The Blackberry Walk

The question posed today is what was BNA trying to say. Themes of racial and group identity certainly shine through in the show - the animals being an oppressed class and all that. But the message becomes more interesting once the nature of the Beast Factor was revealed. The beastmen went into berserker mode because they were in too close quarters with one another - essentially the beasts went mad from being multicultural. Within their DNA (or rather BNA) they had an instinct to become murderous monsters should enough beastmen of different ethnicities appear in a single area. The genetics appear to despise the very essence of multiculturalism - for a beast, after all, a lion and a zebra living side by side without the lion tucking in to the zebra and the zebra packing shop and running away, is wholly anti-instinctual. Yet in spite of the fact that their ideals, their aspirations for the oppressed classes of beastmen to live in an intersectional paradise, repress their instincts, they decide to pursue this goal. So far the show doesn't seem like the kind of show the socially conscious Netflix wants on their station. Then we have our protagonist and her friend, Michiru and Nasuna, who are a tanuki and a fox respecively. Both of these animals are revered in Japanese folklore as shape-shifting animals, as demonstrated in the show with the girls' ability to morph their bodies. This very morphing ability can be understood as a mercurial spirit - a shapeshifter who can't even figure out their form, a Trickster figure if you will. Foxes particularly in Japanese folklore are seen as conniving, as they are in Western lore like in Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr Fox - very much playing into to this Trickster archetype. What's more, Michiru and Nasuna boarder between mankind and beastman, just like other archetypal Trickster characters like Pan who boarders between animal, man and god. The common thread for these mercurial Tricksters is their many identities and many faces. This will be important later on. Next we have Oogami, who is Ginroh, literally silver wolf, who is essentially the Zeitgeist or guardian spirit of Animacity. He sees the genocide taking place before his eyes and sees a vital need for beastman identity to be kept alive, not to let them be subjugated and their identities to be thieved from them by his antagonist, Alan, who is later revealed to be a golden Cerberus. This battle between gold and silver, between pure yet haughty and impure yet honest, is an interesting archetypal idea. The idea appears in Gintama, when the robotic hypnotic Kintoki mesmerises everyone into thinking that Gintoki never existed and his gold equivalent was all that there ever was. Another story, this time a folklore tale from the Celts, is that of Gold-tree and Silver-tree - a tale of how a queen named Gold-Tree tries to kill her daughter, the princess, named Silver-tree out of jealousy of her beauty. Alan, therefore, attempts to purify the whole playing field by making everyone human, so only his 'elite' bloodline of purebred beastmen may continue. As an elite, as a god ruling from the heavens, as gold, he believes it right to impose his cultural genocide within Animacity whilst keeping his own identity a secret, in true Straussian fashion. From his position from above, he lives in the world of being, in the eternal city of Ukiyo-e, in a unchanging pure world. Contrastingly, as shown in the motif of Gold vs Silver, Ginroh is a god who lives amongst the people rather than one who lives in the clouds. He is impure, insofar as he lives amongst man who is tainted by becoming and the material processes of life and death, yet nevertheless divine. Whereas the gold god, Alan, wants to subjugate beastmen by pacifying, the silver god, Oogami, wants to save them and fight for their continued existence. He is their zeitgeist, after all. The solution to the show is quite deus ex-like, yet it is interesting. Through 'antibodies', or whatever other scientific paganistic term they wish to use, they use the blood of Michiru and Nasuna, our mercurial Tricksters, to make a vaccine to prevent the spontaneous monster-shifting. In essence, the beastmen must incorporate a little of the Trickster archetype in order to get along with one another. In order to co-exist with one another. In order to achieve a successful multicultural nation. Slavoj Zizek reminisces about his youth in Slovenia saying that everyone in Yugoslavia used to joke about each other. Slovenes made fun of Serbs, Serbs made fun of Croatians, Bosnians made fun of Macedonians, etc. But when tensions rose, and ethnic hatred heated, the jokes stopped. The very act of being able to joke about stereotypes, about ideas, about our very many differences, is how societies function effectively, how people don't take these differences seriously. A good joke proves you truly don't mean whatever you're saying - it means that we're all comfortable enough about the topic that we're able to joke about it and able to acknowledge it without repression. Humour is a complex function of the mind. Specific timings, specific ideas said in certain poetic ways elicit an uncontrollable response in us: a laugh. And it is the Trickster archetype who rules over the kingdom of jokes. The mercurial Trickster is the comedian who has a license to say whatever he likes, so long as he says it in a funny way - just like how the court jester was solely allowed to mock the king. Only through the joke can subversive ideas and new, uncomfortable ideas be brought to people's attention without eliciting a serious response, without eliciting violence. The beastmen are, after all, violent. The show is at pains to point out that the beastmen aren't like normal people - they're fast to get their blood pumping ready for a brawl. A social commentary, perhaps, on people's aggressiveness towards other political groups, which is more common than ever today. A social commentary on our failure to provide sufficient comedy, sufficient Trickster energy, into the realm of discourse, and instead present it through confrontation and anger. Just like the beastmen, we need an injection of mercurial spirit to produce a happy multicultural society for the future.