Grrl Power #1430 – Captain nugget
A line of Cora’s that I had to cut for space: “I’m a hard fighting adventurer, but I also like taking care of my men. Sometimes that means running dangerous missions beside them, sometimes it means dressing up sexy and being domestic. And by “domestic,” I mean being a galactic-class whore because I. do not. Cook. or clean.”
Cora’s is very much an instant noodle kind of gal. She also won’t turn down an amazing meal at a high-class restaurant, but she’d rather build a cooking robot than spend time learning to cook.
I like the idea that watching her teammate and boss battling giant mecha and 20-story tall bioweapons is… interesting-ish. It’s background entertainment.
Unfortunately, the comic doesn’t quite support that. The team’s really only been in, uh… four major fights? Let’s see, the restaurant fight with Vehemence, the fight with Sciona’s Golem, then Sciona, then the fight in New York against Lapha’s mercs, and uh… Max’s fight against Darude. Oh, and the fight against the Ascenders in their base. So, six big-ish fights in 1400 pages? Man, I don’t like drawing fight scenes, do I? Hah. Well, Sydney was gone for 53 days when she popped into the future. Let’s assume the team got into a few fights during that time. Stuff that helped scare all the Super Villains underground.
I don’t really think Sydney would be bored by Max’s big arena fight, but right now, the battle is like a soccer match when the ball is being knocked around in the middle third of the field. I’ve literally only watched about 20 minutes of one single soccer match, but that middle third of the field is “the boring zone.” That’s when you go to the kitchen and refresh your drink. I’m convinced soccer would be 10x more interesting (which is to say, remotely interesting) if the middle third of the field was removed. What I mean about the fight is Max isn’t struggling dramatically at the moment, so Sydney’s keeping the corner of her eye on it.
I guess she’s torn between a big flashy battle and peering into the somewhat alarming sexual predilections of her space boyfriend and his crew. It turns out, Cora and Dabbler are a good match as friends. Dabbler definitely broadened Cora’s sexual horizons, but Cora is from a society that isn’t descendant from Victorian values, and has total medical security against accidental pregnancy and STD’s. Or is it STI’s now? When did that change? Anyway, she also has access to all manner of aliens and technology too, so once your succubus friend opens horizons in an environment like that, the sky’s the limit, only it’s not the limit because space travel is common place.
Here’s one of Gaxgy’s in progress shots of the painting Maxima promised him. Weird how he draws almost exactly like me.
I’ve finished the main picture with the nude variant. (More like the clothing is the variant, because it’s easier to add clothes than erase them.) But I haven’t finished the bonus comic yet, so I’ll update the incentives soon.
Patreon doesn’t have a nude version yet, but I’ll try and update this each week until it’s done.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
Sydney, Cora is only wearing panties as a courtesy to you
She wears them once in a [Blue Moon](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gFqeslmpC8).
… Auto subtitles decided to use Romanian!
Usually it’s Thai (because of all the Thai Dramas)
Wait, did Cora imply she ‘loses’ her limbs and becomes a living onahole? o_O
That indeed was my, uh, takeaway.
Cora has admitted that she was born limbless and Dabbler did make those potions for Sydney to… accommodate the size differential between her and Frix. So, yeah I’m sure there’s been some fetishes that have been explored that would make Reed Richards Spock up an eyebrow at.
Actually I was thinking more of added “limbs” such as Cora the Futa.
Frix smiles knowingly.
Considering the title is “Captain Nugget,” yes, that’s the clear implication here (“nugget” is slang for a quadruple amputee, due to their body roughly resembling a chicken nugget). Not my fetish, certainly, but some find it hot, plus it’s a pretty safe bet they’ve engaged in a lot of fetishes on that ship.
I figured she was implying that “Hump the stump” was infact a game they play.
That is a very very specific fetish never or almost never encountered in real life.
So specific and impracticable, in fact, that I was rather disturbed to discover that it is not merely experienced by living people, but also sufficiently prevalent that it can be referred to by a name rather than having to be described specifically on the rare occasions it comes up in conversation.
I don’t kinkshame here, but I am truly baffled by this one.
I wouldn’t have minded “topless Tuesday.”
