Brand New Animal Inconvenience! · 5:46pm Aug 3rd, 2020
A bunch of 'furry' themed anime came out in the past year, apparently jumping on to the popularity of the manga "Beastars" and it's first season of anime. As with most quickly-made copycats, the non-Beastars were lackluster.
One, however, garnered enough interest to draw fans in.. and then quickly disappoint most of them. It did at least inspire me to do.... this.
Producer Guy: So, you have a fetish for me?
Writer Guy: A wha-
Producer Guy: An anime! That's what I meant.
Writer Guy: Oh I sure do, sir! It's called Brand New Animal and it's totally original!
Producer Guy: How so?
Writer Guy: It shows shape-shifting people with mysterious powers being hated by normal humans!
Producer Guy: That sound exactly like X-men...
Writer Guy: It totally isn't because this time, they're actually magical animal people!
Producer Guy: Oh my gosh!
Writer Guy: It tackles racism by showing that the Beastmen are mostly psychotic weirdos who sell their children off to humans as slaves, have a baseball game where the players actively try to murder each other, have weird religious cults, and can randomly turn into berserk monsters that kill everything around them! Also some of them have immense powers, and they try to eat each others souls or something for more power.
Producer Guy: You know, it sounds like the humans would have a whole lot of legitimate reasons to hate and fear these immensely dangerous freaks of nature. I thought the message was 'racism is bad, m-kay?'
Writer Guy: Oh it is, and we're all supposed to get that clearly when they're killing each other and the one head Beastman basically wants to become a supreme being and dominate all other life on the planet.
Producer Guy: Wowwowwow...wow. But wait, it sounds like the Beastmen are kinda supremacists themselves kinda alot.
Writer Guy: Oh yeah, they are!
Producer Guy: Well I guess we'll see plenty of humans doing awful things to balance this out and pull us back to being in favor of the Beastmen, right?
Writer Guy: Oh, not really, we're hardly going to see regular humans all that much.
Producer Guy: So I'm supposed to sympathize with the plight of these beastmen, despite many of them being just as bad or worse than we're being told the humans are, despite never seeing the humans being really really evil, and having the Beastmen Leader being a traitor to his own kind and kinda like super Hitler.
Writer Guy: Yeahyeahyeah!
Producer Guy: I'm not really feeling this at all, and I think I'd be absolutely terrified of these Beastmen myself!
Writer Guy: Well then I guess you're just an alt-right Yahtzee and if you don't want me to go flood Twitter and Reddit with accusational posts with my Chinese bot army, I'm gonna need to you to get all the way off my back about this!
Producer Guy: Whoah-ho! Consider me stepping off that thing, as well as bowing and pledging allegiance to whatever ideological cult you command! But, you know, just a hint, we kinda do need an audience and things sounds really preachy and people are getting kinda annoyed when we do that all the time.
Writer Guy: Yeah, sucks that everyone's not as brainwashed into wokeness as we are. The reeducation camps will take care of that.
Producers Guy: Reeduca-... that sounds a whole lot like actual Na-
Writer Guy: BUT!! It'll all be fine because we have a spunky young protagonist who's a cute and fluffy tanuki!
Producer Guy: Ohhhh, spunky young protagonists in fur are TIGHT!
Writer Guy: Ohhh my god! That did NOT sound right!
Producer Guy: Oh yeah, forgot about the whole Epstein thing we're supposed to all still be hiding!
Writer Guy: Whoops!
Producer Guy: Whoopsie! So, I guess it's gonna be hard for the protagonist to defeat the super god-tier animal Hitler guy.
Writer Guy: Actually, it's gonna be super-easy! Barely an inconvenience!
Producer Guy: Oh really?!
Writer Guy: Yeah, because she'll have hooked up with another guy who's actually a virtual god himself, and we'll tease that really REALLY obviously from, like, the very beginning and give out his name and everything, and we'll see him transform and use powers and be COMPLETELY OP... but everyone's gonna be totally surprised when it turns out HE'S the super-god. So yeah, they beat the bad guy.
Producer Guy: Well this certainly sounds like you've put at least 15 minutes into writing this thing! I'm sure it'll make a ton of money and people will make Youtube videos that get millions of views!
