How To Make Friends And Influence Mice

It appears that our conical helix has reached its height and plummeted directly back to the central bottom-most point. Now Chris is off to a party, and we're left with the scattered debris of his collapsed adventure. One piece of that debris is a mouse the size of a human! Astonishing.

But on to other things. On to a bygone time when all mice remained smaller than a shoebox, as nature intended. A time not long after all Martians had been made artificially puny, as nature may or may not have intended (it is at this point uncertain how nature feels about Martians.)

A time when mouse-sized antics were helping expose such evils as prejudice and bigotry.

I previously expressed concerns about the application of stereotyping in Superosity regarding mouse dietary habits. As in much fiction, it has Superosity has tended to assume that mice have an inordinate love for cheese, which is quite untrue. They do not turn their noses up at cheese (except perhaps in the act of sniffing it out,) but as omnivorous creatures mice have a variety of tastes and do not restrict themselves so obscenely. Having noted this prejudice, I postulated that as a perfect construction such as Superosity could not have done such a thing in error the use of this stereotype must have been purposefully put forth in a satirical light.

As it turns out, I was quite correct.

Even as I expressed those concerns, the very subplot was focusing on the issue of prejudice in a much larger way. Mice are brought to the brink of war with Martians just because Martians are different, Martians start to suspect mice are stupid just because of a few facts that lie outside of mouse understanding, and then along comes Chris and in Chris we see extreme cultural ignorance.

Just look at his patronising expression as he arrives to a mouse party wearing Mickey Mouse ears and carrying a bottle of oh-so-cute "tiny" wine. Is it any wonder that it came to fisticuffs? Yet Chris himself found reason to accuse the mice of bigotry.

There is a lesson in this subplot for all of us. It is easy to belittle a culture and see only one face of it. It is easy to see nothing more than differences, feel threatened by the differences, and view the bad points alone. This is not understanding. True understanding can only commence when you start to find the good in someone, such as his ability to beat you up. Then the first steps towards harmony be taken. Then you can open a dialogue, learn the virtues of the foreign culture, and invite a foreign culture to learn the virtues of your own. It is sad to think that each character may have only learnt parts of the lesson, leaving the reader alone to view it as a whole.

I can't wait until Mask finds out about Worrimer's new size!