Wapsi Square Forum

Thor wrote: EDIT: Hmm. I would have expected a new strip to have dropped by now...Are we going to have to wait until Friday?

Probably Monday. I expect fillers until then.

illiad wrote:Ok where do you want the few thousand female satyrs I found???

I think grammar or semantics is the problem... Do tell, what is a female bull??? or a female goat???

Semantics and cultural ignorance. Those are all fauns.


To answer your other two questions, "cow" and "goat". "Nanny goat" or "jenny goat" for the females. If you meant to type "ram" instead of "goat", the answer is "ewe".

Wapsi wrote:

Gyrrakavian wrote:Ahw...... And he's been so good with the mythologies so far. Satyrs don't have horns (they're 1/2 horse), so he'd be a faun (1/2 goat and with goat horns) or a descendant of Pan (also 1/2 goat).

Roman Mythology satyrs have horns, goat legs, and a large penis. Greek Mythology satyrs have horse ears, human legs, a large penis, and a horse tail. Both were depicted as lustful and sexually forward. Not to worry, I know my Mythology inside and out.

Sorry to sound like a whiner. It's just that for whatever reason the whole faun-satyr triggers my OCD. Again, my apologies.

Gyrrakavian wrote:

Wapsi wrote:

Gyrrakavian wrote:Ahw...... And he's been so good with the mythologies so far. Satyrs don't have horns (they're 1/2 horse), so he'd be a faun (1/2 goat and with goat horns) or a descendant of Pan (also 1/2 goat).

Roman Mythology satyrs have horns, goat legs, and a large penis. Greek Mythology satyrs have horse ears, human legs, a large penis, and a horse tail. Both were depicted as lustful and sexually forward. Not to worry, I know my Mythology inside and out.

Sorry to sound like a whiner. It's just that for whatever reason the whole faun-satyr triggers my OCD. Again, my apologies.

Be careful if you ever delve into Native American lore. Were-critters can vary between neighboring tribes, or even branches within tribes. For example, Kiowas don't use anything that was once a real bear. We can have symbols, like carved stone or wood figures, or painted depicions on tipis or clothing. But no real bear claws, or skins, stuff like that. Just about all other surrounding tribes will have all of that, and will even eat bear meat. Ma raised us mostly Kiowa (as Pop wasn't strongly brought up in either Choctaw or Arapaho ways), and even her mother, who was full Comanche, deferred to her Kiowa husband's traditions when raising the kids. I'm in the middle of Kipowa country anyway, and have had to tell jewelry makers they won't be selling any bear claw jewelry around these parts.

Gyrrakavian wrote:

illiad wrote:Ok where do you want the few thousand female satyrs I found???

I think grammar or semantics is the problem... Do tell, what is a female bull??? or a female goat???

Semantics and cultural ignorance. Those are all fauns.


To answer your other two questions, "cow" and "goat". "Nanny goat" or "jenny goat" for the females. If you meant to type "ram" instead of "goat", the answer is "ewe".

yeah., I was just pointing out the idiocy of 'naming conventions'.... eg, there is NO 'female bull' - it is called a cow... why there are so many names for basically the same 'bovine' species????

Chinese keep it simple.. 2015 is the year of the sheep - An adult female sheep is referred to as a ewe (/juː/), an intact male as a ram or occasionally a tup, a castrated male as a wether, and a younger sheep as a lamb..

TazManiac wrote:Up until now, perhaps he was an introverted studious "I'm fine by myself" loaner but with the recent 'demonstrative expressiveness' going on, he's even more gun shy. maybe.

Based on what's been said, it seems more likely that Jacob is a loner and his sister Randi is a loaner.

illiad wrote:yeah., I was just pointing out the idiocy of 'naming conventions'.... eg, there is NO 'female bull' - it is called a cow... why there are so many names for basically the same 'bovine' species????

