"Women" is a social category that doesn't normally include 3 meter tall feathered hexapods with magnesium bones, even for this setting's version of humanity.
Transcript
Bip's avatar appears on the tablet in Talita's hand, shocking her.Bip: What’s up?
Talita scowls.
Talita: First of all, turn your passive mic recording off after this.
Bip: Until Monday?
Talita: Until I respond to you in text. Also…
She looks incredulous.
Talita: You called me a woman…?
Bip: Was I wrong?
Talita: No, I am. But it’s… weird… to randomly assume I’d have a human gender.
44 thoughts on “Runaway to the Stars: Page 71”
Paroxysmall
Talita’s and Bip’s faces are basically the same in the fourth + fifth panels
Joey
“Turn off your passive mic recording” strikes me as a somewhat intrusive request? I know it’s her equipment and her space, and the idea of being spied on by technology is inherently scary, but being asked to just Stop Hearing Things In Your Immediate Vicinity because you’re unfortunate enough to have ended up living in someone else’s house – it’s a little bit grim. But I might be projecting my squishy animal perception of things onto Bip here.
ZigmundJija
Every time I see Talita or any other centaur, I want to jump on the walls from an overabundance of emotions.
Gar G
Say whaaat?
Ruby
“Well, not to flaunt my ✨extraordinary✨ observation skills, but I gathered that from your way of dressing, your mannerisms and your interactions with your friends. Also, I rummaged through your personal data to find something with which to flatter you and it all refers to you as a woman, species non-withstanding.”
Origamigryphon
I love how Talita can be all angry angles in one frame, and round woobiness the next
Athelind Llewellyn Long
Angrles!
Liza
“*I* know I’m a woman, how do *YOU* know I’m a woman?”
anon y mouse
I love Talita’s face in the panel when she goes “You called me a woman…?” I can’t really parse it but it’s clearly not her being angry or frightened. Happy, maybe? It must be so so nice to find one more person who doesn’t exoticize her. Makes me happy that she’s happy. :>
evileeyore
“It must be so so nice to find one more person who doesn’t exoticize her.”
My take? this is one of the reasons she get’s won over to Bip’s side and ends up joining Bip’s crew.
anon y mouse
That would make sense. Bip has a good heart.
hal9000
im gonna assume its a mix of Talita’s very human name, accent, and body language. Bip’s former crew were centaurs, they must know a lot about their culture and body language, and to them Talita’s deviations is as clear as day whereas to humans, especially those with little to no exposure to other centaurs, don’t pick up on those differences since they don’t have a frame of reference.
hal9000
then again if Mel’s plans go as intended the inhabitants of Dirtball will get *really* familiar *really* fast with how proper homeplanet centaurs act, talk, and walk.
boxesofboxes
Oh man, i totally didn’t pick up on that when that page happened, my brain went to ferrets. Ooooh man. Mel, good theory, bad in practice.
Joey
Wait what’s Mel’s plan and how do you know it? I remember them asking for Talita’s apartment plans, but nothing related to home planet centaurs.
Joey
Oh never mind did a reread I see what you see now the phone call with Ohwihtiil oop.
Solidago
If I recall correctly, centaurs have three genders (at least those linked to biology), matriarch, non-reproductive female, and male, right? And I suppose the female genders are only in context of a clan. So even in translation & in assumption of cisgender, “woman” wouldn’t quite convey the whole picture of centaur sex roles.
It’s got to be part of the reason she started considering their request! Seems like Talita isn’t used to being seen as a woman. It surprises me, I’d think female alien = woman in human eyes, and even if centaur sex is difficult for humans to differentiate she presents very femininely (purely as she wants to, or is it to help others see who she is?). Wonder if she gets default he’d a lot or if aliens are just “it” to those less familiar with them.
Apollo235
In RTTS the default is they, at least for Jovian English, so Talita probably gets called they by strangers
Jay Eaton
Depends how you define gender. I feel like the reproductive hierarchy of centaurs is more comparable to a caste system or familial system, most centaur societies would have a fairly strong conception of gender as determined by sex because it is such an important element in their clan system. For instance, it’s important for maintaining the matriarch’s reproductive exclusivity, female workers are eligible to replace an old matriarch, and worker males are often wed into the entourage of allied clans to strengthen bonds.
But centaurs are also fairly androgynous and the sex of workers rarely matters outside of reproductive control, so you could definitely compare them to a sort of “eunuch” third gender class. I suspect another kind of third gender that would appear in centaur societies are female entourage members—beautiful crossdressers who are reproductively useless, but can be politically useful for the same reason other entourage marriages are, and if favored enough can replace their aging partner as matriarch.
