I'm sorry for feeding into this.

It is a hex that furries seem to place upon themselves that, any time any vaguely furry media is released in a "legitimate" format, we must add it to "the furry canon" and debate it's place among the other members of this club. Furry, as a community or fandom or whatever you view it as, does not actually revolve around any particular canonical media. That's an aspect that makes it truly special, and allows it to endure on and on. But in the same way sci-fi has its staples (Star Trek, etc.), there are pieces of media that furries tend, as a whole, to be more aware of and discuss more frequently.

In recent years, we have been so lucky as to receive a variety of content that feels particularly furry, starting with the 2016 Disney movie Zootopia. There are always smaller products that capture attention, cartoons like the wonderful Netflix show Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, or arguably characters like Catra and other background figures in She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. I certainly appreciate them, and walking through the dealer's den of a furry convention, I'll likely see one or two vendors selling something related to these smaller properties. But in terms of the discussion, when new furry media comes out right now, a few big tentpole names must be discussed alongside it: Zootopia and Beastars.

A brief word on Zootopia

Zootopia, having been with us for now 4 years, has already been discussed in depth. We don't have to have the conversation about its problematic approach to a story about prejudice and racism. We don't have to talk about how I don't find predator-prey stories all that compelling anyways, we don't have to talk about how much better I think the story might have been if they had committed to the harder line that would've involved Nick Wilde being put in a heavy collar to "suppress" his "predator instincts". In this post, though, I don't want to talk so much about the individual stories so much as what relationship they have to furry anyways.

Zootopia in particular has been looked at as bringing furries back into the limelight in a way they hadn't really been before, besides maybe things like the CSI or Tyra Banks episodes. The world is a different place than it was ten, fifteen years ago, and furries are much less the punching bags of the internet than they used to be. Zootopia is clearly influential on furry itself. Artists draw fanart of it a lot, of course, and we can see in some artists' styles a familiar approach to animal shapes and so on. Plus, Zootopia is an easy shorthand to talk about furry with folks who are unfamiliar. See these animal people? That's the sort of thing we like.

Of course... Zootopia isn't a furry story, not really. It involves anthropomorphic animals, yes, and it clearly has left an impression on furries as a community. But, in ways that are not always easy to elucidate, there is a feeling of absence in it, when looked through the furry lens. The story was not created by a furry, you can just tell. It doesn't seem aware of the types of stories told by furries, the tropes they have created among themselves, the ways these stories are shaped. There are moments that feel like they could be references to aspects of the furry community, but they feel shallow, surface-level only. The story uses animal people as the vehicle for its allegory about race and prejudice, and a significant amount of work has gone into building the world of these animal people. That much is readily clear from everything about the work, and I think it is the strength of that world building that draws so many furries in. But, its plot is a bog-standard police procedural. Its characters, though they reference certain sorts of stereotypes at times, don't really feel like animals, just people with a wider disparity between their looks. The world building can begin to take on a tone of "we just did this to justify why we can use animal people in our world".

I'll tell you openly, even as I recognize Zootopia's problems, I did enjoy watching it. I won't deny I enjoy furry-ish stuff getting a bigger spotlight, and I think it's nice to be able to have this shorthand that is easier to communicate with a wider number of people. And others have and will write so much more and so much more eloquently about the interesting question I think Zootopia inadvertently raises: What exactly is furry media? What exactly does it mean that I can say this movie absolutely full of anthropomorphic animals isn't really furry? But this is the energy I'd like to bring into discussing exactly how I feel about comparing Beastars and BNA.

A bit more about Beastars

To me, Beastars came out of left field. I had heard about BNA being in production, then to-be-made by a studio I've enjoyed the previous works of, Studio Trigger. And the look of it, the name, all very clearly suggested something I should be excited for. But in the meantime, there was Beastars, another Netflix anime that also featured a wide cast of anthropomorphic animal characters. At some point furry Twitter got a hold of it, and every so often snippets and fan art of it would break out into my feed. So, when it was finally released from Netflix jail, I figured it was worth it to check it out, at least to tide me over until BNA.

As I watched Beastars, I was very surprised by a sensation of familiarity I felt for it. As I've mentioned to one or two people, watching Beastars felt... very much like I was reading a short story on FurAffinity or something. And, for better or worse, I mean that in multiple ways.

