Now that I have the three Dinos books (Dinosaur Therapy, Dinosaur Philosophy, Dinosaur Friendship), I’ve found further poignant Dino strips about what I called deep friendship in my 1/8 posting “The best bits of me”. Deep friendship is also known as a kind of love: philia, the love that friends have for one another (as distinguished from eros, romantic or sexual love). That has brought me to strips in which two of the Dino characters are attached erotically as well as philically — notably, this delightful “big bed” strip from 2022, involving the two characters the creators refer to as red and blue (called Brn and Blu in my earlier posting):
(#1) Bed space is nice, but the embrace of your lover is even nicer
The creators of the comic have gone to some trouble not to gender the two characters; they differ in color, but otherwise they’re identical in appearance. This means that #1 can be — though it doesn’t have to be — understood as showing same-sex eros. With this remarkable result, as reported by the creators on Twitter (now called X) on 6/16/22:
this comic was too much for Instagram and they deleted it
Consequently, the strip didn’t come up in my earlier net searches, which turned out to depend on Instagram; I didn’t discover it until I got my copy of Dinosaur Friendship. I am offended.
More red and blue in bed. The creators of the strips in print also make designs for imprinting on merchandise they sell. One of these — “New Sweet Dreams” — has red and blue in bed (each fantasizing about the other):
(#2)
Another imprint design has red and blue holding tails, adorably, while working in the kitchen together.
My 1/8 posting. Featured this Dino strip:
(#3) In other strips, blue and red profess their love for one another; whatever their romantic attachments might be, in this strip, red reports one of the great satisfactions of deep friendship: in the company of your friend, you feel that you’re the best person you can be
I’ve had male friends who were “best buddies” with me (some straight, some gay), but without any erotic attachment. I’ve had extended sexual relationships with men who were good friends but no more than that. And I’ve had male partners who fit with me both ways at once; they changed me and changed my life, and I believe I did the same for them. That’s an amazing gift.
(Of course, blue and red could be a heterosexual couple, in which case the strip still sends a sociosexual message — but a feminist message rather than a queer one.)
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