#This got really long but too be fair there are 5 species discussed here vs yesterdays post discussing 2

[wetlandwanderer]

Northern Leopard Frog (Lithobates pipiens)

Today I’m going to be focusing on leopard frogs, specifically the Northern Leopard Frog as that’s what I have a recording of, however, I will put some information on the calls and ranges of all of the species of leopard frog found in North America (in addition to the Pickerel Frog).

The call of all leopard frogs have an overarching similarity in that they are often described as having a chuckle or hiccup like quality. The Northern Leopard Frog specifically has one of the longer calls in that it can be described as a long snore interrupted by short repeated hiccups or chuckles. When multiple of these frogs are together the snore can be lost and what is left is a jumble of overlapping hiccups (as can be heard in the recording). 

The two most similar calls in this group that it could be mistaken for would be the Southern Leopard Frog (Lithobates sphenocephalus) and the Pickerel Frog (Lithobates palustris), but for two different reasons. The Northern and Southern Leopard Frogs both have the same chuckle quality to their calls that characterizes most of the leopard frogs, however the southern species’ call is much shorter and higher pitched with a sound interspersed throughout that sounds almost like someone rubbing a balloon. In comparison the pickerel’s call is more similar to the long snore that can often be heard from the northern species just without the chuckles throughout. 

The Southern and Northern Leopard Frogs do not inhabit the same region for the most part as the Southern Leopard Frog is found everywhere south of Iowa and New Jersey. The Northern Leopard Frog’s range on the other hand extends from the southern edge of the Northwest Territories in Canada south to Iowa and north Kentucky and then west to Arizona, Nevada, and north California. It is by far the most pervasive species with the largest range amongst the leopard frogs.

The Pickerel is found everywhere east of Kansas and south of Quebec, with the exceptions of being found in east Texas and not being found through most of Illinois. The only other species of leopard frog the Northern Leopard Frog crosses over with otherwise is the Plains Leopard Frog, who thankfully has both a distinctive call and appearance that set it apart.

Physically leopard frogs look pretty similar, thankfully there is not a lot of crossover between most of their ranges, but for the species that do inhabit similar ranges here are some of the species specific traits to keep an eye out for. Pickerel Frogs specifically crossover with all four leopard frog ranges, so something to look for is the bright yellow coloration on the inner thighs of their hind legs. The other two species that have crossover with others are the Plains Leopard Frog (Lithobates blairi) and the Rio Grande Leopard Frog (Lithobates berlandieri), found respectively in the Great Plains regions north of Texas and east Texas south to Nicaragua. These two species have a broken dorsolateral fold. This is the ridge that goes down the sides of all leopard frogs unbroken, however, near the hind legs on these two species the ridge is split instead of being a straight line. 

Their calls are also some of the most distinctive in the group as the Plains Leopard Frog’s call is more of a short “chuck” or 3 cut off laughs in a row, while the Rio Grande Leopard Frog’s call is much deeper then the other species and is in the form of short rapid trill that sound almost like someone rubbing a balloon but slowed down. 

Since leopard frogs are one of the more recognized groups of frogs that many are pretty much guaranteed to run into at least sometime while in the US, I hope this expanded on some of their more distinctive traits for future observations.

[bardqueenofgallifrey]

Charlie and Miss Quill (Favourite Relationship, for Class Appreciation Week: Day Five)

Oh man. Oh man. *screeches into the void*

Will I ever be able to convey how much I love these two? Not just individually but their whole bizarre relationship and how damn fascinating it is?

My boy. My wife. I adore them both so much. I just want to give them both all the hugs they could ever want. Because goddamn do both of them really need some hugs. 

(I’ll try to avoid too much overlap between this and my Charlie post for Day Four but some might be necessary. I’ll also probably overuse the word ‘fascinating’ but it’s the best I’ve got.)

Now, these two. This relationship is one of the most unique things I’ve ever seen on television.

You know something has a fantastic complexity when it’s impossible to label it.

It’s not a friendship. It’s about as far from a romance (*snort*) as it is physically possible to get. It’s not even really a rivalry, or a hero/villain thing. (The only label you could possibly get away with is ‘a slave and her master’, but that is grossly oversimplifying the entire situation and doesn’t remotely do either of them justice.)

Let’s talk about how we first meet them. Charlie is clueless but sweet. Quill is the super awful but hilarious teacher.

And then we see Charlie come home, to a quietly crying Quill (!), see that they live together, and get the first idea that something unconventional is going on.

(”What’s the matter? Why are you upset?” He asks, without any measure of concern. “The real question is why aren’t you? All the time, at every waking moment?” Okay, so some kind of emotional baggage here. But not something either seems to further broach, at least, not in regards to asking for/offering comfort.)

