El Goonish Shive

From Hammerchlordians to Haircolourchlordians?

They explain why it's "mysterious" in-universe right there, and considering how often hair colour was used as a defacto parentage indicator in the history of our world and others(see Game of Thrones Season 1 for an example), it's plain why this would be a pretty big deal.

So when gene science gets invented, and they can find repeatable and reliable expressions for brown hair in all it's shades(technically all natural hair is either some shade of brown, or colorless, because melanin), but none for grape jelly purple or mopey blue, that will be regarded as pretty darn mysterious.

So this explains the red-headed Nanase being born in the otherwise monochromely black haired Kitsune family not resulting in Mrs. Kitsune's murder and Mr. Kitsune's ritual suicide.

I bet that's been used as a get out of jail free card in the past...

(Reads about supposedly averted murder and suicide)

I usually never say this so congrats, buddy: what the fuck?

Erm, divorce isn’t in the cards because...

Edited by fredhot16 on Aug 30th 2019 at 3:28:02 AM

That's how history rolled. Kid is born with the wrong colour hair, somebody gotta die. Sometimes lots of somebodies.I want to say things are different now, but... Can I?

Now? With them? With unpronounceable name?

Again, divorce is also an option.

Am I missing context with the Kitsunes in relation to the idea of them doing this in reaction to infidelity?

Edited by fredhot16 on Aug 30th 2019 at 4:04:02 AM

Again though it isn't explained. It's wierd to us the audience but not to the characters. Calling it literally "mysterious hair" is odd because from their world's perspective it isn't mysterious.

In science today we have tons of mysteries. We don't call stuff that though. The orbits of our solar system indicate that there should be an extra planet of a pretty large size in our solar system. We don't go around though calling it the "mysterious planet" though we give this Theoritical planet a stand in name of "planet X". In our world though whether or not this thing exists is debated because it's possible it just isn't there at all. We don't know we don't have evidence for it. We don't even teach kids it at high school cause it's only theory.

So in the EGS universe calling these hair colours "mysterious" seems unusual. To them it isn't mysterious at all, it's just normal science.

Looking at it scientifically one shouldn't be able to tell what is and isn't wierd. You can't say what Gene is brown hair because someone with that gene could have blonde hair as per this comic. Or the other way around. As such how could you ever say with certainty that a gene correlates to this colour?

If the hair colour doesn't correlate to the gene then you can't proof what Gene means what. This isn't even getting into the other problems you'd have of more fundamental issues. How do you even know the "mysterious hair" is the oddity in the first place? For all you know those could be the norm and people with normal hair could be the oddity. So even labelling which one is mysterious in the first place is making a massive leap that only someone from our perspective could make.

In universe they would probably just come up with two separate terms for these things. Like we did with blood, when we discovered blood transfusions we didn't understand why certain people's blood only helped certain people and not others. We'd eventually understand why but for a ling time we didn't. When that problem occurred we just gave then different labels though, we didn't declare one the "normal" one and the rest oddities. It makes much more sense for there to be two terms that indicate whether your hair colour is the same as your genes or not. The fact they don't do that in universe indicates that somehow hey have access to some foreknowledge they shouldn't have.

The thing causing this change is also entirely undectable by their means. Scientifically this would just more indicate genes don't actually control hair colour. Much like the old "how do you know fairies aren't doing it" problem if we can't find proper correlations it shows we don't understand what's happening. It would be easier to make the leap that genes for some reason don't control hair colour than it would be to say they do but some outside undectable force is changing them.

If somehow they manage to end up in this area though why would they ever teach it to high school kids? You leave all this maybe stuff for college. We don't go around teaching about planet X, the fundamental forces, speacil relativity and other things of a confusing nature to kids in our world. We don't even mention them because it's confusing and we don't actually know what's happening with it, so why on Earth would they teach school kids about an entire branch of biology no one understands?

Perhaps this looking to much into things but it bugs me. It's trying to explain something we already had an explanation for but makes even less sense than the previous explaination. It's just pretty shoddy world building that seems unintentionally bad.

Edited by poph on Aug 30th 2019 at 4:05:43 AM

Possibly some knowledge of Japanese history. Also, while I used Mr. and Mrs. Kitsune as examples, I wasn't actually being that specific. Think more archetypically.

When you have a hypothesis that explains 99.9% of cases, and you have 0.1% contraindicative data, you don't just throw up your hands and go back to the drawing board. You say, "Well we've got a pretty good grasp on this, but there's this one part we haven't figured out. It's like, mysterious... or something." Seriously, without the ability to do that, physics would be exactly nowhere.

