o-o Well gosh dern, didn't know Miss was that old

it's a setup for part 3 of the comic Nothing to worry about

:v cool

❤️

That's disturbing.

can't agree more.

Wow, Muffet sure makes her rig stay 'in character'.

She's letting more of her legs show in this distracting, emotionally-charged moment which requires more hands... yet she's still making sure to puppeteer her cosplay 'face' into an appropriate expression.

She gets a lot of practice. She lives with a human that is very afraid of spiders so the more human she acts the more he can be "not afraid", sooo yeah.

And either the octopus sisters are trying to mislead us about their natures again, or they just showed some serious insensitivity as members of this group.

they are just ultra-rude and disrespectful

i mean they pushed a software update on Kathy so thast she does not understand russian anymore.

Seriously? How'd I miss (or possibly forget) that?

I'm guessing this 'asshole' aspect of them was inspired by the studies where octopi were observed 'punching' fish, toward no discernable end.

no, the whole asshole aspect was inspired by the fact that i needed 4 opposing views, so isolde is rude but not in a mean way, just giving voice to thoughts without thinking, Kathy and Miss are the well mannered ones, Miss even more than Kathy, and Masha and Mania are just mean for meannes sake, they are just... like... wired like that. It's a character flaw.

I keep thinking Isolde looks like a kind of Hayao Miyazaki critter in this picture. Probably because of those poofy, big-eyed soot sprites he's so fond of.

looks can be deceptive in that.

Yeah. Her cute look makes it funny to know she curses like a stevedore having a bad day.

Then it makes a most interesting coincidence. As far as we can tell, real octopi can act like real jerks when in the mood for it. The 'fish punching' seemed to serve no useful purpose, and an octopus is intelligent enough to note that. Yet they choose to do it sometimes.

when you are very smart an you know you are food for 90% of sea life and/or you will life up to be 5 years old at most and then die either you had sex or not... i'd be angery too. 😂

I just find the idea humorous: such primordial-looking creatures having minds keen and sophisticated enough to be true assholes, rather than just vicious or ill-tempered. And that they're choosing that option!

Dude, most animals are just extra-focused people with a super stunted brain.

They take more time to understand stuff than an average human would and don't care if there is not a very immediate reward.

That does not mean that they do not have feelings. Even simple amoebas have been shown to be able to express joy, fear, panic and whatever... and they are single-celled organisms, so... they literally cannot have a brain.

It's why i have always strived to not use "sentient" as a means to express "a form of higher intelligence" because animals can totally "feel" and "sentient" means having the ability to feel.

The problem comes in defining intelligence as we humans define it... because of course you can teach a monkey to use tools and even paint but it will still behave like an angry and spoiled child in hormonal tempest, much like 99.999999% of the animal kingdom.

So... what is the problem here. Well... the problem here is that a lot of people misread "being able to feel" like "oh, so they are human" or "maybe they should have human rights" or... whatever.

Animals like my characters above are a fantasy. And any kind of generic "naturologist"-like researcher will tell you to not anthropomorphize animals... because you will not relate to them.

But you can understand them pretty easily if you have studied them and they will totally share a large chunk of our own emotional responses... in their own way.

So yeah. The octopus might be punching fishes because they were angry for having missed a meal they were counting on... or they might do it to teach themselves new hunting tricks... to practice, basically. Or maybe because they saw a fish, punched it to stun it because they were a bit hungry then the taste of the fish (which they can feel with their tentacles) made them think twice or... a thousand reasons. Maybe they were bored and that is their only counter-strike-like game they know how to play.

Sooo yeah.

In this specific case... Masha and Mania are just assholes.

Oh, they have feelings. I never meant to imply anything to the contrary, and don't think I did.

I was saying that octopi have rather crude-looking forms to most, but are quite intelligent while having the pragmatism that often comes from a being that has to survive in the wild. Yet the behavior I described seems quite petty and a lot more like something a human would do than most animals. So the image of them doing it seems funny.

I feel someone has to pass a certain threshold of self-awareness to really be an asshole, because until someone has enough sophistication to really know better they are simply being unpleasant.

It's borne out by the fact that although I've known many mentally retarded adults, and a couple of them could be quite irritable or annoying, I've never so much as heard of one that I could call malicious. They seem to have even less capacity for hatefulness than most children.

In 2021 ignorance is most of the time seen as disrespect or outright hate.

And reacting to ignorance with hate or seeing actual violence without understanding the origins... will generate actual hate.

It is why a lot of people are getting radicalized nowadays, they are shown violence enacted towards people they identify with and never told why. Or they receive hate for things they did not know...

...for some reasons we as a species seem to be behaving as if we are all knowing gods or expect others to be all knowing. And that is a default behaviour.

Have you ever stated an opinion and be told "that is your opinion!" possibly with hate behind those words? And when asking what was the other opinion be denied an answer because they hate you?
Have you ever seen people getting beaten in the street and people outraging for "a general trend" that might or might not be general, and nobody asking if that was a mistake or what were the specific conditions that led to the specific violence and how the situation might have tinted the point of view of the people doing or triggering the violence?
Have you ever seen a person getting their life destroyed.... for treating everybody equally and not respecting the (unstated) request of a few people who literally did nothing at the moment but expressed outrage after the fact for that person not meeting their personal and unexpressed needs? Or for those needs to have been expressed but in such a way that the other person mistakenly thought that there was a different need, but did so in an improper manner based on that snap decision because of time constraints? ("let me give this person more confidence" etc.)

The fact is... we have a ton of information at our fingertips but we lack the ways or the will to process it.
And instead of trying to put ourselves in somebody else's shoes... we try and fortify our position.
We ask others to doubt their own beliefs without doubting ourselves our beliefs, and therefore we ask people to put themselves in our shoes.

What i see is not malice... if anything what i see is a lot of people trying to defend themselves against everybody but never opening up if not to a select few and only if they already match their own point of view.

What i see is basically people never admitting to any mistake, and never allowing others to make mistakes.

What i see is people demanding to be seen as unfailing gods, even when faced with proof of their own extremely limited knowledge, and expecting others to be unfailing gods, even with their extremely limited knowledge.

What i see is people reacting to explanations as if they are "excuses" and reacting to traumatized people as if they are haters.

This is unsustainable.

Agreed, even though I sometimes lose perspective on the issue.

I still never saw evidence of real malice or ill intent within the people I spoke of, under any definition I'd heard of. The experiences involved occurred over decades and in many settings. Make of that what you wish.

In general i agree with you.

I have seen the effects of true malice and known victims of it.

But in general it's a mixture of ignorance and bad choices that get assigned to malice.

As i said once. The biggest lie ever told is that evil people are many and out to get you.