Grrl Power #1497 – Foot muse
Oh my god.* Who could it be? You guys will never guess. What a mystery.
I was going to write a big long post about shoes vs. not shoes, but as I was thinking about it, I realized why aliens are so often naked. (Like Grays. Not the sort of media where the aliens are naked for other reasons.) They’ve lived in a post-scarcity society for so long they no longer have need of textiles. Because they don’t have companies that exist solely to be profitable. Once a society hits the “we can just tell the matter replicators what I want, so we don’t need money” stage, I thing there’s going to be a resurgence of hand-crafted stuff. Cause people will need hobbies, but after a few generations of that, people might be all, “maybe there isn’t really a need to even wear shoes, besides these knit ones from space etsy don’t really work that well.” And over a few generations their feet toughen up a little bit, and eventually they’re like, “who even needs shirts or pants? We keep our junk on the inside anyway.”
The way I see it, Wookies are at that last stage before abandoning pockets. That’s why they still wear those pouch bandoliers.
I’m not serious about any of that. I can’t imagine any society, much less a space-faring one, that doesn’t need pockets. Unless they have subdermal matter replicators or something. It’s just such a common trope. But space monsters almost never wear shoes. So I started thinking about what percentage of Grrl-verse space aliens would wear shoes.
*(Becky)
Oh, look who it is in the vote incentive. The NSFW version is finally up at Patreon. Plus a bonus pic.
I think she would get in trouble for doing this. She’d mess up the… floor of the waterfall? Is that what it’s called? The receiving pool? No, probably not that. Anyway, she’d churn things up and cause a ton of weird erosion.
Since you might be wondering, Niagara Falls is about 165 feet high, so Babezilla obviously doesn’t have to be full sized. I’d say she’s about 175-180 feet tall here?
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
Taliiiiii!!!
I hope more Mass Effect characters will show up.
i agree. also yay for the Tali cameo and love.
Tali is best girl! She is wife.
The very best girl.
Hmmm, who could it be indeed?
Whoever this clearly very mystery individual is, who is obviously very intelligent and handsome and worthy of a following of die-hard fans (All Praise this mysterious person, amen), he also has impeccable taste in shoes which probably go great with $3000 suits.
That’s Stalwart.
Yes, I expect that you are correct about who it is.
Although the overlong pants legs do look a bit shabby.
If Deus is going to pay that much for his pants one would think that he gets them tailored better.
I think Deus is more of a Wingtip man, anyway…
Why would a spacer go barefoot with all those different *Space* Micro-Plastics on the ground from other people’s footwear? Traction has a price.
That’s what I was just thinking. The purpose of shoes isn’t necessarily due to foot toughness reasons (there’s humans who go barefoot all the time, and their feet are calloused and tough enough that they can walk over rough terrain and like, pavement without issue) but to help stop extreme damage (stepping on a thorn or burning/acidic/poisonous surface) and to help avoid pathogens and parasites getting in contact with the body. Hooved aliens would probably have shoes (even/especially species like Andalites that actually ingest through their feet- they’d maybe go unshoed in their own spaces, but outside of ancestral grasslands and buildings/ships with flavoured carpets they’d at least wear little hoof booties) to help with excessive wear to the hoof (the reason for irl horseshoes), pawed aliens would have shoes for the same reason humans do and possibly to help prevent claws from gouging or dulling surfaces, arthropodic aliens would possibly go without if they molted often enough or had ‘all terrain’ claw/pad/sticky/water repellant feet. Though crabby points might wear more, and so they might go with anti-wear shoes for aesthetics or to keep feet strong between molts.
Maybe really advanced species just say, “Screw this protecting our fragile bodies, we’ve got genetic engineering! Let’s just make them not be fragile.”
And then after a few generations of competition in that area, nobody wears shoes because, eh, they can walk across hot coals and broken glass without trouble, and don’t have to worry about foot fungus setting in because the space between their toes is always getting a good airing.
But pockets stick around because, sure, you can engineer in pockets, but then you have to deal with lint, and rolling over in your sleep and your keys poke into your kidney. So pockets stick around until you figure out how to engineer in access to hammer space.
Which Cora and Dabbler have. So grrlverse aliens don’t need pockets.
Cora ‘n Dabbler are also incredibly wealthy, which always helps
Hammer space is just a better pocket. You still have to carry around the means of accessing it.
Eh, even if they had feet that could walk on rusty nails without issue, I think shoes would still stick around. Stepping in space dog doo would still be really icky barefoot.
