Don’t feel bad for it, it’s a horrible little parasite
Out-of-Placers
A story of inconvenient changes
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OOPs now has a Russian translation which updates shortly after the English pages are posted!
Now also in French:
And Ukranian:
every little victory counts in the end.
Kass better get used to it because Kass is now little, therefore all victories are little
Ah, the little menace!
Ex-menace
I recently started reading this comic. Very fascinating) I especially like the drawing and the elaboration of the lore details.
Btw, what foot did Kass use to catch that mosquito?
Zhat’s her left foot. Yinglets have feet that are almost exactly the same as zheir hands.
I think they meant “Where’s the thumb?”
For Kass at least, look for color to know if you are looking at a Arm hand (brown fur), or a Foot hand (black fur). Yinglet paws are a bit like that of monkeys, in that they all can be used to grasp things or manipulate them. Kass in using her footpaw for something other then walking, is showing some mental growth in becoming a Yinglet, which for her, is a good thing.
THE CATCHER FOOT
Hrm. I wonder if what Kass is wearing is new undies, or just some new lounge wear. I’m betting on zhe latter.
In eizher case, it’s nice to see her becoming more comfortable in her current form.
Kass has been trying to new configurations to find one that doesn’t feel wrong and weird!
(They will all feel wrong and weird because Kass is a yinglet)
Yinglet anatomy is fascinating and amusing all at the same time.
It’s amusinating
Kass has focused her chi and snatched ze bug froms ze book. *nod nods*
Sooo… shall Kass becomes ze Ying-Fu Matriarch?
*is smekked* Owies!
The Smek is a beginner art, yet used throughout the life of any master
Geh, “little parasite” may be a misnomer. You’ve got me imagining mosquitoes the size of my thumb…
Well, littler than oneself thankfully
So wait, are we talking about the yinglet, or . . . ? 😅
Right???
So what did the bug taste like?
Mostly like partially-digested blood and burnt hair
can we please have a cracked out edit where their eyes are just absolute saucer sized?
Edits are allowed and encouraged! >: D
Just wanna say, their underwear is cute, and I’m glad they’ve become comfortable enough to graduation from cloth wrappings.
They just kept shifting and falling off!
“Don’t feel bad for it”? I can’t even go at my computer in the evenings because I’ll get eaten alive by mosquitoes (and that’s after already being unable to go at it during the day because of the sun in my eyes ><), and I can't enjoy spending the weekend at a summer house because I get bitten by horseflies all over, get big horrible bites that look like they'd never heal, and THEY SPECIFICALLY TARGET ME!!! Others go completely unbitten!!!
I CHEER!!! GO, KASSEN!!! KILL THEM ALL!!!
Yeah, zhis. Unless somehow zhat was some kind of rare and endangered bug, I zhink most of us are in zhe ‘kill annoying bugs’ camp.
This is the right way to think
I really like the dilating pupils. Nice touch.
Also, that was a nice catch with that bug.
Kass is proud of it but will not brag about it because it involves being good at being a yinglet
Aside from certain specifics, this is surprisingly relatable.
So we’re all just rolling with Kass as “she/her” now, I guess, and taking the line that form determines psyche and identity?
I was kind of reading him as effectively trans, being an initially cis male now *literally* rather than figuratively “trapped in a woman’s body”, as well as a human trapped in a yinglet body … including the altered brain chemistry messing with his ability to focus, and stay awake for long periods, and in some cases emotional response to things like younglets … but all of those can be induced or neutralised with ingestion of various chemicals IRL without affecting a person’s identity or psyche. And he’d probably like to return to being a human male if possible.
Like I kinda thought that was one of the points of the story… it’s an unwanted change, and a demonstration of the mismatch between body and mind experienced by someone with dysmorphia / body or gender dysphoria. With all the emotional turmoil, existential crises, and external misidentification / altered preconceptions from others that come with… (which, well, I would personally say is happening right here in the comments, it’s a “nice” if unwelcome bit of QED).
Val, can you clarify it one way or the other, or are you keeping it deliberately vague and unstated to let people draw their own conclusions?
Val seems to be deliberately vague. People has been calling Kass both “he” and “she” and Val has answered comments which used both but has never corrected either use.
I also want to say that only this site commentariat seems to adamantly insists on using “she” for Kass, both Furaffinity and 4chan threads seems to use both with a preference for “he”. It seems to boil down to a couple users promoting Kass’s signing a report “goddamn scav bitch of Ivenmoth” as a sure proof of self-identification. Which sort of misses the point regardless of what is Kass’s identity (and to my opinion i am not sure author even wants to define the Kass’s experience in a modern gender categories).
It’s not just that, no. Kass not only used ‘her’ about herself, but even corrected ‘him’ to ‘her’ when talking with Vizlet at the Enclave in OOP 27. You could argue this was because females have a slightly higher status than males in yinglet culture, but on the face of it, it’s simply acceptance of the appropriate pronoun for a female.
That’s presumably also why the Trademaster corrected ‘mister’ to ‘miss’ in Prelude 35, and the seamstress in OOP 5 and the nurse in OOP 137 used ‘she’. I don’t recall effeminate male scavs being ‘she’, either. It just indicates that they think she’s female. Which… she is.
Besides, there are bigger fish to fry. As noted in a [currently-auto-moderated] comment on OOP 162, the change in species seems to have been been far more troubling and inconvenient for Kass than her new sex.
Oh wait, an explorer called Lopin ‘she’ in OOP 135, but only because he assumed based on what he could see (the dress), and then when he saw *more* he sort-of corrected himself. Which I guess kinda proves the point.
