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...
78 thoughts on “RttS Reader Questions 34”
Mitta
GMO humans! Humans modded to work for space companies! GMO pets that barely live a year! Capitalist horrors beyond our comprehension!
Arcstone
https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_fullsize/plain/did:plc:rp2swpdpu56ugdcockaw4ucx/bafkreifmy65hvyll5pccdswql45ot6cxc2mnunwfjl2hbwqybqtavwxtyq@jpeg
O hai
Foxqlove
Are the GMO pets truly chimeras, as in, a single organism with cells from multiple different zygotes, or do they grow from a zygote with recombinant DNA? Or secret third thing?
HAL9000
it’s dibi! retconned and then making a reappearance as a dead pet… rip my little lizard friend
HAL9000
wait hang on its not even a lizard is it. salamader catfish thing friend
HAL9000
anyway this reminds me of my own childhood and begging my ma for those dyed chicks in markets only for the dog to eat most of them 🙁 or turtles in little keychains that died after like a week even if you put them in a bowl. humanity never changes huh
Enai
Turtles in keychains?? Poor things… whatever happened to using plastic figurines for that purpose? They can be made to look very lifelike (hello, Schleich!), don’t suffer, and don’t risk the wrath of the authorities for illegal trade in endangered animals.
HAL9000
huh i thought this was like a known thing, anyway here’s an article on it. its not just china that does it but tbh its more common to see like little fish stalls selling sandwich bags of fish & creatures rather then dedicated keychains.
JoB
I still remember what nowadays would be called a shitstorm, back in the 70s or 80s if memory serves well, when a fashion show included a pair of transparent high-heels with two live goldfish swimming in the heels. I don’t think that that kind of … goods would remain on sale for long here (Europe), not back then, not now, and not at any time in between … but yeah, China is a different matter so far …
Enai
Ew, humans. What are we even doing :-((
Sometimes, I want to exit the species.
Arcstone
what in the godamn
Arcstone
Sorry, turtles in keychains, what?
Darth Biomech
It’s nice to see that, in the future, the concept of animal rights is dead, apparently. *eye twitch*
Though, to be fair, you can’t have it and biopunk in the same sentence, I guess…
That Neoraptor is cute as hell though, I’d caved in. Bastards know how to hook you.
Gar G
I honestly love that some of these are a thing but it really is tragic and sadly reminiscent of real life too
A lot of fancy goldfish and toy dog breeds, for example, were bred for looks, often at the cost of health problems brought on by their deformities, along with poor genetics
Not to mention the whole thing of them just wanting people to replacements, sadly the fate of a great many pets that die young due to improper care (goldfish being the most notorious example, made worse by how if they manage to survive in horrible conditions it gives people the impression that they’re doing something right)
Gar G
Yes I’m a pet person, how could you tell
MyUniverseinaBox
Haha, capitalism
💀
Hydroloxguy
If I may ask, exactly how do you ask questions meant for the characters?
Antarctopelta
At the end of every chapter there’s a few days’ period where a Google form opens up for asking questions for the AMAs, then closes. It’s closed right now
JoB
When the last pages of a chapter appear, Jay posts a link to a web form, like here.
Be warned, however, that there’s a grown stash of still-unused Qs to pull from …
Greebus
The Victorians are green with envy at the levels of unethical dog breeding humanity has now achieved.
Claire
I like snakes because snakes say :3
JoB
[t-shirt I actually bought]
Michi
Holy genetically planned obsolescence, Batman. That future of yours is scary at times.
Marcie
You gotta upgrade to Premium if you actually want longevity
Fallingfeather
DIBIIIIII!!! And man, I can’t even blame her, all of those animals are cute as fuck. But I’d rather them be able to function like actual animals…
Vinemaple
I need to go dig Dibi out of Jay’s Tumblr. She was clearly well-loved by the community!
JoB
Here ya go … for a start, I guess.
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
Jay Eaton
It is a domestic dog modified to be the size of a mouse. It has some chimeric genes but mostly to make its adult body size more viable.