Amen! That’s the only downside of having kids, topless any day for my wife becomes a thing of the past. I’m a “closet” nudest and that stopped for the same reason, except I did enjoy shirtless and shorts in the summer for myself, and she was fond of her “daisy dukes” and tube tops :P
Preach it brother!
When going through a lot of high risk jobs where having the better gun and Intel is your only advantage… Finding ways to deal with that stress is probably important. Even more so when you got an entire harem of sexy eye candy as your crew with similar stress and also agree to do the harem stuff with you.
I can totally see her point because if this mission goes pair shaped she is taking the risk while the humans can always flee back home.
“pair shaped” nice.
Admit it, that was on purpose.
Cora jumped the gun there. She’s so accustomed to Maxima being a prude that she forgot that Sydney didn’t hesitate to start a relationship with one of her crew.
And that Sydney does have an order of magnitude more Parsec Points on her Galactic Travel card
-Don’t leave the planet without it.
Sydney absolutely hesitated to start a relationship with one of Cora’s crew. She waited long enough to learn his name first.
… Didn’t she start before she even got back to Dirt? o_O
I get the impression that Sydney was actually prudish in practice if not in mindset. It is just that Frix had a set of attributes that punched her fetish buttons. If you recall she was even uncomfortable with him seeing her partially naked when she got out of the pool after their first bath together. She reads a lot of slash fiction but I suspect that Sydney, especially before she was on well regulated ADHD meds could be a bit much in a relationship. While she implies that she wasn’t a virgin early on in the comic she apparently doesn’t have a lot of experience in the ways of romance.
Gives new meaning to the term spitroast for those who know.
Kinda funny to hear about “terrans are prudish” when that isn’t really reflected in our history.
Also, how can she be pent up? Surely there must be some sound proof rooms to get busy in during the trip.
There are some games they play that require the entire ship. So she’s pent up because she can’t play Strip Tag while she has guests.
– Kinda funny to hear about “terrans are prudish” when that isn’t really reflected in our history.
The anglosphere is a bunch of stuck-up prudish puritans. Everywhere else? Can’t comment, not lived there long enough.
Humans aren’t that prudish. Any area stuck under some conservative Christian, Moslim, or similar religious rule though. Just look at the history about interracial relations, same sex relations, pretty much anything about LGBTQIA+ acceptance, behavior towards furries, or someone with a hobby that is not considered masculine / feminine enough, and just how recent some of those have become acceptable, if at all.
So yeah, individual humans, mostly not that prudish. (Western) Society, incredible prudish.
True enough. But it is a societal constant that sex sells and it sells well.
Only if it is NIMBY, and inside a hundred foot concrete bunker, two miles underground
funny thing though, is that sex does not sell particularly well, if at all. The original ad-men from the 60s already acknowledged this, and they were sexist by the standards of the time where sexism and mysoginy were practically a requirement for being able to step out the front door.
One of the inventors of modern marketing at the time is credited with saying “Sex doesn’t sell, unless that is what you’re selling”.
And more recent studies have confirmed that while it certainly draws attention (from certain demographics) that attention also overrides the subject of the campaign, the brand or the product. The demographic susceptible to such imagery will remember the facade but not the subject. And those who are not susceptible are more likely to be embarassed by the product and the association the campaign established than to be enticed to purchase.
Which is why you do not see such ads much anymore.
Not sure I agree here. The demographic has changed (from men largely to women) and so the kind of sexiness you need in the ad to sell something has changed a lot. Also the target emotional response (you don’t want to turn them on, you want to make them insecure and envious). With those caveats, it still works.
This also goes a way to explain Western prudishness. “Permitted sexuality” serves as a more effective incentive when the population is repressed. Once most marriages stopped being arranged (mostly according to earning potential) they needed another way to work it. Hence the modern emphasis on objectifying standards of beauty and glamour.
Certain jeans add was follow by a lot of jean sales.
* Jean Gray not included
… Have you not been seeing ads lately?
‘Sexy’ ads (specially aimed at women) are still all over the place
Terrans are *absolutely* prudish. The VAST majority of humans are monogamous, for one thing. We consider porn “private.” We wear clothes even when the weather makes that less comfortable. We don’t let kids see other people naked or even hear about reproduction. Virtually every society adheres to these rules.