The real reason for abandoning clothes is that people get too lazy to dress themselves. The real reason for continuing to wear clothes is the need to stand out from the crowd, but body paint being too time consuming to put on each day when you could just throw on some clothes you just had replicated.
So, since I don’t want to always assume Deus, I’ll guess “space being that walked through space-time instantly to get to Cora’s ship and back and laughed at that weird queef joke”.
I would bet that it’s Dues. I mean we know he has access to portals, and saw how famlair Max fights. Just winger which of his followers came with him.
No, you’re right, it’s Mr. X-Face himself.
Because he’s been watching the fights.
Because he has a personal Stargate.
Because he knows Ixah is Max
Because he’s a commensurate troll who’d suddenly and ‘inexplicably’ appear just for the sake of seeing reactions.
And finally Dave pretty much told us with the “Oh my
God <b.Becky, who could it be?” comment.Is “OMG Becky, who could it be?” a line from a movie or a trope or something?
If the chief Gendarme from Casablanca told me to bring in the usual suspects here, D.X.S. would be the first one I’d pick up.
There are some other interesting suggestions in the comments today, but Deus would be here because he wants them to know that he knows, and to pick up his winnings in person.
Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back.”
A simple Google search would have answered your question ;)
Some people don’t trust Google
I imagine ‘A Google User’ would, tho.
Asking here is social.
Never heard of “Sir Mix-a-lot” either way.
How accurate are your pseudonyms?
I think Nthaniel explicitly wears indoor slippers and a morning robe.
I don’t think he’s the kind of being who often changes into other footwear – even though it would only take a single thought.
Because comfort is the point.
Isn’t it about time for Sydney to be abducted again?
What works for shoes on an extremely clean space station (because you really don’t want stuff getting where it shouldn’t in a closed environment) doesn’t work on a frontier planet.
Cleaning is probably easier when vacuum is very convenient and the problem is keeping it away from living things.
Aliens in media likely don’t wear shoes because it’s already a costume. If you’re showing the feet you want to show the feet, not whatever someone has to dream up to cover those feet that someone already had to dream up.
Shoes might also be more difficult to do as a costume. The hobbits in LOTR were wearing shoes that looked like feet (I think). Putting “flip-flops” on top would just make them look way too big and they probably wouldn’t move correctly.
Space Station and exfoliation, ’nuff said.
No, it was actually canon in the books that hobbits go barefoot. The movies had enough stupid additions, but at least they didn’t change that.
I think you misunderstood… the hobbit characters are barefoot, but the actors playing them are wearing shoes that look like bare feet.
And the actor who played Sam apparently kept a record of every day he had to go through getting the hobbit feet put on (a lengthy process) without them actually appearing on camera…
No, that was a reply to “Putting “flip-flops” on top would just make them look way too big and they probably wouldn’t move correctly.”
They didn’t put flip flops on them because it would be contrary to the book, which had them barefoot.
Yes, putting flip flops on the hobbits would be going against the book.
My scenario was giving an example of why a TV show with aliens (call them “hobbits”) with big hairy feet likely wouldn’t use shoes, flip flops or not. It makes costuming even more of a royal pain than having the actors wear shoes made up to look like feet.
Admittedly it’s not a good example. It sounded better in my head.
I don’t think I believe in space stations bigger than, say, an office building, that are extremely clean.
We will need to relocate and transplant a whole biosphere to actually live anywhere else. If a station that supports us does not also support our cats and dogs, the mites that eat our skin flakes, the bacteria in our guts, plus all the rats, bats, mice, weeds, goats, chickens, snakes, bugs, and etc, that would probably be a life support emergency requiring immediate correction.
At best, we may get to leave wasps and chiggers behind. But for long-term stability I’d bet on needing to bring an uncomfortably large percentage of every kind of life on the planet.
I mean advanced sci-fi automated cleaning is a thing.
Sure. You can have clean sections for living and working in. But if you get everything absolutely clean and banish all other lifeforms, you will die. Everything is needed to keep a biosphere stable, including the slimes and parasites and pests.
We will have to learn what’s possible and what’s reasonable for sealed environments. But we already have some inklings from the ISS.
You want to keep them as clean as possible. Automated cleaning is likely a really good plan. Including possibly pumping sections down to vacuum occasionally.
You really don’t want rats or roaches behind your consoles. Or fungal films. Those things have to work, or bad things happen.
Yes, there will be ecologies in the growing areas. But you’ll likely have to either suit up to work in those areas or there will be some sort of decontamination process coming and going.
