Oh.
Transcript
Gillie: (ASL) Why??
Gillie looks back to her phone angrily. Idrisah walks closer, looking apologetically between Gillie and Idrisah.
Idrisah: Talita, it's a language that was never intended for your body. We won't judge you if you struggle to pick it up.
Talita: I’m going to judge myself.
Gillie sneers.
Gillie: (ASL) For what!? Not being human?
Talita cringes as if she'd been struck.
She makes an admission as heavy as it is small.
Talita: Yes.
45 thoughts on “Runaway to the Stars: Page 179”
Gar G
“I’m going to judge myself”
Me with anxiety: Yes, exactly!
*sees Talita’s yes* Damn that hits hard… (I mean that’s basically her entire life really)
Rad Internet Stranger
Aww poor Talita.. Gillie doesn’t seem to quite realise how big a deal not being human is for Talita considering her expression. I hope she doesn’t laugh in our favourite Centaur Gal’s face!!
Imp!
Gillie’s signing the word “human” in the fourth panel, where the signer gestures to themself… I feel like that rubs salt in the wound for poor Talita here….
Adrienne
Holy shit 😭
Peter Jensen
“This one looks ironic on me”:
https://www.tumblr.com/jayrockin/666752955492581376/gillie-helps-talita-adapt-the-asl-alphabet-and
thegriffin88
I get it. I have anxiety and after almost 40 years I’m still not happy that I can’t make a phone call to anyone but my family without steeling myself for a long uncomfortable process. Or that I can’t answer the door for more than 2 seconds. I feel like I should be able to do these normal human things, Even though my brain isn’t programmed correctly, so dealing with this will always be like going to the dentist. And NOBODY kicks my ass harder than myself.
Eux
the shading! goddamn! you used the comic style to add so much weight to the script its so goooooood. but also: damn. wishing a lot of healing for all of them lMAO i know its coming down the long barrel of the story but. OOUGH. OOF. OUCH.
SheTheTDE
Don’t judge yourself for not being human. Humans suck. They see something beautiful and their first thought it “how do I make this benefit me?” And the three most comon answers are mate with it, eat it, or turn it’s remains into something else. You are so much more beautiful than a human.
checkers
I have bad news for you about the propensity of nonhuman animals to act to benefit themselves and their most common behaviors when encountering a novel object
Joey
Very funny that the website assigned you a human avatar for this comment. It is a very human comment too, I think.
enigmew
FINALLYYYYY not that i enjoy seeing either of the girls in this amount of emotional distress (except i kind of do. its super cathartic) im so so so glad that they’re finally talking about it. having followed this series on tumblr for a while before hand, i forget that this is the start of their relationship and they DONT know each other very well at this point! so having this moment where the social politeness of coworker friendship breaks through into a layer of genuine vulnerability… its about time. there’s no way that talita would have realized such a confident person like gillie would have felt like her avoidance of sign language would have triggered feelings of not being worth learning sign for. there’s no way that gillie or idrisah would have realized that talita was insecure about not being a human. hard conversations are so necessary to fully understand one another. im so excited to see this follow through.
Calypso
She takes up so much space but she’s curled herself up so small…
kaitie
Considering half of sign language is facial expression, I can’t blame her.
Stray Cat
I’ll assume Talita goes into more detail about “not being human” (the dysmorphia other commenters have mentioned) on the next page, so instead I’ll mention: this shows how big a hole Calcery’s departure left. From AMA entries we know that Calcery helped with Gillie’s communication (and I suppose I will admit that if this had been mentioned in-comic, it would give some extra context to this whole situation – but I understand if it’s too late to change that now. These things happpen). How else would it take years for things to hit this point – years for this conversation to have become necessary?
zofifi
Girl! Aww 😭 Girl!
Kayjack
So all centaurs have a seasonal antler growth. Does that come with any emotional/psychological changes for either sex as well? Is this like a particularly bad time of the year to be going through this emotional strain for Talita? I know they are mainly for social signaling and not fighting but is their any vestigial heightened emotion response that accompanies it?
Jay Eaton
Not really. Antler growth in centaurs is not tied to sex hormone cycles as it is in Earth’s cervids. The only thing I can think of like that for them is pregnancy aggression. Thankfully, Talita is unlikely to ever need to deal with that kind of hormonal moodswing.
oh6
Yikes, straight to the point there, Gillie.
ttt
its called Deaf bluntness. it’s a cultural and context-rich communication style designed to give information as quickly and honestly as possible to others who are frequently stripped of that information and context by hearing society. as a result, Deaf culture is straight to the point and doesn’t value hearing culture’s longwinded or delicate ‘politeness’, which can come off as walking on eggshells to Deaf people. it can be culture shock for hearing people to encounter it!
hessian
really cool info, i didn’t know this!!
