The cast of characters of my Dinosaur Wars stories includes not just heroes and villains, but some important supporting players as well. F’rinstance, meet Gar, the Kra.
Now, I’ll be the first to admit Gar doesn’t seem a very likely friend and ally for Chase Armstrong and Kit Daniels, the hero and heroine of Dinosaur Wars, but looks can be deceiving. Sure, Gar has long dinosaurian jaws equipped with fangs that could chomp a human in half pretty quickly. Sure, Gar is toting a nasty Kra weapon called a tintza rifle, which can shoot either a laser blast or a paralyzing electric arc. But look at it this way, wouldn’t you rather have him on your side in a fight?
For a space invader of dinosaurian descent, Gar is relatively soft-hearted. While his peers among the Kra are mostly content to consider humans as food items, Gar was the one who realized that exterminating humanity on earth is no better than what happened to the Kra 65 million years ago when the asteroid hit. So, he’s stepped up and gone against his own kind trying to seek peace with “hoonahs,” the Kra term for humans.
Yes, that’s right, the Kra have a language, which befits any space-faring race. Their language, Kra-naga, is hard for humans to speak or understand, and the same is true for the Kra’s grasp of human-speak. Not only are all the words in the English language foreign to a Kra, but pronunciation can be quite tricky for them too. Given those huge fangs and a lack of lips, Kra have quite a problem with pronouncing the letters B, P, M and W. Try any of those without using your lips. Tough, huh? Add fangs and it gets quite problematic.
You can learn a lot more about Gar by reading Dinosaur Wars: Earthfall, which is available in Kindle, Nook and other ebook formats. The price can’t be beat, while it lasts: free!
Gar’s not only my favorite character out of the two books, but he was the first one I learned the name of. I recall first learning about Dinosaur Wars from a dinosaur book review site. Due to a misunderstanding, I thought Gar was a small robotic creature (which was actually the fighter-walker). I did eventually learn that a Kra wasn’t the name of the machine, but the species of dinosaur depicted on the cover.
One thing I find interesting about Gar and other Kra is, because they don’t have lips, their facial expressions are limited. Besides changing pupil size (I assume they have bony eye rings and thus cannot move their eyes) and opening their mouths wider or shutting it, there isn’t a lot of variety of emotion they could show through the head, at least specific ones that we humans can detect. Kra, I imagine, would be able to tell if their fellow peer is upset if they were to look just at the head, but a human might not be able to, at least from what I read.
With Kra I imagine that much of their emotional expression comes from not facial expressions but body language. While with humans, a lot of expression comes from the face, so when we express ourselves, much of it goes towards how the eyes and mouth look. But with Kra, I would think that more concentration is placed on the body, for instance tail position, lowering/raising the body, hand postures, and feather positions. While it is true that we humans don’t rely solely on the face for emotional expression/identification, we still rely more on the face, whereas I imagine Kra rely more on the body.
James Gurney’s latest Dinotopia book, Journey to Chandara, did have illustrations of what I imagine some Kra body languages might look like. The illustrations were of a feathered oviraptoroid dinosaur. The body shape is Kra-like in appearance (with some differences of course like a beak instead of a fanged mouth), so it makes for a good reference as to what postures a Kra might be capable of.
Of course I could turn out to be wrong. In a picture I never uploaded, I had drawn Gar, Gana, Saurgon, and Ugon (or is it now Oogan?) together and I made the error of giving Gana a crest as big as the three males she was with. I don’t know where the picture is anymore, unfortunately, but if I get a hold of it, I plan on correcting that mistake.
I do look forward to the next installment of Dinosaur Wars. I do feel bad for Gar and Gana, and it would be nice if they were able to reunite. Gar believes Gana is dead, and it’s reasonable to see why. Gana, by the end of the first book, is alive, but cold, air running low, and I imagine that if help doesn’t arrive in time, she would die, either from cold or oxygen depletion. I look forward to reading the conclusion of that.
Inferdramon, thanks for your thoughts about Gar. From your drawings, I can see you’ve got the Kra figured out pretty well. Regarding their relationships, I was just revising the second book, Counterattack, for its pending release as an ebook, and I ran across a scene late in the book where Gar, at the National Museum in DC, calls Archaeopteryx a cousin. I guess that helps explain a bit more about the relationship between the Kra and other dinosaurs. They emerged right out of the nexus of the maniraptor / troodon / archaeopteryx / bird continuum. The truth is, I didn’t want to get any more specific than that. It’s always fun to have a bit of mystery in the story mix.
I haven’t yet looked at Gurney’s latest, but it sounds interesting. I draw most of my emotional expression for Kra from birds. They do quite well at expressing themselves without eyebrows and lips. Much of their “expression” comes from head posture. That is, excitement often means pointing the snout or beak upward. Aggression is expressed by holding the head low. Mouth open may mean “I’m mad enough to bite you.” Watching birds do such things guides my writing.
Sorry about the Ugon / Oogon thing. Blame it on Dr. Ogilvey. He’s been revising his Kra-to-English dictionary. He came to realize that certain spellings led to ambiguous pronunciations, none worse than the name of villain #1. When spelled “Ugon” Ogilvey was dismayed to hear people pronounce the name, You-gon, as well as Ugh-gon and even Uh-g’n, when the actual pronunciation is Ooh-gon. Hence the shift to Oogon, which is much harder to mispronounce.
Meanwhile, keep posting your drawings. I enjoy them a lot.
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