“Woman,” to me at least, has a strong connotation of humanity (same root… human/man/woman)? Definitely in the setting this is considered a xenogender identity. More on that shortly though
Septemberdale
Man and woman come from the same root, Man, same root as Mann in German, meaning any person. Man in the modern context is actually a shortening of Werman, of the same meaning as modern English “man”, meaning specifically a male person. The “wer” portion is where we get “werewolf”, a wolfman. Woman, meanwhile, is a linguistic mutation of “wifman”, of the same meaning as modern English “woman”, a female person. It is from the “wif” portion of this that we get “wife”, a married woman, because it was socially assumed for much of history that an adult that isn’t a monk or nun will be married, even though if we look at actual records this isn’t exactly the case, and also where we get the word “midwife”, because “mid” used to be a synonym for “with” as well as meaning “central” like it does today, and a midwife was who is there in the room with a woman who is having a baby.
Meanwhile, “human” comes from a Latin root, the same root as “humus”, meaning rich earth, because we walk on the earth as opposed to gods that are usually presumably in the heavens doing gods stuff.
evileeyore
Nice break down there Septemberdale!
Zuorai
Do centaur genders have distinct names, like how “woman” is a human gender and “dun” is an avian gender?
Apollo235
Yeah I really want to know more about homeplanet Centaurs! Apart from names, the only centaur words I’ve seen are ‘penkhalla’ (presumably child) & ‘Al damech’ (presumably clan) both seen in the First Contact comic. There’s also ‘roaj’ (presumably an insult) which appears in character AMA 3, and is probably not the same language as the first two. I really hope we get a centaur lore-drop for the inter-chapter section!
Jay Eaton
Penkhalla means “little one” (Penk=person and alla=diminutive suffix). “Al damech” is “the word” since Relaghul was trying to think of synonyms at the time. “Roaj” is a different language and means essentially “Luddite.” I haven’t done any detailed language building for centaurs though because I have not yet been forced to, lmao.
Apollo235
lol understandable. Related, the short story involving Maulu, is that on hold for the book?
Jay Eaton
Can something be “on hold” if I never started it…… screams as I drown under the 4 graphic novels I have planned already
Apollo235
Ah no pressure sorry! The book, The short story, anything else, its all more RTTS lore and ill be a happy camper!
mycelium
turns out they don’t exactly care about gender enough to name them distinctly, so they don’t really have a concept of gender. the closest thing they have is their pseudo-eusocial clan hierarchy levels, being the matriarch, their entourage, and the workers. we don’t have any words in any centaur languages to describe these yet, but given how recently they were contacted and how little they seem to engage with the larger alien community, I doubt that we’ll get them in anything more than some of the supplementary material or Jay’s blog posts
Jay Eaton
In English (since dun and bright are English terms) centaurs are usually referred to by their sex (female, male) or their clan position (matriarch, entourage, worker), whichever is more relevant. Clan position is more important than sex usually, but the two are intertwined.
Centaur conceptions of gender tend to be tied to sex, but some cultures view individuals as sort of genderless until they are moved to a reproductive social position. It’s complicated and doesn’t mesh well with human or avian ideas of gender. In some ways it’s more comparable to bug ferrets, who are definitionally genderless but have age-based household role systems.
TotallySomebody
I feel like this page is calling out the readers (me included) for assuming Bip’s pronouns are soley masculine 😭
0xabad1dea
She clearly has a (stereotypically feminine) human first and last name written on her human university diploma that Bip found, and I’m guessing she clearly sounds like a native English speaker, so I don’t think it’s very surprising that Bip would infer this was a very human-cultured centaur even if she doesn’t have a convenient explanation of her backstory written down in any of those files. But maybe Talita is very used to humans not realizing that she is the most human centaur ever until they get to know her…
since I already know about Bip’s former crew from the posted background materials, I’m guessing they are noticing a lot about her body language and such too.
Wormy
i wonder if any of the centaurs on bip’s ship identified similarly to talita
feesh
it certainly seems like Bip’s crew were wayyyy more connected with their culture than Talita is, so i somewhat doubt it, but it’s a possibility!
Nadg
I knew it! Talita was flustered because she was called a woman, not (only?) because of Bip snooping in her files
evileeyore
My bet is that Bip’s former Centaur crew were all one small clan, so they were probably very ‘Centaur” in their culture.
Spinland
Oh, and mad props to Talita for not dropping (or even flinging) that tablet when Bip startled her like that. B)
g
Talita they’ve literally admitted to going through your files not even 10 minutes ago. how would they not have known
Ruby
To be fair, human paperwork could be biased to interpret other species’s identity and gender expression through a human perspective.
Spinland
Bip revealing themself to be an astute observer and interpreter of the information they’ve gleaned via poking through her files and listening into her conversations.
AnormalADN
Well, if Bip had been rummaging through her files and listening in on her conversation with Idrisah and Gillie, they probably got clued in on the fact some way or another, right?
Spinland
Jinx! 🙂
scout
first
Jay Eaton
Could we not do this here
scout
yep, sorry. i wont do it again