reanimal's themes of csa are inseparable from its themes of war as both boil down to the same thing tarsier was using animal abuse to talk about; exploitation, the body rendered a shell to be used. you fundamentally cannot have a complete image of hood and the sniffer, i think, if you do not factor in how chapter 1 ties him to explicit wartime imagery.
we focused in on the ice cream truck and tricycle scenes too much, when those to me are little more than smokescreens, things to make him appear more "palatable" to the children he terrorizes. likewise, i don't think we focused enough on him first appearing in a munitions factory. we moved on too fast from the skins hanging from the rafters of a place where bombs are made and bagged corpses fill a hole in the ground just outside.
it's in this factory we first see what is symbolic of assault, the sniffer invading the corpse of a boomer in a dirty bathroom, skins stuffed in the toilets. the photography room depicts a pig head, hood's animal, shoved in a toilet too. and it is sososo striking to me that we first see this here. invasion in a place where mass death is designed. the skins are often solely associated with hood's assault in the analysis i see on tumblr, and this isn't wrong, but i don't think enough people linger on their direct ties to the boomers; with the boomers being the "before" stage if the cleaning house is anything to go by. this makes their symbolism two-fold, being the gutted remains of those left to die in a bombed out, flooded town, and gutted on a more metaphorical level; they are empty, nude things that want to consume you just like the mother consumes her wayward child, just like the lamb consumes all in its path, just like the soldiers loading children too small to even properly hold a rifle into their trucks is consumption.
a rooster sits atop a tree stump without its head, the elevator comes down and a soldier's legs stand inside, his torso blown clean off. men in a theater watch a film depicting the slaughter and abuse of children, but they do not see it, just as they watch but do not see the predator directly in front of them, just as the soldiers sit in their empty theater heedless to the tank barreling down the aisle. the soldiers in the bunker crawl, like the skins. the pianist is the only soldier to not raise his gun, to resist being a cog in the murder machine, and he is slaughtered no different from an animal for it. meat to be used, eaten, and spat back out. a dog eats its own vomit.
gummygunk
theartofmadeline
vaporwave
stormborns
