Speaking of the ridiculous creature that’s the Indoraptor, and using JWE footage as reference for drawing the prototype, there are some distinct differences in how the Indos in the game move and how the Indo in the movie does.
There’s of course an explanation for this in both the doylist and watsonian sense. The game’s JWFK update came out at about the same time the movie did, or actually even a bit before the movie, so the people making the game had limited reference for animating their new dinos, especially one that’s as legitimately weird as the Indoraptor is, though obviously they had access to some movie footage etc. in advance. And also, it can be assumed that different individuals just move a little differently, and the Indos in JWE would probably be a more advanced version since they’re apparently mass-produced now in the AU that JWE takes place in, while the prototype is the first and at the time only one. There’s bound to have been some debugging between Mistake: The Dinosaur and something they’d be willing to put on display in a theme-park.
Some of the differences I’ve noticed include:
The JWE Indoraptors’ animations have them walk on all fours and run on two legs. We see the prototype use both stances for both walking and running and often switch back and forth between them, and obviously a movie creature is going to have more varied movement than an AI in a video game, but in general the prototype seems to prefer the other way around from what’s default in JWE.
The JWE Indoraptors move digitigrade on all four limbs, meaning even on all fours they don’t put the heel of the palm to the ground as they walk. The prototype at least sometimes does. Which I think means the JWE Indoraptor is an animal meant for both bipedal and quadrupedal stance, while the prototype Indoraptor is a bipedal animal that for some reason has adapted to also move on all fours. He places his hands on the ground the way a human would.
Which brings us back to one of my favorite fan theories surrounding the creature, namely that the Indoraptor is part human. Perhaps the prototype is more so than the later versions. Which I guess makes sense; wouldn’t want to freak out the paying park guests too much with a too uncanny-valley animal.
And it is possible that him looking uncanny-valley creepy in general is what they’re going for more than that he is literally part human genetically, but I think the way he’s animated achieves the goal of looking unsettling in any case. There are some moments where he moves more like a human in a raptor suit than the JP1 raptors that were sometimes actually played by humans in raptor suits did. Like,
coming out of my cage and I’ve been moving like a proper dinosaur~
wait what
what the fuck??
alright, back to more or less normal-looking movement immediately, but I saw that, what was that???
So in conclusion JWE is really useful for seeing the dinosaurs in good lighting and such, but as ridiculous as the Indoraptors in the game already are, they’re still not half as absolutely fucking weird as the prototype.
Latest somewhat random raptor squad & co. observations made while looking up references for something else about them:
Barry is left-handed (and Owen and Hoskins are not. Noticed while staring at people’s watches in a scene all three of them are in, for reasons of drawing Hoskins’s watch and ring dangling bloodied from Delta’s mouth. Besides which wrist he wears his watch on, Barry uses his left hand in his other scenes the way I as a right-handed person would use my right, so, seems canon). I don’t know if Omar Sy is left-handed, too, or if it’s an acting choice.
The raptor charge at Owen at the gate when he turns and runs is a bluff. I kind of just suggested it on a whim in my raptor jaw-snapping post and thought the main thing going on there was that the raptors weren’t keeping in mind as clearly as usually how breakable Owen is compared to a misbehaving packmate of their own species. But now I think they actually never intended to catch up to him, counting on that he’d run away instead of being foolish enough to still stand his ground and keep defying Blue until she’d feel pressured to do something more serious to him than just stare him down angrily. That charge was as much all bark and no bite as the jaw snapping, just a notch more intense.
Why do I think that?
Because of Echo showing up after staying away for most of the action, right before the charge.
She’s to Owen’s right and behind him, where he wouldn’t see her, as he’s focusing on the three raptors in front of him. I don’t think Barry sees her, either, at least at first.
She’s at a perfect spot to execute the trap Dr. Grant describes to the kid at the beginning of JP1 (side note, yes I know about the fanon that the kid was Owen as a child and that’s why he got interested in learning about raptors. I like it, though I’m not sure if I want to adopt it as my hc personally). Echo could cut Owen off before he reaches the gate, and Barry could do nothing even if he did notice her in time, besides shout “look out, behind you” just before she leaps.
But Echo is the last to move, despite being closest. She doesn’t when Owen runs, or when Blue chases after him, giving the other raptors a cue/permission to do so, too, not until he’s already getting away from her reach and diving under the gate. I believe she’s quick and observant enough that this is deliberate.
I don’t know if Owen realized that (or if he might have eventually, with more time to think about it - it was kind of a busy day from there forward). Though it’s good of him to be wary, I think he does overestimate the raptors’ eagerness to hurt him, as much as they like to test their boundaries with him.
Which has consequences, as I think it contributes to how, when the raptors go rogue during the hunt for the Indominus, he instantly behaves like they’ve betrayed him, too, just because they’ve turned on the InGen troops (not that I blame him or Barry, because yeah these are predatory wild animals, it’s not exactly a farfetched conclusion - and anyway, what were they going to do, start shooting the InGen guys to show the raptors they’re on their side?), but looking at the situation from the raptors’ point of view, they might actually be unsure at worst about whether they should now count their human packmate(s), too, as “human” over “packmate”. If they did come to the conclusion that they maybe should, it’s probably not because they’ve been waiting for an opportunity to do so, but because they’re out in an unfamiliar world, with humans all around them who make them uncomfortable and who they can tell don’t intend to have their backs and are only using them, and so the raptors need more than ever reassurance that dad(s) will keep them safe in this new, scary situation. And, they don’t get it.