For all we know this is a inteligently managed nanosphere and they’re all breathing defensive nanobots that manually interferes with the biological reactions the entire time while there (utility fog/blue goo), especially to prevent self-replicating nanobot attacks from spreading (grey goo) but also hostile interactions between alien species whose very exhalation might be a deadly threat to others without active nanobot interference.
I know what you are thinking and don’t disagree…but we are all going to laugh when it turns out to be Faulk or Achilles (but him wearing slacks like that, with that particular cut and shoes like those)
If we’re talking alternative possibilities, Stalwart likes slacks and dress shoes. We see him in https://www.grrlpowercomic.com/archives/comic/grrl-power-163-no-one-appreciates-a-good-defense/ with similar shoes in hand, having removed them to avoid damaging them while kicking a tank. (His shoes look like they have shiny buckles, though.)
Fair point! Well struck sirrah!
Did anyone else read the first line of the commentary, and immediately sing it in the Zaboombafu song?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=me6AkQ-DVD8
No, but alternatively I started thinking that it would be funny if somehow Deus obtained a prefixed title pronounced “ama”, so that someone (perhaps Sydney, or the occasional nerd-cred curveball Max) would sing calling him “Ama Deus” like Falco’s song “Rock Me Amadeus”.
If it was Max, it would then immediately backfire with Deus choosing to interpret the “Rock Me” part in a certain way.
You are aware of who “Amadeus” refers to in the song, aren’t you? It is a real name.
Is that Bender?
Looks like it! Good pop culture ID skills!
I noticed that too, was about to ask when I noticed you caught it.
I think it’s Flexo.
Gossamer
There is a high chance that is Deus, but I’m curious if he’ll recognize Sydney immediately.
He will, because super-intelligence is bullshit like that.
The fun will be if Syd goes for “he knows Tzerki” or “I don’t know who you are”
It would be extremely funny if he does NOT have super intelligence, but just the ability to read minds, hear very distant conversations, or influence others a bit. By implying he has super intelligence, he makes people wary of him, making them act slower and more predictably.
OR IS THAT WHAT HE WANTS YOU TO THINK?
Hmmmm.
Hmmmm.
Hmmmm.
(cont.)
Evidence of his habit of knowing things he should have no awareness of points to yes.
Yes and he will be a smug asshole about it.
Sydney already reacting means that she is very likely to CONTINUE to react upon seeing him properly, and even if he doesn’t know for sure, the chance of him making a confident guess leading to confirmation…
Sydney does not have a great poker face or covert startle response.
She couldn’t get five steps without triggering a plot point. Damn
Sydney IS a plot point.
Syd isn’t a plot point, she’s a plot nexus. (Which is appropriate, as a genre-savvy main character)
She is the protagonist.
In the history and prehistory of earth, there are many civilizations and groups of people who have discarded various inventions and done without them, but no group of humans who invented or acquired the technology “SHOES” have ever gone back to doing without them entirely
Sure but no human civilization has been post scarcity either.
How did you get out of your box, Kitty?
It takes more than a box to contain a undead cat. It’s like a ghost ninja.
at some point we have to ask if maybe the box is inside the cat
Schrodingerling’s cat is a flerkin?
No, Schrodingers were bred from a Cheshire/Bakeneko cross, and retain the abilities of both of those breeds.
You know what a ‘flerkin’ is, right?
Probably have the spelling wrong, but it’s close enough if it is
No, we’re all inside the box. The cat is the only thing outside.
The answer is the cat has a smartphone! :)
While I expect Deus to be the owner of those shoes, would love if it was an agent of the Xevoarchy trying to track Sydney’s portal, bonus points for it being either the Ripper or the Bird from #981 – Victory pose
Oh hey! Bluce and Gail were on that page! :)
Question is what happened to Gail’s other two arms?
Mr Amorphous looking like Deus on a bet!
… Why would Morph be there? And how would he even have gotten there?
When we’ll have the technology everyone will just use force fields to protect from cold/heat, dust, insects, etc. Not necesarily bullet proof force fields, just something to keep temperature constant and remain confortable. Add some holographic tech and you could make it look anyway you want, like skins in videogame, or DLSS in real life. And many will just go around naked, because why not?
> DLSS in real life
So white and smooth, except when it bugs out ant turns you into a mushroom?
Based on the reference being made, it is obviously Sir Mix-a-Lot. There is something he wants to tell us about his personal tastes, and he’s going to be very frank and honest about it.
Dont know if you noticed but searching for grrl power doesn’t show your website in Google whats up with that?
it did for me. Must be the algorithm screwing you over.
Did you misspell it (or autocorrect) it as “girl power” instead of “grrl power”?
