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

[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.