I got distracted from drawing raptors by going to check a thing about raptors. So after this latest being a parody of myself, I thought I’d share the thing I checked about raptors in case someone else finds it worthwhile information.
The scene is dark and the night vision cameras are monochromatic, so it’s hard to make out which raptor does what, and I wanted to find out. I did find out (I’ll spare you the visuals, tw for gory if not terribly graphic descriptions):
The first raptor to attack an InGen trooper is Delta, seen from her victim's camera. I identified her by the raptor not having Blue’s or Charlie’s more distinctive markings, or Echo’s misaligned jaw. She’s also missing a few teeth in the same places Delta is (upper left, and lower right near the front. I hadn’t noticed that before, but I did see it now going back to a few scenes where I know the raptor whose teeth I’m scrutinizing is Delta).
Next we see a shot from Echo's camera with her running towards a human, but Charlie beats her to it.
The humans begin firing at the raptors and in their general direction. A raptor I can't identify with certainty (but since Delta and Charlie are busy, I’m guessing it’s Echo) is shown running away from the gunfire.
One of the humans' cameras shows the fleeing raptor running directly away from him as he shoots. Still on his camera, another raptor jumps at him from the side, landing a couple of bites somewhere around his head before the camera breaks. A few frames with the raptor’s flank in view show the attacking raptor is clearly Blue.
Then Delta's camera shows another raptor attacking a human from a group of three in front of her. This one is a bit further away so it's hard to tell which raptor it is, but considering everybody else is probably busy already making a kill at the moment, I think it's Echo finally getting her teeth in some prey.
Soon after that, still on her camera, Delta attacks one of the other humans who were with Echo's victim.
Delta's kill is then immediately shown also from the camera of the third human, and right after, that human is tackled by a raptor, too, and dragged away while he struggles in vain to be let go.
I think the raptor dragging him is Echo, who just turned around after oneshotting her previous victim. Her tail appears striped, but not as distinctly as Charlie’s would be. On the control room screen Echo’s video feed is a bit hard to make out as Hoskins stands in front of it for most of the shot, but she is moving through the undergrowth and I can’t see a human in front of her that she would be chasing.
The raptors’ headsets’ camera feed is divided into four sections on the control room screen, with Blue in the top left corner, Delta in top right, Echo in bottom left, and Charlie in bottom right. (In left-to-right order of reading it’s arranged by their ages oldest to youngest.)
Delta in that shot seems to be about to bite the face off the human she has pinned to the ground. Blue and Charlie are each chasing someone. One of their targets’ video feed is shown under that of the guy Echo is dragging (I think Blue’s, but I’m not sure).
Right after this Owen comes across Charlie eating someone in the long grass, so it looks like she caught whom she was chasing.
Out of the raptors in the JP/JW series, I think I've probably given the least thought to the Sorna raptor pack featured in The Lost World: Jurassic Park. Their part in the movie is minor, and they seem pretty uncoordinated and uncomplicated compared to the other raptors we're introduced to, but there's certainly more to them than just a miniboss level of mindless attack machines, so overlooking them isn't exactly fair.
So I thought a bit more about the group of three raptors who ambush our heroes at the abandoned InGen worker village, one female and two males. The pack as a whole is larger than just them, as seen in the long grass scene, and we don't get much information about their life otherwise. But maybe there is some indication on screen, after all, of what might be the group dynamic of at least this team of three, chaotic and volatile though it is, and maybe it even has some implications for JP/JW’s version of the species as a whole.
The attack begins with one of the males ambushing Sarah, and then being distracted into pursuing Ian instead while Sarah and Kelly run indoors, the other two raptors going after them. What we see of interaction between raptors, the two charging together and digging under the door to get to the humans counts, and they seem to be cooperating fine at the moment. At some point the raptors disappear from the door, having realized the humans are digging their way out from the other side of the building, and circle over to wait for them.
Both raptors leave the door, but the male is the only one who crawls into the building, at first. We don't see the female again for a bit, but she eventually goes in, too, when the male that went ahead of her gets himself killed instead of catching the prey.
unpopular opinion: the only cringeworthy thing about Kelly Malcolm killing a Velociraptor with the power of gymnastics is that the raptor responds to “hey, you!”. galaxy brain edition: it’s actually hilarious that it does, you guys are just boring.
Then follows the confrontation that lets Sarah escape from under the raptors' noses. I could assume it's random violence, and it probably is a fight that in a more functional pack would not have happened or gone as far. But the Velociraptor depicted in this franchise is a very social animal, that in all other packs we've seen, including the about equally dysfunctional JP1 pack, has established some kind of tiered social structure among themselves, so it's not unlikely that place in the pecking order plays a part in why these two raptors behave the way they do, as well.
The male that waited for the prey on the ground snaps his jaws at the female when she falls off the roof and lands on top of him. From what I've already concluded about other raptor packs' use of this gesture, it's either a scolding or a challenge, the response tending to depend on which one, i.e. whether it's done upwards or downwards in the pack hierarchy. The female snaps back at the male, so the tension is not over at that one snap, and it continues building up as each raptor returns the gesture with increasing aggressiveness, until it escalates into a physical fight.
The one who turns it into one is the female. Which I think is my clue for which one may have been in charge in the trio.
