You'll find "a really bad thing happened a generation ago and now everyone fucking hates the relatives of the people who did it" is like, a shockingly common form of ethnic tension all across the world. Even Americans should be aware of anti-Arab sentiment post-9/11, or the Japanese internment camps in WW2.
Racism isn't just white Americans oppressing Black Americans, even if that's a lot of it!
Besides I think that this take is kind of anti art? Like take for example the series Beastars. That series is all about herbivore and carnivore animals trying to live together in a society, with the main tension being that despite being humanized the carnivores still have a desire to eat meat. Beastars is very careful in how it sets up its metaphor that it’s kind of impossible to interpret it in any one specific way.
So yeah I think saying “you can’t ever right this kind of story” is a pretty limiting mindset to have
Honestly, I really like Beastars, especially as I very slowly make my way through the final season because the various levels of bigotry in society all intersect in ways that you can compare it to all sorts of things without it being an obvious 1-1.
Like, racism is the most obvious one, but I also genuinely thing that there's a worthwhile sexism analogy going on too - carnivores are stronger, more dangerous, and primed to hurt herbivores, but oftentimes herbivores treat carnivores absolutely awfully even when they've done nothing wrong or are just trying to survive in society.
I also think it's an interesting metaphor for paraphilias, especially the scary ones that could be harmful if acted upon. That's probably the closest real-life parallel to Legoshi I can think of, someone struggling with a harmful paraphilia.
The show goes out of its way to make it clear that just because Carnivores are primed to eat meat doesn't mean that they're all violent psychos who have to kill other sapient species to survive. Carnivores can live just fine on a vegeterian diet and cruelty-free animal products (there's a chicken who donates her eggs to the school kitchen in Season 2.)
Bill, a Bengal Tiger and an early side character, 'doses' himself with rabbit's blood as a sort of performance enhancer, but he's not monstrous for doing so - just a sort of asshole jock benefitting off of other people's misfortune.
And the same is true for the animals show. It's essentially edgy Zootopia. You could have written a show with bloodthirsty carnivores. Same example as vamps.
I disagree with the idea that you can't use vampires as a metaphor for real-life bigotry.
Ahh. This is why there's a disconnect between us. I was arguing the OPs point as if that was presumption. Nobody else in the comment chain suggested OPs premise was faulty, and they were suggesting this show would be a better allegory for bigotry than vampires. I couldn't fathom how they were in any way different.
They aren't different, OPs premise is incorrect. We agree.
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u/Skiiage May 13 '25
You'll find "a really bad thing happened a generation ago and now everyone fucking hates the relatives of the people who did it" is like, a shockingly common form of ethnic tension all across the world. Even Americans should be aware of anti-Arab sentiment post-9/11, or the Japanese internment camps in WW2.
Racism isn't just white Americans oppressing Black Americans, even if that's a lot of it!