Poor O’Shea being picked on! No worries O’Shea The Divya has faith in your ability to be badass. That, you might have to stop a catfight. Then the choice will be which girl to hit. Fun times!

@Holly ‘n Drew – Good luck and have fun while home shopping! I’ll just settle back down in lurkdom during the hiatus.

Now what would be really, really fun is if Alexis is the one who takes Rei down a peg or two. We don’t know the extent of her combat skills but she did get Agrippa by surprise, maybe she can do the same to Rei?

Not to be too harsh or anything, but I had just figured that by this point in the future, what with the approximately equal numbers of male as female fighters we saw on the Earth base, people would be over the whole “I can’t hit girls” thing. I mean, it’s sweet and all to choose not to be aggressive toward someone who is physically weaker than you, but it’s one thing to say “I don’t hit girls”, another to say “I don’t hit women,” and completely another to say “I don’t normally hit women, and would prefer not to. As you are clearly a highly trained combat soldier from a race which is more physically advanced than mine, I’m sure you understand my hesitation.” Or it’s equivalent: “Can I hit you?” Considering Grey’s history, he’s probably met more than a couple women in his life who could cause him severe physical damage in a fair fight or otherwise. Where is his hesitation to train with a girl coming from? Has he somehow advanced this far in the Terran military without ever training with female soldiers before? If he maybe comes from a more conservative colony planet that might work?

i like his initial inclination toward chivalry. i bet he’s going to hit her in training, though!

re: advertising, a few well-placed link trades might do terra a world of good. crimson dark, wayward sons, marooned, feywinds, for example. sci-fi and fantasy comics would trade links with you. dreamland might give you a major boost with a front-page link if you did a guest comic for him – he always needs a bit of buffer.

@Holly, not so much that Grey would act in a way which is politically correct, but that it wouldn’t occur to him to need to be. For instance, most racist people in the world today think slavery is bad. There are different levels of cultural acceptability. I was thinking that 200+ years in the future, based on where we are now, while Grey might still not want to hit an average girl, he should see nothing wrong with hitting a soldier girl/combat woman, particularly one from a species which he knows is physically superior.

@Larsson, generally, in a war is when diversity shines because everybody is needed regardless of cultural norms for who-should-do-what. Which is why there were women in factories in WWII. I’ll agree that Grey as a cocky sniper makes this work, I’d also noticed that Grey’s troupe seemed to have more men in it than women, which suggested his troupe at least to be a bit more backward.

I suppose my main issue stems from the fact that Grey knows Azatoth train harder and are naturally physically stronger than humans. Additionally, he spent the first 20+ years of his life fitting all Azatoth into one category and all humans into another. Why would his sexual prejudices beat out his lifetime of racial prejudices? ( esp considering, based on modern patterns where sexual issues are on the way out faster than other prejudices, and would therefore be likely almost-missing by the time of this comic)