I didn't have my shit together yesterday, so you all are getting an anomalous Friday post. It features: man-made horrors beyond comprehension, and an extremely deep lore callback. Readers of this comic often ask the characters about their favorite animals, likely because they are Creature Enthusiasts, but Idrisah is the only one of the main cast who is a fellow Creature Enthusiast.
Transcript
Paroxysmall asked: Idrisah, Gillie, have either of you had pets before?
Gillie: (ASL) My daddy is a ball python breeder, if that counts? I've never really been a pet person. Snakes and reptiles are neat though.
Idrisah: Oh, I had SO many pets as a kid. It makes me cringe now, but I was constantly begging my mom to buy me these trendy GMO pets that barely live a year. The companies producing them never bother to give them better longevity, because they just want people to buy replacements. It's ghoulish. I remember having glowfrogs, neoraptors, minidragons, toppies, domestic bats, castle ants, weekers... The worst was pocket dogs. Those things had a deathwish. One escaped the cage and strangled itself in my bug net, the other somehow chewed its way into the top of its water bottle and drowned. My mom never got me anything as large as a typ cat, buuut... there was one exception... On one of our family trips to Earth, my uncle trapped this feral catfish dragon. They're really invasive in South Asia, so it's illegal to release them. I named her Dibi, befriended her with bits of fried fish, and begged for days for my parents to let me keep it. She lived with us in Nexus Jovia for 11 years. I still miss her...
31 thoughts on “RttS Reader Questions 34”
Entguarde
good god what IS a pocket dog??? is it actually a canine???? oh my god it looks like it would be so easy to accidentally crush. oh my god that is atrocious
mossrabbit
honestly i think its impossible to be an animal lover if you dont look back at your past and weep for the animals you unknowingly mistreated. i still shiver thinking about my poor rat and my hamsters, but its a sign of growth to know you wrong by those little guys. honestly it makes sense that companies would still use cute, cheap, and badly made things to manipulate kids into making their parents buy them stuff, only now instead of toxic plastic we’re using living breathing animals! (whose production may or may not produce its own waste that may or may not be toxic)
capitalist biohorror is such a fun point of conflict <3
JoB
> Those things had a deathwish.
Well, it fits the scheme(ing), I suppose. No better guarantee that the parents will buy again than making the pet commit suicide right in front of the kid’s eyes any way it can. :-Z
… is that a halo floating above Dibi?? Canonically, or just to visualize the ex-
parrotGMO status here … ?wingedhorror
I think the halo serves to communicate that 1) she was a favorite and 2) she dead.
Eux
EXCELLENT creatures…..oh idrisah……this is such good lore
A Box Of Fox
DIBI!
Amanda/OwlBear
catfish dragon so cute
Skadoosh
With those short lifespans, are the companies even maintaining breeding stock or do they just keep cloning artificial embryos and raise them in incubators?
wingedhorror
I assume industrial scale cloning. If you want them to keep being bought from you, you don’t engineer them to be capable of independent breeding. (Sorta/kinda like how Apple doesn’t like people being able to repair their products.)
joeytwoeyes
DIBI LIVES!! Well, Dibi dies. But Dibi existed!
Zuorai
Big fan of the studio ghibi lookin chinchilla creature. But yeesh, the pocket dogs, now that’s grim
Joysweeper
Deebs! I’m glad, I’d wondered if catfish dragons still existed. Love a hardy beast that can be easily tamed. and ball pythons still winning I see!
hmm yeah if the overton window is radically shifted for tinkering with *humans*… these *would* be awfully cute, I bet versions that lived longer and had good quality of life would be a lot more expensive huh.
John Varley’s Steel Beach has a mention of cats and dogs that were modified to be forever kittens and puppies but a lot of science fiction kinda ignores or neglects that humans really like pets, and in a wide range of ways at that. It’s hard to imagine us leaving all of them behind.
Filiya
The catfish dragon is also GMO, right? Why does it live so long? Was it bred for a different purpose, or was it just lucky?
TheOneAndOnlyVoid
It might have been an old gmh when companies didn’t make them live short lifespans for trends.
Joysweeper
Not a trendy pet, I’m thinking. It’s bigger than the pocket pets, and there’d be demand for a companion that stuck around for a while and was hardy.
TheBeaft
Ok but the inherent horror of man playing god aside, those castle ants look and sound awesome.
NotOkapi
I know it cannot be good for them to waste energy on building “castles” and that they’ve definitely been otherwise fucked with to be kid friendly but the inherent joy of bugs Building Things… understandable if tragic.
Skadoosh
They don’t exactly need to scavenge for food, so they can waste all the energy they want. It just might not be great for the environmental conditions inside the nest. But it would take a few years to build a proper colony, so maybe the kits were just a bunch of workers harvested from a lab colony+a bottle of queen pheromones so the people wouldn’t be able to keep them going forever?
JoB
> the inherent joy of bugs Building Things…
You’ve obviously never watched Phase IV. 😉
Rob
That is one seriously creepy movie!
wingedhorror
YES!
Or the Outer Limits’ “Sandkings” https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0667945/
petra
wonder how much those trendy pets cost if they were designed for people to be enamoured with their novelty……. i’m gonna say a little more expensive than a hamster??
also i remember seeing that slug creature in the Depths of RTTS Tumblr, but i did not know of its Lore
hurgaburga
ooh are people gonna have a lot of questions here
also the fate of idrisah’s menagerie probably should have been expected, even 300 years in the future we still have flashy overpriced pets whose health is an afterthought, and of course something with the worst aspects of dogs and hamsters combined.
i hope at least some of these creatures can have more healthy and fullfilling lives under the right care
and also DIBI IS CANON AGAIN!!!1!!!!!!11!1!!
(but hes dead so-)
Light-In-The-Fog
Man made humans? Is that a transcript error?
Jay Eaton
Typo
Light_In_The_Fog
No problem :3 thx for the friday post 🙂
Tumorhead
DIBI I LOVE YOU!!
Origamigryphon
Noooo, Dibi was not only retconned, but killed off 😭
Joey
I won’t even get rats cause the live such a short time. These little buddies would break my heart 😭. Why are the picket dogs low key hamsters though lol.
Filiya
My friend had a rat. She was incredibly smart and sweet. And she lived for such a tragically short time. After that, I became even more doubtful that I would ever decide to get one myself. It was hard enough seeing, even with someone else’s pet, how that little person developed and faded away in just 2 years.
NotOkapi
THE GRAND RETURN OF DIBI!!!