Your definition of “prudish” is based on some kind of human average, but objectively, we are incredibly prudish to the point you don’t even realize how prudish we are because your calibration is off.
Some of this has practical roots, such as preventing unwanted disease and pregnancy, but a lot of it doesn’t, and even has the opposite effect.
And your thing about Western societies being more prudish than non-Western is even more wrong. China, Japan, India, and *especially* the Middle East are even stricter about these things than most of the West. Middle Asia, or whatever you want to call Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, etc., are as stricter or stricter than most of the West, and would all be ctricter if we didn’t count Eastern Europe as part of “the West.” Africa is not, but probably should be, since it lacks the access to disease and pregnancy prevention that most of the West has.
So that pretty much just leaves a bunch of small Southeast Asian nations, some Pacific islands, and some of South America as the only places less prudish than the West, a small minority of humanity.
Monogamy is due more to most people not being emotionally comfortable with multiple partners rather than them disliking the idea of having that much sex. There’s a reason why the concept of harems are pretty popular, if not the practice.
And the clothing thing isn’t inherent, it changes wildly from culture to culture and geographic location.
“but objectively”
There is no objective standard of prudishness. So we’re just working off the common definition and, on average, terrans do like sex.
“And your thing about Western societies being more prudish than non-Western is even more wrong.”
They specified conservative and religious, not Western.
Also, the clothing is largely due to prudish laws: after Prince Albie died, Vickie got depressed (and heavily repressed) to the point people started drowning because of the laws stating they had to swim in head-to-toe wool long-johns (even the men), and you had cops patrolling beaches with freaking measuring tapes to make sure they were the proper length!
And they did state, at the end of their post, “(Western) Society”
All I know is that the people I would like to see naked in public are rarely the people I *want* to see naked in public.
Ah, yes, the humble snorg nut, which famously spends the greater part of its life (about 90 Earth years) cultivating its humility. But it comes from a tree, so … meh.
Sooooo…. do Terran tree nut allergies include non-Terran tree nuts? Would a human so afflicted that eats a snorg nut be safe, or be dying?
Depends on if the non-Terran nut has the some ingredients (or whatever the correct term is) as Terran nuts
Society from Victorian values … In the anglosphere mainly …
Oodly puritanism is also comming from the USSR , Stalinism was puritan as Victoria’s reing -1837-1901 -.
Rather complicated , early middle age – 476-800 AD – was more lax about nudity.
18th century and early 19th century was also less puritan than the 1830 – 1960’s …
In France we were less puritan during the 1970-1990 period than now.
Perhaps is due to less cultural contamination from the US.
But France is more liberal than US about sex and nudity , Germany also …
Sydney apparently would be OK with eating vat-grown meat (p684) since it doesn’t involve anything cute having to suffer for her food. Depending on how common vat-grown versus natural meat is, keeping her vegetarian diet might be less of an issue out in galactic society.
Out in the wide wide universe it is probably possible to find things that are indistinguishable from the most perfect steak but which were never alive. Syd would probably have to adjust her morality to fit around something that was never alive but which perfectly simulates something that would have suffered in the process of becoming food.
My first thought would be a species that you can ‘shear’ for meat, like sheep. Harmless to the critter, delicious for others.
I imagine that after some questions to ensure the farming practices are humane, she’d dig in with some spicy noodles.
I love how Sydney and Frix are just smiling at each other in several of these frames. Really shows how good a couple they are.
OK uh, I just now got that Maxima is *not* the grey. In #1427 I had interpreted panels 5, 6, and 7 as the grey disguise being shredded by an attack, revealing a more skin-tight disguise. And then… I guess reappearing a few strips later, which confused me. It was only on this page that I noticed both characters in the same panel! (And only then because the grey was using an ability Maxima doesn’t have.)
That’s entirely on you for missing panel 6 of the comic where her cloak gets torn off. He even used the 180-degree rule to show the Grey facing left while Maxima is facing right to differentiate them, and showed us the cloaked figure in the intro comic. Then had a whole discussion about her disguise looking like her, but skin-tight, which wouldn’t make sense if her disguise was the Grey and got torn off.