For one, Beastars felt very tropey in ways that, from reading fics on furry sites (and particularly romantic or erotic ones), I could recognize playing out. Particularly towards the end, the "Oh, I guess we just have to stay at a love hotel, because it's too late to go back to the school and it's cheap and it'll be fine! But, also, you know what a love hotel is for..." plot device seemed ripped out of so many erotica I've read, a flimsy excuse to get two characters into a position they can have sex together. Also, a brief aside, these are high schoolers? It's, uh, I dunno, a little weird. Anyways.

So, Beastars does seem in some fashion more aware of furry culture. Its predator-prey aspect doesn't feel as big a stumbling block as Zootopia's; it doesn't seem like it's really trying to make it an allegory for racial prejudice in the same way, although the story does still involve prejudice and societal expectations. The characters' animalness is front and center; part of how I think Beastars handles the predator-prey thing better is that they lean so heavily into it really being about animals and not mapping directly to any particular real-world prejudice. And the world building, in this case, like Zootopia, is meticulous.

That being said, it is precisely that world building that feels the least "furry" to me about Beastars. Because, while there are certainly furry writers who do like to world build, and who do end up writing in ways that feel like they need to justify why these anthropomorphic animals are around, a great deal of furry writing and works... don't do that. They tell stories that involve furry characters because, furry characters are cool, and they want to do that. I'll admit, I'm biased in that the sorts of stories I would write myself do look more like that than the meticulous world building justifications. However, I think that justification is unnecessary to be able to tell a good story. In some ways, I feel like it upholds weird prejudices about furry works being inherently "bad" so that these works with its "legitimate" justification can be "above" that. For some writers, what they really care about in their writing is the world they're building, and the actual narrative they're crafting is not as high a priority. That's fine! But if that's not how you're approaching the writing, these justifications often just end up distracting and detracting from a story. If you want to write a story a certain way, just do that; if you clear the bar for a reasonable suspension of disbelief, people will come with you on the story no matter how justified the furry aspects are.

(I'll note here that, in the same ways I noted at the end of the piece about Michiru specifically, I think this will necessarily be affected by what people personally look for and care about in stories and writing. Not everyone will agree with me; that's fine. To put it out there, in general, what I care about in a story is the narrative itself: what the story is trying to say, and how the characters' interactions with the world around them and each other shapes them. World building still plays an important role, of course, but in my personal model, it's specifically to serve the purpose of building characters and a larger narrative, and thus it's okay to elide parts of the world that just aren't relevant to that purpose).

The other principal meaning for me behind "Beastars feels like something I would find on FurAffinity" is in its quality. As I mentioned with Zootopia, I do not typically find predator-prey stories very compelling. The plot of Beastars, particularly having read most of what's released of the manga as well, is not really telling much of a new story. It's also not doing so in ways I find especially compelling; the character work is a little hammy and predictable, their internal struggles and character arcs not feeling especially riveting. Legosi is the exception to that; having an autistic main character is a little newer for me. But particularly as we step into the world of the manga instead of the anime, I have especially harsh things to say about the way the story approaches interspecial relationships and their kids. I got to a certain point and just felt like I wasn't interested in continuing, thanks largely to its handling of those aspects. Maybe the story will eventually be able to redeem itself, but I don't know that I'll be there to see it based on what I have to get through to get there.

And though I say all this, I want to be clear. I did like Beastars. The anime improves on a lot of aspects even over the manga. When the second season of the anime comes out, I expect I'll watch it. But Beastars feels difficult to recommend for me beyond "Oh, it's a furry anime." Especially when I feel like, in some ways, Beastars feels like it's not quite furry itself anyways, just made by someone very familiar with furry content.

An update, after further reflection, on the ways these last two paragraphs are unfair to Beastars, but also why I'm so quick to be harsh on it given that it plays dangerously close to a particular trope that I strongly dislike in furry media

See this other, short blog post. (It's mainly separated out from this one because I didn't want people to have to jump back into the middle of a post they may have already read to get the gist of what I was saying. Sorry if that makes this read oddly now. Also, I do go into a few spoilers about Beastars itself from the manga.)

So where does BNA sit?

I really liked BNA. If that doesn't come through in the post about it overall, I'll be shocked if you don't pick it up from the post about Michiru specifically. So, I obviously have largely positive things to say about it. But I can start by talking about the one main thing that the story does that makes it feel less furry.

