jordangreywolf (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jordangreywolf) wrote2020-03-14 06:28 pm
jordangreywolf) wrote2020-03-14 06:28 pm
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[Shows] Beastars is Incredibly Messed Up
I remember hearing all this buzz about how Beastars is, like, this award-winning amazing thing that absolutely must be seen ... except, of course, it's only on Netflix in Japan and not in the US. Until now.
By the way -- I'm not going to say "whodunnit," or give away major plot twists (such as they may pretend to be) but in order to express my problems with the direction this story takes, I'm still hinting at a few things, and this might be considered spoiler-ish.
So ... possible spoiler warnings. Your mileage may vary. Also, standard disclaimers apply: If somehow you've found my stupid journal ramblings and have mistaken this for a serious CRITICAL REVIEW of an anime, please move along. I am nobody. I'm only ranting here because I can. Yay, internet!
...
Well, after seeing all these YouTube reviews (the reviewers presumably checking out bootlegs or something?), it seems that Google figured out that I was interested in the show, and on my smartphone, it popped up, in my daily "Google news" feed, a link to an online comic site with the Beastars MANGA.
So, hey, if Google is offering this to me on my phone, then it must be worth checking out. So I did, and ... well ... I didn't make it all the way to get current on the manga.
BEASTARS IS SERIOUSLY MESSED UP. I can't get how someone thought this was "award-winning." Rather, it feels like someone's furry vore fetish given life. I've read/viewed some reviews of the first episode that make this claim that the carnivore-herbivore thing is somehow "allegorical," but I suppose the same could be said of every manga/anime that has the fate of the universe being decided by teenagers in HIGH SCHOOL. At some point, I doubt it's so much a concern about allegory as it is a certain lack of imagination or slavish devotion to established trope.
Trying to articulate exactly how it's messed up, and not just in the same ways that countless "serious" anthropomorphic-animals series are "messed up" is hard to do. "Furry vore fetish" isn't quite spot-on ... but go too far into the manga, and I think it's getting pretty close.
As the story starts off, it looks like there's the potential for some interesting dynamics. It looks like, hey, this could be setting up to be a murder mystery where we have the twist that our "detective" protagonist is wrestling with the potential to become a murderer himself, because this is a warped world where ALL higher-order animals (mammals, reptiles, avians) are intelligent. Therefore, MEAT IS MURDER. (But it's okay to drink milk and eat eggs. Oh, and to eat bugs. And APPARENTLY, fish. I think. I'm not sure on that, actually.)
First off, the setting is a bit awkward in that there are no humans to be found -- no hint that there ever WERE any humans -- and yet our characters recognize themselves as "beasts," and there are domestic breeds (dogs, chickens, etc.). The title of the series comes from this vague "ideal" that some student at this academy wants to become the next "Beastar" -- this horrible portmanteau of English words is not just a clumsy translation of some Japanese term, but slapped right into the story.
There's this tension between carnivores and herbivores, though the dividing line is a bit vague at times. (Some creatures I would think of as omnivores somehow seem to be grouped on the "herbivore" side.)
Violence works strangely in this world. Sometimes characters can take an amazing amount of damage and still keep pressing on ... and at other times, their bodies seem to have all the consistency of Play-Doh (as one character -- not particularly imposing-looking, but he's a carnivore -- accidentally RIPS THE ARM OFF OF ANOTHER CHARACTER his own size while rough-housing, in a scene that comes off as almost being hilarious in its ridiculousness, yet it's played for "drama" in the manga).
Oh, and the power of food is positively anime-esque and mystic, despite the laughable attempts to be sensible and "realistic" in the world-building elsewhere (all that detail on how diets are carefully maintained for all our carnivores to live vegetarian lives). I'm reminded of this weird trope I remember seeing in Lupin III, where our hero is bandaged, in bed, presumably with broken bones and bullet holes, but he needs to get into action, so what must he do? FORCE-FEED HIMSELF MASSIVE QUANTITIES OF MEAT! Because that's what every hospital does to get its trauma victims out of the emergency ward in short order, of course? Well, that sort of logic apparently works here, too. Getting thrashed about in a fight? Surely it's because you've been denying yourself meat, Mister Carnivore, so HERE, EAT ONE OF MY LIMBS TO GAIN THE STRENGTH YOU NEED TO FIGHT! (What the heck *is* the message behind this series, anyway?)