Sooooo…. do Terran tree nut allergies include non-Terran tree nuts? Would a human so afflicted that eats a snorg nut be safe, or be dying?
It depends on the biology. If the snorg nut organism (it might not even be a true plant) used the same biochemistry to produce the nut as a Terra based nut then yes, allergies could be a problem. If the protein is present and you have an allergy to it, you have a problem. There is also the issue of whether or not a human could digest and utilize the nutrition from that nut.
I have spoken with a guy that lost his legs… he did tell me in far greater detail than I would have wanted about some “conveniences” of not having legs get in the way (he had short stumps). I guess his girlfriend was happy? I was a teen back then and I will admit the thought hadn’t occurred to me before then. And no I never met a woman in the same state, but I have heard things…
I believe the term STI over STD started gaining traction about 10 years ago. I think it has something to do with stigmas and accuracy, since some same symptoms can have multiple causes.
According to Wikipedia, one reason STI is generally preferred because “infection” includes asymptomatic cases that can still be infectious, whereas “disease” implies symptoms.
To some degree it I feel it gets confused with “that terminology isn’t politically correct so lets say something different now.” I worked in mental health and as a medical adjacent administrator long enough to see the cycle happen a couple of times. Often the only thing that changed was that somebody got to have a warm fuzzy because “change”. I would, on the other hand, weigh in in favor of STI as it is more specific. Not all diseases are infections. When you are running an infirmary and concerned with infection control is does become important.
I think “STD” carried the connotation rather well though, because if something is transmitted, then it is infectuous. Saying that something is sexually transmitted implies that it can be transmitted.
That said, there’s a broad category of things we think of as being sexually transmitted that can also be transmitted in a myriad of other ways, and vice versa. If someone got a cold while having sex with an infected person is their cold an STI? If someone got hepatitis B in a blood transfusion is their case of it now something else besides an STI?
The short answer to that question is yes. Vectors matter in treatment planning and prevention. Just look at how much effort it took to get (most) people to understand that you can contract HIV by means other than homosexual intercourse.
Oh. In that case “STI” does make more sense in particular contexts. “Sexually transmitted Infection” is a single instance of infection in a particular patient, which actually was contracted through sexual contact. “Sexually transmitted disease” refers to types of disease organisms categorized by being often sexually transmitted, without respect to any individual case.
So HepB is an STD, but Fred’s (or whoever’s) particular case of it may or may not be an STI. At least theoretically.
Of course, humans will never speak more precisely than they think, and that’s one of the primary forces that shape language. So if you sell them on “STI” in either case, they’re going to generalize it to the other as well, even though it’s not fully meaningful there.
Just as a reminder to Dave, we still haven’t found out what happened to Wyrmil/Cooter.
Limbs optional? well since i have an artificial leg, i consider that a nice amenities lol
I imagine that there could have been some fights during the occasional time jump in the comic. Also I would have thought that team members not in sight are some times off on a mission.
… Would limbs optional make it easier or harder to find fetish play wear? Ah yes, let the intrusive thoughts flow….
With how Gray tossed that black hole equivalent in her general direction, it’s a good thing she already has a bat.
But since her, what was it called? Reality reinforcement field is only effective in millimeters, it’s not likely to matter. Except it somewhat extends to objects being held, so MAYBE?
If that wiggle wiggle bit was supposed to be her eyebrows: methinks it’d be better as waggle. I’ve waggled my eyebrows at ppl, never wiggled. Might just be cultural too. But wiggle makes me think she’s wiggling her butt outta sight, not the eyebrows.
waggle is usually both at once, and usually implies thick eyebrows, whereas wqiggle can be one then the other, like caterpillars playing tag :)
Waggle is generally used to describe larger and more deliberate movements while wiggle is generally used to describe smaller and more random movements. Think wiggling your fingers vs. wagging a tail. Waggle is technically more appropriate to describe deliberately moving eyebrows up and down in a suggestive manner.
But this is a pedantic argument; everyone understood what was happening.
If you think soccer is dull, you should look into 5-day test cricket – you get 5-10 seconds of action followed by a good 20 seconds of people moving into position for about 3 minutes, then up to a minute of rearranging people for three two hour blocks each day (so 30 hours total unless someone wins first). Across that time, you might have up to 40 wickets fall, so around one every 45 minutes on average, though they tend to cluster, so you can have hours go by with one side’s score slowly ticking up…
Both watching *and playing*, in my experience, cricket has to be one of the most boring sports out there.
