What’s With the Whole ‘Kaa’ Thing?

Kaa hanging from a bar.
Hanging Kaa

Almost everywhere I am on the Internet where I can select a username, I am some variation of ‘Kaa’ or ‘Kaa Serpent.’ Why is that? I’ve been asked this a number of times, and this is my attempt at an explanation. This is modified from text on my old site, which is still live, but no one ever goes there, including me. :)

One of my favorite films of all time is Disney’s The Jungle Book. Gotta dig that cuh-ray-zy jazz, man! Before I saw the movie as an adult, I had read and thoroughly enjoyed Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. When I saw the movie, I realized that Disney — in their ‘wisdom’ — had more or less villainized Kaa. Turned him from what he was in the books into a sniveling, hunger-motivated toady of Shere Khan who wanted nothing more than to eat the man-cub Mowgli. I sort of understand where Disney was coming from on this. Shere Khan was the villain. Villains — like heroes — need sidekicks. Kaa is a snake. Snakes are (unfortunately) viewed in our society as intrinsically ‘evil.’ At least partially because of a misty-eyed fairy tale involving a man, a woman, an apple, and a ‘serpent,’ but I digress.

In Kipling’s The Jungle Book, Kaa is not strictly a villain. He is, at worst, out for himself. He is self-centered and his motivations are simple. But if the needs of others coincide with his own best interests, he’s willing to help, as long as he gets something out of the deal. And that something is not necessarily always Mowgli served up on a platter with an apple in his mouth. In fact, next time, he might decide that the same people he helped last time are now good candidates for dinner. He not about to go slithering through the jungle like some herpetic Mary Poppins, looking for people to help.

In short, he’s misunderstood. Hold this thought whilst I go on a digressive tangent.

Digressive Tangent

Remember how, in the Disney movie, the Bandar-log (monkeys) steal Mowgli from Baloo so King Louie can try to force the secret of man’s red flower (fire) from Mowgli (the man-cub)? And then Bagheera and Baloo valiantly go to the Bandar-log temple and single-handedly — um, bi . . . octo-pawedly? — rescue Mowgli from their evil clutches?

Yeah, no.

Would it surprise you to find out that Kaa is actually the hero of that story? Read “Kaa’s Hunting” by Kipling. That’s the story that got Disnified into that sequence in the movie. Bagheera and Baloo go to his rescue, but are hopelessly outclassed by the Bandar-log, and Mowgli convinces Kaa to help by using his hypnotic ability to save Baloo and Bagheera from almost certain death. Yes, Kaa does . . . sort of ‘accidentally’ hypnotize Baloo and Bagheera, but luckily for them, Mowgli is there and he gets them away and Kaa is left alone with the hypnotized Bandar-log. It is probably best not to speculate what Kaa does with them.

Back To the Story, Already in Progress

Now, flash forward to the early 1990s. I’m newly shed of an aborted attempt to get a Master’s Degree at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, spending my days working for The Man and my nights chatting with friends online. Something I’ve been doing for probably three years or so by this point (the chatting part, not the The Man part). Several of my friends have recently discovered a brand new place online to play. A MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) called TinyTIM. In a move that many saw as insane, TinyTIM’s wizards (administrators) allow everyone to build, or create new regions on the game. My friends and I set out to construct a Pernese Weyr and play as dragonriders. Prior to this, on the game, I’m known as Otter, but as soon as we start to build the Weyr, I change my name to S’thel (a much more fitting name for a Pernese dragon-rider). To make a long story (slightly) short(er), we succeed. More people join the Pern area and we role-play as dragon riders, and it’s quite fun and I make a lot of new friends on TIM, many of which I still have to this day.

Now, flash forward to early fall, 1991. TIM is going strong. Hundreds of people login over the course of a given week. We are in the midst of planning an online Halloween party. How this works is, we all change our character names and descriptions and come to the party in character and everyone has fun trying to guess who is whom since no one looks or sounds like they normally do. Trust me, it’s less weird than it sounds. :) As I cast about for a ‘costume,’ I think of The Jungle Book. I tried Mowgli. No. Baloo. No. Shere.Khan. No. Bagheera. No. I ignore the Seeonee wolves and King Louie and all the incidental characters like Col. Hathi the elephant, Tabaqui the jackal, and Chil the kite. Finally, I tried on Kaa for size.

TIM allowed one to program things quite a bit. I realized immediately that I could write a little script that would cause anything I said to be hissed. I changed every single attribute on my character — and there were a lot — to work for a snake. Coiling up instead of sitting, chortling sibilantly instead of laughing, etc. I came up with ways I could still do many of the standard actions, such as shrugging, but as a snake. I went to the party as Kaa . . . and basically never went back to S’thel. I mean . . . I did go back to him, but I created a new login for Kaa and he became my default character from that point on, and I only got out S’thel (and his bronze dragon Dalith) for special occasions. Over the years, I found ways to dress up Kaa as other things for various holidays. KaauldLangSyne for New Years, SantaKaa for Christmas, the EasterSnakey for Easter, etc. Each with a whole new set of programmed items and actions.

I basically became Kaa. Online and in real life when I’d meet people from TIM, they called me Kaa. I still answer to it, under the right circumstances. :)

So that is why there are references to ‘Kaa’ and snakes on my blogs and other online accounts. My Twitter is KaaSerpent. My Facebook page is KaaSerpent. My yahoo name is Kaa. I’m Kaa on Disqus. I’m KaaSirPent on DreamWidth (formerly LiveJournal). I’m “philosophidian” on Blogspot. Etc. It’s basically Kaa and snakes all the way down.

And now you know.

  1. I’m fairly sure I must have seen it as a child, but I have little or no recollection of it since it was first released when I was three years old, and Disney didn’t start the seven-year-re-release-schedule thing until later. So I probably saw it and was probably not at all impressed. :)

  2. While I’m griping about Disney, I have to point out that they basically reversed the personalities of Baloo and Bagheera in the movie. Baloo is depicted (and fabulously voiced by Phil Harris) as a lazy, kind of dumb lay-about and Bagheera is prissy and overly concerned with rules. In the book, that is somewhat reversed. Baloo is the teacher in the jungle and makes sure all the young animals know the Laws that apply to them. Bagheera considers Mowgli his pet and sort of saunters in once in a while to check on him. Read the book. It’s way, way better than the movie(s), except for the jazz, which is definitely the best part of the original Disney movie. :)

  3. This is an even longer tale that makes even less sense than the Kaa story. It has nothing to do with skinny, hairy gay men and everything to do with actual otters. :) Although I could regale you with the story of the Otter Orgy on another MUD called FurryMUCK at some point . . .

  4. There are actually rules about when ‘c’ is pronounced as a ‘k’ or an ‘s’ in English, with a few notable exceptions. It was a matter of doubling all occurrences of ‘s,’ ‘x,’ and ‘z,’ but only doubling ‘c’ when it was followed by either an ‘i,’ and ‘e,’ or a ‘y.’ Exceptions were put in place for words like ‘façade’ (which is a ‘c’ before an ‘a’ that is doubled), ‘island,’ ‘aisle,’ and ‘isle’ (silent ‘s’), ‘Celtic’ (it’s a ‘k’ sound) etc. Each time I found a word that didn’t conform, I modified the script to take it into account. The ‘AutoHisser’ is fairly foolproof at this point.