I have to disagree entirely. It disproves it if anything. All it shows is that people make assumptions based off of appearance at first meeting, but can entirely change what they think of the same entity if offered more comprehensive evidence to the contrary.
Lopin was dressed up as a stereotypical girly-girl, on top of already looking effeminate by human standards. So the otherwise uninformed interloper assumed female, and certainly *feminine*, therefore “she” or “girl” was the safest bet. On revelation of male genitals, that changed – though at least in our current real world that might itself actually be a mistaken recategorisation until you can confirm that they were merely dressing up because they lost a bet or someone needed an ad-hoc mannequin.
Though Kassen’s current body might imply the opposite of that situation, we have far greater knowledge than a simple glance (and, for the Ivenmoth staff, the equivalent of an official press release from the Trademaster… which could have all kinds of falsehoods in it, but they’re sort of obligated to take as truth) may provide, as do those closest to them (squadmates, Ran, Viracroix, Lopin, Vizlet…). Taking a particular set of organs and the assumptions of side characters (themselves guided by another with ulterior motives) as cast iron evidence that the spirit pulling the body’s strings is psychologically binary-female and should be referred to as such / prefers that approach is, at least IMHO, misguided and poorly thought through.
…I can barely believe I’m taking 4chan’s side on this, vs people following the comic more directly, but at least they have FA backing them up.
Oh, and I already addressed #s 27, 137 and 162 in my main reply on the next page of the comic, but #5 comes right under the same banner, with extra flavour. If the medical staff had been told merely that Kass was formerly human somehow transformed to Yinglet (and assuming from that basic info that said human was a female officer, not a male private), why would the seamstresses know or think any different? They may not even have been told the transformation part, just that the house militia had recruited a yinglet woman to its ranks. The assumptions of randoms are pretty much meaningless, it’s all surface layer.
And in fact, there’s FAR more content in that same page that would go against that one word uttered by an extra who has basically a single line of dialogue before never having any significant role ever again. Isher calls Kass “he”, Elim refers to the two of them as “brothers”, Kass seems extremely uncomfortable about the seamstress’ perception, etc…
(and in the prologue, well, Viracroix seems to be having fun fucking with Kass just as-is, in a half joking fashion, and the adjustment of pronouns and titles is still a conscious one… and most likely due to him having a very definite agenda, already negotiated towards with Vizlet off-panel, which requires having an automatically respected and trusted agent on the inside of the enclave – and to hell with the thoughts and feelings of the inferior neo-officer he’s ordering to take up that role… the use of “miss” and “her” etc is as much to cement the idea of how Kass needs to act to carry out the mission as anything else, if not also maybe a little bit of subtle psyops brainwashing … as with all the others, Kass has little to no say in it and definitely seems unhappy and confused about what they’re being railroaded into)
Cherrypicking singular examples of in-universe misgendering, or sarcastic/ironic statements by the character themselves which indicate unhappiness with the situation and thus actually the opposite idea underneath, doesn’t really do anything to support the idea that “Kass is female, feels that way inside, and is wholly considered as such by their immediate peers”.
((ack, I wish these could be edited — the Trademaster’s choice of words might even be for the benefit of not letting slip to Vizlet the full truth of the situation. She definitely doesn’t seem to even really half-believe the tale until much later on, even beyond what Kass says themselves, needing more direct evidence such as the extreme sleep deprivation… but trying to introduce a near-naked and clearly female-bodied Yinglet as supposedly both a human and male, right off the bat, would probably have just been that last extra bit of fantasy which broke her suspension of disbelief. OK, sure, maybe you found a sufficiently deformed human and did other work on them to grow hair all over, accentuate their more yinglet-like features in terms of limbs and snout, attach false ears, tail, shelltooth, maybe even fake the eyes… but why would you bother with the sexual side?! If the human wasn’t originally female, then it would be less work to recreate something akin to male yinglet anatomy, and they still have seats on the council and can work as diplomats…))
Plus the question isn’t over whether Kass has a female body. That’s not in question. It would even be appropriate to use the normal pronouns at an initial encounter. It’s more what you do when you have more knowledge than that.
Let’s have a thought experiment. Making the assumption that you’re binary cisgender with absolutely no previous question about it, curiosity about how things might be on the other side, etc… you’re kidnapped by some bunch of psychos who want to make extreme fetish videos, and are surgically altered, on camera, to appear physically opposite to your birth sex. Maybe they do more than that whilst you’re tied up, but afterwards, you’re just turned loose.
How do you now feel, and want to be addressed?
Well, if the authorial intent (outside of authorial death…) is to leave it vague for now, then I’ll let it play out and see what happens. My pondering about what the truth is on the story side was more of a passing thing vs the comments, really. And there’s plenty of space for it to go either way, or remain fluid and nonbinary (always an option). Some people certainly have gone with “zhe” instead (though whether that’s just meant to be “she” with a yinglet inflection?), and at this point I kinda find it most fitting to use “they” until/unless it’s cleared up.
The “scav bitch” thing … is clearly sarcastic, right? A piece of bitter, depressive/defeatist, ironic self deprecation? A self respecting and accepting Yinglet would be unlikely to refer to oneself using either term, after all. Kass even thinking of themselves as Matriarch seems to be difficult, despite it being an indicator of veneration and nominal power. The sign off was essentially bad tempered lashing out. If I was to call myself that for some reason (especially after the rest of the diatribe in the letter), it doesn’t make me either of those things, nor unequivocally imply that I actually see myself as such.