing that day.
Flame crystal on the blonde one (first encounter) is a different shape and colour to Lapha’s (Lapha?).
I think we can safely surmise that Lapha is at least a little bit more than JUST the flame. it is a visual representation of her but there is more to her, even if it is not very visible.
you can cut the difference with with techno-organic bodies *of which there are various forms, artificial cells *basically a body made of specialized nanites, possibly even protein based*, as well as a mixture of organic and cybernetic parts. A Frankenstein’s monster approach where body parts are grown and put together to make bodies, heck we know the tech exists as Cora gave Peggy a leg growing vat.
but in this case we have to ask if the species is naturally little flames that take control of other organisms and made their own clone bodies to inhabit when they advanced enough, like maybe they were parasites or symbiotic to some native species., but could also after developing gene tech, androids, and techno-organic tech just make new bodies so their kind don’t need to wait around for new hosts.
or did this species undergo “artificial ascension” attempting to make their entire species into living energy programs…but back fire it a little and end up as the equivalent of (we are self sufficient brains…but of course we need bodies to move around)
So Her race is a symbiosis between a relatively nonsentient disposable body and a miniature posession demon-energy entity? If the body is edible, it seems unlikely it’s just a robot like some seem to be speculating.
Robots don’t have to be made out of metal. A sufficiently advanced starfaring species could easily create biological blanks/bio-androids suitable for use as a host body to an intelligence that would otherwise be forced to possess possibly-unwilling sapients. In point of fact, providing bodies to intangible possessor-spirits of Lapha’s assumed/alleged species would likely be seen as a greatly magnanimous/charitable act, or at this stage in the species’ development their access to such bodies could be held as an inalienable (inhumanable, if you’re an offworld native?) right.
Either way, it’s perfectly possible the body is still an android despite being edible. That or Umbrivions eat metal as easily as they eat meat, or he’s containing Lapha’s body rather than ingesting it. We simply don’t know enough to say with certainty.
Lapha’s body responded to a medical device that had a “stem stim”, and the body had the potential for a tail, so it was probably a biological entity of some sort. From the action, it seems that the body didn’t have independent consciousness, since it turned off in mid-word.
I think ‘inalienable’ still works in the larger sense – Terran aliens to the US have inalienable rights.
Although now I want to overload the term to also mean “someone with resistance to alien possession”. It would be very useful to have someone that you knew wasn’t part ofa team of super-intelligent beings infiltrating our planet and living amongst us.
Ummmm ‘inalienable’ has nothing to do with the word ‘alien.’ :)
It comes from the latin verb ‘alienare’ which means ‘to transfer by sale.’
English can be funny! :)
“Inalienable” still works, tracing back the etymology. There’s a bit of scope for confusion with “aliens”, but that’s because the English language has never really been very fussy about how neatly it uses the handy words it
stealsborrows from everyone else.The core element alien is derived from the Latin alienus, “of or belonging to another”.
For non-Earth Peoples, that pulls through fairly cleanly into “belonging to another planet”. It’s been used on Earth for centuries to mean “belonging to another country”, so the last bit is not much of a stretch.
For rights, we make a stepping-stone of alien-able: something which can be made to belong to another. The in- prefix then simply denotes something to which alienable does not apply.
The concept of ‘inalienable’ as in ‘inalienable rights’ as you’ve sort of mentioned, actually means ‘to transfer by sale.’
So inalienable means ‘this cannot simply be sold away’ or, more simple ‘this is something inherent to your very being, which is a part of your existence.’ So when they say ‘inalienable rights’ they are meaning rights that you have by virtue of your existence, not rights which are given to you from the state or any other person.
Psychedelic Sentient Venus Fly Trap…. That could be the stuff of nightmares right there. So far gone you can’t resist, but not so messed up as you can’t realize what is happening to you
More of a Pitcher Plant with tentacles than a Flytrap, really.