(Also, forget the notion of conservation of mass. Never mind that in the real world, a carnivore who takes down prey his own size does not INSTANTLY CONSUME THE BODY IN ITS ENTIRETY, but rather takes a while to finish that meat, or has "friends" to help dispose of it. Nope-nope, NOM NOM NOM it's all gone now!)
And then there's the "erotic" angle. Okay, this is "for adults" (or something) so I'm not going to gasp in shock that naughty things happen. But ... eh ... it's one thing to have carnivores who can be attracted to and simultaneously want to devour a pretty herbivore. It's another to have an herbivore who "subconsciously wants to be eaten" and ... eh, if you read that part, you'd know what I mean, but I hope you don't bother. It just makes me feel as if the author had some serious ISSUES to work out, and it's all just quite the train-wreck once it gets that far along.
Oh, and that murder mystery? Forget that. This story meanders all over in all kinds of directions, and by the time we get to find WHODUNNIT, it's like ... WHO?!? Who's this guy? Was he here at the beginning as a suspect? Does he look at all like the hulking murderer we saw in silhouette early on? Were there really any clues at all to help us sort this out on our own?
NO. No, not really.
And I just started watching the anime (second episode in), and it's looking like it isn't going to improve upon this at all. Maybe in the original manga, the original writer either didn't know or care "whodunnit," or changed her mind partway through the writing ("Oh, that would be too obvious!"), and one trouble with releasing a story in a serialized format is that you can't just skip back to the beginning and slip in some foreshadowing or clues to make it all retroactively make sense. You can end up writing yourself into a corner. But here they're remaking it as an anime. THEY COULD FIX THAT. A second chance!
But no, it doesn't look like they're bothering with that.
If you find something you like in Beastars, well ... good for you? This is, of course, purely my OPINION, and I'm just some randomly-ranting person writing in an online pseudo-journal, not some "serious" critic.
Season 1 is on Netflix now. I don't THINK they can possibly get to the serious "train-wreck" portions of the story I'm referencing in just a single anime season. Maybe they'll work a miracle and do some major plot revisions and salvage it, but so far they seem to be pretty faithful to the manga (for better or MUCH WORSE).
(I'm still perplexed by comments I heard from some that, "This is NOT furry!" This is one reason I usually avoid using such a term; it seems to have no useful, generally-agreed-upon meaning. If Beastars isn't "furry," I have no idea what is.)
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I've pretty much lost track of where Sinai has gotten to these days-- Envoy is just running stuff for a couple people and I don't worry about it anymore. If I had to revisit the Sinai thing, I'd probably aim for a more compact campaign style with arcs than 'sure, ALL the characters in ALL the places.' Having a plot outline in mind seems to help keep things on track, and I much prefer a regularly scheduled campaign over trying to run stuff whenever people happen to pop online.
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Huh. I thought I had made a comment along those lines. But I have a bad habit of typing gobs of text (even more than what you see here!) and deleting it several times over, to the point where something might be lost in the mix.
Anyway ... yeah, that was one of my thoughts. In the manga, there were certain things about the setup sequence -- the murder that sets things off -- that strike me as rather failing for the "murder mystery" aspect. Basically, there are details shown that might be mistaken for *clues* about the killer's identity (but only clues that we, the viewers have, because we get to witness the victim's murder), and later on, when we get introduced to what might pass for the cast of possible suspects, there's really only one realistic candidate based on what information WE as viewers know ... but he didn't do it.
It feels to me as if the author intended a particular character to be the "baddie," but spent a little too much time developing his conflict with the protagonist, to the point where if he were "revealed" to be the killer, the readers would probably yawn and think, "Well, DUH." But instead there's this other character who shows up several chapters into the story, and suddenly we're seeing a lot of him, and in short order, BOOM -- reveal! He's the killer! I can flip back and ... hey, why isn't he in the background in any of the previous scenes? (I did a quick Wiki check, and in the manga he doesn't even first appear until Volume 6 -- the "murder solution" story arc -- and in the anime he doesn't appear until the 8th episode.)
What's really annoying is that there is NO GOOD REASON for him to not appear until then. I think it's pretty clear that he wasn't even conjured up for the story until late into the manga ... but for whatever reason for the anime, they didn't decide to fix that by at least having him in the background earlier on.
This story fails as "murder mystery." As soon as we are introduced to him, it's time to show that he's the killer. There's no "aha, it all makes sense now!" at all. There's no PRETENSE that, "If you had been paying attention, dear viewer, you would notice these CLUES that pointed to the true culprit!" No, if anything, those clues CONTRADICT it ... and yet they didn't bother to fix them in the anime.
