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Good and bad monsters

[TW: discussion of abusive relationships, and children and animals being in pain and danger, also mentions of food]
[Spoilers for Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, and some other JP/W media]

Some thoughts on cute raptor comics, because as it happens I've made quite a few of those by now.

I find interesting the occasional strong reactions to my drawing Blue and the Indoraptor from Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom getting along and being friendly to each other, and potentially eventually becoming a pair. Sometimes people tell me they find the two dinosaurs interacting amicably weird, because he's a villain and she's a heroine, and that's just a bad ship dynamic all around. Sometimes people seem to like these two together precisely because they fit the villain/heroine ship mold, and after all, what fun is romantic tension without maximum drama.

I feel like both of these people are talking about different characters than the ones I'm drawing, but, I also feel like that's not entirely these people's fault.

Mystery raptor

I came across a feathered raptor figure that I'd never seen before anywhere, and decided it needed a good home. And also I just wanted to have a closer look at wtf it even is.

One more tigerraptor

Well, maybe they're not all that identical, or it could just be that they're my babies so of course I can see a bunch of differences in their designs.

Incidentally, this picture features six dinosaurs

Anyway, I started painting Finder, and good thing I can indeed tell him and his brother apart, since they are at about the same workstage.

Migrating birds

Raptor petting thoughts

[Spoilers for Jurassic World and Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom]

I didn't actually think of this when I came up with the headcanon for a particular JP/W raptor behavior that I've used in some of my fanworks - pressing the topside of one's head to the underside of another raptor's jaw to feel safe and taken care of (or the other way around to give reassurance of that) - but I guess it's not entirely without basis in canon.

The Jurassic World pack were raised by humans, and I think they consider Owen and Barry their parents, but obviously a lot of instinctual parent-child interactions are more difficult between a parent and child of different species. This is something wildlife conservationists who raise orphaned wild birds have to take into careful consideration, when they're dealing with an imprinting chick that they need to be able to eventually release into the wild, and thus raise as much like a parent bird of the chick's own species would as possible.

And it's amazing. Picture by International Crane Foundation.

But of course the JW raptors were intended to be always kept under human control, so them adapting to interacting with humans was not something to discourage. The humans can't make the noises raptors make to bond with their family, but the raptors understand tones of human speech well enough to pick up on what's meant as calming and soothing and when they're being given directions.

Any physical gestures of affection are difficult to provide once the raptors are big enough they can be dangerous to interact with, but we see Barry petting them and talking to them when they're in their muzzles, and Blue and Delta do seem to welcome it from him - from Hoskins not so much. As it happens, among these calming touches is Barry having his hand on the raptor's head.

Misty