One interpretation is that the first snap was the male reprimanding the female for being clumsy and not doing her job well enough, and she responded in kind due to feeling unfairly chastised and wanting to set the record straight. Another is that the female snapped back at the male to reassert her dominance, when the male got presumptuous and criticized her leadership of this hunt. Considering the female goes on to upgrade the quarrel into teeth and claws instead of letting this seemingly minor thing go, I'm leaning towards the latter.
She has something to defend here, that she feels she has to keep defending - other than her life, of course, which she on the contrary puts in danger by not backing down - and I think it's her position in the pack hierarchy. The same way Blue keeps acting aggressive towards Owen when he puts himself between her and the paddock worker she considers prey, because she feels challeged, since as far as Blue is concerned she is the leader of the pack and Owen is the sidekick. Blue doesn't get what she wanted, but Owen does back down, kind of, and I also think Blue just really, really doesn’t want to hurt him, so that's that.
From what I can tell of the Sorna raptors’ fight, the female raptor wins, or at least ends up on top the last we see of them, putting down mutiny successfully - and possibly much more permanently than Blue's winning her own fight over pack dominance with Echo was, where both got to heal and (at least eventually) went back to being buds afterwards. Despite whatever issues they have with each other, Blue and Echo love each other first and foremost, and when they forget that they do they have parental oversight to break up fights before they get out of hand. We don’t know the relationship of these two raptors, and in any case they’ve probably had limited guidance growing up to teach them restraint in social conflicts, whether it’s knowing when to back down or when to show lenience.
And so she ends up losing two pack members over some humans. Maybe that’s worth keeping her rank to her.
So... while I'm analyzing fictional dinosaurs that their writers may not have even given this much nuance intentionally, because 'tis what fans do, I'll add that I would also not consider the raptors' genders irrelevant here. I mean we don't get much fodder for observations of male and female raptors interacting because of the whole humans not wanting them to breed thing, but we do have the other Sorna pack from Jurassic Park 3 as another example. As I already touched on in my post comparing the raptors of each movie in general, the JP3 pack is very well-functioning and harmonious, and, it's also led by a female.
The female raptor in TLW is not necessarily the leader of the whole pack (though she could be), but she does seem to me to be dominant to at least the two males she hunts with, though her authority is rather fragile. I think the order of the raptors' entrance to the building to get at the prey supports this theory of her being the one in charge, with the female possibly taking more of an organizer role rather than being the first to rush in. It’s reminiscent of The Big One getting her two subordinates to attack the electrified fences for her, instead of getting zapped herself while seeking weak spots.
How much of that kind of leadership is behavior natural to the species is another matter. The JP3 female pack leader is only seen at conflict with her packmates once, when one of the males is about to attack the surrounded humans and she tells him not to. His response is to sheepishly step back, looking to me more sorry he did something she didn’t like than scared she’ll hurt him for it. The JP3 pack seems to me like a family that looks after each other, as shown by the lengths they go to to get their stolen eggs back.
In the other more functional pack, Blue leads the hunt for the Indominus from the front of the formation they run in, and when they decide their alliance with the Indominus is over, Blue is the first one to defy her and get smacked into a wall for it. With Blue seemingly dead, the next one to step up to the plate is Delta, who, as the second-oldest raptor, I think considers herself having just inherited pack leadership, whether both of her remaining packmates (read: Owen) are on the same page about that or not. She and Echo don’t charge at Owen’s command while he stays back, but on his cue with all three of them taking part in the fight.
Perhaps the natural style of leading for weird featherless Dakotaraptors Velociraptors as depicted in the JP/JW franchise is as the first line of defense of one’s family rather than as an armchair general of expendable underlings, but as the Sorna pack seen in TLW is likely the same version and generation as The Big One’s pack of grudgingly co-operating strangers, leadership looking similar in both packs makes sense. However, among all their differences, one thing TLW’s and JP3′s (clearly discernible as) mixed-gender packs still have in common is the females we see being dominant over the males.
Here I am longposting about dinosaurs again, specifically, comparing the Velociraptors of each Jurassic movie.
Which I already did a bit in my post about one specific method of their communication, that focused mostly on Jurassic World.
[Spoilers for all of the series' movies released so far, including Fallen Kingdom]
Jurassic Park
The first Velociraptors we met in the series gave all of us who first saw the movie as kids nightmares. Their scariness is a different kind than the T. rex's, whose danger is based on her size and strength. The raptors are smaller and sneaky and you're not safe from them anywhere, and they are given an extra creepiness factor with both their uncanny intelligence and especially what we hear of their violence even towards their own kind. The T. rex is a large and dangerous animal, but she's just doing what she does, and this time that meant attacking a car because it was shiny and she thought it might be something to eat. Even the Dilophosaurus was just hunting. The raptors, apart from the contrasting scene of the hatching of one that suddenly gains an ominous tone when the infant’s species is revealed, are monsters.
In retrospect, they were so even in context of their species as depicted in this franchise, which, yes, progressively “defangs” them, so to speak, because the original version we were shown was a highly dysfunctional one. The Jurassic Park and The Lost World novels address the raptors' senselessly violent behavior towards each other as an unnatural state created by being grown in a lab with no meaningful social contacts, when the species is naturally a very social one, and to develop properly they need a pack, a family. No one taught them how to raptor, so they function solely on instinct, and as no one has bothered to socialize them to see each other as more than convenient allies, it's every raptor for herself unless co-operation, at which they're still very good when they give it a try, happens to be beneficial.
