932 Perverse Attraction.

by

Okay, first of all, if you haven’t seen The Dark Crystal go see it. I’ll wait.

Did you see it? Good. Let’s continue. So Kira and Jen are the last two Gelflings, as far as they know. And they save the world from the Skesis, heal the crystal and that, but who cares? At best they can have kids themselves, but then their kids are fucked. Unless there are at least 20 other breeding pairs left, or incest doesn’t result in goober babies on crystal world. The Dark Crystal isn’t the only movie that has this problem. I can’t think of any others at the moment, but I know I’ve seen them. Some one is the last of the somethings and then they find THE OTHER ONE. So they don’t have to die alone, I guess… There really needs to be something that adresses this problem in storytelling. Can it really have gone this long without anyone thinking of this? Actually no. I already know of a bible story where they adress this very problem. When Lot, and his family, escape God’s wrath visited upon Sodom and Gomorrah his daughters think they are the last people alive and trick him into fucking them so they can have kids. Whic genetically isn’t that bad. The web toed kid thing from first cousins is actually a myth. As long as you don’t KEEP doing it the chance of doodle kids isn’t much worse than random chance. If you keep it up the weak genes start to double up geomertically and then everyone is fucked. Like royalty.

As an aside, in some ways tyrants are stymied by their insatiable desire to fuck cousins. Eventually the family line gets so backwards they become unfit to rule and the peasants can oust their cousin humping asses. The British royal family has gotten wise to this, however. Truly they are the cleverest of kings. Also, I guess countries where they have harems get past this too. The harem is kind of what evolution wants any given man to achieve. Sex up as many women as you can so your specific code gets out as far as it can. You can kill off as many rivals as you want so long as you leave enough for your offspring to get down on. Kings that throw dick wherever they like are the ones who win genetically speaking.

Anyway, whoever is responsible for that bible story already figured this whole “last of our kind” problem out and adressed it, but we seem to have abandoned that wisdom. I’m not saying you have to show other survivors of decemated races, but you might alude to rumors about sightings or something. That was one good thing about The Secret World Of Arietty. They suspected, at least, that there were still other borrowers out there. Then one showed up. Maybe not the best choice for a mate, but Arietty won’t have to safety dance all up on her pa.

In Fraggle Rock, before I saw the later episodes, I thought the Gorgs had this problem because there is no evidence that there are other Gorgs. Eventually you find out that there are, and that the Gorgs you see in the show are FUCKING DELUSIONAL. They aren’t the king or queen of anything and Junior eventually will be able to find a mate. I don’t know how Henson forgot that whole deal between Fraggle Rock and Dark Crystal, but he also forgot about doctors and kind of made it impossible to ask him.

You know what else is odd about Fraggle Rock? You never see Fraggle kids. The Doozers had the whole range of ages, but Fraggles only had teens to the aged. They implied that Fraggles do procreate, but you never actually saw baby ones. I can’t imagine a Fraggle being a very responsible parent, but there were certainly a lot of them. They must have had some kind of care system, or something. I guess there had to be other Boober-esque Fraggles who actually enjoyed tedious tasks, like child rearing. Or maybe they just stuck the babies all in some pit so the strongest ones would survive.

I wonder…

24 Comments

That post you made is completely hilarious Crave.

Actually made me think!

And also I have never seen you swear in your comic before

And because I have too,
FIRST!

I don’t have the characters swear unless it makes the dialog sound natural. There’s actually very little swearing at all. I swear in the blog quite a lot though. XD

The fraggle rock thunder-dome! I love it! With only the one adult left behind to make sure it lasts long enough not to got down the crapper, or at least until he got bored with the job and goes out exploring! the loophole in all logic, you go crave!

In fantasy, I believe the magic MacGuffin (in this case the Dark Crystal) will undo all the bad crap (and is implied that if the baddies win, crap will continue like in the “Belgariad” universe [D&L Eddings]).

Science Fiction it’s a lot harder to buy this unless they mention genetic drift and assembly, but then there’s usually a Eugenics problem anyway and you end up rooting for the least-worst bad guy anyway since everyone’s dicks.

Dark Crystal? Try Star Trek: the Voyage Home!

“No better than the ones who wiped them out” indeed, Spock!

At least in that case we can rely on far-future technology. There have to be specimens of humpback DNA preserved somewhere on the planet, and from that they could conceivably (handwavology!) create material for zygotes to implant in the female whale. For that matter, if someone really tried, they might be able to vat-clone a whale. That wouldn’t have been out of the question with the sort of sci-fi wonders the series was known for. The issue was that they needed the whales RIGHT THEN.

Yeah, I always figured that whole plot was “here are 2 whales, now go away for another 500 years, when you come back to find out why you only heard whales for 1 generation (or 2) we will have better tech and can just shoot you.

Well, I read the entirety of that blog post, and not to put to fine of a point on things, but there are a lot of those types of logic holes in many shows and movies. Most of the historical fiction ones require you to think of it as an alternate reality type of thing because of how thoroughly they ignore the majority of known (and proven) history.

Oh, and don’t forget the little scientific errors in a significant portion of the Sci-Fi stuff. Seriously, they have a tendency to show things that have either been scientifically disproven, or that you can’t create a working theory for as it requires a scientific assumption that is either unproven or that can neither be disproven nor proven.

