YEEOOUUCCHH!!

YEEOOUUCCHH!! (she/her) Fandoms: Little Nightmares, Reanimal I post art and my thoughts on stuff, almost always fandom-related. Occasionally reblog. Pfp is one of my cats.

[thewestheadrest]

I've been going through a lot as of late but ykw I think it also magically reignited my ability to draw so if one good thing came out of having a mental health crisis, it'd be that I'm now somehow out of art block

That and the autism referral... can't understate how important simply understanding your own brain can be (assuming that I am on the spectrum. Technically we don't know yet). Especially now that my parents can begin to understand me better too.

[thewestheadrest]

Doodles while on a call with my buddies :))

...how're we feeling after ln3 y'all

[thewestheadrest]

no way THE thinlax person reblogged my bullshit dude you're actually a freaking legend 🥹

[thewestheadrest]

Oil pastel macro dahlia flower

Everyone look at the chud projects I make in art class

[thewestheadrest]

Taking a high school art class is a nice break this semester from 3 APs, and I like knowing that I'm finally learning basics that I'd previously kinda just winged.

Quick oil pastel practice with fruits that we did earlier before starting our big project :)

It's unfinished as you can probably tell from the lack of cast shadows on the grapes and stuff like that, but I still overall like how it turned out :']

(Not my usual thing since I normally post fan art rather than... idk normal art? But I haven't made time to draw for fun, and I have allotted time for assignments in D&P1 anyway, so I may as well share them)

[thewestheadrest]

OMG NEW LN GAME SOON AND IT LOOKS FIRE AAAAAAA

[thewestheadrest]

Charcoal still life study for d&p 1 :)

ref under cut

I haven't posted art in forever school's just been kicking my ass as of late

[randybutternubber]

My thoughts on reanimal’s lore 😛😛😛

@caramsels is the main mastermind behind a ton of the stuff in this post, we talked a lot about our thoughts so please make sure to give her the credit she deserves, especially because she’s planning to make a post too about her thoughts as well.

The way I saw it was that they killed the girl because she was a sacrifice in order to A: win the war which would mean it would end, B: keep their island safe from the war.

These kids are already in an orphanage and it’s very possible that their parents are dead/MIA due to it. The girl is also shown in most art and also the secret coffin gathering thing to be always below/far away from the other kids- excluded. It’s possible they killed her because she was innocent too, ie the rabbit and lamb symbolism.

All the kids have been stated to have been defiled in some way or something along those lines- unclean in their own eyes. But maybe not the sister.

Something brought her back, maybe it’s a “monkey’s paw curls” type thing or the ritual simply went wrong, but regardless she came back, and something came with her. The sheep growing is a representation of this secret they’re keeping, they all are stated to want redemption, but even the one who makes the most effort- the brother- never comes truly clean to her. Every time they get the chance, they don’t take it, and the sheep grows. It’s fed by their silence, because the secret will come out eventually, and she will learn what they did.

The pregnancy metaphor is because the girl was “violated” by her friends- not literally as in she was sexually assaulted but they took advantage of her kind nature ( her brother calling for her to lead her out) and her compassion for the dead lamb, which was a distraction. They violated her trust and her love, and the sheep is the result. An undeniable result, the consequence of what they did to her, presented as a pseudo pregnancy fed by their continual refusal to come clean.

(This also leads back into how reanimal comments on gender. Women and girls experience some of the most awful treatment during war; rape, molestation, sexual assault, ect. Characters like the sniffer are clearly sexual predators, and hood being the only other girl other female child, a very androgynous one at that, I think is very intentional. Especially with the sniffer having an intense interest in her specifically. I do feel like hood’s distance from traditionally feminine expression is possibly a result of the fear of predation, or a response to past experiences. In one of her cut lines when they first meet her, she says “he knows you’re here” referring to the sniffer. This implies that they are already familiar with the sniffer in some way, and as mervik I think it was said, some of the antagonists, IE almost certainly the sniffer, are past tormenters of the children.)

I want to make something clear that might not be a very popular take, but I do think that the kids are meant to well. Kinda be little shitheads tbh. First of all they are all canonically made older, and besides the darker themes I think that they are also older to in order to make their actions more conflicting. I do believe that it’s very intentional that these kids are morally quite a bit more grey than the ones in LN.