If you can think of a better excuse for spending five days drinking beer, I’d like to hear it.
Golf
that’s why it’s called ‘cricket’, you can hear them chirping
Ngl if I had access to whatever outfit I wanted with a thought and limbs optional I’d be pent up after skipping topless tuesday and orgymnasium monday party with the whole gang too. Life’s too short not to slut it up. (“slut” being used here as an honorific of course)
You bringing up various battles reminds me that we’ve been left with lots of dangling threads. What happened to Darude? Deus was supposed ot hand him over to US custody, but Max ran off after the Ascenders attacked, and then Anvil and Dabbler and Sydney got pulled out to help with that. What happened with Death Toll? I remember some talk about seeing him and maybe exploring what would happen when Varia touched him in the after-action of the Ascender incident, but we never got that far due to switching quickly to the dungeon storyline. Cooter and Wyrmil are still missing too. And so on.
I realize some of these are possible future plot hooks, but some feel like things we should have covered but just didn’t.
Cora is one of the characters I find most attractive because she is closer to human normal. Just me.
Well, technically, she IS human. Just not quite ‘normal’. Well, Earth-normal. Apparently her ancestry was from random humans “shanghai’d” into working crew on spaceships that visited Earth in the past. Blue/pink is from genetic tampering. Then the limbs thing was from being born quadriplegic.
If grey’s power is specifically psionic, I guess it’s not Kevin after all. Up to now, the grey had flexed, postured, and grew (without resizing his head to match), all of which correlated with Kevin. But while Kevin can make up powers (ka-pants, or in this case ka-bodysuit), those powers would not be specifically described as psionic.
Isn’t it great how it’s empowering for Cora to be captain of a crew of attractive males willing to service her every need and desire? Not like how it would be portrayed as skeevy if it was a male captain of a ship crewed by willing and beautiful women.
The gender flipped (also, the much more common) version feels skeevy because there is the power imbalance, sometimes implied, more often quite explicit.
Dave made it clear through story telling that the male crew of the ship has every bit as much power and agency that Cora has. She may own the ship but she does not own, or control, her crew. They may share recreational downtime on the ship, but they share far more common interests, like saving space stations, liberating priceless artifacts with extreme prejudice and so on. You know, the usual a crew that shoots together stays together stuff. The male crew of her ship are all experts in their chosen field, and clearly have the freedom to leave any time they choose.
Sadly this is rarely the case with the more common harem fantasies. Those rarely bother to offer even a token explanation why all those girls sacrifice common sense, independence and dignity to be with what is essentially a massive loser a*hole. The story assumes that the readers just accept the girls do this, because historically women had little choice, and certainly not the freedom to express different desires. But without agency on the part of the women over their relation to the sole male mary sue of those stories, the power imbalance is huge, and the story becomes automatically a bit (or a lot) skeevy to our modern sensibilities.
I don’t quite get your angle here. Are you saying that both gendered cases would morally be neutral but have different optics? Or that we should show more goodwill to the “man captain of a ship crewed by willing and beautiful women” trope? Or that Cora gets too much goodwill for it?
I’m not trying to pass any judgement here – I would actually agree to all of the above, if these tropes and stories happened in a vacuum and not a textual context as well as a heavy cultural one.
The narrative has established the crew’s willingness as more than a device, they are “people with complex attitudes and histories” – it’s just that they ARE here in the first place out of their and Cora’s shared desire to explore, plunder, profit, safeguard the universe from Fel bullshit, and also be part of some sort of polycule.
The norm for personality, consent as more than a device, and fleshed-out existence is incredibly lower for the “man has a harem” trope, which sets a precedent that influences the optics considerably. The “sex object shoulder candy” crew is an established trope in a way that the “powerful-warrior-yet-considerate-lover crew” just… isn’t.
I’d say that what cinches it is that on Cora’s ship, the entire crew is empowered.
Soccer will never make it in America because we already have a game where nothing happens, called baseball.