Oh, it's worse than that. If you see a herd of cattle over there, and all of them wander off except for one, and you can't determine (due to distance, tall grass, or whatever) whether that one is male or female or neutered-male... there actually IS a word for it, but not many people know the word, and it's usually used in plural (the singular and plural forms are identical).

(The word is "kine".)

Oh, and the difference between an ox and a steer lies in what humans plan for the future of the animal after the surgery that made it not a bull.

[quote="Warrl
Oh, and the difference between an ox and a steer lies in what humans plan for the future of the animal after the surgery that made it not a bull.[/quote]


And I have recipies for the trimmings...

Dr. Otter wrote:

Opus the Poet wrote: Eyebrows...

What the Hell was that about?!?

That my good man is FLCL (pronounced Fooley Cooley) when the space bureaucrat loses his add-on rectangular eyebrows... I highly recommend watching the whole series (6 shows) to get some really wild laughs. Be alert though because the creators changed animation styles willy-nilly for humor.

Gyrrakavian wrote:Ahw...... And he's been so good with the mythologies so far. Satyrs don't have horns (they're 1/2 horse), so he'd be a faun (1/2 goat and with goat horns) or a descendant of Pan (also 1/2 goat).

And Medusa was a terrifying ferocious killer monster, ultimately beheaded by Perseus. And Oedipus solved the sphinx's riddle, causing the sphinx to kill herself.

There are two things to keep in mind here.

First, that there is no such thing as a “definitive” description or definition of what most things in Greco-Roman mythology were or did. Their depictions changed over time, had regional variations, and many were themselves actually adaptions or corruptions of other myths acquired from overseas during the Greek orientalisation period. Today's popular opinion of what these myths say is built up on a majority opinion of the few fragments of story that have managed to survive the last few thousand years. Even with this tiny remaining sample selection, though, you can often find several radically different versions of any particular mythology.

Second, the world of Wapsi Square isn't the same as the one that you and I live in (or so we assume. . .). In our world, all of these mythological critters are basically just inventions of somebody's imagination thousands of years ago. Since they created the characters, their descriptions of them are automatically “correct”. It's like how Tolkien's description of hobbits is correct, because he's the guy who came up with them in the first place. There aren't really any hobbits (Homo floresiensis aside), so there wasn't anything for him to be mistaken about when he tells us about their appearance and habits. We can take his descriptions of them as a hundred percent accurate and definitive.

In the world of Wapsi Square, on the other hand, all of these mythological creatures really exist. All of the myths and legends about them aren't the definitive sources that created the beings, but rather something along the lines of attempts at describing something that has been observed. And if you've ever read any contemporary attempts at nonfiction, such as the travelogues written by Herodotus, you'll see that these descriptions of real things didn't always match all that closely with the reality. The stories of gods and titans and centaurs and gorgons and fauns and satyrs and everything else are just sort of muddled and often incorrect, a fact that has been mentioned many times in-story. So by the rules of the story, any depiction of a mythological being given by Mr. Taylor is the correct and definitive one, while any divergence from accepted “correct” mythology is due to the original myths being wrong. These aren't the satyrs and sphinxes and gorgons of mythology, these are the satyrs and sphinxes and gorgons of Wapsi Square.

Think of this comic as possessing its own mythology, independent from but parallel to our own.

Yeah, I mean, the goddess Mayahuel for whom the Mayan culture was named is ditzy idiot savant!

TazManiac wrote:btw- this whole Satyr thing can be cleaned up real quick like with a single scene at the Library where two are standing over an opened, impressively thick looking tome and one says to the other*

"see? heres where they got the whole thing mixed up, so nowadays we just go with it..."

* Slight edit for emphasis...

TazManiac wrote:

TazManiac wrote:btw- this whole Satyr thing can be cleaned up real quick like with a single scene at the Library where two are standing over an opened, impressively thick looking tome and one says to the other*

"see? heres where they got the whole thing mixed up, so nowadays we just go with it..."

