Wild Republic Deathmatch

Summer is a slow time for the government in the Wild Republic.   It's the time when the legislative bodies adjourn and everyone else takes turns having vacations so that they can go home and hang out with their own species for a while.  This is less true in local chapters like ours; everyone gets a bit of vacation, but not at once, and the chapter is expected to stay open and operating as usual nevertheless.  With so many government employees on vacation elsewhere, though, this makes things a bit dull for the local chapters.  This means that everyone has more time to themselves; but it also means that they get a bit bored.

I think this is why they decided to have a local Deathmatch.  Apparently it was Mimsy's idea.

By the time AJD and I got wind of this, they'd already more or less worked out how it would go.  They had the tournament brackets all set up, so everyone knew who their first opponent would be.  Everyone was supposed to participate, including the youngsters and visiting diplomats.  Even level-headed types you'd expect to raise objections to this scheme - like Leprosy and Lady Faraday - were really into the whole idea.  (It must be noted that Leprosy was scheduled to fight Plouie, and therefore may have had an ulterior motive.  Lady Faraday was going to fight Rochester and has no such excuse.)  Let this be a lesson to you: civilisation only takes you so far.

Before anyone reading this gets too excited: no, this didn't end up happening.  It was called off at the eleventh hour.  Mind you, it wasn't called off because everyone came to their senses; or at least, not exactly.  It was called off because Desmond suddenly pointed out that Magick was going to win.

I don't think that the fact that Desmond, a manatee and rabbinical student, was scheduled to fight Murchison, an arctic fox and special agent, should detract from the wisdom and perspicacity of this observation.

Anyway, that was kind of the end of it.  Of course Magick was going to win.  It was blatantly obvious in retrospect.  So much so that it was agreed that they didn't need to go to all the trouble of having the fights to determine the winner.  Magick has been proclaimed the Official Champion of Wild Republic Deathmatch and everyone settled down to have a party.  I mean, parties are good too.

Magick suggested a poker game, but no one took him up on it.

Despite all the excitement that had been brewing over the cancelled event, there was surprisingly little disappointment in the group.  I guess they really were mostly bored.  In fact, there were only two disappointed personages: Rusty and Navarre.

My understanding is that the initial match-ups were the result of chance; Quixley wrote some sort of script that randomised them.  Therefore, perhaps no one should be blamed for an unfortunate oversight produced by the script.  Rusty's first match was to have been with Laszlo and Navarre's with Cami.  The winners of these two matches, however, were to fight each other; and Rusty and Navarre were grimly excited for this.  Each of them was dead certain that they'd win the first match, and then they would have a completely sanctioned reason to beat the shit out of each other, as they've been longing to do for months.  (I think they may be underestimating Laszlo, but never mind that.)  Now, with the golden opportunity snatched away just hours before, they were pretty devastated.

So one Deathmatch match did actually happen.  While everyone else was imbibing various spirits and telling stories, Rusty and Navarre snuck into the corner and succeeded in beating the shit out of each other.  The match ended in a draw.  Here they are; somehow in the excitement no one noticed what they were up to until it was over.

Since the fight was no longer sanctioned, technically they needed to be punished.  Discipline was left to Jasper, who decided that they really couldn't be blamed that much, given the oversight.  Offering a lion and a tiger a likely chance to duke it out and then snatching it away?  Not a great idea.  Feeling some degree of responsibility in the whole affair, and also noting that they'd already done a damn good job of punishing each other, Jasper decided to put them in detention together for the next twenty-four hours, where they proceeded to ignore each other.

 

This is as far apart as they can get until they're out of detention.

Jasper's opinion is that when they emerge from detention, they'll either have found a new common ground, or they'll pretend that the whole shameful episode never occurred.  His money is on the second.  The first, in his view, is not improbable, but he thinks they have a lot more fights to get through before they make it there.

The Wild Republic Salutes the Philadelphia Flyers

One of the other things ASD and I did while he was here was go to two hockey games.  (We took Stal to the first one, actually, by virtue of necessity.)  The Flyers lost them both, the first in sudden death shootout and the second because their stupid captain hit a guy in the head with his stick three minutes before the end of the game , so the Bruins scored on the power play and we didn't have a chance to tie it again.

Anyway, so part of the fun of going to a Flyers game is that you get to wear all your hideous Flyers garb, because our colours are orange and black.  For some reason ASD and I only ever end up rooting for teams that wear orange and black; not sure what that's about.  So, since ASD is a good sport about these things, here we are in our hideous Flyers paraphernalia with the three orange-and-black denizens of the Wild Republic:

Gilly fell off my shoulder almost as soon as AJD took the picture, which is why my head is at that angle.

