As for Kiwi’s hands, I occasionally use that gesture myself. I find that, after an hour or four at the keyboard, that makes for an effective stretch to ease the strain on my wrists.

There is a certain air of class that I find refreshing, sir. I can’t quite put my finger upon the why of it, but you have an ineffable je ne sais quoi about you.

@Lloyd. We’ve never met, but I like you already. Lloyd (too).

My perception of it is as a specific body language pose that says the person doing it is outraged about something. They’re putting their hands like that because they’re ‘saying’ with that pose “I’m trying to keep from slapping someone” or [substitute the phrase of your choice].

It’s so Kiwi.

It says something about the company she keeps – she has to exaggerate all of her gestures, etc. because of her size relative to who she’s usually talking to. Just raising an eyebrow or frowning slightly would likely be missed by her larger friends – especially if she was bobbing around in flight.

By the same token, Paddington has had to learn to restrain his own movements, if smaller people around him are to be at ease. It makes him seem passive – but he’s not, really. One of the things dancing does for him is to let him move freely.

Now here’s a question for Scott. Am I just projecting my own conceptualization of Kiwi and Paddington onto this, is it something you deliberately aimed for when you were developing them as characters, or did it just happen that way because it somehow felt ‘right’ to you?

I wonder how much of it comes out of the way you pose them in 3D. The models impose their own limits on what you can do with them – but getting a pose the way you want it has to be easier in some ways than drawing and redrawing it would be. You can keep tweaking.

I admit I like this interlude because it gives Kiwi and Paddington some time at center stage so we can come to appreciate more about them. It also fills out Dreamland more – there’s an ecology, an economy, and of course politics implied by what the two of them have just been discussing.

Plus now we know rock giants fart.

It’s touches like this that make the story so entertaining.

Oh, and one more thing. You think Kiwi has her hands in an awkward position? I’m trying to type this over the big gray cat who has insisted on parking across my lap while he purrs…..