The Big One rules her pack with fear of deadly violence that she demonstrates herself very willing to deliver, when a more natural pack situation would instead see the leader(s) as a source of guidance. None of the humans bother to understand the animals and their needs, either. Muldoon, who probably does the most at least in terms of not underestimating what a threat they pose, seems to downright hate them.
Perhaps, after a definition, they're monsters. But it looks like we had a hand in turning them into that.
The Lost World
The first sequel's raptors are less about stealth and the creeping horror of being stalked, and more impulsive pouncing with little planned co-operation. There’s not much showcasing their intelligence by figuring out the human world, but to be fair they are already on their home turf with the humans being the intruders, and they're still problem-solvers, such as by circling around to where they anticipate their prey to escape to, even if the teamwork involved seems coincidental at best.
From what I've understood, the raptors encountered on this part of Isla Sorna are of the same version, and the same or next generation, as the JP raptors were, the different colouring some of them have simply being due to sexual dimorphism as we didn't see any male raptors in JP. They exhibit the same behavioral problems, including willingness to engage each other in serious fights at seemingly little provocation, with fewer restrictions in the absence of fences and humans, but we're not given much information about this pack to explain it further. Do they have any reason to see each other as family, are any of them so by blood, what's their inner hierarchy and how is it maintained, or are they even organized enough to have one?
Both movies' raptors are social wild animals raised in relative isolation in captivity, then released or escaped to fend for themselves and figure themselves out. Sorna's are more adapted to the world around them, as it's closer to the world they would naturally live in, but not necessarily to each other, and are learning it as they go. The process isn't always pretty.
Jurassic Park 3
This is the closest we've gotten and will probably get within the movies of seeing the raptors in their natural state. And what do you know, they not only co-operate effectively but also treat each other well. They also only bother with the humans because the humans have something of theirs, instead of killing everything they can get within clawing distance. How much of it has to do with this apparently being a different version of Velociraptor than JP's and TLW's as they would hardly evolve physically that quickly, I don't know, but they've probably been on the island for about as long. By this point we should be looking at at least a third generation out of captivity, raising a next one, rather than a bunch of confused, parentless Lost Boys.
I'd love to know how the TLW pack was doing around this time and if they'd sorted themselves out anywhere near to the same extent. Or if they ever managed to at all, before Isla Sorna fell enough out of ecological balance that it couldn’t sustain the growing populations of so many invasive species, and any surviving dinosaurs the humans wanted to preserve had to be moved to careful containment again on Isla Nublar (which I wish was addressed better or at all within the movies, as it’s a perfectly good reason, along with Sorna also being volcanic, to not just move Nublar’s dinosaurs there to escape the eruption of Mount Sibo). Unless they were simply left behind to their eventual extinction and some of them somehow managed to adapt anyway, both wild raptor packs are unfortunately dead by the time of Jurassic World.
The JP3 pack’s level of communication is notable compared to the previous movies, as is how much of it is vocalizations. Besides a specific distress call, there’s the general “come here” aimed at pack members that was only used once in JP, and was completely absent from TLW, but the JP3 pack, and Jurassic World’s Raptor Squad, seem fond of it (the latter less so as they’re not used to being out of each other’s sight), along with various quacks and croons that serve a purpose beyond aggression and hunting. They make enough noise at each other you can put subtitles on it.
I also find interesting the JP3 pack’s apparent hierarchy. The raptor who would seem to be either the pack leader or at least in a position to boss around the others we see, I think is implied to be the mother of the eggs the humans stole. (And in a nice parallel, because come to think of it the raptors really are the dinosaurs most like us, the first human she goes to for her missing children is another mother who came to the island to find hers.)
So speaking of that, I keep seeing the idea of male animals being more aggressive and/therefore dominant applied to the dinosaurs of this series by fans (usually male fans, yes). But at least when it comes to Velociraptors, we’ve seen female pack leaders of various temperaments, and not a single male one (or at least not one clearly recognizable as such) even when the pack isn’t all-female. JP3′s representation of the species is one female raptor leading a bunch of males that seem quite harmonious about the arrangement, whether what we see is just the team that went after the egg thieves or the whole pack.
There's a fan theory that the Big One is one of the dinosaurs in JP that changed their sex from female to male allowing the population to breed, which isn't unfounded because according to the Dinosaur Protection Group’s documents there had been juvenile raptors out of containment on Isla Nublar sometime before the building of Jurassic World. But I think it's worth questioning why one would automatically look to the aggressive pack leader for the male one, when there's nothing but the assumption of male dominance being default to say the male couldn't have just as well been one of her subordinates. Or one of those she had already killed if it was little enough time ago that the female raptor(s) he mated with that survived the Big One's takeover could have still laid the resulting eggs shortly after their escape (especially if the sex change comes with even partial change of appearance, as all of the first movie's raptors have the female colouration, though anything too drastic would probably have tipped the humans off that something's up... at least assuming there was enough of him left to identify).
Jurassic World
The Indominus Rex now has the role of the monster. Her raptor side is one of the ways she tries to establish ties to the world around her, but it goes about as well as with previous examples of raptors not knowing how to raptor, and it turns out the Big One’s style of ruling doesn’t cut it with a pack that already knows better. By now the humans' fault in this angry overgrown puppy trying her teeth on every surface to see what’s meant for chewing and basically only interacting with the world by lashing out is acknowledged, though.
