Collision, page 15

Comic can be found here at my site (all pages in one), and here at deviantart (latest page).

(Content warning for blood continues. Also this post has minor spoilers for various JP/W movies.)

New page featuring some strange, scary creatures that a family runs into in the woods.

As well as the cardinal sin of fanfiction: mid-scene POV change. Only for a moment, though.

Humans are not all that strange to Blue; she and the Indoraptor were both raised by them, and Blue especially got to know some of her handlers as peers to try and communicate with. In her current situation, though, she hasn't gone near any in a while. Skye has never seen one this close up, and being the clever girl she is, she can pick up on that her parents treat the occasional human they notice nearby differently from how they would react to any other non-raptor animal.

Wild animals generally don't want anything to do with us. Some have adapted to living alongside us (like many birds you'll find in a city -  although not pigeons; they're feral domestic animals and not actually wild), but still tend to keep at least a cautious distance, until food is involved. Habituating wild animals to seeing humans as something to approach for food can have tragic consequences for both humans and the animal, and it doesn't always take much to give an animal the idea that at least when food is scarce in the wild, we're an option worth trying again. Even if humans themselves are not the food (but in the case of a large carnivore, it might be a matter of "at first"), a big animal, or a smaller animal, too, that's persistent enough, starting to harass people for snacks and venture into campsites and backyards, or in a city setting, to restaurant terraces while people are still eating there, is likely to get someone hurt, which will eventually get the animal killed.

The JP/W dinos (and other cloned prehistoric animals), unlike contemporary wildlife, have no instinctual fear of humans. Most of them grew up around humans and are used to us - and many would indeed see us as a food source even if it's not us they want to eat, because it's humans that have been feeding them their whole life. Those that haven't had much or any contact with us before, like the Compy that Dieter Stark decided to zap, and which was probably from a generation born outside captivity, still don't see us as all that special, and approach us if they would approach other animals our size. That's kind of the horror element of JP/W, after all, that the dinos aren't afraid to hunt us just because we're humans, the present-day apex predators, although I do also want to see some of that less horror-genre-typical but no less dangerous "hand-raised and human-imprinted adult Triceratops harasses random people for food like a giant petting zoo goat".

But Blue and the Indoraptor, at least in this AU, have been keeping their distance from humans for a while now. This is entirely learned behavior, and something that doesn't usually work on wild animals habituated to humans, because animals normally have no way of knowing just how much of a danger we can be to them even when an individual human might not be. Blue and the Indoraptor probably have killed and eaten people on the mainland, just haven't gotten caught for it so it's not known it was them, but the humans going missing would have brought other humans searching for them, and more humans hunting for whatever did this to someone in their community. And, being extremely intelligent social animals themselves and already familiar with some human behavior, I think the raptors would have worked out the cause and effect and realized we're far riskier game to hunt than they had thought.

This doesn't make them less dangerous. I think Blue can be easy to see as a friendly neighbourhood Velociraptor who might let people pet her, and, well, she might, but if you're close enough to consider petting, she's probably in a situation where she is stressed and on alert, and though she knows humans as a group to be dangerous, she knows very well that as individuals we're weak and squishy and that in a one-on-one fight she will win (not that she isn't known to accept worse odds than that, too; see canon). In that stressful situation a fight may very well seem necessary to her.

Blue is not a domesticated animal despite having been raised by humans, as domestication is a generations-long process, and whether she's tame is pretty questionable. She is trained, but despite what Eli Mills' sales speech about the I.B.R.I.S. project's implications about raptor obedience would claim, I don't think she has ever actually even taken commands from a human. She's willing to listen to ideas from her human parents, maybe consider that from humans that her humans seem to trust, but she does what she's told if she feels like it ("You came on a good day," says Owen to Hoskins after a relatively orderly feeding, and Barry's congratulations to Owen about it would hint that even that much has only now been "finally" achieved). Benefits of her training are mostly that it makes communicating with her easier if you're already someone she's willing to humor.

The Indoraptor was explicitly trained to attack humans, so he has every reason to see us as part of his natural diet. ...Or maybe not; as lacking in morals as his creators may have been, I doubt letting him actually kill and eat humans would have been part of his training, with the death of that one maintenance worker he caught by surprise being an accident. It would certainly have shown him humans are killable and maybe tasty, and he doesn't hesitate to hunt humans after escaping, but he does have experience of humans being scary and dangerous, too, having grown up abused by them. At the time of his escape he's likely eager to finally try his amped up hunting drive on something, and judging by his emaciated appearance he's probably quite literally starving, providing further motivation. As it happens, humans are what's immediately available to hunt, and probably become less and less scary with each one he notices he can easily kill. But would he seek out humans to hunt after leaving the manor? Maybe, it's a prey he knows can be found in the world outside his cage, but if he ends up killing more humans I'm not sure whether that would necessarily be more due to seeking out specifically humans or because we're still everywhere and easy to run into when searching for something to hunt.

The myth of "man-eater" animals is a compelling horror story, but we're really not that special, and an animal specializing in hunting us for food would need an actual reason other than that it's scarier for us to think about. Not saying there can't possibly be any such reasons, but there's definitely a lot of misunderstanding and fearmongering, too, that contribute more to the idea, and usually unusual behavior of animals towards humans starts with something humans knowingly or unknowingly do to disrupt the animal's normal life that has allowed it to mind its own business without bothering us. Even with his background, I don't think the Indoraptor has enough of a reason that it couldn't be quickly invalidated by changing circumstances, and that change could very well be just getting to the outside world where he has a wider selection of prey. Or if not, pursuing an all-human diet would quickly get him killed.

Maybe if he was by himself that's where the story of this alleged monster being on the loose would have ended if it didn't already at the manor. But, he's not by himself.

I'm getting a little off-topic and ahead of myself here, but as the comic's title may hint at, the raptors navigating human territory and what could go wrong with that is kind of the elephant in the room that this comic is finally addressing a bit more directly than their occasional passing humans by from a distance has during the story of this AU I've been drawing of their adventures.

I have no idea how the next movie will handle that topic, though we've seen some glimpses to the JW animals encountering humans with non-movie canon material (though not about Blue, as far as I know). But this is an AU, and things are a little different anyway, and those little differences can have a big impact on how things would go.