Opposing Archetypes Collide! Epic Struggle Ensues!

Every now and then, implacable foes meet each other and fight for ultimate dominance.  Light and dark.  Good and evil.  Fire and ice.  Matter and anti-matter.  Lions and tigers.

Obviously, this post is about the last one.

Lions and tigers are each completely convinced that they are the most important, biggest, and most bad-ass cats around.  Each of them has a legitimate claim: lions are generally acknowledged to be the kings of beasts, but tigers are larger.  Both groups take the rivalry equally seriously, although in different ways.  There is no room for compromise, and they get a bit annoyed if you try to remain neutral.

Lions obtained their title because they're of generally steadier and more serious temperaments; they're also more social, and their internal cohesion does give them a bit of an advantage.  Tigers are scrappier and wilder, as well as larger, which means that they're less disciplined even though they're a bit more aggressive.  They're also largely solitary, except in mating season.  To use a handy D&D metaphor, lions are lawful and tigers are chaotic.  One suspects that this is as much a part of their enmity as the whole status thing.  Even if jaguars were bigger, lions and tigers would probably still hate each other's guts on principle.

Since we acquired the new lion, the feud has been introduced to our chapter of the Wild Republic.  Rusty and the lion are more or less the same age, which is probably for the best; it means they're equals, and if one or the other ends up dominant, it will be on the basis of merit.  So far it doesn't seem that either of them has an edge; we've seen them wrestling a few times, and they're pretty equally matched.  The wrestling matches tend to end with the two of them lying on their backs side by side with their feet in the air, which is kind of adorable.

Our lion and tiger are pretty representative of the Epic Feud as a whole, so they make a useful case study.  Rusty is kind of a bully, sad to say.  He's very aggressive - he even likes to chew on us sometimes, and he's always pouncing on people, just for the hell of it.  He really wants everyone to acknowledge him as the top cat, and he's totally convinced that tigers really ought to be the kings of beasts instead of silly boring old lions.  Rusty is rather endearing in his own way, but it's kind of in spite of himself.  Skandar (the white tiger) is not dissimilar, although he's mature enough that he's more likely to mouth off to people than randomly pounce on them.  If you provoke Skandar, though, he'll go after you.  Tigers are hot-heads.  Casper, the older tiger, is more of a gentleman (I think he's a different sub-species from the other two), but he's still pretty snarky even if he's more genteel about it, and I bet he was a lot different in his younger years.  Tigers are bad boys.

Our lion, on the other hand, is a law-abiding fellow who is cheerfully planning to go to grad school (never mind that he's not yet in middle school) in order to make himself as educated and informed as possible when it's his turn to lead a pride.  He's a solemn, earnest little fellow, kind of a gentle giant.  Last night we discovered that he's learning Yiddish (I'm sure Desmond is delighted), not because he's Jewish (he's Buddhist, of course) but because it will add to his experience and make him a better lion.  You see what I mean?  He's basically an overachieving boy scout, except when his anti-tiger instincts kick in.

It kind of reminds me of The Outsiders, you know?  Or something like that.

Personally, I kind of think lions deserve their royal status, because they're much more aware of the responsibilities placed upon them.  Nothing worse than a negligent, entitled royal, right?  But I've always kind of had a thing for tigers.  It's partly because they're stripy and partly because I have a major weakness for bad boys.

If you're a wild feline who is neither a lion nor a tiger, one of the truths you're taught very early on is that choosing sides in this epic battle is not really a good idea, all things considered.  Naturally some of them do have obvious preferences.  Cami, being both shy and intellectually inclined, gets on much better with the lion; their personalities are more alike, and the lion is less likely to randomly pounce on him.  Sir Tristan rather prefers lions on a general principle, mostly because he's from the Wild Parlimentary Monarchy.  But they're both careful to remain as officially neutral as possible, even though lions and tigers have little patience with this.

The others are either more evenly split or less invested.  Flurry really doesn't care; he's too young.  Mahler, older than both of them, professes not to care, but has a slight inclination towards Rusty as a fellow Asian cat. Khamsin's stance is the most nuanced and interesting: he's inclined towards the lion, since they're both Africans and have a certain ancestral affinity; but he's also inclined towards Rusty, because tigers are more physical, and cheetahs are the most athletic of all the cat species.

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.  The adults have very little patience with the lion/tiger feud, and as far as they're concerned, the main reason a baby lion and tiger were both sent here was to foster mutual tolerance within the Republic.  They're likely to try to get Rusty and the lion to cooperate with each other, or even become friends.  Apparently it's not unheard of for odd love-hate friendships to crop up between lions and tigers in this way.  It's far too soon to tell whether this will be the case for our chapter, but Alfredo is not one to underestimate.