For a long time I was ignorant of the fact that anthro-art … is not meant seriously. Anime cat girls and dog boys in general appear quite optimistic, drawn with bright colors and cheerful expressions. I had never come across a furry story with engaging character arcs because I just accidentally stumbled upon decontextualized furry porn on the internet. Then I played Arknightswhich reversed all of my previous assumptions by leaving heavy on issues such as war, class conflict and discrimination.
Arknights is a mobile tower defense game that uses a gacha system to distribute characters. Each character has a specific combat role that makes them indispensable members of your roster. At first I only liked the human-looking cat and rabbit girls who starred in the main plot. They were cute, and my familiarity with anime had desensitized me to their more common animal characteristics.
Cat ears felt downright normalized after a while due to their prevalence in the list, but some animal traits were significantly rarer and took me longer to warm up with. But slaughtering a guerrilla resistance movement was a team effort, and I couldn’t afford to pass it on bladder
In most gacha games, the characters are designed to appeal to the aesthetics or sexual preferences of a different player base. Each figure embodies a kind of aesthetic archetype, such as “cool and sophisticated gentleman” or “exuberant, upbeat woman”. Since Arknights is a gacha game, I use that (rather boringly dressed) Bull type because otherwise I wouldn’t have enough shield characters. I need someone who can block three enemies and he’s my man. So from the start I had to familiarize myself with furry and furry neighbor characters that I might not otherwise have liked. And in this game we all have a war trauma for trying to fight off a dangerous enemy. Who has time to be picky about who to ally with?
Arknights trained me to stop being picky. Is a character based on one? bird, a hyena, a R.A.M., or a bear, I would use them according to their individual talents. I started to associate each character with reliability within their specific gameplay niche. I was always excited to see mine Wolf girl
Even out of the field, I was amazed by the anthro NPCs of the story. the Ruler of the lungman faction is a total bastard of a dragon man willing to sacrifice the city’s most discriminated population to protect them. And be do wifeDespite her marital devotion, she was ready to defy him to preserve the things they both loved. They weren’t just interesting characters – they were deeply flawed, contradicting people who happened to have brightly colored horns and elongated snouts.
and Arknights does not sexualize them cat and Hare Animal traits of the characters as in some anime media (like the fate Franchise) or use them to indicate a lesser status like in several Fire sign Games. You were taken as seriously as any living being. It felt strange to me seeing even iconic mascots like Person 5‘s Morgana has often been the target of cat jokes. While Arknights is strongly influenced by issues of discrimination; they are not about species differences, but about prejudice against people with a dangerous, communicable disease. If you have rabbit ears or a Leopard tail, then that’s perfectly fine. Normal even. Arknights I didn’t assume that characters would hate each other in a completely fictional setting because they were physically different, and I liked that.
Even if the characters are full furs, Arknights does not rely on anime shock value to create compelling characters. Sure, the brawler character Mountain is a full-fledged tiger. But do you know what else? He is a polite scion of a wealthy construction company. He hates violence, but he’s damn good at it too. People fear and respect him equally, and not just because he is over six feet tall. I trust him more than most people I’ve met in real life, and he has a more interesting personality too.
Once you’re in ArknightsFurry or not, it’s a fascinating war story featuring some of the daring worldbuildings I’ve seen in an anime video game. Arknights integrates his anthro-race lore into the plot, but never uses it as a punchline, which makes the characters far more engaging and interesting than they otherwise would be.
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