Marcie
The fact that they’re linguists might work against them. Talita doesn’t know if they see her as a friend or a potential science project. Is this an attempt at deepening their friendship, or are they gonna turn around and write a paper about her?
pelya
What even friends are for, if not for writing research papers about their struggles to learn their friends’ language?
Robin
Such potent body language in all these recent panels
Ave Zancuda
Beautiful
Apollo235
Jay, please give this woman a hug
NTLS
Okay wait a really cool detail is that the textbox casts a shadow on talita. i know this is an emotional moment but i thought that was cool
Sparky Lurkdragon
YES!! This has been my favourite part of this whole sequence since the Patreon reveals.
galmetallic
the SYMBOLISM
ttt
talita is also talking to a xenolinguist who speaks a language her body can’t produce. except talita has way worse baggage she needs to address and hasn’t for decades due to not having the emotional tools she clearly needs.
but yeah this kind of thing would be addressed in humans with therapy, medication, and normalization by meeting with others. but talita has resisted meeting other centaurs, *centaur-compatible food* is hard to come by let alone medication developed–which it probably hasnt been, considering how strict centaur society seems to be–and who knows about therapy, if talita has done it or if its helpful for centaurs. i wonder if movement therapy or accellerated resolution therapy or EMDR would be helpful for a centaur’s neurological/psychological makeup.
also note: no wonder gillie hates the app. she keeps having to look at it instead of being able to read body language and the careful microexpressions talita makes. that must be horrible, cutting off another channel of communication for her. i’d also feel gross pointing my phone at somebody all the time, especially if there were nothing i could do about it. it’s not like gillie can suddenly learn to hear or talk aloud.
Vinemaple
I keep forgetting that Talita and the Touati-Sharpes are “work friends,” even when they’re usually so easy around each other. We’ve heard in AMAs (suspiciously convenient ones) how Talita is stuck at that point I always get stuck with in my IRL: “Is this person really going to be my friend, or am I about to get hurt again?”
I guess I want to see them be besties so bad, that I overlook how they’ve never shared as much as they’re sharing now, because of Bip.
un_pogaz
I think it’s hard to explain in such clear-cut terms just how much dysmorphia work hard on Talita.
Really looking foraward of Gillie’s reaction to this revelation. And if Idrisah have already some pieces of this puzzle, I don’t think she ever imagined it would be that bad.
Vinemaple
I just realized (sorry, morning coffee brain) that the Touati-Sharpes interact with aliens all day, every day. It’s their job to deal with the cultural and linguistic gaps. It’s possible they haven’t yet internalized what growing up as the only one of her species, among Humans, has affected Talita.
HAL9000
and they’ve never interacted with a centuar other then talita before, so they have no idea just how deep her socialisation/species issues go. they dont realise she isnt a “normal” centaur
Zidane
love the detail of the speech bubble casting a shadow on talita in the last panel
Vinemaple
This is also one of the most alien poses we’ve seen Talita drawn realistically in. The twisted neck, the sideways eyelids making her nicitating membranes look like nicitating membranes, her facial integument all ruffled, her hand looking more than usually strange and clawlike, her trunk curled fully back over her closed mouth so it’s unclear where her voice is coming from, the extra detail in her nostrils… even the reflections in her eyes seem to remind us they’re protected by oil instead of mucus.
This is one of the most powerful things one can do, when one can draw the same character in such a wide range of detail. An artist can really hit their audience over the head with an emotional beat, this way. It’s the other side of the silly Idrisah faces. I’m so jealous, I’m still trying to figure out a *standard* way to draw my Qhantchiki.
40
Well you can’t just namedrop your little guys without showing them off!
Teod
She really really needs a hug. Regular hugs even. When was the last time she’s been hugged?
Vinemaple
It feels weird to admit this, but I think hugging a crying Centaur would feel really nice. I guess the object ought to always be to hold the person THROUGH their crying, and not to MAKE them stop crying, but I would still feel weird for enjoying the vibration rumbling through my entire body.
blythe
Im with gillie here ngl
sure it’s an explanation but almost certainly not a good reason to not try. if theres human signs adapted for *avian* hands a centaur can do it
Adrienne
Even going to a different country and learning to speak a language that pronounces words in ways you never have is intimidating… so I can only imagine what it’s like to be raised by a species where it’s physically impossible for you to ever fit in completely with anyone 🥲
K
I’ve seen in side comics where she’s not been allowed to participate in activities with other children due to being a centaur and instructors worrying about her strength. Now we’re seeing the effects of exclusion and living in a society that was literally not made for you. I want to give Talita a hug 🙁
Greebus
I like the shadow of the speech bubble on Talita’s body.
boxesofboxes
Op, there it is. We all knew it, but now the ladies do, too.
eterna
oooooouh the shadow under the speech bubble, all that space around a single word. the weight
Arcstone
Someone hug her. :c