As for the genetic angle……how genetically stable are they? Most animals are more genetically stable than humans, thus requiring more generations of severe inbreeding before significant problems appear. In fact in many domesticated breeds intentionally rebreeding a mare back to her sire (sorry, I’m most familiar with horse terms) is referred to as Line Breeding, and can usually be done for more than three generations before minor problems reliably start to appear. Yes, it would require very careful breeding programs to prevent problems, but unless they are particularly genetically unstable (like humans) it should be theoretically possible.

Many domesticated animals are pretty inbred. Lots of different pure breed dogs are likely to suffer from various genetic problems specific to their breed, just as one example. The difference is, in the case of a “defective” dog or horse or whatever, humanely euthanizing them is generally considered acceptable. With humans, not so much.

Thanks, Crave — now you’ve made me hate one of my favorite movies! I am taking the Blu-Ray and the DVD I was going to give to my niece and burn them and their filthy, incestuous ideas in a flame of my righteous ire!

Sure I am. This was a great observation, though. Unfortunately, Jim Henson didn’t forget about doctors, he mistrusted and feared them, having been raised a Christian Scientist, and told his ex-wife he didn’t want to trouble anyone. And a Z-Pak probably would have saved his life. As great as some of his work was, that was a stupid way to go.

About as stupid as Harry Nilsson working himself to death after he’d already had one major heart attack.

Oh yeah — I forgot — the Cheetah has so little genetic diversity that some scientists have conjectured that their gene pool may have hit a bottleneck of fewer than ten animals, about ten thousand years ago. That means that the mating of any two Cheetahs amounts to the same as a Hillbilly shotgun wedding between kissin’ cousins… One minor disease could wipe out their entire population is one go — even if they weren’t already endangered.

Hm. I always assumed Fraggles kinda…popped new ones out. Like Gremlins outta Gizmo. Just seem like a fuzzy poppin’ kinda existence. I mean, “Dance your cares away; worries for another day”…these guys don’t have time for child rearing! I gotta assume each new Fraggle just pops out sometime without others really noticing. The new ones grow to maturity really fast and just join the party right then and there. They don’t have kids so much as they have new party goers.

With human characters, I’ll give you that, but whenever it comes to weird animal puppet things, I just assume they have some kind of non-ktype reproduction. Maybe there aren’t any baby fraggles because they reproduce asexually like starfish. From the shredded remains of multicolored fabric and cotton fluff comes a new adult fraggle from rapid regeneration of a missing limb.

Then we get into stuff like smurfs, which I theorize reproduce in either a Queen Bee sort of setup, or maybe just in a cloud of spores.

I fail to recall the name of the episode, but the smurfs actaully cover the issue. They are golems, formed from magic mud. female smurfs are inherantly evil, hence their being only one, who was ‘fixed’ by Poppa smurf with a magic potion.
In the particular episode in question, a second, emale is made, who is not only evil, in a mischievious sort of way, but also made from tainted clay that will explode. Poppa smurf is able to fix both conditions.
Evil females by nature who might explode, and must be fixed by the elders. Read into that as much as you like.

That sounds a little too close to the Catholic concept of Original Sin for my comfort zone. Oh well, I was never that fond of Smurfs anyhow, so I really couldn’t care less about severe religious overtones.

Maybe fraggles hatch from eggs. Maybe the cartoon series covered this?…
Erm… by googling Fraggle Baby, this is what I found on muppet wikia:
The issue of Fraggle birth and reproduction is deliberately obscured. Early on, the production team had considered explaining that Fraggles are hatched, and this is reflected in Storyteller Fraggle’s dialog in “The Terrible Tunnel.” Early on, baby Fraggles are also featured in several crowd scenes. At some point, however, a decision was made not to go into the issue. Thus, in “Wembley’s Egg,” the Fraggles are confused by the Tree Creature egg, and doubt Wembley’s claim that it is “a house for babies.” Familial relationships exist among Fraggles, for example Traveling Matt is Gobo’s uncle.

So, I looked up the animated series too and found this bit of hilarious propaganda for Doozers:

All There in the Manual: Where do baby fraggles come from? According to the book “The Legend of the Doozer Who Didn’t,” doozers who stop working turn into these!

Though it turns out that’s just a story Doozer parents frighten their children with, as revealed in “All Work and All Play.” Cotterpin Doozer wants to become a Fraggle, but eventually has to face up to the fact that the old story isn’t true and that she has to remain a Doozer.

Perhaps the Fraggles reproduce the same way the Horta did in the Star Trek (TOS) episode, The Devil in the Dark. They die by attrition until there are only a handful of Horta left, collect the eggs, then assign one to remain as protector.

NO
KILL
I

Fraggle genetic diversity has to be pretty low.
Homozygosity reaching critical mass from all the incestuous fraggle-matings.

My hypothesis was always that fraggles just don’t do child care. Their babies roam around wild, and those that make it to the point of being able to fend for themselves are just lucky. They survive as a race by knowing nothing of birth control, so there are actually swarms of fraggle babies crawling around just under the view of the camera.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.