So far as I can tell, two episodes in, the anime adaptation is pretty faithful to the manga -- and in this case, that's (IMHO) not a good thing in all respects.
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Oh boy. 20/20 hindsight and all that. There are so many things that if I could go back in time and lecture my younger self, I would advise to do. The trouble is that I wouldn't want to end up SQUASHING everything in the process.
I think that by dangling the prospect of "rags-to-riches" "slave-to-queen-of-all-Savanites" right in front of Kaela in her very first adventure, I was setting things up for DOOM. It was a dumb idea. (Sure, some interesting things came out of it, but that doesn't erase the initial TRAIN WRECK I caused.)
Honestly, I think a lot of it could have been avoided if I'd just spent more time trying to get a feel for what the players hoped and wanted. Maybe some more time spent OOCly checking in with the player for his or her opinions could have enlightened me. A character might *in-character* be friendly given a given NPC, but privately the player loathes having to interact with that character. (E.g., "My character is polite and trusting, but this NPC seriously creeps me out, and I wish he'd go away! Just because my character smiles and greets him doesn't mean I'm having fun!")
I can't say that would solve everything by any means. I mean, I had to learn things somehow, right? And even now, I'm not exactly a grand success as a GM. But, eh, I can still wish.
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That said I wouldn't try to do it again mostly because of the number one thing-- our own circumstances have changed and we no longer have the kind of free time it takes to do random RP all over the place. I'd sooner try writing a book or an adventure game.
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... is it bad that my suspicion is the lesson being learned here is not to get too heavily invested in Gwendel's RP guild antics? -.-
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For now, I'm just playing a "Reynard" clone, coming up with silly poems to praise the heroes and their grand schemes, and maybe do a few sketches to entertain Gwendel. I'm holding out the possibility that maybe, possibly, I'll try to "run" something, if that interests Gwendel at all, but I'm getting mixed signals even on that. I think Gwendel mostly benefits from having a sounding board. (I mean, I could be that to a limited extent anyway -- but only so much, if I'm not at all involved personally.)
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"Talk to your players about what they're enjoying/not enjoying" is some of the best advice for any game, though.
I don't miss the time-sink or the stress, but I sure do miss all the fun of roleplaying. :D
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It's really peculiar, I suppose, for me to hold up something like "talk to your players" as some really big bit of advice ... but once upon a time, it just wasn't something I thought about. Somehow, I had this notion that the GM conjures up an Adventure, and it has Puzzles and Mysteries to be Solved, and there is a Right Way of doing things, and a Wrong Way of doing things, and ... well, I think I pretty much thought of the GM's job as being a somewhat more interactive moderator of a slightly higher-order version of a Zork-like computer adventure game. I mean, I don't think I would have DESCRIBED it as such, but I was heavily influenced by such games as a standard against which to measure what an adventure "ought" to be.
And in any case, the GM does his job, and it shouldn't be that the GM is going to tweak or change anything in response to whether the players are enjoying it or not. Or something.
On the one hand, I guess I had this notion that things must happen as they happen, and if the GM tweaks it because the player is having a hard time or whatnot, then it's going to feel like a "cheat." I mean, I suppose that there *is* a way to do that badly.
For instance, way back early in college (my freshman year, I'm pretty sure), I was in a Hero System campaign (Champions superheroes), and my character had a couple of followers (I'm pretty sure I was abusing the Follower rules), and a situation arose in which one of my Followers got killed, and I was helpless to stop it. And even though it was /just a game/, I felt "emotionally wrecked" by it, and my lip was getting quivery, and -- good grief -- I felt like I was going to *cry* over it. It was not a shining moment for me. Well, the GM obviously felt bad for me, or awkward or whatever, and immediately backtracked and -- oh, she's not really *dead*. Just really badly hurt ... hospitalized, but you got there in time, okay? And a few other concessions.
And the thing is ... I felt *worse*. For the GM to make such an obvious retreat from the original position felt like I had *cheated* by making sad puppy dog eyes. I wasn't happy with the outcome, but for it to be amended for the sake of my feelings felt wrong somehow.