So you give it a name, like Planet X, or the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and work around it. In this case that name is 'mysterious hair', probably coined by someone mocking the idea, in the tradition of the Big Bang and the DCEU.

And yes, people do learn about various known unknowns in high school. At least I did. Math things, like Pi and the search for the highest prime number, astronomy things like the observable universe problem and black holes. I learned how little we know about the oceans and how little we know about what actually happened in history. Including, at the time, how little we knew about genetics. Not to date meself but 'junk DNA' was still a thing taught in schools back then, rather than something that makes every geneticist facepalm like they do today.

So yeah, late high schoolers should absolutely know this stuff, if they're at all studious, and I don't think anyone has been shown to be notably Book Dumb.

Edited by Daremo on Aug 30th 2019 at 8:45:50 AM

..."search for the highest prime number"?

Highest recorded prime number, if you want to be pedantic about it.

if those were the percentages that would make sense. Dan has informed on Reddit though it's actually 5% of the world's population that has mystery hair. For comparison that is actually a higher percentage of people with a negative blood type. When we discovered that we kept researching the thing until we found out what the problem was and we wouldn't give it something like "mysterious blood".

With such a high percentage of stuff being wrong there is no way I could see any scientist being comfortable with that theory. It would just lead into the host of problems I explained above again.

I'm not sure which high school you go to but none of that stuff is went into now. (Except Pi but like it's just a number so it's not much.) They don't even touch upon those topics now.

Again I just feel it's terrible world building that wasn't needed. Maybe it's best we just agree to disagree.

Also on an unrealted note out of everyone I think Elliot would be the most Book Dumb. He still seems like the type to study though.

I'll just point out that "strange quarks" are a thing that actual physicists work with in our world (and arguably the real world understands "strange quarks" better than the EGS world understands "mysterious hair").

New NP, whatever that means.

Hmm... I thought this was going to be an Isekai parody, but now I’m not so sure. This looks like something specific.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Aug 31st 2019 at 7:07:57 AM

It’s Fable, bro.

It's the Fable series, I reckon.

Shive's commentary in this comic and the last one says Fable. A mix of the first two, in fact.

“How do I pronounce "Nanase"?

Nah-nah-say. The origin of this name is Japanese.”

Oh, thanks Shive. Huh, I’ve been pronouncing it right this entire time.

I actually did think it was "Na-neys" before I read the FAQ, but that was in '03. (At the time, with Sister and Night Out over and done with, I felt like I'd missed the boat...)

I somehow ended up pronouncing it "Nah-nancy-sayers". I still don't know how I managed that.

Edited by poph on Sep 1st 2019 at 3:23:42 AM

I always pronounced it as Nuh-NAH-Say. But Nah-Nah-Say makes more sense.

I feel sorry for Tensaided's neck.

More recaps, and a retread of a joke that was funny the first time.

You know how the title for this chapter is "Title Pending 2 - Even More Pending"? I'm starting to get the feeling that the story is pending as well.

Or, to put it in a less convoluted way: what exactly is the point here right now? Where are we going with all of this?

The point is introducing and integrating Ashley into the main cast, since she's now a part of it.

Also I kinda liked this page's retread of this joke, because it adds an extra something. The original was a fun and quirky Ashley moment; special props to her "KKKKKGH Time to crawl in a hole and die" face in panel 5. We need more Ashley bits like that.

This page brings that bit back, but because it's Justin, he wants to see a martial art based on dance soccer. Because of course he would. Justin's a big ol' nerd. Elliot went to the School of Anime-Style Martial Arts for the martial arts, but Justin went for the Anime-Style. And anime loves making martial arts out of everyday activities.

Looking at you, Ranma 1/2. "Your ice skating kung fu is no match for my tea ceremony kung fu!" "AHA! But now you both shall kneel to ME, the master of the ultimate art, DINING KUNG FU!!!"

So it's a good character moment for Justin that he's not only interested in dance soccer, but he wants Ashley to make it a fighting style.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Sep 2nd 2019 at 8:30:43 AM

Still, introducing Ashley to the rest of the cast could be done without the many pages of recapping everything that's happened thus far. Unless Shive is indeed trying to make a "new readers can start here" type of chapter, but then, some advance warning would have been nice. As it is, it's just a big reminder chapter for the sake of introducing Shive's new Grace as a main character.

Or, to put it in a better way: I'm bored with this chapter. Can we get some story going?

Also, I find it a bit of a stretch to consider this a good character moment for Justin, but I do enjoy more Justin, so I'm cool with it. Plus, the original Ashley moment this comic is referring to was indeed good, and we need more of that.

Edited by TheLovecraftian on Sep 2nd 2019 at 11:45:23 AM

I would have liked to see more of Susan and Diane.