Portrayals of...

[frameacloud]

Comic for the week of February 3, 2007.


I don't have anything against these ways that people have for coping with death and grieving. Any way that you're able to accept a loss and move on with life is just great! Unfortunately, some of the ways of looking at death don't work for me, so some kinds of well-meant reassurance doesn't have the intended effect.

Take a look at the date: I drew this last June, but I thought it was too far off-topic, so I just stashed it away in my notebook. Thanks for letting me know that you're okay with exploring other parts of life than therianthropy itself in my comic. The third panel originally had more text in it, but I erased some of it because I didn't want to offend some well-meaning authors.

I named a lot of the recurring characters last March, along with other specific individual traits, but I could never work them into a script! So let it be known that the protagonist in this week's comic is Theodore "Thuban" Brown, the same dragon who was in the very first comic. Although Thuban isn't literally me or anyone else I know, I've used him a few times in the comic to retell some of my own experiences through, and I've retold some of Kistaro's experiences through Thuban as well. None of the characters in Theri There are supposed to be specific people I know, so don't worry, I haven't charicaturized any of you in here. The most likely thing is that I'm using the characters to describe bits of myself, or generalized things of the therianthrope and otherkin communities, but there's no one-to-one relationship of a character to a real person.

You may also recognize the girl with the algiz rune sweater; she's a deer therianthrope named Rosanore. The woman in the first panel is hard to recognize because her hair is pulled back (and I didn't capture her face very well...) but she's another recurring character: a mountain lion therianthrope whose name I haven't settled on just yet, even though her personality seems fairly clear to me. I'll have to write out some character bios sometime.

[Edit 2017-04-03: Updated links.]

Comments

[lupagreenwolf.livejournal.com]

*grin* I love it. I especially love the expressions!

[silussa.livejournal.com]

I'm afraid I've quite settled into the "death is a part of life" concept....yet I look at it objectively sometimes and realize just how that must sound to most people.

[drakocrowley.livejournal.com]

While I don't quite have the viewpoint of the second girl, I'd probably fall into that category, as I tend to take a stoic outlook. Whatever is, will be, and there's no use fighting it.

Continuity suggestion

[ekevoo.livejournal.com]

Maybe since you have reocurring characters, it would help if you also spanned some specific aspect over several strips? It's somewhat hard to explain such complex things without a little continuity. I know there's the context problem, but maybe it's a risk worth taking?

On death and char. creation.

[pumott.livejournal.com]

Someone once asked me if I was afraid of dying or how I'd feel if the wishes of what happens to my body were not met.
my response was: "I won't complain." ( ;?) I'd be dead, how could I?)
///On a seperate thought: Reminds me of a maxim I've had to use every now and then with the subject of death: Having no fear of death does not necessarily make one an eager canidate for suicide.
/// I don't know, I've always tried to be euphemistic when telling someone that someone has died, but every time I just go "Ah, um, well, um, *sigh* he's dead."
/// I think I've only cried/felt loss at less than five different deaths in my life so far. And only one of those was an actual living human being. The others were a dog, a cat, and a couple of literary characters.
/// I've had problems before basing characters on me or people I know. Mainly from my girlfriend;
Me: Well, there's this rabbit named Clarissa-
Her: Is Clarissa based off of me?
Me: Well, no, you're a seperate character, you see and-
Her: (coldly) And just who is Clarissa based off of?!

Okay, I know bunch of random thought-vignettes, but hey, it's how my mind works. (Not that I'd ever claim that my mind worked. ;?) )

[draco18s.livejournal.com]

The "they're in a better place" line of reasoning

Exactly my thoughts. Comforting someone who's just experienced loss is not my strong suit. Besides, if they are in a better place, what the heck am I still doing here?

[silussa.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't say better; more like one door closing, another door opening.

But then, after you remember dying a couple of times, it does tend to take a lot of the "OMFG I'm going to cease to exist" edge off.