I really don't know what I think I should have done, were I in the GM's position. I don't want to break whatever "willful suspension of disbelief" the players have that somehow this game "reality" has any substance to it -- that there are mysteries to solve (and the GM isn't going to just arbitrarily change "whodunnit" to string you along), and that good or bad things might come about because of player decisions, not just because of the whim of the GM. But I *am* going to have to make some course-corrections and decisions on the way, because (especially in "sandbox" campaigns), the PCs are going to do unexpected things, go unexpected ways, and I'm going to have to generate new encounters, new characters, etc. I might as well have player interests in mind when I work on that.
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And this is one reason I really dread the idea of being roped into doing some roleplay with Gwendel on World of Warcraft. The whole situation has every downside of running plots on Sinai, with none of the upsides. Really, it would be easier to just run roleplay in Discord (the chat program of choice it seems for Gwendel's guilds), rather than trying to do everything in World of Warcraft with all the narrative and dialogue going into those little corner chat windows ... but then, that might beg the question, "Why bother with World of Warcraft at all?" (And I suppose that would be a grand question ... and the answer would just be that there are people who play this game who want to roleplay, and it would be GREAT if the game accommodated us with appropriate tools, but it doesn't.)
Every roleplay session is a pickup group, and good luck getting any continuity. Gwendel's pretty regular because, frankly, she doesn't have much competing for her time, other than her own odd sleep patterns.
Nobody who runs adventures seems to have any sense of pacing. It's pretty routine that we'll head out to some location, they'll set up raid markers to represent the locations of NPCs and the GM will try to narrate their dialogue, be overwhelmed by input (frequently doesn't reply to whispered questions or even stated ones from some of the NPCs), combat will go on for a very long time (I can get up and do some pacing to get toward my miles across the house before I hear the "ding!" that lets me know that it's time to look at the screen again), and then when it's getting close to the projected end time, suddenly the villain will surprisingly roll over and die even though it sure looked like his health bar was hardly taking a beating.
A big deal is made of campaigns where "characters can actually die." I suppose the stakes in many ways are even higher than at a typical tabletop D&D session, because: a) It takes so much longer for the story to develop; b) Players might well be playing their characters multiple nights a week; c) It takes months upon months of "grinding" to get your character up to a high enough level to be able to go to the locations where these RP sessions are often held. If your character were to "die," then I *suppose* you might be able to just come up with a new nickname for your character, much like a campaign where you recycle the same mini at the table but bring in a new sheet (e.g., "That last character was JIM Blackstone. This new one is JERRY Blackstone. Same surname, same species, same profession, same look ... but totally different character!").
I just intend to keep the stakes small. I have no intent of wading into the drama with "PC perma-death." If I want to run something with "high stakes," I might as well have the players create new "red-shirt" PCs specifically for that adventure. There's a mod called TRP that allows you to see "poses" and dialogue from characters that substitute their "in-character" name instead of the actual WoW character name. (This can of course lead to some confusion if you want to send a /whisper to a particular character, when it's not immediately clear what the character's "real" name is ... but so be it. As it is, there are so many umlauts and accents and other oddball characters in names that it's a challenge to type them in anyway.)
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Yeah, it's always more impressive when someone manages an actual character name in WoW that doesn't have the silly accent characters.
And I can't picture trying to RP *combat* in a WoW setting. There's... uh... an actual combat engine and all that, even if it means basically either only one-on-one duels or fighting against dungeon mobs and bosses. Shoehorning in a faux combat on top of that... Well, yikes. I'd imagined they were doing more soap-opera style RPing, I'm surprised they're doing the roll-playing as well as role-playing.
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Anyway, I digress. The attempts to handle combat are pretty awkward. Combat is seriously abstracted. Attack, offense ... whether you're at range or in melee, fighting with a battleaxe or a coffee mug, it's almost immaterial. Pretty much everyone has generic offensive and defensive capability, with some slight variation for very generalized classes (warrior, spellcaster, healer). More experienced characters have cooler stuff they've been awarded by "GMs," but I have very little sense at how they manage to moderate it all.
(What happens if you have one "Monty Haul" GM who gives his players too much cool stuff? Well ... it just seems to be that the GM, if he doesn't like it, *could* theoretically nerf your stuff in his particular adventure some way or another, but nobody likes doing that, so the cheesy folks who invent all sorts of new powers for themselves tend to dominate things, just like they would on GenesisMUCK, because the GMs don't appear to say "no" very much to the regulars.)
It's a bit of a mess, but Gwendel is heavily invested in it, so ... eh, that's how it is, and I'm trying to participate a bit (especially since I'm not GMing anything at home for the foreseeable future).