The Raptor Squad is among the more functional packs, but it is still far from natural and has its complications resulting from having been raised by humans. They've been treated a lot better than the JP raptors were back in the day, and Owen's criticism of the Indominus Rex's unhappy isolation lays out pretty well how the approach to handling raptors has changed more towards acknowledging their needs, even if it is due to the higher ups being interested in exploiting their natural tendencies.
(yes, I know that screenshot is from the next movie, it’s relevant here)
This pack is a family, and though all the raptors are the same generation and still fairly young, they have had a parental figure to guide them throughout their lives, and have been socialized to consider each other sisters despite probably not being blood-related.
But there is miscommunication due to the parent being of a different species, and distrust due to that difference in species crossing a predator/prey line (though it may, again, be kind of the humans’ fault that it does). Owen is afraid of his raptor daughters, which is wise of him, as they could kill him very easily, but it also comes between them truly respecting each other as equals. He interacts with them every day, but ever since they grew out of their baby stage it's been through bars or from an overhead walkway, and he and Barry only touch them when they're muzzled. The raptors’ relationship with their human pack member(s) is tested for its true nature when the barriers are gone, with mixed results.
(Incidentally, the “I’m not angry, just disappointed” tone Owen says it in is why “That’s how it is, huh?” in reaction to being surrounded like prey by the dinosaurs he raised is his genuinely funniest line in the movie in my subjective opinion.)
The JW raptors are not tame. As much as Owen and Barry took as good care of them as they could (and were authorized to) and obviously both cared about them, the raptors were never going to be perfectly content in their captivity, and their training doesn’t make them not dangerous (some of it probably makes them more so; there’s a reason competently run zoos in real life don’t give large predators live prey to practice with, but again, the higher ups had an agenda for the raptors that involved letting them get good at killing stuff).
Still, they represent a logical next step in these increasingly more socially functional and less abominable dinosaurs being able to extend their pack bonding to another social species, when encouraged by one that likes to befriend everything it sees. Of their frightening intelligence, something even their human handlers to some extent misunderstand and underestimate is the complexity of emotional intelligence, especially in the case of the pack leader, who is a young animal that feels things like deep attachment, fear of abandonment, and annoyance at being condescended to, towards a parent she can’t fully communicate with. For better or for worse Blue viewing Owen as her dad informs more of the pack's behavior than he might, until possibly recently, be aware of.
Events largely out of their control divide them with quick and grave consequences, but, they do manage to make up. Too bad those external factors still reduce the pack to two overnight and separate even them. For the short while they get to go for a spin through the woods together, from the raptors’ joyful screeches and Owen’s little sideways glance and smile at seeing Blue running alongside him, it’s pretty obvious that, albeit under different circumstances, that’s what all of them wish they could just do all the time.
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
The population total has shrunk to one point something individuals, so at this point we’re definitely looking at characters rather than a species in general. And though Blue demonstrates right in her first scene she has no qualms about attacking and killing humans, and the humans who do have her best interest at heart know not to approach her while she’s unrestrained, even Owen still doing so with caution, she is a protagonist in her own right, and never shown actually trying to harm the other ones. Not a team pet by any means, but loyal to at least one (1) squishy non-raptor.
Were the original Velociraptors the modern ones are altered clones of, even in this series' universe, quite as intelligent as she apparently is? I doubt traits like forming bonds with other species were this prominent even if they were present. Blue, as much as she is contrasted with the hybrids (the obvious ones, at least, as all of the cloned dinosaurs technically are hybrids to some extent), is also a human-made anomaly.
This movie’s theme of taking responsibility for your past actions applies to Owen not only in his work with the raptors being used for things he didn’t intend, but to that work’s effects on the raptors themselves, especially on the only one left. He raised a dangerous wild animal which now loves him as family, even while she’s aware of them being different species and of Owen ultimately only having as much control over Blue as she lets him have, because she simply likes him anyway. But how is he ever going to be able to give his time-displaced dinosaur daughter the kind of life she deserves? I think by now he must have realized Blue actually does really, really want him around, and values being trusted to interact with him on her own terms.
The wolf Hoskins raised from a pup seemed to consider him pack, but was also still a wild animal that despite maybe passing for its domesticated version to the untrained eye was probably not safe to be around for anyone but him, which is a problem when he still has to live around other people (and we’ll leave for another time speculations of what reason his wife might have had to want to stab him and how much he deserved to be so loyally protected in the first place). If the dinosaurs ever do get moved to a sanctuary island (and assuming it fares better than Sorna), is Owen going to move there, as well, to be near Blue? Is he instead going to let her stay with him where he lives? How is he going to keep himself safe from the other dinosaurs, or the other humans from her, without creating more confining barriers for her? Even if he can trust to probably be safe around her, himself, what about the rest of his family, which now includes a human child?
I don't know how to resolve that, either. Only that Blue is not going to be happy being put in a cage, but the vocalization she makes in her closing shot is not a victory roar but the sound raptors use to call for their packmates.
The other side of that coin is the Indoraptor, yet another mistreated raptor turned monster. He is an Indominus Rex v.2 in-universe, the smaller and creepier model basically as the original raptors were compared to the T. rex, and an even more extreme case of a tragic abomination that has no place in this world by no fault of its own (yes, I see you, portrait of Mary Shelley on the wall of Lockwood manor, that was a nice detail). We've come back to that dreaded, lurking in the shadows, too terrible to even be natural take on the raptors, turned up to eleven, and deliberately induced, by the side of humanity that tries to exploit rather than befriend everything.