When I watched the first few episodes, I was watching with my boyfriend and his brother, who is not a furry. His brother immediately perked up when the cops first appeared, because he was curious if they would make them pigs. At first, I pointed out how that would be a little on-the-nose, and among things that are more solidly written by furries, those sorts of things don't happen so much. Stereotypes about species exist some, but, they often diverge from mainstream stereotypes of animals. Wolves among furries are often pretty neutral, as opposed to their largely negative portrayal in Western media. And, indeed, BNA's cops aren't pigs... but as you may or may not know, "cops == pigs" is a Western way to disparage the police. In Hong Kong, protestors on the streets insult cops as dogs. And in fact, all the police in Anima City are dog-type beastfolk. So, it is actually that on the nose.

But other than that, and the makeup of baseball teams in Anima City (which is not strictly upheld anyways), these sorts of species-specific groupings are largely not present. The Family isn't all aquatic animals. Sylvasta's employees are a random assortment. Species plays a role to some degree in how beastfolk behave -- bird beastfolk being able to fly has a huge impact on their culture, for one. And from even the first episode, the way the beastfolk fight feels animal, honest to themselves. Shirou fighting with only his fists is depicted as an incredible insult to beastfolk he views as having debased themselves.

But smaller pieces of the world also feel very furry in a particular way. The world contains mammals, avians, reptiles, and so on, and doesn't feel any need to explain why there's multiple different types. Everyone can transform between human and animal form at will -- most furry stories won't even give their characters that because it feels too OP. Characters have piercings, and clothing, and so on, and when they transform, it just works out. Clothing doesn't get ripped. Piercings don't fall out. The way a furry might write these things, you could give an elaborate explanation of why this works. And for sure, some folks like to world build in that way which can be very interesting. But... that's usually not actually the point. The point is, you want to include animal people in your stuff and you think their character design would look cool if they had piercings, so you're going to just do the thing you like and not worry about it -- c.f. any furry design that incorporates tattoos. In BNA, even in their human forms, often characters are drawn such that things like their noses vaguely suggest an animal nose, instead of human ones (usually by not drawing much to suggest a nose other than its shadow, which casts a triangular shape). Pieces of the world are elaborated on some -- Jem is chastised for taking baths in his bird form because his feathers clog the drain, but it's mostly just a light touch to acknowledge their animalness rather than to get into the specifics of the world. BNA's animal forms are roughly all the same size, unlike Beastars's characters' sizes, which are dramatically different depending on species. There are some stereotypes involved with animals (bears are kinda dopey, the mink character is a slippery thief, etc.), but they get broken frequently and without much thought put into it because they're not anywhere as rigid as things like "carnivores are going to eat the herbivores because bloodlust is in their nature" that Beastars gets. And to compare specifically with the way Beastars handles interspecial stuff, BNA does address it, specifically so they can say "Hey, this mostly just works out and isn't like a big deal. Also, if you believe that race species mixing is a bad thing, you're the fucking villain, and we'll demonstrate exactly how that's bullshit."

The characters are sufficiently animal, and the world building is furry in the way that, it is clearly a furry world but it also doesn't feel the need to justify itself too hard. The story, both as an overall thing and in Michiru's character arc, doesn't require the characters to be animal people, just different from everyone else somehow. And that's really what feels the most furry about it. With furry works, a lot of times, the stories are stories that could be told in other ways or with non-furry characters. The authors just ended up using furries because they wanted to. And you can obviously tell a "coming to terms with one's own queerness" story without using animal people, but that's what BNA did.

Wider reflection

Both Beastars and BNA (as well as Zootopia, and Kipo, and...) are shows that definitely appeal to furries. Anthropomorphic animal stuff in mass media draws us like moths to a lamp, or mothmen to soon-to-collapse bridges. I like them both. But whereas I feel like I could only really talk about Beastars as "the furry anime", BNA has a substance in a different way. And I think I also particularly like that, for the most part, I can point to it and say, if you pay attention to this, you can maybe start to get a sense for the vibe that differentiates truly furry stuff from not. I know people talk about it like furries just give attention to whatever the newest furry thing is. Aggretsuko was left behind for Beastars. Beastars was left behind for BNA. And I'm sure some people do like Beastars more than BNA; there are legitimate things Beastars does in ways that some people will prefer. But to me, I look at this succession and I don't see myself jumping ship for new trends. I see a progression of stories that feel more and more for me. BNA, for me, was better than Beastars. Aggretsuko I didn't even really enjoy -- it's barely furry at all. Maybe something newer will come along that I like better -- and maybe I'll feel then that it also was more for me than BNA is. But we'll see.