Plus, then there’s the whole casual conversation about killing students. You know. Just everyday chatting between a boy and his physics teacher who he lives with, with a gun that is very obviously far too high tech.

And then we get the whole thing with April. Back to initial conclusion. Charlie GOOD. Quill BAD. And finally, after that, we get the explanation. Aliens, from another world, and from conflicting races(/species??). 

Except, that’s where the explanation gets interesting. Because the ones we get are both completely biased.

“…leading terrorist.” - “Freedom fighter.”

“They mismanaged their economy and grew resentful of our success.” - “The Rhodia ate up all the planets resources, including those of the Quill, and then they were surprised when we objected.”

“We tried to help you!” - “By making us so dependent that we could never recover.”

This, along with the ‘slavery/punishment’ thing that had already come up in their first scene alone together, sets the precedent for the interesting relationship that their relationship has with the audience. 

Which is, that we never get an objective view of it. We’re presented with his perspective and hers. After that, we have to draw our own conclusions. 

(Yes, this is going to go into the whole “what really happened on Rhodia? who was really in the wrong?” thing, but only because I think getting to the truth of that is essential before looking at their relationship, or else your view is going to be skewed to whoever you automatically favour. And yes, anyone who knows me knows which one is my fave, but I promise that I’m doing my absolute best here to work with facts and not opinion. I’m not villainising anyone here, I adore them both. Besides, I welcome debate on all of this, so long as it’s civilised!)

Now, it seems easy and logical to side to with Charlie - after all, we can see he’s certainly the more moral of the two - and yet, it’s not that simple. More moral isn’t the same as being right. Quill later describes her people as being ‘oppressed for centuries’. And hell, looking at our own world today, what’s the one thing we know? 

People in power twist the truth. (*cough* Trump’s alternative facts *cough*). Those being oppressed don’t tend to be lying. They just want to be free.

So, that makes it a bit trickier, doesn’t it? As the series go on, Charlie’s refusal to even consider that Quill’s situation might be slavery, amongst other smaller things (see ep 4), indicates that he is stubbornly set on believing in the goodness of his people and culture, even when others around him are trying to gently point out that this belief might be flawed.

There’s no doubt Quill did some awful things. Her actions should never be excused. But, “a riot is the voice of the unheard” (MLK Jr), and episode 7 confirms that her army really was fighting out of desperation after centuries of oppression.

“Do you know how oppressed Quill have been for centuries?! We died, and died again, and where were you?”

Look at her face. This moment is too emotional to be fake or embellished (also, in this moment, she has no reason to lie or exaggerate). So, the Quill were as oppressed as she claims. This is one of the only parts of their story not up for debate. This is a fact. 

So, with the more evidence the show gives us, we do see that it’s likely that Quill’s account of what happened on Rhodia is the more accurate of the two. (Still not objective, but more accurate, and the best we’ll get for now.)

So: Quill is right but not in the right (because, you know, she killed people, and has killed at least one innocent person since, albeit only to save herself). 

Meanwhile, Charlie is wrong, but not in the wrong. It’s pretty obvious that Charlie genuinely believed his people were good and not mistreating the Quill. 

Whether or not this is a belief that spread across his whole people is impossible to know. If so, firstly, yikes, but it’s fairly plausible when you consider “I would have tried to be a fair leader” and “a wish is the same as an action”. It seems likely (and this is going into headcanon/opinion territory, not fact) that the Rhodia were not oppressing the Quill deliberately, and because they were intending/wishing to be fair rulers, as far as they were concerned, they were - meanwhile the Quill are like “are you fucking blind?”

(The alternative is just that Charlie’s parents and government were secretly really fucking shady/way more explicitly racist than Charlie. It’s an intriguing possibility, given that Charlie is 100% a good bean who was just fed a lot of “we’re so great and just!” propaganda, but like I said, trying not to villainise anybody here! You can pick whichever one you want to believe - or better yet, hit up my inbox and give me your take on the Rhodia and their morality, I’m always up for some civilised discussion/theorising/debate!) 

ANYWAY. Back to Charlie and Quill’s relationship. I didn’t mean to get so “Rhodia vs Quill” but I just think that trying to understand what happened as best we possibly can is important for looking at their relationship. 

Now, their individual portrayals on the show is really interesting. 

Quill is initially not really shown as a sympathetic character - though within the first episode, we get enough to show that, yes, she does have as much of an angsty backstory as Charlie, and yes, she does have feelings. She’s just still, you know, kind of awful. Across the series we get more tidbits - the Inspector incident showing how desperately lonely she is, this then being reinforced by her half-wanting to join the kids in their celebration at the end of episode 3 but instead walking away, and then in episode 5 we really see her walls come down:

*holds armful of kittens* So, will this be enough to make her feel better? No? Damn. *showers her with kittens and hugs anyway*

The thing about Quill is that she tries to act tough, and cold. She is closed off, but that’s as far as it goes. Because when it comes down to it, she feels things SO deeply. Not only that, she actually doesn’t have much of an emotional filter. Her rage, her devastation, they burst out of her because she simply can’t stop it. 