One oddity about him is that apparently he is, specifically, a he, despite being lab-made in a film series where that meaning the animal is female has been a plot point. He would have to have been deliberately made to be male, then - I’m guessing, under the impression of male aggression and/therefore dominance being default, as he is in any case more of a status symbol than practical at his intended use as weapon (even if he was functioning as intended). Feel all the manlier for having all that manly violence at your command, I guess. In an accurate reflection, then, of what he was created to glorify, the badass Edgelordraptor is a miserable and unwell creature collapsing under the strain of his exaggerated upon exaggerated physical and behavioral predatory traits.
Like Blue, he is also a little too human for his own good - only in his case it's literal, or, which animal do you think his opposable thumbs and ability to smile came from? But his handlers wouldn't treat him as even an animal, let alone something with complexity of thought equal to or surpassing animals that humans have in real life been able to communicate with on a deep and advanced level. The lack of parental guidance that may have explained the JP raptors’ problems is brought up, for the solution to make the next generation of Indoraptors more functional. But of course functional here means under human control instead of happy, and considering the conditions we see the prototype living in, just having a mom would definitely not have made everything alright for him.
Then, there’s Maisie. Whether her choice at the end is the right thing to do or not, she understandably finds the cloned dinosaurs something to see herself in. Though it may just be hinting at her being a clone like them, we are given quite a few seemingly small similarities between this human child and specifically raptors. Enough so that fans are already speculating she might be, either by design or lab accident, part one herself, like the Indoraptor (and in that case probably also the Indominus Rex, whose intelligence we never did get an explanation for) is probably part human.
In any case, that she and the Indoraptor have both been raised isolated from the world, without anyone that either of them really consider parents, is a pretty clear parallel between the story’s princess in the tower and the dragon in the dungeon. It doesn’t mean they're capable of interacting in a way that won’t end badly for at least one of them, but that it does is ultimately the fault of those who put them in that situation.
Sympathy for raptors even when they're the scary, ruthless monsters, that’s where we’re at now. Does that ruin them, water them down? I'd say it adds something, because they were animals with reasons for their actions even when all the emotion those inspired was fear.
The Brachiosaurus was the first dinosaur we met, and her death is a pretty clear symbol of things no longer being the same. A Velociraptor was the first dinosaur we actually witnessed, though, even if we couldn't see her yet. The evolution of their depiction is interesting to me, from horrifying partially because of how alien they are, to actually pretty relatable the more we find out about them - to the point where it’s pertinent to question how much of it is narrative anthropomorphization - with increasing attention paid to how they might see us in return, other than just through ways they’re plotting to kill us.
Now I’ve finally seen everyone in the room on both sides of the screen moved to the brink of tears because of all things a Velociraptor’s life is in danger.
[spoilers for all movies in the series that have been released so far, including Fallen Kingdom]
This wonderful post by Feynites on how Owen has probably misunderstood his place in the raptors’ social group got me thinking more about how the events of that first movie, as well as what I remember of the events of Fallen Kingdom from my so far one two viewings, seemed from the raptors’ point of view. And I think this particular behavior found in both movies is a good insight into it.
The jaw snapping I’m talking about is when a raptor lunges her head forward, noticeably or only slightly, in a pecking motion (they are birds, after all), and bites the air, and it’s done towards another animal but more as a demonstration than a serious attempt for that particular bite to connect.
The thing Blue does at Owen in this moment here when he’s just gotten between her and prey (the worker who fell into the raptor paddock). Obviously an aggressive move, and Owen responds to this one from Blue with an also angry “Hey! What did I just say?”
So... what does this gesture from her mean about how much danger he’s in in this scene? It looks pretty scary for one. It’s mean to, of course, it’s a warning. What exactly is he being warned about?
Well, to put it in some context, I made note of all the other times the raptors do this in the movie, and they are these:
Blue snaps at Charlie earlier in this scene, when Charlie is slow to follow Owen’s instructions. She lunges far enough at her she could have bitten Charlie’s neck if she wanted to, but Charlie doesn’t act threatened afterwards.
Right after that, Echo, too, snaps at Charlie, who is being clumsy and smacks Echo on the head with her tail while turning around.
It’s very quick and I initially missed it, but when Owen runs into the paddock to get between the raptors and the worker who fell in, right when he stops, Delta turns her head towards him and snaps her jaws. She does move her feet, too, to turn towards him fully, but she steps to the side instead of closer while snapping, and is still easily far enough she couldn’t have thought she’d catch any of him in that bite. The same is true of Blue’s snap at Owen soon after, when he directly addresses her, telling her to stand down. The raptors walk slowly towards Owen (and he backs away from them), but though Blue may take a step during her snap, it’s at the same pace she’s already walking, and she doesn’t take another step right after, still keeping enough distance from Owen neither can reach to touch the other.
Right after the raptors hit the gate when they do charge at Owen, Delta, Charlie, and Blue snap their jaws, in that order. Delta’s is a bit hard to tell who it’s aimed at, but I’m guessing Blue who is right next to her, although it could also be at Charlie, past Blue who is leaning back to shake her head at the moment. Then when they’ve backed away from the gate a bit, Charlie walks past the both of them and snaps at Delta along the way. Blue snaps at Charlie’s back after that. More on that later:*
Dinosaur drama in the background. Don’t ever turn your back to the cage because you’ll miss it. (On another note, what Barry says to Owen in French here before being told “Yeah” and they both laugh, was “You should have let her eat him.”)
