Talita has eight eyelids total. The nictitating membranes appear white but are really semi-translucent, most non-Talita centaurs use them to protect their eyes from bright light, irritating liquids and dust. The membranes can twist about 90 degrees in orientation, while the outer feathered eyelids are fixed in position.
Transcript
Talita frowns and shakes her head.
Talita: (ASL) I don’t have eyebrows.
Gillie: (ASL) You’ve got those… uh… white eyelids?
Talita: (English) My nictitating membranes?
She squints the two white inner "eyelids" that lie underneath her outer feathered eyelids.
Talita: (English) I do use them to imitate human expressions. I picked it up as a kid. It's kind of a reflex now.
Gillie: (ASL) Try mimicking the eyebrow signals with them.
Talita grasps her neck nervously and stares off into the distance, considering this.
Talita: (English) Oh… I… I don’t know… It wouldn’t really… look similar…
Gillie looks at the transcription on her phone, unimpressed. She puts it down and flutters a hand to distract Talita from her anxious spiral.
Gillie: (ASL) Hey hey hey hey! Stop over-thinking. Copy me.
20 thoughts on “Runaway to the Stars: Page 193”
Fallingfeather
I love/appreciate the detail that she automatically stops signing as soon as she gets reminded of how her body is different. She’s not going to get over that all at once!
Gar G
Gotta make do with what you have and she isn’t gonna judge 🙂
ryttyr
How does that many eyelids even work mechanically?
kalikat
four eyelids per eye (upper and lower nictitating membranes, upper and lower outer eyelids)
edenmachine5457
.four eyelids per eye- the upper and lower eyelids (the white rimmed ones you see in the top right corner), then the two nictating membrane eyelids below those. the nictating membrane eyelids are between the top set of eyelids, and the eyes. the top right panel shows it pretty well
JoB
Now I’m really looking forward to future pages. YEET!!
Famout
Eight eyelids?!? Gawd damn, the more we learn about centaurs the more they seem built to handle anything. I suspect the only real weakness is calorie intake demands.
Oh and social anxiety too clearly.
Aidan
I mean humans have 4 so we’re not too far off, just need some plastic surgery and some muscle reconstruction around the eye and it’ll be totally 100% the same
Septemberdale
Eh, having two brains in separate parts of the body seems like it would result in reaction time also being a difficulty. Probably not extremely damaging on their homeworld (at least against other living beings) because people and most animals have the same issue, but might have caused some issues for Talita growing up.
Tentament
The world building page mentions their two-brain setup also leaves them susceptible to some nasty neurodegenerative diseases.
Sparky Lurkdragon
I have multiple sclerosis and it’s quite bad enough with only one brain to worry about. Centaur!MS sounds horrific.
JoB
… this is going to get interesting. I suppose that Gillie will have Talita try to angle her nictitating membranes’ edges to match the orientation of human eyebrows, but the problem is that humans (instinctively) interpret brows and (sorta-)eyelids quite differently. (Case in point, raised brows = “questioningly”/”interested” but “raised” lids = wide-eyed = “surprised”/”fearful”.)
Vinemaple
If it were me, I’d suggest a doggie head tilt.
Crypewstoast
I was thinking the same thing! Tilting your head to the side is like a universal motion of questioning/confusion/thinking. But even if then we have that one down for questions that kinda makes what she can emote through facial grammar a bit limiting
ilvos01
Good thing, too, otherwise we’d never be able to read your face.
Light_In_The_Fog
I love the way Talita sits. She just so blorp 10/10
pelya
So Talita can emote both sleepy cat eyes and assault cat eyes. And her winks can have vertical or horizontal polarization.
Greebus
I like Talita’s face in panel 5. I can tell that all this social interaction and focus on herself is wearing her out. I wonder if she was bullied as a kid, for being an alien.
Vinemaple
I thought Gillie might say that… I suppose the Heavily-Implied Incoming Centaur Workforce won’t often see Talita making eyebrow motions with her nicitating membranes, so it’s not like she’ll be freaking them out any more.
Did not realize her nicitating membranes worked like eyelids, I thought were uni-directional. I always figured Talita uses her nicitating membranes because she can twist them to look like HUMAN eyelids, she probably realized her actual (horizontal) eyelids were creeping the other kids out.
Kaamos
Less “creeping the other kids out”, more “humans think I look mad”… there’s some posts on Jay’s blog on the matter of human vs centaur expressions that touch on the fact how centaurs’ usual lowered eyelids reads as an angry face to humans!