Note: Be grateful for endorphins; it explains why women, after bearing a child, don't rip the male's nads off. ;)

[draco18s.livejournal.com]

Yeah, and reincarnation has its perks too. }:=3)~
I don't remember dying, or even if I've had any past lives, but it's something I believe stongly in.

[silussa.livejournal.com]

Well, I kinda suspected it...but remembering it really, REALLY strengthens one's belief. *wry grin*

Although remembering dying.....eh, no fun at all.

NOTE: poison is NOT a clean way to die; it's a horrible mix of cold and asphyxiation, then numbness and asphyxiation. I suspect one soils oneself along the way, but I was quite past noticing.

[draco18s.livejournal.com]

I know this is a horrible thing to say, but...
*LAUGHS!* I'll be sure to remember to not poison myself.
Or fly into a hill, as someone else's memories have their dragon-life ending (ok, less fly and more "hurled by storm wind").

[silussa.livejournal.com]

Wasn't self-poisoning. Envenomed blade.

That's what happens sometimes when you get caught trying to steal someone else's stuff.

But yeah, it DOES sound kinda silly, won't argue that. *wry grin*

[draco18s.livejournal.com]

Note to self:
Don't steal unless you're playing ShadowRun. };=3)~

[lady-yin.livejournal.com]

Heh, I dunno. Death is a part of life, there's no denying that. But somehow, saying it that way, all gentle and comforting, summons images of dying peacefully in bed. Of course, that's what most people want.

But then, no one's ever called me normal. I want to die...I dunno. In a storm. In an avalanche. Killed by a wildcat, a wolf, something. I want to be the family anecdote my descendants trot out to impress their kids. Because as far as I'm concerned, the only good way to die is to be killed by something more beautiful than you.

Gods, it sounds really stupid when I say it out loud like that. Don't mind me. Siiigh.

[frameacloud]

There's nothing stupid about that. It can sound paradoxical to have preferences about something that one doesn't especially want to have happen at all, but a lot of people have preferences about it nonetheless. (In elementary school, my friends talked about it one time, and one person argued that freezing to death in the arctic tundra would be preferable because-- so far as she knew-- it was least uncomfortable, compared to some of the other ways we'd thought of.)

"I want to be the family anecdote my descendants trot out to impress their kids."
Huh... come to think of it, how an ancestor died is one of the tiny blurbs of information that tends to survive in a family's oral history when everything else about the person has been forgotten. Especially if it was in an exciting, horrible, or tragic way, so that it's a memorable story. Aside from that, it's all names, dates, and careers. It's sort of sad, since those aren't the most important parts of a person.

There was someone who was talking a while ago about how one of the depressing things about graveyards (aside from the obvious) was that graveyards were so monotonous, each person being memorialized with the same types of things (name, dates, career, relations) but nothing that tells you about, say, what their sense of humor was like, or that they were very trustworthy even during difficult times... all the sorts of things that people really want to remember about their loved ones, that stuff isn't engraved on the stones at all, unless if someone has an unusual epitaph.

"Because as far as I'm concerned, the only good way to die is to be killed by something more beautiful than you."
Have you read "The Jain's Death"?

(I didn't expect this week's comic to result in such morbid discussion, but I guess I should've seen that coming, given its subject! *chuckle*)

[lady-yin.livejournal.com]

I realize that the ways I want to die will most likely be quite painful, and if I ever actually encounter any of them I will probably change my mind about halfway through, buuut....be a little late then, won't it? ^_^

Heck, even if I don't get my way about cause of death, I'm still not gonna have a gravestone. There is definitely going to be something in my will about cremation and scattering on a mountain somewhere.... If my family wants to remember me, they can just trade stories about how I could imitate a hawk well enough to panic the squirrels.

I had never read that story before. It was interesting, to say the least. And definitely thought-provoking. When the man said he had met her in a past life, I was thinking he had been the tiger. The ant gives an entirely different slant to the story. And the panel where she looked at the tiger and thought only, "How beautiful...." Ah, yes. That. Exactly.