When the raptors are released to track the Indominus, right when they start slowing down, a raptor that I think is Blue (after further investigation, I can see it’s actually Delta - Blue is at the front of the group) snaps at a raptor that I think is Echo (I’ll get to why**), which directs the raptor being snapped at to a different spot in the formation they run in (which according to the radar Barry looks at becomes a pretty neat rhombus.)
After Echo jumps through the side window of the van Claire is driving and then falls onto the road, it looks like she snaps at Delta when she runs past, but on closer inspection she opens her mouth to make a sound at Delta instead, so not an example.
On the other hand, when Echo joins Delta in chasing the van right after, she bumps into Delta when getting alongside her. Delta snaps at her for that, and they continue the chase.
Delta snaps her jaws at Zach and Gray when she jumps into the back of the van, but it's clearly in genuine attempt to bite them, and she just can’t quite reach that far, so it’s not an example of this behavior. Neither is what she does with the Dilophosaurus hologram, as she's jumping towards it while snapping, and thought there was something to bite there.
When the raptors have the humans surrounded and Owen reaches a hand towards Blue to take off her headset, she snaps at him at first.
And, that’s it. My conclusion is,
It’s a form of raptor-to-raptor communication. It’s a warning to cut that out, or just scolding a packmate for something you didn’t like, but it isn’t necessarily followed by violence, and usually isn’t.
That it’s directed at Owen means he is indeed considered pack, including in some pretty tense situations.
Whether Barry is, is unclear, since we never see him interacting directly with the raptors while they’re unrestrained, except for Blue attacking him in the forest. For what it’s worth, what we do see is him spending time petting them to calm them when they’re in their muzzles, which they seem receptive to, as Delta and Blue’s reaction to Hoskins makes very clear what it looks like when they’re approached by someone unwanted while muzzled. And during said attack in the forest, when Barry has a clear shot at Blue, instead of shooting he says her name, and Blue not only reacts but stops attacking, probably only then recognizing him. He hasn’t worked with them for as long as Owen has, but he, too, seems to count as more worthy of respect than humans in general to them.
The snapping is usually done by an individual higher up in the pack hierarchy to one that’s lower in it, and exceptions to this rule mean the situation is not resolved at that one snap. How it goes from there, depends. The raptors’ order of age from oldest to youngest is Blue, Delta, Echo, and Charlie, which I think is also their order of who gets to scold whom, with Blue at the top.
Owen is indeed not the leader of the pack, because Blue, and Delta at least once, do this at him.
So what was up with the Gate Drama*? According to additional but official material, I forgot which, Charlie really, really likes Blue, for one. If Delta snapped at Blue there, I guess Charlie then told Delta to respect their awesome big sister who knows best. Blue snaps at poor Charlie for her trouble, because it’s not her job to put Delta in her place for that. It’s an exceptional situation, but I think that interpretation makes sense, and what goes down is hardly serious, because they’re sisters and get along. What did Delta get angry at Blue for? I’m guessing putting up with Owen getting between them and prey, which was pretty rude of him to do, from their point of view. And that was serious.
Basically what Owen did, though heroic from the human perspective, to the raptors was one pack member, and not even the leader, hoarding the kill all for himself. And then he talked back to Blue when she told him to share! The nerve of this guy! Owen thought Blue was challenging his authority by defying his telling her to leave the worker alone. In truth, to the raptors, the situation was Owen challenging Blue’s authority, which she felt increasingly compelled to reassert the more he defied her. There’s not really a solution there that would have made everyone happy because obviously the guy couldn’t really be let get eaten, but the “Hey! What did I just say?” that Owen might have thought helped de-escalate? I’m guessing did the opposite.
Was all of this a serious enough offense that the raptors tried to kill him? They did charge at him, and I think Blue knows Owen is not a raptor and is weak and squishy and easy to kill, but I guess there’s a chance it’s an example of some behavior just being instinctual enough to override that knowledge for a moment, because assuming the charge wasn’t simply a bluff to begin with, if Owen was a raptor, whatever they were planning to do to him might have been perfectly survivable.
Again according to additional official material, when the raptors were younger, Blue and Echo did have a pretty serious fight, which got physical enough it’s the reason Echo has a scar across her snout and a slightly misaligned lower jaw (**and the jaw’s the reason I think the raptor snapped at right before they confront the Indominus in the forest is Echo). It was, you guessed it, because Echo challenged Blue's leadership of the pack. I’m sure both raptors got plenty of vet care afterwards, but depending on how much setting Echo’s jaw needed, I think in the wild, too, that would have been nowhere near a death sentence, especially with her pack protecting her while she heals. Still, blood was drawn, though it seems to be water under the bridge these days. Some things about pack hierarchy are a big deal to this pack, too.
Speaking of which, other raptor packs are also shown doing the snapping behavior.
Jurassic Park’s only example is when the raptor that I think is the one Muldoon refers to as the Big One follows Lex and Tim into the kitchen, and calls for the other raptors to join the hunt. One of the other two shows up, and Big One snaps at her when she does. “What took you so long?” I’m guessing is a pretty accurate translation of that snap, and if I’ve identified the raptors correctly, the pack hierarchy detail holds true, too.
