Raine Dog
Raine Dog is a web comic created by D. C. Simpson, the author of Ozy and Millie.
It is the memoir of a blue-furred dog named Raine. In the present, she's an anthropomorphic dog who can mingle with humans as well as other animals. But it wasn't always that way, and it is suggested that she helped make it that way.
She started out an almost ordinary puppy. But she loved her first owner so much that she learned to speak and read English (among other things) to be like him. He could forget she was a dog—which proved to be their undoing.
She was spayed because she "molested" her family's son, and sent to the suburbs. The new owners kept her tied to a tree without human attention. This drove her crazy (explaining a lot about the "present day" strips), so one day, she took off her collar...
A first attempt at starting the comic began in 2009. Reactions varied from complete apathy to utter condemnation. The first bubbles of discontent toward the comic occured when Simpson published a non-story comic where Raine Broke The Fourth Wall[1] to talk about "red dogs" and "blue dogs", not so subtly taking aim at Red State/Blue State politics, specifically at the Republicans.
Fans and non-fans alike were not pleased with D.C. Simpson's allegory, and even if you didn't find the idea of doing a comic where a major plot point involves a dog making out with a young boy to be weird, a lot of people couldn't get past Simpson's politics, going as far as to call them "ultra left-wing",[2] which had already started to grate on some fans due to I Drew This, although Ozy and Millie tended to avoid this because it wasn't really a politically-themed comic.
The comic elicited such a heated response from even Simpson's fanbase that she ended up disowning a fan message board because they didn't receive this comic very well. In 2011, however, she decided to restart the comic, but reaction wasn't much better this time around, because the few pages she happened to post went past Darker and Edgier by having Raine Dog apparently being assassinated, leaving the rest of the story to be told in flashback. Putting aside that she opened on a dark note, the new opening looks very much like Raine was being set up as a Martin Luther King of her universe, and the Unfortunate Implications of this new take didn't bode over too well, either. The reboot (which is all that is available on the live web as of August 2021) lasted for all of four strips.
- Accessory-Wearing Cartoon Animal/Barefoot Cartoon Animal/Fully-Dressed Cartoon Animal/Half-Dressed Cartoon Animal: Rainedog has been all of these in the comic and its associated artwork.
- Alternate History Screw: Despite supposedly being about examining the idea of how sentient, speaking pet species would be treated in our society, it completely ignores that this concept would have completely altered everything about human history. It's just our world and modern society with cartoon animals wedged into it and treated like poor abused slaves, meaning it's the entire other sentient species sharing our planet that are getting the screw in this alternate history.
- Amazing Technicolor Wildlife: As noted, Raine has blue fur. Of course, this is actually a political commentary associating Raine with liberal, "blue state" Democrats.
- Author Avatar: Raine
- But You Screw One Goat!: Among the other Unfortunate Implications of the comic is the suggestion of bestiality. The fact that this was supposed to be a comic deconstructing the relationship of cartoon humans and animals in contrast to real-life humans and animals doesn't make this any better.
- Carnivore Confusion: Raine's refusal to hunt means she has to scavenge from garbage bins. By the present, she's become a vegetarian.
- Continuity Reboot: In April 2011, Simpson restarted the comic from the beginning and took down all the old pages.
- Darker and Edgier
- Dog Stereotype: Mostly averted so far.
- Earn Your Happy Ending: Implied by the contrast between Raine's Dark and Troubled Past and her present day contentment.
- Glasses Girl: Rainedog, in the present day.
- Go Mad From the Isolation: Raine suffers a mild case of this when tied to the tree.
- Humans Are the Real Monsters: Not all of them, but enough.
- Interspecies Romance: Raine and Boy sharing a kiss leads to her getting spayed.
- I Was Named My Name: Inverted. Raine's old name, Princess, was abandoned when she joined the pack of wild dogs. "Names are how humans know us. We have no need for them."
- Lions and Tigers and Humans, Oh My!: The entire comic is a Deconstruction of how this trope would work if animals could talk—but were treated no differently than animals in Real Life.
- Orphaned Series
- Sliding Scale of Animal Communication: A bit ambiguous. At the start of the story, it could either be Level 0 or Level 4 (for Raine herself), but it seems to reach Level 5 or Level 6 by the present day.
- Talking Animal: All animals, apparently.
- Walking the Earth: Raine does this for a while after escaping from her neglectful owners.
- What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Not much, even though they can communicate with humans.
- ↑ Not unusual; this comic was Breaking the Fourth Wall since its very first strip.
- ↑ This Mod has not yet read all of this title, but what he has read is more centrist than Bernie Saunders' stated campaign platforms... and Saunders, while being left-wing, is nowhere near "ultra" as far as world politics goes.