These flowers are a chorus of sorts...
The main text starts below the otter's feet...
"He cloaked himself in her defeat..."
"Wrapping her discredited beauty around his neck..."
And then, in the small balloons and the blue text, "Claiming moral victory/ Over her seductive frivolousness / As he hid his/ Powerful blandness/ In her perfect, useless wings."
The fish says, "He was our champion. He wanted something for all of us, something we could share. Something we could deserve."
The bug adds, "Not like she did, tarting all over town."
On the other side of the piece the bug says, "It is nice to have it in a more manageable size. This beauty will fit right in, no hogging all the attention, no biting..."
He continues...
And then, in the feather boat, it says, "I cant look! I can't stop looking!"
The otter fur has darkened in this piece, and the swan has switched genders. The otter may molt again in another piece, and their genders might switch again- in the last one, Fight/Flight, the swan and the otter were brothers. It doesn't matter. They are containers for ideas, and in this case the ideas about beauty I was talking about worked well with ideas about the control of femininity, so it made sense to have the swan be female in this one.
Anyway, gender-flexible animals have been around for a long time..
I'm pretty happy with this turtle. I did a lot of turtle research: I went to the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences to draw their turtle and worked from a number of pictorial sources- but in the end, as usual, I made the animal up. This is a very long fingernailed version of a red-eared box turtle.