What differentiates the situation from Jurassic World’s raptor squad is the other raptor’s submissive reaction, which we see none of in JW. This doesn’t look like a happy family, and, well, remembering Muldoon’s account of how this pack came to be of the configuration and the size it is, and knowing the JP raptors were not raised and socialized together, it isn’t one. The JP pack are more like an example of the kind of putting unrelated adult wolves in the same space to form social groups they wouldn’t naturally form in the wild situation that led to the errorenous alpha theory about wolf packs, which are now increasingly widely understood to actually be families. That other raptor wouldn’t dream of snapping back at her pack leader, because that’d probably mean teeth at her throat in no time. To their credit, though, these raptors still do try to avenge each other when Rexy chomps down on one of them.
JP3 doesn’t have any examples. This pack seems pretty zen towards each other, and are also demonstrated being caring parents. They’re a family unit with multiple generations, living in the wild; a dinosaur version of that natural wolf pack. The jaw snapping behavior probably happens among them, too, but during the movie, we only meet mature adult raptors with the shared goal of retrieving their stolen eggs, while the JW pack are basically still a bunch of kids, who bicker like the siblings they are, and for most of the movie don't have any particular clear goal to focus on instead (and probably have quite a bit of frustrated energy to vent by bickering, from being wild animals living in captivity in a paddock that I don’t think is nearly big enough for four animals their size).
The Lost World’s raptors on the other hand provide the most violent example in the series, because its one example of jaw snapping behavior escalates into a full on fight that may or may not lead to one of the raptors killing the other. At the very least it looks like it might soon, if not already on-screen. The raptors start by one falling onto the other, getting snapped at, and then each of them returning the gesture with one of their own every time with increasing aggression, until finally one of them (the one who fell) pounces on the other, at which point they don’t even notice their prey getting away anymore and just focus on mauling each other.
The Lost World novel does describe the raptors encountered in this part of Isla Sorna as particularly dysfunctional, with apparently no care for the pack’s younger members and a tendency for cannibalism even with other food readily available. But that’s the book, and the movie is not a direct adaptation. We don’t know this pack's dynamics, and maybe this has simply been a long time coming for these two. This is a much larger pack than JW’s four so we don’t know these two raptors’ level of relation, either. In any case, neither of them backs down and breaks up the situation, so it gets all the way as far as it can.
Blue messing up Echo’s jaw seems amicable in comparison.
Does this answer whether the JW raptors tried to kill Owen when he got greedy with the best live prey they’d had so far? Not definitely, and even if they didn’t they could have killed him by accident. But the fact that Delta and Charlie can overstep their respective places in the hierarchy right after one pack member already did something pretty major to challenge Blue, and Blue both lets it slide and doesn’t have to watch her back for having done so says something about this pack’s willingness to stay on good terms, and not out of fear of each other.
Even when Blue allies herself with the Indominus, I’m not so sure killing Owen was something she was actually prepared to do. What we see is all the raptors looking directly at him (going by their headsets’ video feed) when the Indominus directs them to turn on the humans (though they don’t attack yet at that point), Charlie looking confused about what she’s supposed to do when she comes across Owen in the woods, Blue attacking Barry, the other human who’s been taking care of them (but it seems she didn’t know it was him when she did so), Blue chasing Owen’s motorcycle when he lures her away from Barry (would she have gone back to attacking, or left him alone anyway, though?), and, though Blue chases Owen, she doesn’t do so for long.
Claire has the raptors’ headsets’ video feed open on her screen when the movie cuts to them at the van. Charlie’s is blank since she is already dead at this point. Echo is running through the woods, and Delta, well, seems to be eating someone. Blue’s screen shows Owen driving away, and soon after we get to this shot, Blue just stops running and lets Owen get away. It’s not to just go back to attacking Barry, we see at the end of the movie he survived, with little to no injuries.
In front of the visitor center they definitely herd Owen, Claire, and the kids in the same manner the JP pack surrounds the humans to kill them, there’s no question it’s a hostile confrontation. Whether it would have ended in treating all the humans as prey if it came to that, I’m not sure, but I wonder how sure the raptors were of that, either, and whether they were at all hoping it would come to that.
So let’s go back to that last example of jaw snapping in JW.
The snap is pretty half-hearted, and Blue barely even moves her head forward when she does it. Owen doesn’t withdraw his hand, and replies to her in a calm voice like she’s the scared one needing reassuring.
Which, I think she is. From Blue’s point of view, Owen betrayed her first by co-operating with the InGen assholes who used her and her sisters as tracking dogs, even though we know he had no choice. He’s her dad and he should have protected her and taken her side. Showing trust in this scene as he does, is to tell her it’s okay, he still cares, he’s still one of them. Blue’s body language actually becomes less hostile already the instant Owen puts down his gun, but she still snaps a bit to let him know it’s not quite so easy, and she needs the extra bit of reassurance to forgive him, which, please give her a reason to do, this fighting seemed like a good idea at the time but it got out of hand and is no fun. She wants to be family again.
...And then he leaves her alone on the island for three years.
No wonder this is the greeting he gets at their reunion.
But you know what, inbetween the screeches and growls, she’s still expressing her annoyance at him by jaw snapping. Even at this point, to her he’s still pack. I don’t think there’s ever been a time she would have wanted him to be anything else.
