#im sooooo close to finishing this scene and i dont wanna make food until im done

[orcelito]

"2-3 hours" Well it sure has taken a bit longer than that. Still not done yet either, but almost... Almost...

I think this is one of the most technically difficult scenes I've ever written. Trying to give it the gravity it deserves without it feeling cheap... trying to capture all the Emotions of it....

Man.

I'm getting there tho. And it will be so rewarding.

[sunshine-tattoo]

just finished watching the new netflix anime BNA (brand new animal).

wanna give it a review. SPOILERS AHEAD. (also im bad at spelling Japanese names because of my dyslexia so ill be referring to their characters mainly by their titles)

things i liked:

lesbian undertones

dont trust pharmaceutical companies

the real evil in this world are rich white guys

wolf guy had big dad energy

animation was charming

nina was adorable

some cool biopunk elements

themes of erasing identities for the sake of calm

athletic female protagonist was not sexualized

equality should not mean sameness

cute furries

things that could have been improved:

the ending made no sense at all

it was obvious that alan was the villain all along but the pureblood wolf thing came literally out of left field. there was no buildup at all. no mention of beastman species only marrying each other and the politics therein.

and the solution to this plothole could have been sooooo easy.

have “pureblood” beastmen be high members of society or something. like the malfoy family in harry potter. have it be an actual plotpoint. instead of the entire series being beastmen vs humans up until the final episode.

or have pureblood beastmen be ones with no human ancestry. the same themes apply.

also if alan really was immortal, then a better story would have him as the actual general of the army that wolf boy fought. that would have really clinched the dynamic between them.

the biopunk elements needed to take center stage

some of this may just be my personal taste towards scifi vs fantasy, but i felt like their was a lot of buildup towards a story about genetics and equality that never really went anywhere.

take the scene where rhino guy goes completely bonkers. i thought for sure that it was from him being injected with something by the masked snake guy. that maybe it was some kind of drug to make beastman DNA go completely haywire. i was actually digging his crazy transformation a lot.

but then they go and explain that its some kind of syndrome that beastmen get by being in close quarters?

that felt both like weak writing and a bit ableist.

a better solution would be to have it be an experimental drug that the pharmaceutical company developed and was using the beastman city as a testing ground.

or if it needs to stay connected to the past, perhaps the compound that causes the reaction was found in the environment of wolf boy’s ancient european city. the human army witnessed the beastman transformations and recorded it. eventually alan’s family found why it happened via science and made it into a drug.  

the role of women in the city

the episode with the orphaned kids and grand grandma honestly was a bit of a waste for two reasons.

the first is the very human-centered idea that animals are sexist the way humans are. this is incorrect.

quite a few species are matriarchal. like elephants. or they have no hierarchy at all.

the fact that a lioness was being told she was weak for being female fucking blew my mind. have you ever seen a lion pride? females bring home the food and the males look after the cubs.

the second reason is that, even if you ignore the lack of basic understanding about animal societies, the sexism trope didn’t go anywhere.

we never see any other cases of women being treated badly outside of that episode.

the mayor is never belittled and one of the strongest baseball teams in the city is made of female pink flamingos.

don’t spend a whole episode trying to establish something in the world-building and then don’t use it again.

the mayor’s past as a holocaust survivor should have had more plot importance

maybe this is just me speaking as both a jew and a gay, but i really didn't like that the holocaust was used as just a backstory for how the mayor and wolf boy met.

i was really hoping to find out that there was connection to the pharmaceutical company and the cruel medical experiments that were done in the camps. as many scientific breakthroughs can trace their origins to horrible human experimentation done at the hands of fascist governments.

it also would have cemented alan as personal villain to both wolf boy and the mayor.

how magic works

they did not need to explain everything, but maybe a little explanation here and there could have really made the story clearer.

for example, when tanuki girl arrives in the city she learns about how magic is something that can be found in beastmen blood but it is very rare and species dependent. so tanukis and foxes have a much higher chance to do magic than other species (like japanese folklore). they can change their tails to do basic shape-shifting.

it also would explain how wolf boy became immmortal. since he bathed in the blood of his fallen clan and absorbed all their magic.

alan’s identity as a beastman

honestly i could write a whole post about him but ill just keep it to the basics.

alan should not have been a beastman. he should have been a human.

because making him a beastman took away the themes of oppression in the story.

alan was a rich, white human man who did not care for the lives of others (human or beastman) and was happy to use them as pawns and test subjects. not to mention his family most likely had ties to the nazis.  

his particular hatred for beastmen could have come from the killing of his ancestor’s army by wolf boy. leading the family to want revenge on all beastmen and the silver wolf in particular.

that is a realistic villain and one that the audience is happy to see defeated.

how fox girl and tanuki girl becam beastmen

i think that them changing into beastmen should have been intentionally done by the pharmaceutical company, not as an accident via hospital embezzlement

two girls badly hurt in a bus crash would have been easy targets to inject an experimental serum. one that was designed to change a human into a beastman so that the company could learn how to reverse it and make all beastmen into humans.

fox girl exhibited symptoms first and was grabbed by big pharma to use as a pawn.

tanuki girl was a spare who eventually disappeared from their radar and then reappeared in the beastman city.

i think that the embezzlement story could still have happened, but the effects were worse. beastman blood sold to the highest bidder, which turned out to be the pharmaceutical company itself and its illegal experiments.

tanuki and fox beastman blood could have been chosen specifically because of their ties to magic as well. which allows for their shape-shifting.

snake guy and his mask

i think that snake guy should have been one of the first beastmen experimented on by the company.

the results left him scarred and stuck between his two forms. but because he was brainwashed by the company, he gladly serves them.