#also im so sad bc ive already run out of ppl in my area like all i want is a femme goth gf i can simp for and/or bone down

[let-the-love-tear-us-apart]

witness me uwu

[flyingcookierambles]

forgot if i already talked about it but i guess i honestly didnt like wolf children/boy and the beast that much lol and i think i finally figured out why

ok so ill have my original post and short convo i had with this one guy and then write about my feelings after those two that provide some context.

ok real quick so wolf children and the boy and the beast are both from award winning anime director mamoru hosoda!

wolf children has a single mother with 2 kids who are werewolves/shifters since they can change whenever they want. she’s a widow because her husband was walking around the city in wolf form, scared ppl, and got killed by animal control in tokyo. she and her kids move out to the rural boonies on a small homestead where she farms and stuff so that her kids can have space to be their wolf forms and run around without fear.

the boy and the beast has a human child fall into the hidden magical parallel furry world and get raised by this beast/bear furry? i...forget what his adoptive dad’s species is lol, sorry its been a long time since ive seen the movie.

spoilers for the ending but. here.

wolf children - yuki, the daughter, decides to stay in the human world with her mom and go to high school. ame, the son, decides to live his life as a furry/wolf boy protecting the forests.

boy and the beast - adoptive father sacrifices himself for protag, fuses spirits/hearts/whatever with protag so that they’re not really separated even in death, then the protag and dad defeat the antagonist and the protag decides to stay in the human world with his human girlfriend.

soooo. yeah. the movie ends with the families splitting up and the two cultures of mundane humans and magical creatures separating forever.

(og post) original post from my kitsu:

“ok, so like after watching wolf children tonight, im left with a bunch of questions and, idk maybe i dont understand the ending, but like. what. i also have a copy of the boy and the beast and watched it a while go. and like. i feel like, out of his two movies, they were overall very good. however, the endings always leave me with a ton of questions and mixed feelings? is mamoru hosoda just going to be “that guy” for me? you know, “that guy.” like, he’s an ok dude but you have mixed feelings about him? is it still worth watching his other movies, the girl who leapt through time and summer wars, at this rate? idk???? edit: …. i realized i also borrowed mirai from the library, am i going to watch the whole thing and then be like. what.“

response to this one guy, pseudonym:

I didn’t like wolf children and while I overall enjoyed the boy and the beast I did feel it was lacking something. Give summer wars a go though as in my opinion it’s easily his best film, that said I haven’t seen Mirai.

my responses:

“ that’s interesting. hmm im trying to figure out what i didn’t like about his endings for these two movies and i think it might be the whole separation thing? but the weird thing was that i didn’t mind the family separation thing in maquia, another family drama oriented anime? so idk ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ????? what about you?”

pseudomym:

“I haven’t seen Maquia. It’s been a while since I watched either film but I just remember Boy and the beast feeling generally a little uninspired and wolf children feeling hollow having nothing going on but cuteness and idealization of the mother character that I couldn’t get behind. It also fell into the annoying and well worn trap of insisting the daughter come to terms with her wolf side as necesary but the boy’s arc is to go reject his humanity and abandon his family to live in the woods as a young teen and the mother learning to accept his really stupid decision. Fuck that, thats a shtty life decision and it should be treated accordingly.”

my response:

i agree with some points! like, i get that the mother was a hardworking single mother who needed to give her kids some more freedom and also isolation in life to hide the whole werewolf secret, but when ame was just like “imma drop out of elementary school,” and hana was ok with it, i was just staring at the screen like “no, why are you letting him do this?” i feel like my issue with the boy and the beast was that ren decided that “humans and monsters need to live in their own world,” and left forever when i was thinking “no man, you can have both, work in the human world on weekdays and just go back to the monster world on weekends or something, you have basically nothing in the human world but this random girl you met and whatever the japanese version of the GED is.”

so. after thinking about it. literally for a few years. i realized. the reason i don’t like these movies, or at least their endings, since the premises sounds interesting enough for me to try them. is probably because im projecting my own weirdo complex identity issues on them. (own ramble lol) (other ramble on kitsu) (transracial tag on main) (racial imposter syndrome with NPR’s Code Switch) (all mixed up what do we call people of multiple backgrounds, also on NPR’s Code Switch)

so. as you can hopefully see. i. am currently in a pretty big identity/culture crisis. and. i think that the endings of these movies rubbed me the wrong way because their solution was to choose one over the other. like. there’s no room to try to make it work, to try and have a balance between the two worlds.

as mentioned above, in wolf children, why the heck not try to make it work? be a furry forest protector and still visit your mom because you’re in the same area. in fact, ame is literally the stupidest kid/literal elementary school drop out because, instead of trying to help the forest with actual laws and such because bc, its sad but let’s be real, capitalism and bulldozers can affect the forest more than one kid trying to larp as the big bad wolf of the forest. and you know how ame could’ve tried to protect the forest in a more substantial way? literally just. finding a balance between the human and magical werewolf/animal world and becoming a botanist/biologist/ecologist/forest ranger. someone who can bring some actual solutions to fixing issues in the forest with science. instead of like. “feeling the forest vibes” or whatever the heck was even happening there.

and then also as mentioned in the boy and the beast, protag-kun leaves behind all his childhood friends and the ppl who helped his adoptive dad raise him, practically his adoptive aunts and uncles, behind for a random girl he met, his birth dad and step family, and whatever a japanese GED is. like. again, why not try to make it work? have two cultures????

you dont have to choose one over the other!!

i’m sure that mamoru hosoda didn’t mean to be like. idk. insensitive to people of mixed races/cultures, etc., esp. since japan is not a very racially/culturally diverse place so he probably didn’t even have this mindset when making these movies, but the message in the movies’ endings that you have to pick one culture, country/world, family, etc., over the other because they’re just too incompatible is just. absolute bullshit. do i care that they’re werewolf and magic furry world culture? no, i think you can and should still try dude.

like. i have. a bunch of intersectional race/culture/adoption issues, but am i going to try to have some balance and learn about all of them and live with them? yeah????? do you realize how stupid it is to me to think about like. having to pick between cultures???? its just like. to me, picking one over the other would be like forcing me to stay with white americans or just like. go back to china. like the boy and the beast protag did or someshit????? like???? i can try to balance them??? tisn’t that the whole point of like. chinese american/ immigrant created mixed culture/experiences, esp. for ppl like me who are transracially adopted and have complex life experiences???? wtf??????

like. i would love to learn more about my birth country and all but im not going to be an absolute dumbass like the boy and beast protag and move to another world/country just because “its where i’m from” or “i have biological family there.” i cant speak the language, i’d leave all my friends and family oceans away, how the heck would i even live??

anyways TL;DR - as a person with some complex feelings about identity, and culture, and a person greatly interested in intersectionality due to my lived experiences, mamoru hosoda’s movies and their bullshit anti-intersectionality messages, again most likely unintentional but my brain read it as this, make me not like his movies.