Squidmerchant
I probably wouldn’t get any of these cause I can’t stand the idea of a pet with a short lifespan but man… toppies would tempt me…
Jay Eaton
That’s how they get you. You must resist.
spunce
WIN FOR DIBI REMEMBERERS #DIBI
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.
A Box Of Fox
Maybe even third option, symbolic to show she was such a gentle little angel of a genetically-modified salamander beastie?
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.)
Chase Wanderstar
Also, if it’s a clone, you don’t need to worry about making sure you have two of the same sex if you don’t want your two critters to become a dozen critters, they’re all gonna be the same sex as the one they’re cloned from anyway. Many parents of kids that want a pocket pet would see this as a convenience feature.
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.
Beast
Dibi, my friend Dibi!
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.
Jay Eaton
They are part of an older generation of GMO pets, from before planned obsolescence became an industry norm. (Though there are larger and longer lived modern GMO pets… but Idrisah’s mom wasn’t buying them, they’re expensive.) Like chabbits, catfish dragons were a surprisingly robust chimera design, and after too many got released by negligent and irresponsible owners, they also proved to be very good at taking care of themselves. They’re invasive riparian predators in southeast Asia, India, and Pakistan, as well as some regions of central America and SE North America.
ShadowWas
Horrible and very realistic … I dun like this future….
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/
Vinemaple
“Sandkings” was based on a terrifying novella by George R. R. Martin. One of the many disturbing “weird tales” my high school math teacher shared with me.
This is a PDF link: https://forwearemany.files.wordpress.com/2009/04/sandkings.pdf
Casey
I feel like if I was a soulless corporate type trying to extract money from people by making GMO novelty pets, I wouldn’t give them super short lifespans. Too much of a risk of kids and parents getting burned out by the constant pet death. A more lucrative but equally evil option might be to give them longer lifespans, but to make them dependent on some proprietary nutrient so that you can continue to make money off of overpriced food.
Someone please find a way to ban the idea I just proposed so that no one can ever use it.
Vinemaple
That’s probably how they do it nowadays, in RTTS. The short-lived ones was probably something a board member insisted was the best way to go.
Jay Eaton
Oh don’t worry those exist too. Idrisah’s mom was not super keyed into her kid’s pet hobby but she was savvy enough to recognize the pets with proprietary feed and vet care were probably a bigger waste of money than ones with a rat’s lifespan.
Skadoosh
Even pet rats make it 2-3 years on average before dying of multiple health problems caused by hundreds of generations of inbreeding (or up to 5 years in some cases if they’re well bred) so a 1 year lifespan in an animal that’s entirely artificially designed is just evil.
Falconette
They probably *do* have a rat’s lifespan if they’re cared for by someone who fully knows what they’re doing. A 9-year-old… doesn’t. Think all the present-day shocking tales of unusual hamster deaths caused by kinds of negligence an innocent child wouldn’t logically predict.
HAL9000
rat’s lifespan is not due to their breeding- wild rats raised in captivity do not live any longer and often die younger even in ideal conditions. its just the nature of rats to not live particularly long, and human breeding efforts actually elongated their lifespan overall which is why they present issues that their wild relatives don’t get becuase they live long enough to get them. wolves and other wild things are the same way, a wild wolf will not live as long as a domestic dog even in captivity, hell even humans these days die more often of age related dieases then historically due to improved medical care and longer lifespans
Enai
@HAL wild wolves reach up to 17 years of life in captivity, and in the wilderness up to 13 years, according to wikipedia. For dogs, lifespan reaches from ~7 (Dobermans, Pugs and similarly unhealthy breeds) to 17 years, making wolves look precisely equally as (genetically) long lived as dogs. So, what makes you think humans bred dogs for longevity? If we had, there would be some results by now, wouldn’t there?
TJ
Genetically modified animals becoming invasive species is a fascinating concept.
Vinemaple
It’s already happened in North American farming. If your crops get cross-pollinated with the big corporate farm’s proprietary GMO crops, whoops, you just committed IP theft.
And some of those GMO crops have “terminator” genes, that prevent them from setting viable seed, requiring the farmer to keep buying seed from the company every year. Those genes also hop to non-GMO crops, as well.
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 🙂
Michi
Are there other kinds of humans?