Episode 5 highlights her belief in what she did on Rhodia. It points out that the arn were never given to Rhodians, only Quill (reinforcing before the confirmation in ep 7 that yes, the oppression of the Quill was very much a real thing), and has Quill saying that everything she ever did was for her people, the people she is shown to care about so deeply that she is weeping for them and shouting at the people refusing to acknowledge her very real pain. 

From that scene onwards, she’s more or less given the same treatment the kids are in terms of sympathetic portrayal - while not losing the fact that she is of course still far more morally grey than all of them except Charlie, and still has a generally hostile disposition. 

Now, Charlie is meanwhile always painted as the more sympathetic character out of him and Quill. Obviously. And, it’s fair. He’s a lovely boy and has a good heart. Look at his precious face. 

*pats him on the head fondly* *gives him a Polish puppy to snuggle* 

He’s a good boy (puppy joke not intended, sorry), there’s just some grey morality and very rose tinted beliefs in there. But the latter certainly isn’t his fault. The way he clings to them and refuses to hear other sides of it maybe is, but hey, if all your people/family were dead, you wouldn’t want to hear that maybe they weren’t as great as you thought they were. You’d want to hang onto your belief that they were good people who never did anything wrong. 

The reason his relationship with Quill is so interesting is because it’s completely different to every single one of his other ones. Charlie is super sweet, right? He cares about people even if he’s just met them, right? Yes. 

Unless… Quill is somehow involved. Then his empathy is gone, his fucks are out the window, and she can be in tears in front of him screaming about watching all of her people die (something he himself also experienced) and he just… doesn’t care. He calls her heartless. 

This has so many fascinating connotations, but the only logical conclusion is that he just doesn’t see Quill as a person in the same way that he does everyone else. Whether this is due to her status as a criminal/murder/terrorist or her being a Quill, is up for debate. But given his “you are heartless, like all Quill” line, I think it’s a solid combination of the two. Whether it’s an implicit or explicit prejudice he has, it’s also hard to know, but I tend to think implicit just because it’s hard to imagine him consciously deciding that a whole race of people are bad. Plus, his ignorance on it comes across a lot like: “What do you mean? I’m not racist, I have black friends! would have tried to be a fair ruler!” It’s something he’s been conditioned to think, just like everything else. 

Now, add that to Quill’s (frankly, understandable) hatred for her enslaver - who, to be fair, wasn’t technically the one that enslaved her, but you know what I mean - who is also the only person left she can blame for the oppression of her people and the general downturn of her whole life, and…

Well.

That’s a cocktail of fun. By which I mean, a lot of complex and mostly negative emotions flying around one house. 

They are a pair who for all intents and purposes can’t stand each other, yet circumstances have forced them together and will not let them part. THIS IS GOLDEN WRITING RIGHT HERE. SERIOUSLY. 

Let’s have a look at this scene from What She Does Next Will Astound You. It’s honestly incredible, I wish we could have gotten it in the show, but at the same time, Charlie’s internal thoughts here are so great and couldn’t have been conveyed on screen, so maybe it was for the best. 

(Context for anyone who needs it: extraneous circumstances = Quill can temporarily use a gun, and now she has one trained on Charlie.) 

*screaming into the void again*

TLDR; Him sort of thinking they’d bonded while all the while suspecting she would kill him at first opportunity (pretty sure this is set before she knows the Cabinet isn’t empty, for the record), and feeling a weird sense of relief when he turns out to be right? His chosen last words being ‘fuck you’? Her not even intending to kill him but just wanting him to apologise because goddamn doesn’t she deserve at least that from him? Him talking about not wanting her, reinforcing just how stuck they are with each other? 

I love it. I love them. This whole relationship is so complicated and tumultuous and fucking fascinating. 

They have a shared sorrow, a shared tragedy, and yet through all this time together never comfort each other through it (like Quill and Ballon so readily do). And it’s just because they’re just too damn different. A prince and a soldier. A Rhodian and a Quill. The world they mourn was two completely different places, to them. For Charlie it was a place of solace. For Quill, it was a battlefield, a place that had looked down on her, from the moment she was born. They remember each other’s loved ones but only as enemies. 

They have completely different worldviews. Charlie’s is all very ‘civilised’, and all about learning. Quill believe in fighting - for them living and fighting are more or less the same thing (which is what makes the punishment of the arn slavery so particularly cruel, actually, which begs the question, were all Rhodia oblivious to this crucial cultural difference, or was it deliberate? @ Charlie’s parents: *squints*). 

