Thread:Yoshimickster/@comment-995426-20151104041829/@comment-995426-20151108013115

To be honest, my interest in beast people living amongst a human world has evolved quite a bit.

Before I became interested in TMNT, I was a fan of the 1980s TV series Beauty and the Beast. It's nothing really like the reboot TV series that airs on the CW, as Vincent was actually a cat-person. He lived deep under the streets of New York City along with a secret community of humans in "The World Below", beneath even the sewers and subways, in long abandoned tunnels and an endless network of caves, underground cavities and underground lakes. The secret living spaces in that series could be so deep underground that some had lots of geothermal steam. Vincent was the only mutant-like character for the most part. He was played by a younger Ron Perlman (long before Hellboy fame), and 2K12 Leatherhead reminded me a lot of him&mdash;the fierce appearance, the sensitivity, the soft-spoken voice, the philosophical and romantic nature, and even the occasional bursts of ferocious anger he struggled to control. 2K12 Leatherhead was so much like Vincent that it became very easy to see Mikey as the "beauty" to Vincent's "beast" of their romantic relationship.

When I was a younger teenager, I was mainly into TMNT, especially Mirage and the Palladium RPG. The RPG actually had a system for helping you design your own mutant characters, and additional resource books helped you develop Triceraton characters, etc., too. For a while my biggest interest was in the Doc Feral scenarios and its supporting cast of mutant characters. There was no new RPG resource book published after 1990, because older audience for TMNT declined so rapidly because most adults and even teenagers didn't want to be seen associating with what had become perceived as a "kiddie" franchise. Of course, now that situation has changed, but with a new problem, with adults who grew up on the 1987 TV series but most of whom still prefer its legacy and think TMNT should always be action comedy that's fun for the kids and should never be all that dark or mature. A Mirage or Palladium fan can't win! XD

When I was a young teenager, my interest shifted mostly to the Super NES game Star Fox, with its entire fictional multi-planetary world filled with beast people. But unlike most people, I did not became a fan of Star Fox 64&mdash;I ended up hating that game. XD But I did like what Star Wolf became in Super Smash Bros. Brawl.

As I got even older, in the late 1990s, I became an enormous fan of the PlayStation 1 video games Breath of Fire III, Xenogears'' and to a lesser degree Breath of Fire IV.

The Breath of Fire series was interesting in that, almost anywhere you traveled, there was a random population distribution of both ordinary humans along with beast people, and they were all simply treated as people (not "humans" vs. "non-humans"). It would be like if mutants of the TMNT universe all lived normally above ground, lived in ordinary apartments, worked in ordinary jobs, freely co-mingled with humans, sometimes married and started mixed families, etc. Notable beast person characters from those games included Cray (a cat-like person), Garr (a Guardian, a race of dragon/gargoyle-like people), Momo (a rabbit-person), Rei (a tiger-person) and Scias (a dog-person).

Xenogears was different, in that it had people called demi-humans who had been created through centuries of secret experimentation. They lived scattered around that game's world, but most were concentrated in a city called Nortune, where even there most lived segregated from humans in abject poverty. Most demi-humans were not directly mutated, but were born the way they are, and most of their parents were also born the way they are. Notable demi-human characters from that game included Franz (a dolphin demi-human) Hammer the Supplier (a rat demi-human), Ricardo Banderas (Rico, a secondarily-mutated Elru, which were already elf-like demi-humans), Seraphita (a rabbit demi-human) and the Thames Captain (a walrus demi-human).

Now, I actually spend most of my time in the very large and very diverse furry community, with a page on FurAffinity where I publish most of my musical arrangements. It's sorta funny to think about&mdash;the actual community itself covers a range of grass-roots interests from G-rated to X-rated, but the public came to perceive furry as being nothing but X-rated (trashy bottom-of-the-barrel subject matter on daytime talk shows and TV crime procedural dramas didn't help things), and this perception hurt the reputation of anthropomorphism and therianthropy itself so much, that it actually became less and less common to see them in primetime TV and films targeted to adults. The fact that the Beauty and the Beast TV reboot has Vincent looking totally human (and not all that beastly) seems to be a symptom of this, for fear of being perceived as furry bait. My interests today actually remain truer to my TMNT, Star Fox, Breath of Fire and Xenogears interests. I mean, make no mistake&mdash;I'm still gay and my list of art community favorites will reflect that&mdash;but I find some stuff like humans-wearing-manufactured-fursuits kinda creepy and uncanny valley.

And yet it's somewhat different in Japan, where varied have been portrayed in centuries of art living much like humans&mdash;this is called kemono art. You see, Stan Sakai wasn't remotely the first artist to draw a rabbit as samurai. :P So they're still relatively abundant in video games, manga, anime, etc. In addition to stuff like Star Fox and Xenogears, I also like Morenatsu, a scripted romantic comedy dating simulator where you play a human young man who can choose from nine different young beast men to court romantically in a laid-back slice-of-life scenario of a modern rural Japanese town mostly populated by beast people. Morenatsu started out as an H-game, but most of its gameplay scenes are tame (and indeed can be watched almost entirely on YouTube), and it actually not only has a large fanbase of gay teenagers, but a ginormous abundance of relatively worksafe fanart. I've also casually watched stuff like InuYasha, whose main character is a half-human dog yōkai living in Japan's Sengoku Period of history where there are lots of other yōkai characters.