* Slight edit for emphasis...

I saw what you did there, Taz.

kingklash wrote:Be careful if you ever delve into Native American lore. Were-critters can vary between neighboring tribes, or even branches within tribes.

Following up on that line of thought a bit, I researched one particular Native American mythic "beast" that I thought Atsali might have encountered by now: the thunderbird. Varying stories of the Thunderbird are found all across the U.S. and Canada, including both the northeast (where Atsali is living now) and the southwest (where she and Katherine had the Big Adventure). If thunderbirds exist in the Wapsiverse and have a human morph, they might well be around for her to meet... possibly even attending the same high school... and yet there's no sign of them. We know that Pablo is open to Native American characters (Shelly and family, and the ursamorph twins)... and yet, he's chosen to (apparently) pair up Atsali with a member of a related Greco-Roman mythology.

Maybe thunderbirds just aren't suitable partners for a siren, despite both being winged paranormals? Maybe they're too violent in nature (some thunderbird legends have them as being pretty bloodthirsty). In any case, Paul has kept them off-stage and has brought in a family of satyrs instead.

♬ And she'll have ♪ faun, ♪ faun, ♪ faun
now that Daddy's kept the t-birds away ♬

(Places a turquoise Thunderbird into the Pun Jar)

Dave wrote:

kingklash wrote:Be careful if you ever delve into Native American lore. Were-critters can vary between neighboring tribes, or even branches within tribes.

Following up on that line of thought a bit, I researched one particular Native American mythic "beast" that I thought Atsali might have encountered by now: the thunderbird. Varying stories of the Thunderbird are found all across the U.S. and Canada, including both the northeast (where Atsali is living now) and the southwest (where she and Katherine had the Big Adventure). If thunderbirds exist in the Wapsiverse and have a human morph, they might well be around for her to meet... possibly even attending the same high school... and yet there's no sign of them. We know that Pablo is open to Native American characters (Shelly and family, and the ursamorph twins)... and yet, he's chosen to (apparently) pair up Atsali with a member of a related Greco-Roman mythology.

Maybe thunderbirds just aren't suitable partners for a siren, despite both being winged paranormals? Maybe they're too violent in nature (some thunderbird legends have them as being pretty bloodthirsty). In any case, Paul has kept them off-stage and has brought in a family of satyrs instead.

♬ And she'll have ♪ faun, ♪ faun, ♪ faun
now that Daddy's kept the t-birds away ♬

(Places a turquoise Thunderbird into the Pun Jar)

SA-WEET!!!

Sgt. Howard wrote:

SA-WEET!!!

I bet it can't fly, either.

Atomic wrote:I saw what you did there, Taz.

I thought this was pretty funny myself...

Warrl wrote: Based on what's been said, it seems more likely that Jacob is a loner and his sister Randi is a loaner.

AnotherFairportfan wrote:

Sgt. Howard wrote:I bet it can't fly, either.

ANYTHING can fly... at least ONCE.. even if it was only from far UP in the air to the ground... but it FLEW!!... or as Woody would say "Falling with Style!"

scantrontb wrote:

AnotherFairportfan wrote:I bet it can't fly, either.

ANYTHING can fly... at least ONCE.. even if it was only from far UP in the air to the ground... but it FLEW!!... or as Woody would say "Falling with Style!"

Monty Python's Flying Circus, Episode 11

(Man holding cat enters.)

Compère That is Tiddles, I believe?
Man Yes, this is, this is Tiddles.
Compère Yes, and what does she do?
Man She flies across the studio and lands in a bucket of water.
Compère By herself?
Man No, I fling her.
Compère Well that's extremely interesting, Ladies and gentlemen - Mr Don Savage and Tiddles.

(Man whirls the cat round and round. He lets go of the cat, it flies across studio. A hollow splash and a meow. Quick shot of a real cat sitting in a bucket.)