xenosaurus

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comic about dinosaurs

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Diagram of my kitten who fell asleep on my lap that i drew through tears. Pleawse. I cant get up

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it's always really funny to read reviews of the murderbot books that are like 'we eventually learn that the secunit is not a mindless automaton after all but a person, who hacked the module that controls its behavior and just wants to watch its tv shows in peace' as if that isn't literally the first thing we learn about it. like, the first sentence:

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One of those days.

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Grocery shopping

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youtube that is a big question

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absolutely enamored with your shades setting. I'm always a sucker for settings where kids are granted an animal companion in some way, and I love when people poke the consequences of things like this with a stick. You've mentioned that there are procedures to modify dangerous shades, and that flare was allowed to go unmodified because he was cute- but I imagine there are instances where an abused child (and shade, perhaps) winds up being traumatized by the forced separation and modifcation

Oh, absolutely, shade adjustments are hard on everybody involved. Just at base level, assuming the changes are minor and well tolerated, you still have to deal with:

A multiple day hospital stay for a shade that is usually equivalent to a third grader

The social stigma of having “made your shade wrong” that your peers have definitely noticed applies to you

The government is now aware of your family and CPS intervention can cause its own issues if it becomes necessary

How abusive or neglectful parents might react to an extended legal responsibility that is their child’s “fault”

There’s also always the cases that get REJECTED by the government when they really shouldn’t be, because budget cuts happen and there isn’t enough funding to go around. So now you have a fire risk in your house, or a shade that needs a water tank you have to maintain (hi Leech), or a struggling kid with a bad temper and a shade that bites people. Things can escalate very quickly!

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This is what leech’s little face looks like.

He says ( ˶°ㅁ°) !!

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TJ is a woman in her early 30s who also works as a security guard, she’s the one who hooked Flare up with his job. TJ pours basically all of her money into adaptative tech and fun activities for Leech, her shade (she calls him her brother).

Leech is not actually a leech. He’s a lamprey-sea snake sort of mashup, weird little wiggly fish thing with scales and a toothy suction cup for a mouth. TJ thinks he’s the cute. It is not a commonly shares opinion.

as a little treat for myself, I’ve been worldbuilding a “children get a magical beast companion” setting that is almost entirely down the “health and safety complications” rabbit hole

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The next couple of characters are Flare’s main support system- a human-shade duo named TJ and Leech. They’re part of a relatively recent spiritual movement referred to in-universe as “shade parallelism”, which tends to get banned as a cult in particularly traditional communities.

Shade parallelists believe that shades are not the creation of their human partners, but something akin to a twin that is born at the same time as their human. They exist ‘parallel’ to their human until they learn what shape will allow them to be accepted by them.

In practice, these are people who believe their shades are their siblings, not their possessions, and deserve equal status to humans- and they take equal rights for human minorities equally seriously. It goes directly against a lot of religious fundamentalism and cultural traditions while also being seen as strange or nonsensical. As such, a lot of political movements and youth subcultures that share their philosophy are accused of being parallelists, even if they aren’t spiritually aligned.

In circles pushing for radical change in almost any social sphere, parallelists are usually seen as a little out there but widely beloved regardless. They show up to protests, organize transportation for people and shades that are underserved by public transit, host “orphaned” shades that have nowhere to go in their homes, and are the core of open source 3D printed accessibility tools for humans and shades alike.

as a little treat for myself, I’ve been worldbuilding a “children get a magical beast companion” setting that is almost entirely down the “health and safety complications” rabbit hole

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I had a societal question about your new shade-themed setting - what are the views on human/shade romantic relationships? Are they generally tolerated, and are they sometimes considered to be relationships with the shade's owner by proxy?

so I thought about this a bit when I first started working on the worldbuilding basics and decided that all shades are aroace! the watsonian theory is that because shades don't have a biological incentive to pair up (they don't reproduce!), their social instincts are built differently.

the doylist reason is that, while I'm famously down to clown with humans hooking up with aliens and monsters, most shades are very similar to non-anthropomorphic real world animals, and that's a can of worms I'd rather avoid.

shades adjusting to their human partners getting into romantic relationships is a really interesting topic, though! I'm going to get into how some people prioritize their shades as family members vs significant others as family members in the main post!

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An older comic from when I used to work at Build-A-Bear

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got a phonecall from my dad and he said "hey. you gotta come out here. i want you to see something" in a very serious tone so i went outside and

Bnnuy

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The problem isn't the over designed twinks or the silly horse girls or the goofy cookies it's the gambling. You guys know it's the gambling right? I need to you all to know the problem with gatcha games is that they're just normalizing gambling addictions to younger generations.

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I really can’t believe we all grew up together on this goddamn bitch of a website

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I just noticed my darling baby boy (cat) sitting in his little loft bed about 5 inches away from the most delightful sunbeam, so I scooted it into the sunlight for him and he looked me with the biggest widest expression. I don’t think he knew that was an option. I think I just blew his whole little mind