Heh, sorry for the morbidity. I tend to do that. I'm a very cheerful person, really! ^_^()

[draco18s.livejournal.com]

Somewhere in reading your comment I had the thought again of "Vincent Rubio hopes you enjoy the refreshments." as the kind of funeral I'd want (Vincent Rubio being the main character of Casual Rex where he was caught thinking that line in reference to his own funeral). Funerals are...stupid, IMO. I don't see the point and I don't like being AT one, so why should I waste other people's time with mine?

Then there's a friend who's last wishes will be to have a C4 lined coffin and to be detonated in some feild....

[silussa.livejournal.com]

Funerals are a ceremony for the living.

I'm more inclined toward the "wake" idea, myself, although I don't plan to tie up a chunk of ground with my corpse, either.

[draco18s.livejournal.com]

If that's the case, why are they so damnably boring?
And I'm not sure what I want done with my meat after I'm done with it. *Shrugs*

[silussa.livejournal.com]

My father's funeral was actually a strange mix of sorrow, some humor (the person doing the eulogy made sure to get some life highlights in there), and family reunion.

I think most people THINK it's supposed to be boring, though.

[weirgreif.livejournal.com]

Are these characters the ones that appeared in the "Let's get a pizza" comic?

Also, those are interesting wordbubble things in the first panel. They're like scratches in the panel.

[jrrhack.livejournal.com]

I can not think that being offtopic. Everything that deals with life and the way people see it is ontopic. Myself like to think that the life on earth is only a school for the afterlife.

[moonscream.livejournal.com]

I'm curious...why would someone saying platitude-type stuff that they themselves sincerely believe and that is sincerely offered make you run away screaming? Why is it easier to accept something violent instead?

[ladyfox7oaks.livejournal.com]

Possibly because some/many of those folks who trot out the "Fluffy white light- They're in a better place- blah blah blah tripe" either,
A) don't actually believe it themselves and they are just as heartbroken but feel the need to fill silence with SOMETHING even if it's meaningless drivel...
B) believe it to such a degree that you wonder if they have ANY sort of grip on the real world here and now...
C) it also tends to hit home a H*ll of a lot harder, seems more "Real" somehow to many of us who don't find ourselves in voilent situations. (I'm sure it would be different for -say- a Veteran of any war.)
(Yes- Have recently run into both types as I lost an Aunt and a Grandmere in January, in a week.)

and- on the other aspect of it-
D) We've become somewhat jaded to "Violent" death now because of violence-laden media, among other things. So many of us DON'T live in places or ways that would actually bring that kind of violence right to our doorstep- that we tend to think of it as something that just sits out there on the big-screen- "and of course all that red stuff is just cornsyrup and coloring, ya know.."
YMMV... :D

(End ramble now..)

[moonscream.livejournal.com]

Thank you for elaborating. :)

Personally, being someone who actually started to experience death this time last year due to bleeding way too much (thanks to an accident of sorts) and who had to call on the assistance of a powerful medicine man to keep myself in this world, I find it hard to fear it anymore...I mostly fear it being long and excruciatingly painful, or something that would cause panic. Drifting into it on the other hand, I don't fear that at all. For anyone who's seen Samurai Champloo, its like when Fuu was drowning - you just feel disconnection, and drifting away.

There's a difference, tho, between people just spouting platitudes about death and someone who's had actual experience with it...even someone who's gone through the death experience as part of learning about past lives. Many who spout such platitudes will fight tooth and nail to stay alive or will extend the lives of those they love far beyond the time they should because they are actually afraid. Afraid because they're really not sure they actually believe what they've been saying all along.

It can be interesting to ask those who spout such things if they're afraid to die. ;)

--Moony

[frameacloud]

*shrugs* It doesn't make a lot of sense to me, either, but it's the way I feel about it internally, whether it's right or not. (Which is why I figured that maybe it means I'm less spiritually mature than people who can view death that way.) My best guess is that it doesn't seem like a shock to call death a bad thing that we want to avoid, but trying to say that death is actually a nice thing tends to (metaphorically speaking) set off all my klaxons, and something at the back of my head starts going like "Warning, warning, Will Robinson."