Plot twist, it’s actually Maxima’s boyfriend
That… would be exactly the sort of legendary level trolling Dues might pull. Except for probably regarding him as an obstacle in his campaign for closer relations with Max, that is, and the fact involving her civvie BF in this life would probably annoy her.
That reminds me of the board game “Merchant of Venus”, especially the impossible furniture from the horselike Whynoms.
How often do you really look at a man’s shoes?
Some shoes will not be ignored.
Well Earth shoes and they are not Oxfords nor Brogues , so not likely league of extraordinary gentlemen.
But still glossy black monk strap dress shoes so just maybe Deus
Well since I refuse to do the obvious guess, I’m gonna say it’s just a regular human dude we’ve never seen before.
One of the folks whose ancestors got pressganged into serving on an alien ship so now they are just a human who lives in space.
I wonder what Mushroom Head is up to? I presume he’s backtracking the orbs in time to see how Sydney got her paws on them. So I wonder if HE is how we’re going to get a flashback to the demise of the orbs’ previous user way back at the end of the Cretaceous?
Concerning the shoe thing: sure, you don’t need to wear shoes with tough feet, but I imagine it can by unhygienic in some places. Or hazardous. Like imagine not wearing shoes in a busy nightclub and suddenly the drunk golem Cuddly accidentaly steps on your foot. Granted, maybe shoes won’t help in that case either, but also imagine stepping in, like, the acidic puke of a drunk alien from alien isolation. I keep coming up with examples that regular shoes wouldn’t protect against, but you get the idea.
Well, yeah, but by the time you’ve engineered your feet to “regular shoes” durability, shoes start to look more like the safety gear you put on going into dangerous environments, not regular wear.
I mean, you step in acid puke, but not aqua regia that can dissolve even noble metals, your skin just pumps out some neutralizing sweat and you don’t even notice. If the floor isn’t melting through, you don’t care.
But the germs, man, the germs!
It’s all so unhygienic. And slippery too, and that’s not even getting into architecture that might not be designed for hooves or tentacles or feet or whatever your biologically mandated mode of motion is.
What other well dressed men do we have in this comic?
Stalwart.
That man is not well dressed. Your pant legs shouldn’t puddle on your shoes like that. The hem should just barely brush the uppers. He looks like a kid playing dress-up with his dad’s clothes.
I suspect this is more of a minor mistake DaveB made in the art for “Smug D” than it is an actual indicator of who it may be, but we’ll find out in a couple of days!
It’s not like Dave is some sort of fashion expert.
I dunno — those wrinkles where the overlong pants legs fall onto the shoes isn’t something would have to be actively added to the image.
Good point.
Hehehe, Bender!
I count 10 examples of pedal appendages in panel 4. Let’s try naming them! From left to right:
1. A pair of blue-gray boots: ?
2. At least 4 insect-like legs: An extra from Starship Troopers?
3. A pair of gray/beige 3-toed feet: ?
4. A pair of grayish 4-fingered feet: ?
Bonus hand that doesn’t match anything else: ? 4.5?
5. A pair of green ankles with gray-white hooves: One of Dabbler’s moms?
6. A pair of fashionable lavender thigh-high boots: Gail’s friend?
7. At least 1 tan psuedopod or possibly tail: ?
8. At least 5 gray tentacles: ?
9. A pair of brown furry-looking feet: Br’er Bear?
10. At least 2 suspiciously familiar round metal feet: Bender cameo?
11. (Panel 8) A pair of expensive black business shoes: D.X.S.?
I’ve guessed at some of them.
#4 is a Dug from Star Wars (the species that walks on their hands and fine-manipulates with their feet. See Sebulba from The Phantom Menace,)
Thinking #9 might be from Star Wars, one of the bounty hunters from ESB (the pants look similar to the flight suits)
7. could be a Hutt.
I guessed that #7 is probably a Hutt from Star Wars.
Outside of hivemind species, there is also an element of wanting to differentiate yourself from others, some way to claim a unique place in the universe.
But that also has two factors. First is “are your senses even aligned to how they might differentiate?” Maybe they emit colors beyond the visual spectrum for humans, or they might lean on other senses entirely. That’s just the bio level options.
Second, there is also always the reduction process. As symbols get used they often get boiled down to their most simple forms. People get familiar with them and start narrowing down the most essential components. So maybe those naked grey aliens actually do have special markers to differentiate them, but they’re just so minimalistic that we could never ID them as something special.
“They’ve lived in a post-scarcity society for so long they no longer have need of textiles. Because they don’t have companies that exist solely to be profitable.”
