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Pavlov posted:Like, the little raccoons treat it like some inevitable law of nature that one of them gets ate every year and leave it at that. I think that's exactly it. They see themselves as "little raccoons". For all that they seem to spend 90% of the time upright and humanoid, they consider themselves to have as little say in how the humans treat them as any dumb animal would. Same reason Yasaburou defaults to "obsequious functionary" whenever he's around a tengu: the tengu are above, the tanuki are below, and that's just the way the world works. Or, maybe it's an honour thing. Tanuki are tricksters: if a human manages to trap them in a cage, well, they lost in a fair fight.
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Apr 18, 2017 13:18
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SyntheticPolygon posted:Like, Benten is an obviously shady individual who betrayed her respected master and loves eating Tanuki but no one really seems to hate her for it, except for Kaisei. I'm not certain if Kaisei dislikes Benten because Benten eats people or because Yasaburou is clearly crushing on her. Every time she gets mad about her she gets mad because Yasaburou brought her up... but that's also the only times anyone brings up Benten in her presence. I don't know if I'd be so quick to condemn Benten, either. The show goes out of its way to make her seem opaque and alien, but here's what we know about her life:
It's not hard to read this as a woman in an abusive relationship finding a way to escape her abuser and then taking revenge on him, though you would need to take a much more negative view of Yakushibou's actions than the show presents. I actually sat down and rewatched the first season this evening, after I made that last post. It's striking how much... brattier? Yasaburou is in the beginning compared to where he ends up. Pavlov posted:Those are all interesting reads, but the show would only have needed a few throw-away lines to make that clear. Something like the older brother talking about doing something rash after the dad gets ate, and someone quickly talking him down. Or the younger brother asking why nobody's ever tried stopping things, before the Inescapable Social Order gets explained to him. Or really anyone just lamenting how no tanuki could ever stand up to a human etc. The fact that there's no introspection about this is pretty noticable, given that it's such an obvious bit of world-building to do. For the record, I think the show communicates the tanukis' inability to use their powers against the Friday Fellows is communicated perfectly well. It's made very clear- implicitly and explicitly- that they can't transform or maintain their transformations in high stress situations, and then we're shown that basically anything remotely threatening is a high stress situation for a tanuki. Just the realisation that they're in the same room as the Friday Fellows is enough to make the elders lose their human forms en masse. You barely need to infer here.
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Apr 19, 2017 02:05
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