No, you have ‘football’: the sport where only one person on the team is even allowed to touch the ball with their foot, and you spend ninety percent of the time standing around touching each others butts while one side does their math homework (68, 13, 55, hike!)
There is more action in baseball than Gridiron!!
Actually, anyone can kick the ball in American football. It’s just that the scenarios for doing so are so specialized that it requires someone with specific skills to do so successfully. You can send anyone out to kick a field goal, but if it’s a 50 yard long one there’s only one person on the team who has the necessary skill to actually make it.
On the topic of STD v. STI, without looking it up, I believe it was changed because not everything sexually transmitted is technically a “disease”, but it they ARE all “infections”.
Nah, it was changed because it wasn’t PC to call it a ‘disease’, just like how ‘Manic Depressive’ got changed to ‘Bipolar’ (‘Manic Depressive’ perfectly described the affliction, but what the shell is ‘Bipolar’? North and South Poles? Inuit and Penguin?)
George Carlin did a good rant about ‘Soft Language’ for things like this.
Dave, you are forgetting that Max was stomping some guy into a pile of rubble when Sydney came back. So yes, there was at least 1 fight while she was away.
Wasn’t there also the Alari homeworld fight vs the giant alien guys? I’d count that as separate from Sciona’s fight
That was Sydney only. Dave was talking about Sydney’s ease in being distracted away from her boss and mentor actively participating in mortal combat. She’s only seen Max fight a few times, and one of those times Max effectively lost and needed saving (Kevin had Max overpowered and incapacitated, and was steadily growing stronger while Max was getting weaker).
So should watching really be so casual, or should there be more worry/stress involved?
I’d be very surprised if Cora’s ship (does it have name?) doesn’t have a good collection of servitor bots and gourmet-grade autogalley.
Define “major”? We had Vehemence, Sciona’s golems at the council, Sciona’s golem at her hideout, Sciona, Alari homeworld, alien spaceship, alien mercs and Sidney’s kidnap, ARC HQ assault, Darude and the billionaires assholes. Then you have all the scuffles, the sparring sessions, the showcases…
I’d say there was already plenty of fights, and now we even started a battle tournament arc…
Define “major”? We had Vehemence, Sciona’s golems at the council, Sciona’s golem at her hideout, Sciona, Alari homeworld, alien spaceship, alien mercs and Sidney’s kidnap, ARC HQ assault, Darude and the billionaires assholes. Then you have all the scuffles, the sparring sessions, the showcases…
I’d say there was already plenty of fights, and now we even started a battle tournament arc…
I, for one, would be interested in seeing a threesome with Frix, Sydney and Cora. :)
I, for one, would be interested in seeing a threesome with ME, Sydney, and Cora.
I have often thought that soccer would be improved if you drew lines across the field tangent to the points on the center circle closest to the goals and then ruled that once the offense took the ball across that line in their offensive zone, sending the ball back across the center line was a turnover/free kick for the other team. None of this “Oh, I can’t make a good pass so I’ll clear the ball all the way back to our own goalie and try again” stuff.
Not a bad idea. I have long thought that they should move the offside line from the centreline to just outside the goal box, that would really open up the field, so something like the blue line in hockey.
You know, considering the technology in play here, ‘vegan’ may be an irrelevant term as Cora probably has some way to just vat-grow a whole steak or something if she really wanted to. Not to mention a whole plethora of beings which are edible and either don’t feel pain or possibly not even considered ‘alive’ in the normal sense of the word despite being able to produce edible meat. If there’s a place in the universe where Sydney can have a steak and not worry about issues, it’s probably with Cora. Or one of the magic races that could possibly conjure a steak of of aether or something.
Blue moon,
you saw me standing alone
without a dream in my heart
without a love on my own.
Cora has a lovely backside. That’s cannon. You can also make allowances for space technology. All the same I still have to wonder, without legs to attach to and move would the muscles that help to define a lovely backside ever have developed?
Constantly removes the middle third of the pitch until the goals are touching.
I’m sorry if drawing action pages are a chore, but if it helps at all the action pages you’ve drawn throughout the comic are among my favorite and it fills me with joy every time we get a fight scene with these characters you’ve lovingly crafted.
Yes, they are relatively ‘rare’, butt well worth the wait :)