……..*sigh*
I mean I could hypothetically seeing future nations responding to the current extreme profiteering with rules that put new duties on shareholder corporation such that they are required to serve other stakeholders than the shareholders, such as employees or customers or society at large in order to criminalize any organization that violates one of the other stakesholders for the sake of greater profits leading to arrests of key decisionmakers (we already started tracking those after panama) and/or major fines.
Thus they still have companies that are mostly profit oriented, but in a regulator environment where they are much more reluctant to be up front about solely profit-seeking motives or making moves that impact employees or customers too negatively without legal justification.
Another variant that hinders companies existing solely to be profitable might be how german companies are required to have union representatives on the board of directors and consult them on the regular.
My understanding is that american companies who try to expand into europe often run smack into the purposefully ponderous buraeucracy there (for example by thinking they can just fire anyone they feel like for no reason without calling a meeting with the union) and either retract their expansion or start adapting to the local environment.
Germany already has rules requiring that rank-and-file employees be represented on the board
Indeed, that is what I was referencing by german companies being required to have union representatives.
You could argue that such companies struggle to be solely profit-motivated as moves very hostile to employees will be found out and encounter resistance already at the company board level.
Socio economic reasons aside, shoes are handy for interacting with environments other than the one you evolved in or even are used to.
That better not be Deus, because there’s no way he’d tolerate such shoddy tailoring. Those cuffs are in dire need of hemming.
You are just living for this, aren’t you?
Tropes are about to give Sydney a kick.
isnt her a space princess gem kobold something or did she change her version of the alien disguise?
is she gona run away?
this and more questions will be asked next week!
Syd has noticed that one of those sets of feet is pointed straight at her.
There are a few in the earlier panel whose direction is ambiguous, but none pointed directly at her.
Somebody has noticed her, and she’s noticing that she’s been noticed.
All of this happens long before she notices who it is that’s noticed her.
So no one thinks that she just spotted Deus walking out of her room while thinking to herself about footwear?
If you imagine it as a motion picture rather than a panelled comic…
Sydney steps into the passage, closing the door behind her. Immediately distracted by the variety of alien feet, she muses and focuses on the feet. Then a pair of expensive Earth business shoes walks right up to her and stops. Sydney looks up, aaaand: cut to commercial.
Now we have to wait until Thursday again.
There are a couple of ways this could go, even if it’s Deus.
Most likely: he sees right through her disguise.
Possible: he’s looking for his own private stadium box and has only paused for a moment.
If it isn’t Deus, anything could happen.
When it comes to D.X.S., I think that he doesn’t leave important things to chance. Super intelligence implies that he has invested in superior information gathering methods, e.g. if he is there at all he knows exactly whose suite #401 is. That implies that he surveiled their move from the ship to the suite, or perhaps Harem gave it away.
To be fair to shoes, the problem wit shoes isn’t shoes as a concept. It’s the fact that pointy shoes are in vogue in yankelan and europe (and therefore because empire, everywhere). Wide toe box shoes that don’t force the wearer ta microdose on ancient art of Chinese foot binding are actually pretty great: 10/10 recommend y’all get some clown-shoe shaped shoes. They are so much comfier and last longer cause your toes ain’t fidna prison break out the seams.
I know a physical therapist who refers to socks as “mummy bags” and shoes as “coffins”, for basically the reason you described: having your toes held together all the time is actually damaging to your feet and posture.
Humans can also go around without shoes, our feet can develop quite a thick layer of keratin to ward off heat and most uneven terrain. Aside from thorns or very sharp things, we are fine walking barefooted, its just way more convenient to cover our feet with something and never have to develop that layer of protection.
Clothes were an advantageous adaptation. The tradeoff of not having much fur and losing insulation is getting better thermal regulation; with clothes, we can just have both.
Plot twist, it’s Neil DeGrasse Tyson looking for somewhere to buy more Grakz.
Later on in the Star Trek Universe, they have portable transporter buffers, and therefore don’t need pockets. They still wear clothes though (Which is probably a GOOD thing – some of those aliens are butt ugly)
Some of the “humanoid” species have ugly butts (you believe Klingon’s only have forehead ridges?)
must be somebody new guys, can’t be Deus, he isn’t listed in the character list under the page and neither in the “who is who” on the right, so they don’t have a character sheet yet
my logic is flawless and ignore the possibility of information retention for the sake of dramatic reveal
Characters are typically only added to the Who’s Who if they speak on the page, though DaveB has slipped up on both respects in the past.
They were being sarcastic :)
Also, DaveB doesn’t like to spoil reveals too soon (spoils the fun :) )