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Mythics?
Creatures for more magical sorts, Beings for more mundane sorts.
All The Cool Kids.

“Mythics” is still comparing them to humans though. I mean, mythic is the word we use for things that happened so long ago that we’re pretty sure it never happened at all, like legend but hazier and less epic. It seems like the “mythics” in this comic would only be called that by humans.

I just call them mythics, or in my language “Fabelwesen”

Well, that’s interesting. In the TV show Grimm, the people who could “voge” (similar to what mid-form is like in this comic) referred to themselves as Wesen. I suppose that’s what initially drew me to this particular webcomic. I loved watching Grimm and this reminded me of it.

“Sapient”.

That’s how you can define all the beings with human-like intelligence. You can also use “sophont” if you prefer Greek. Don’t use “sentient” though, despite what some sci-fi shows would let you believe, the sentience threshold is actually very, very low (all it requires to be sentient is to be able to sense your surroundings and react to it — in other words, pretty much every living organism is sentient, and we’re already building sentient machines).

But sapient covers humans as well (or most of them at least). She wants a word for non-human sapient beings.
Legendaire? (legendary in French, pronounced legendere).

Oooh. “Mythosapiens.”

This has always seemed pretty nit-picky to me! It’s true that if I look back at old uses of the word, “sentient” seems to be referring to animals and even plants on occasion. But the word “sapient” around the same time period seems exclusively to refer to highly educated individuals, or actions taken by them (like “wise” in “a wise law”).

So in original usage, one word is much too broad, and the other much too narrow. We’re letting words change meaning no matter which one we use to express the idea. So why not use the one that’s already entrenched in science fiction?

Isn’t there word “fae” meaning all otherworldly or supernatural folk?
In Finland, old language word is “Haltia”, similar to word “Haltija” which means owner.
Though at modern (after Tolkien) “Haltia” means only elf.

Oh, what kind of mythic being would the bird-legged leonine attendant in the last panel be?
I’m kind of curious.

That’d be a reverse gryphon, specifically Sam Hain’s brother Dermot!

Reverse gryphon? Is that an author creation or do they appear in legendry/heraldry literature somewhere?

As an aside, i would guess being defined as “reverse-something” might be as bad taste inducing as “non-something” to cite Merial… :P

Not really, no. It means ‘the other way around’. Instead of having the body of a lion and a raptor head, reverse gryphon have the head of a lion and the body of a bird (legs and tail in half form).

I really dig Merial’s comment about the terminology weirding her out. As far as I can tell, she and pretty much everyone from her group except Jim grew up unaware of their fantastic heritage… She may not be 100% human but she can’t see herself as separate from humanity; they’re her family (partly), her friends, and the people she grew up with and understood herself in relation to. I imagine trying to sort out the parts of yourself as a person that are or are not human would be a pretty maddening exercise – especially because, as far as you knew for most of your life, “humanity” and “selfhood” were pretty much synonymous.

Lorne is my all favorite character.

It _would_ suit him to notch the politeness up a bit. Or he might find himself on the sidewalk, completely surrounded by absolutely no chips.
I guess he’s just showing off for Merial. It was a very neat (and intensely female) trick she pulled off to disarm Lorne, when they first arrived at the Avalon. He would be daft if he didn’t try to follow up on that one…

I like “cryptids” It’s a very American term though; Usually used by monster-hunters like bigfoot and chupacabra afictionados. I also like that it is also used for existing animals which are thought to be extinct, but have insufficient evidence like the Ivory Billed Woodpecker; though it’s usually used in reference to folklore based animals which may have been based on an IRL animal with unclear evidence (cough Nemean Lions/lions in Eastern Europe cough). AND it’s linguistic basis means “hidden animal”. In other words ITS ABSOLUTELY PERFECT.

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