I don’t know the anime, but a clip of it once went past my youtube. There was a guy with numbers tattooed all over him who I guess was also immortal as he regenerated at the end of the scene, but he was eaten by this giant piranha plant that once he was inside sprayed him with a chemical that caused him to hallucinate beautiful women so he wouldn’t resist as the acid streamed in to digest him.
honestly any soft bodied plant going after larger prey would probably need a way to debilitate the prey to prevent it from harming them or else risk a Homer Simpson breaking the petals or Amphibia chest burster. which oddly I can’t find a clip of that scene where they escape the giant killer tomato plant by eating their way out just of it eating them. But yeah, in a world of animals with claws and teeth, it may be prudent if a plant is going to eat anything larger it either needs to be hard bodied, disable the animal, or just use a deadly toxin to kill them outright before consuming them.
A vore page! Yummy…
Throwing out an idea or three for the name of Lapha’s race.
Chamaian
Wairuamura
Lasair Pyre
“Oh no…anyway….”
Great job on the aliens by the way, last part actually is a little creepy with the blanked out smile of the human shell.
While this might not technically be a murder, it’s most definitely destruction of property of some kind at the very least. Because what’s more yours then your own freaking body?
If only Lapha had decided to equip herself with a low-tech weapon like a combat knife as well the Clarke-tech stuff which didn’t work out, it might have been useful to make it “uncomfortable” for tentacle boy here to have gotten a grip on her by slashing/stabbing and not need to “jump ship” so to speak by being able to get away.
I think people are missing the point, although one por twp have touched on it.
Go back a very short time in human history – maybe even current time for some human societies. The penalty for many crimes was death. Steal a sheep, you got hung.
Remember the old saying, “May as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb”. In other words, you’ll get hung if you’re caught for stealing either, so you may as well go big.
She is a known criminal. In his society, maybe in most galactic societies, this is how you deal with known criminals. Kill ’em.
Obviously, we don’t agree, but it may make sense to them. We can’t point a finger. It still makes sense to many people to execute folks who commit murder, even when they are obviously mentally ill.
*one or two
She’s not a known criminal to the tour group, they weren’t there for the fight. The only thing she’s done in their presence is climb out of the street (on an alien world where this could be normal), shout at them, and shove Pinky over. Hardly a capital offense, even in the larger galaxy where we saw Cora literally get away with murder in ‘self-defense’.
So maybe we’re getting a view of Umbrovian culture.
To plants, humans may seem super rowdy. Pushing that poor girl over may have been a major assault from a plant’s point of view – notice how her feet are off the ground – oh my goodness, she’s been uprooted! That could be FATAL (…to a plant anyway.)
Or … it could be that this species looks at the value of individuals differently than animals do. Plants tend to reproduce by spreading lots of seeds or spores around and very few survive – most end up as food for something. Perhaps they don’t fully understand that most animals have a very different attitude about individuals (excluding colony animals such as ants); Umbrovians may figure that if you kill one Torchy, there’s plenty others around so why worry?
This is all speculation of course. It could be that this particular Umbrovian is a mass murdering psycho killer on the run from the Law, delighted to hide out on one of Ray’s tours. We thought the battle was over and suddenly we have to fight The Boss Of Beauty And Barf.
+1
But NOOOOOOOO for continuing the fight. Tie the arc off and move on.
False. Pinkie knew that Lapha was wanted by the authorities, so clearly Pinkie had information about the fight. Given the highly visible location of the fight, the fact that Lapha was attempting to kidnap Max is probably known.
Lapha abruptly assaulted Pinkie in an attempt to escape a very nice and polite “citizen’s arrest”. And, since we don’t know how tough Pinkie is, we don’t know how much danger that attack put Pinkie in.
We’ll just have to see how it works out.
How? How did Pinky know Lapha was wanted by the authorities? Where was it stated or shown that they were even looking for her?
Seeing how none of this group are legitimate Dirt LEO, vigilantism is a federal offense
Specifically looking for her? Not shown; implied against if anything, judging by Pinky’s surprise at being lifted.
How did Pinky know that Lapha was wanted by the authorities? Not shown.
Did Pinky know that Lapha was wanted by the authorities? Yes. “<a href="https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-928-this-is-an-ebullient-citizens-arrest/"You should un-go, as you are a criminal of the authorities.“
Corrected link to p928, source for responses one and three above.