*Headline: BNA fades rapidly into obscurity as "Beastars" attracts massive audience and a gazillion Youtube vids.*
You know you're in trouble when your less intelligent then The Fifth Element (and I liked that movie, certainly more then I liked this) Also.... I don't much care for beaststars. Like... at all. I'm not all that big an anime fan.
In point of fact I regard most modern iterations of the genre as overhyped garbage, and most of the old as pseudo intellectual snooze fests (TALKING TO YOU AKIRA.) I kind of liked Ghost in The Shell series with the tachkomas talk about individuality more then I like the pulse pounding action, but the rest was meh.
Like Dragon Maid. And I'd love a proper Berserk. And Monster ended up pretty good, but it dragged on.
As for the furries... whats with the misanthropy. Jesus Christ, this is another thing I dislike about the whole thing. Its like a less intelligent cry baby version of The Conversion Bureau
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Well, I'm a rather big anime fan. "Beastars" is nice in that it's a self-contained world that belongs only to itself. Nothing of our world is inserted, save for the setting appearing similar to our cities.
Misanthropy is what you find mainly in the far-left. Not surprisingly, the furries that hate humans [and usually themselves when you dig a little deeper] are pro-communist.
Yeah, I feel like BNA success is more due for the art style, animation and characters appearence than the actual writing/story.
*reads summary*
So, exactly like X-men, then? Seriously, you drew the parallel at the start but then didn't bring it up again later when the Magneto expy showed up.
5328516 I just vomited this thing up in a YouTube comment in 15 minutes, then copy-pasted here. Never thought to edit it anymore, but yeah, there are a LOT of parallels... such as the tanuki girl being basically Jubilee from the X-Men animated series, running away from humans chasing her and getting rescued and taken to Xaviers school.
It's a very trope-filled series, and never found any sort of central footing. It threw a ton of plot clichés into the mix, and never fleshed out any of them.
Compare with "Beastars", which first put all the focus on developing the core cast's personalities and their inner conflicts, so that when exterior plot elements happen, the audience already has some idea of how each of them will respond, and can also see the seeds of how they might change. It makes them much more relatable than the typical cookie-cutter cast in most shows of any sort.
Season 2 is going to revolve around Tem's murder, and through that we'll learn even more about how the animal society is even more unstable than we already know, and there are MAJOR problems that no one has any idea how to solve, because it's the intrinsic issue of predator-prey instincts which are still so strongly engrained into their minds and take intense personal will to overcome or refocus to any degree. But the alternative is to go back to slaughtering each other... which is pretty much an anti-solution.
It tackles the real issues that a multi-species world would ACTUALLY face, not the cartoonish world with its artificial 'magical rage drug' issue as in "Zootopia". It's bears some similarity to X-Men as well, in that regard, but far more grounded and true to its own internal world-building. There are 'powers', what with Legoshi's rather odd traits as you'll see later... but they're much more subdued, and don't really grant him any immunity to... certain potentially life-ending things (spoilers!). ;3
……….
(HUGE FRIGGIN SPOILERS HERE) The only big flaw I've seen is with the antagonist Melon. He stands out far too much, and is given vastly too much influence despite not being particularly strong or intelligent. He's just crazy psycho. Well, that's one place where the real world would deal with him swiftly. He's at odds with the central government AND several criminal organizations. A single bullet to the head would finish him, yet the manga acts as if he's practically untouchable at times. It's a place where the story stumbles into the "Why Don't We Just Shoot Them?" TV Trope, where shooting Melon is a literal option on multiple occasions... or stabbing, biting, beating with a crowbar... basically lots of ways to end him. He also stands out physically. Antlers and carnivore teeth, which he covers up with a mask... and few others in the entire society wear a mask. It'd make him impossible NOT to ID! There's maybe a few dozen people in the entire CITY who'd come close to the traits of 'a male antelope with carnivore teeth or wearing a face mask'. He'd be cornered in days.
So yeah, that's one place the story stumbles rather obviously into bad trope territory. Eh, it's hard to reach LoTR-level perfection, especially for a young first-time author like Paru-san, our delightful chicken-headed sage.
...Huh. Well. At least it produced a funny blog post on a My Little Pony fanfiction website? :D