Case in point: 

“I believe life tries to kill you from the moment you are born, and the only proper response is to fight back at every moment!”

“You tried to kill me in the nest!” - “All Quill sisters do that, it’s how we know the survivors are strong.” 

“How about that fight? Matron’s rules - no mercy.” 

No wonder Quill and Charlie never get along, or ever really feel for each other except for in the finale, or in Quill’s sympathy for Charlie’s love for Matteusz in ep 5. How can you sympathise with someone you don’t understand?!

Favourite little moments between them (to briefly lighten things up):

“By the way, Matteusz lives with us now.” - “Whatever!” (her lack of fucks gets me every time, after all, she’s already got one teenager making her life hell, what more is another, politer one going to do?)

That whole scene from What She Does Next Will Astound You

That bit where Quill teases him about locking him in the classroom despite April having a key/acts like a total little shit just because she can, because it’s the only way she can fight back against him

The part in Joyride where he keeps trying to make her look at something on an iPad and she laments that she can’t smack him over the head with it

When she and Tanya walk in on Charlie and Matteusz snogging in the weird creepy house in The Stone House 

The finale, meanwhile, gave us some really interesting little things with them. Firstly, Charlie’s rather surprising care for Quill at the beginning, and not wanting to physically restrain her. I have to wonder if maybe during those six days, his belief in his rightness was shaken, if seeing that Quill had gotten the arn out (which they both knew was so incredibly likely to kill her), that she had truly been that miserable and therefore that desperate in order to decide it was worth trying, made him wonder. 

Yay, development!

(He then later goes back to assuming he needs to possibly take her down once she’s awake, but hey, that’s fair! He knows she has a lot of reasons to want him dead, and he knows probably even less of her general morality than we do - he has no idea who she might be okay with hurting now that she can.) 

Then you have this great moment. 

“They’ll come for me.”

“I’ll stop them.”

It’s so simple. They fall into an alliance with such an ease, that it’s in a way immensely frustrating that it’s taken them this long. Of course they’ve been opposing each other up until this point, but goddamn it’s satisfying to see them finally on the same page, finally fighting for the same thing. 

(And, you know, maybe Charlie and the audience realises that Quill was… kind of right about the Shadowkin the whole time? She told him that the Shadowkin would keeping coming and only kill more people if he didn’t wipe them out, and they did. If he’d listened to her in episode 5, Tanya wouldn’t be an orphan and Ram would still have a dad. Just saying. This shit was unavoidable, and Vivian and Varun could have survived it.)

And then. Oh boy. And then - she saves him. 

Is this, maybe, the moment we see Quill realise she actually doesn’t want Charlie to die? (I adore it, I need more of their relationship, NOW.)

She looks at him, realises what is about to happen, and saves him. Her reasons for doing so are tricky to pinpoint, though, without much content left afterwards. All we really have to go on is:

“No, you have to live. You have to live with the sacrifice.” 

By saving him, she accomplishes two things. She gets to have him still be alive. She gets to not become the last survivor of her planet, the only one who can remember it even if they remember it very differently. To not lose the person she might have spent months despising but has also shared many a moment of ‘wtf humans’ with. And? She also gets to watch him suffer, after he and his people caused her to suffer. 

Basically, she gets to have her cake and eat it too.  

And now, I’m just so damn intrigued about where they are going to go from here. Will Charlie resent her for saving him? Will he eventually thank her? Will he ask her to kill him, because he truly wanted to die? Would she, if he really begged? 

Will Charlie finally concede that yes, it was slavery and it was wrong? Will Quill realise it also kinda wasn’t Charlie’s fault? 

THIS IS WHY I NEED SEASON 2 OKAY THERE IS SO MUCH POTENTIAL, THESE TWO COULD BE SUCH A GREAT TEAM, HECK THEY COULD EVEN END UP CARING ABOUT EACH OTHER AND THINK ABOUT HOW CUTE THAT WOULD BE AND WHAT GREAT DEVELOPMENT WE COULD SEE

Ahem. Calm again. 

Seriously. Consider Charlie and Quill being really awkward around each other post-finale. Not sure where they stand any more. Slowly sometimes talking about the serious stuff, trying to understand the other’s POV. Apologies, concessions, until one day one of them saves the other’s life on an instinct, in a panic. And they realise that suddenly they mean something to each other. 

Just consider the potential. These two and this relationship is the show’s unique element, it’s strongest point, what sets it apart from just being “a high school has an alien problem”. 

So, in summary, they’re complicated and wonderful and I love them so so much because the writing of this show isn’t perfect but almost everything around their relationship is.

I didn’t mean for this to get so long-winded but understanding their past is important for understanding their present, and also I just really love them a lot, okay?