3-17-2007 AS#76 There went the PG rating...

[kaskar]

          This F-T 14 Chapter seems to have been set up for future plot convenience. If a pratt fall and 2 comically "shocked" faces are all that is needed to get a bit of humour, and we now get some explainitory facts, then there is no problem. In the PG DMFA storyline, this is not needed, and even joked about from time to time. (  e.g. , in #70 during the twinks adventures, Pyroduck tried to inflame Dan ,and Mab hade to calm him for P-G 13 rating  , and in #166, they jokingly passed over the fact that the syndication of a comic down to a safer level ( e.g. G ), can ruin the look, and even the appeal of a comic. If something happens, so be it.

[Fuyudenki]

hmm.  HEY, THERE'S A FORUM!  Why did I never notice that before?
Yes... thread necromancy... seems to be a tendency for my first posts.  Yes, I'm sure I want to reply, as my comment is more pertinent to the contents of this particular strip than the later ones in the series.  Apologies, I won't do it...often.

I was actually reading back through the archives(unlike most comics, I find this to be very gratifying in DMFA), and something occurred to me.

Is whatever Creature race Henya is hermaphroditic?

clues:
feminine-sounding name for Henya's spouse-to-be(no, this is not hard evidence, which is why I'm getting it out of the way first)
Henya mentions Abel being her maid of honor.  Henya may be a little out of it, but even she would notice that Abel lacks a second X chromosome.(OK, so not all of the readers realized it at first... including me!)
Amber did mention that Henya's race "does things differently"(may not be an accurate quote).  I noted this while reading through the thread to see if my question had been answered already.  It hasn't.

Circumstantially, this also explains that while May is covering Abel's eyes, which is perfectly expected when a young man accidentally gets an eyeful of lady-parts, Abel is also covering his mother's eyes!  This confused me for a minute, as while I will admit I'm not an authority's on the subject, I wouldn't expect him to do so if Henya has perfectly normal lady-parts.  If Henya also has manly parts, then suddenly, it makes sense, as May and Abel are now censoring each other's view of opposite-sex organs.

On a side-note, I understand many male snakes have two(most, I think), which causes me to wonder, but not ask outright, if Henya's race also have two.  Now that would be a disturbing site.

Sorry for the necromancy.  I love both comics.

[kaskar]

          Henya is very probably not a hermaphrodite . I think, ( please correct me if I am wrong) , that worms are hermaphrodites, in which case they have male and female reproductive organs , in which case they can fertilize themselves, I think. Mebbe look thru worms ...

[Fuyudenki]

I know for sure earthworms are hermaphrodites, not sure about other roundworms or worm species, but that's irrelevant, as Amber already said Henya's a snake girl, and snakes are not generally subject to race-wide hermaphroditism.  I'm not going by that either, I'm going by some obviously deliberate oddities in what she says, in how Abel and May react, and by a very deliberate comment by the author/artist who gets to pull all of the strings here and make us run around speculating like... what, headless philosopher-chickens?

my logic is thus: it's weird, but it makes a lot of other weird stuff suddenly make sense.

[kaskar]

              Without author/artist pulling strings , making hypothetical situations, and generally leaving major loopholes in the ongoing plot, this room would die ...

[Aridas]

Amber didn't say they "do it" differently, she said they do things differently. you know, as in, they don't do what we consider a wedding. Consider the stereotypical girl who thinks you score a touchdown in baseball, and that the catcher is a goalie.

[Fuyudenki]

I can understand that my train of thought would be interpreted that way, but it didn't start like that.  "do things" differently, combined with Henya's inexperience with what we(and, apparently, typical Beings) consider a typical wedding, goes to indicate that snake-people of this particular variety don't wed in conventional manners, I'm suspecting an open society where talking about marriage will get you dumb looks akin to what talking about computers would have gotten you a thousand years ago.

"Wait, you say this wooden box--"
"no, plastic"
"what is this 'plastic' you speak of?"
"It's used to build things where I come from."
"Right, so this wooden box... and a window?"

So they don't have conventional marriage, perhaps they don't have conventional genders, either.

[Amber Williams]

Oh for the love of...

NO HERMS!

End of discussion.