I just can't seem to see death as a nice thing.

As I said, maybe it means I'm less spiritually mature than some people, since even though it could make intellectual sense and may even be right, it just freaks me out. Other people seem to grasp it intuitively, and whatever works for them is great.

[moonscream.livejournal.com]

Its your view and you don't have to make apologies or excuses for it. :) I was just curious as to your reasons, and now that you explained it a bit your comic makes a bit more sense to me, too.

I actually belonged to a 'church' for a year called Novus Spiritus, who fancied themselves the revival of the Gnostic Christians of old (they weren't quite, but that's a discussion for another time!), and telling someone in that 'church' that they were one year closer to death on their birthday was something they would be HAPPY about. Suicide wasn't an option, either.

[zeeth_kyrah]

Death is a thing. Just some thing that happens. I don't even recognize death as a cause for grief anymore - though violence and pain certainly are. It's a passing and a transition, and so long as we're living, it's not fully ours.

I went to my grandmother's funeral last year. I looked at the body and carried the casket and said a few words because it was expected, because doing those things would comfort the people around me. I knew without looking that she was gone already and didn't need the fuss; just being close enough to note the body's lack of life-energies told me that. And it wasn't so much "empty" as it was "thing among things". The life had gone elsewhere, peacefully, and what was left didn't bother me none a'tall.

We talk to a leaf; the leaf falls; a new leaf grows; we talk again. Meanwhile, we make contact, root to root across the vastness of the forest.

[frameacloud]

That's a very critical way to put it, but yes, it is something that I'm embarrassed about, for exactly those reasons.

[ladyfox7oaks.livejournal.com]

No- not of topic at all, I think, simply because we all have to deal with it at one point or another, and sometimes the "Critter" side comes out because the "Human" side just can't cope...
I have gone out to a wild lonely place (Or as close as I could get to one..) and screamed, and howled, and cried until the Coyotes were lookin' at me funny- because the human side just wasn't feeling anything, having shut down- unable to cope...
More than once I've wanted to curl up, put my tail over my nose and tell the world to F**k off for a while...

[frameacloud]

A recent episode of "Pearls Before Swine" provides an amusing comparison to this:

http://www.comics.com//comics/pearls/archive/pearls-20070205.html

[lady-yin.livejournal.com]

*Snort*

Oh, that's great.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go strangle the little part of my brain that's going "Well, he has a point."

[draco18s.livejournal.com]

And I have to strangle the part of me that's laughing histerically. Because it's also saying, "it's so true! it's so true!"

[silussa.livejournal.com]

Why strangle it? It's accurate. ;)

[matyre.livejournal.com]

I fall in the I don't like the better place mentality. I don't think I could handle peace and tranquility. Struggle gives things value. Unhappy moments make the wonders I come across more so. Disney Land was magical for me as a child when I first went there, But if I lived there the magic and mystery would fade. I find joy in discovery. If I had a choice between living in warm fluffy light or going through all the good the bad and the ugly of life, I take life again. And if I could not, well I would just have to toy with the afterlife as best I can, do the undead equivalent of camping remove myself from the happy society.

[draco18s.livejournal.com]

None of the characters in Theri There are supposed to be specific people I know, so don't worry, I haven't charicaturized any of you in here.
Awr...*Wants to be charicaturized* X-D

I like the strip, agree with Thuban on this. Various comments about other comments related to my thoughts can be found throughout.

[drakocrowley.livejournal.com]

I like the new navigation buttons. ^_^

[frameacloud]

Yay, someone noticed! Thank you! :D

I'd been meaning to make some navigation buttons for a long time. I spent hours trying to get those buttons to look the way I wanted.

[drakocrowley.livejournal.com]

Hours? Yikes, that took a while. Was most of that time deciding what images to use?

[draco18s.livejournal.com]

I noticed (like, a week ago, maybe I should have said something? Didn't feel like this page was the best place to put it), they look really good. }:=3)