Dinosaur boy: mha's heteromorph's done right?!
So, as most of you are aware by now, I'm very dissappointed in the heteromorph subplot of mha. And one thing particular I'm dissappointed in, is how we hardly ever art to see the everyday struggles of having alter physiology and how that affects a heteromorph in their day-to-day life. It makes the mutations feel...superficial, if I'm being honest.
Well, after digging through my bookshelf, I found a story I really enjoyed as a kid and honestly still holds up pretty well, and actually handles a similar concept to heteromorphs and does it much better. This is "Dinosaur Boy".
So the story revolves around a kid named sawyer who developed the dorsal plates and thagomizer of a stegosaurus in the summer before fifth grade.
This mutation was the result of a incident at a DNA hybridization lab where the ice cream machine was tainted with a virus that mutated the scientists that at from it into dinosaur-human hybrids. These mutations would be passed down to not their children, but their grandchildren, and sawyer is among these grandchildren.
The story does a good job showing just how much sawyer's mutation has affected his life. His diet has completely overhauled, with him now being a vegetarian. His clothes all need holes in them, he has to wear tennis balls on his thagomizer so it does hurt anybody or get snagged on anything. He can't lay on his back due to his dorsal plates, and his tail makes doing things like fitting into a schoolchair difficult.
And of course, he becimes the target for bullies at school to. He gets called demeaning nicknames like "butt-brain"(a reference to when people thought that stegosaurus had a second brain in a cavity located in it's hindquarters) his stuff gets vandalized(putting crickets in his salad and tossing rings on his plates) and even accusing him of eating people when students start to go missing.
There's one scene in particular where sawyer's classmates are reading an article about an incident with a t-rex-headed kid bit a bully in self defense, totally glossing over the fact that it was in self defense to the bully punching them, and that the bully only had a few minor injuries while the poor kid had his snout broken. It's a really infuriating scene but...in the right way.
My point with all this is that dinosaur boy actually took the time and effort to show the diffculties of being a dino-hybrid, while mha couldn't be bothered to flesh out it's heteromorph plot.
Gotta be embarassing to have a not very well known children's book have a better plot about discrimination than an extremely popular manga/anime series.