“Obviously, we don’t agree…”
Humans have the convenience of dominance over their environment. That means they can choose to force criminals to suffer indefinitely in a prison instead of ending their existence immediately. This is partly a survival technique since the human mind treats memories almost the same as it does a new experience; science has shown the two are nearly indistinguishable in brain scans. This opens up a lot of cans of worms for anyone tasked with execution not least because of the emotional doubt and finality.
Plus, there’s the fact humans like to dope up their criminals instead of knocking them out and chopping off their head for some reason. It was done that way for thousands of years because unlike modern methods – it actually works. [[[Aside: If society actually wanted a more reliable method than the guillotine as they initially claimed before switching to the emotional “it feels wrong”… Reel up a 2+ ton slab of iron and drop it like a book onto another slab using one end as an unhinged fulcrum. There is absolutely no case where that’s going to result in partial execution. At worst the criminal just won’t be executed because it fails to drop. Humans are ridiculous.]]]
The aliens in this comic quite CLEARLY do not have full control over their environs. A jailbreak on Earth might mean police overtime or at worst a national revolt. In this alternate universe a jailbreak might be the tipping point for an entire species. Or several species.(Polite nod to Grrkek The Planet-Killer)
This combined with advanced methods of determining guilt (such as, uh, literal magic) executing criminals may be a much safer – and saner – way of dealing with this plausibly existential threat.
Death as “THE” criminal penalty for a wide range of crimes is mostly correlated with societies that don’t maintain an infrastructure of prisons to house their miscreants and who are surrounded by other powers that object to them using exile as a means of removing them from their society.
So. You got somebody who steals horses? Our culture and society absolutely can’t work with horse thieves around? You gotta separate that person from our culture and society. If imprisonment and exile are unavailable, what’s left? Your choices come down to some form of enslavement (possibly forcible induction into the army) or execution.
This is a classic example of what Kant meant when he was talking about treating people (in this case the criminal) as a means to an end rather than as an end in himself.
Treating someone as a means to an end means doing whatever you do to them in order to achieve some goal. Here we do whatever we need to do to the criminal in order to make our society and culture work. Treating someone as an end in themselves means doing whatever you do to the them for reasons having to do with who both of you are as people, and include such options as rehabilitation, therapy, and just plain beating the snot out of somebody in retribution for an act which made you angry at them.
Kant regarded the former (means to an end) treatment as unethical and the latter as ethical.
People have their own opinions on whether Kant was ethical.
And that was Kant’s definition of good conduct – treating everyone as an end in themselves.
Why are you claiming that Lapha was a murderer? She didnt murder anyone.
She tried to capture Maxima, yes. But failed. That’s not a death sentence. (not to mention there’s no possible way they could have known about that since they were gone from the area by that point)
She pushed Pinky, yes. But Pinky is unharmed. That’s not a death sentence.
I’m more concerned about just how hungry that creature is. Will he/it go after humans next?
yeah when something’s go to response of *they hurt my friend and may be criminals* is eat them. you have to question what they think of other species in general. Like, when they see a smaller than themselves member of any species do they have to resist the instinct to eat them, but what if they only resist that instinct because they know the local authorities will kill them, but if you visited their planet they’d think nothing of eating you as you are not one of their kind, smaller, and susceptible to their predatory skills so…you are food to them. Definitely a species to avoid in that case.
“If you didn’t want to be eaten, why did you come to our planet?”
Not counting that Cat that belongs to Captain Marvel, Predator species don’t eat for a long time after a big meal. Like, it’s not uncommon for them to go a couple of weeks between kills.
Of course, we don’t know whether that chassis has any real food value, or was digested at all. If the Umbrivion glorphs it back up, then we will know.
It looks like the lizard guy is trying to figure out how feet work, again. The Torchy’s flame consciousness seems to have shut down his motor cortex.
On the plus side – it will be a lot easier for Garram to have sex with Lapha now.
He just needs a little “me” time now…
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What if they have a cellmate? Would sex with a cellmate constitute a threesome?
Or he’s a bit in shock at the woman he loves having had her body devoured by a monstrous alien. RIGHT after he saved and healed her.