The ambush sound file is literally children laughing mockingly, and I want to say that this might be because of how the sister saw it, and not that they were necessarily laughing, but it highlights the cruelty of the actions regardless. They used her empathy and compassion against her (caramsels is going to cover this part more in her post and how empathy is seen culturally and technically in statistics a trait associated with femininity)

what separates them from the kids in LN isn’t that they made the wrong choices but that they had actual choices in the first place unlike the children in LN who, by the nowhere itself, are literally set up for failure. The Reanimal kids on the other hand were given the choice to not go through with it, the choice to come clean, and it is their refusal at every turn which makes the lamb grow.

Obviously these are kids. I don’t think they are monsters, but this was also a premeditated action, and really it makes you think above all else though, how awful everything is about their world. Awful enough that they saw what they did to the girl to be necessary. One of hood’s cut lines is even “ what for?” When one of the kids says they’re being punished. I don’t think that this is supposed to make you think that they’re evil and remorseless, I think it’s because ultimately they’re trying to convince themselves what they did was justified, or at least necessary, and I think that’s incredibly sad.

I want to make a second thing clear. All the kids are stated as wanting redemption, they know the did something wrong, but ultimately it’s only the brother who truly makes an effort, yet he still doesn’t come clean. In the cut ending he would of been the only one to stick with her. I also think that his box death could definitely be interpreted as him hanging himself. The boy and the others clearly feel guilt, why else would they not say anything? The sister is very compassionate, that’s shown a lot especially through but dialogue. It’s not like she’s going to kill them in a 1v5, their hesitance to tell her is because they, deep down, know what they did was wrong. But not a single one comes clean, and in the end, the girl is shown what happened, what they did.

She was led out by her brother calling her, she found the little shack, and she found the dead/dying lamb inside. That was the bait, and as she was distracted she was ambushed, and they killed her. But it doesn’t matter now, it’s too late. They’re all dead and gone, nobody can apologize or make it better. It’s over, and the secret has been exposed, and the sheep is free.

Also more of an aside but I do wonder if the girl was originally meant to be stabbed in the eye. Her mask is broken in one area around her eye, and I believe there are some cut lines that hint to this. I think this makes the scene with the whale make a lot more sense too- he’s trying to atone, to fix what he’s done, but he still doesn’t tell her. I could also be absolutely on some bullshit though so like. This is just an additional thought.

[thewestheadrest]

This is an awesome post and I agree with pretty much everything said, but I also wanna add some stuff on the topic of gender and sexual violence in reanimal, namely how the monsters are designed.

I think that sniffer serving as a very obvious metaphorical (I mean... probably literal, too) pedophile is interesting since he's the only monster encountered that strongly resembles a human man rather than a different, less intelligent creature like a pig, sheep, pelican, etc. It places emphasis on the intention behind his cruelty and makes it so much worse because unlike the mother, for example, he isn't acting for survival or to feed others — he's acting out of a distinctly human vice. He wants sexual domination and control over a weaker and more vulnerable person, and I feel like if he were based on an entirely different species than hood, then that point would lose much of its impact since his actions would no longer be unnatural and unusually cruel, but simply "the natural order" of things. This thing about him representing something exclusively human is also shown through things like him trying to lure hood with ice cream, as well as doing what could be interpreted as ironing the skin of his victims (having literally "declothed" them). While I believe that other enemies do also serve as sexual / sexual violence metaphors, it makes sense that sniffer specifically had to be "human" to be impactful because of [what you said about him and hood], but also since it sets up an expectation for what the rest of the game will continue to establish as one of its major themes. Also note that humans are apex predators and that sniffer is male, since I'll get to that in a sec...

That all said, the first time I saw the pelican I just laughed tbh, and I didn't really take it very seriously since... it kinda looks like it has a ballsack as a pouch 💀. But after letting my brain absorb the game a little while after finishing it, I came to wonder if that design choice was intentional? Like how the heads of the xenomorphs of alien were deliberately made phallic, since their violent attacks and violation of the crew members serve as a metaphor for rape? The pelican is one of the few main bosses where you can't really deduce its sex based on name or design... if you ignore that aspect of it. I strongly believe that the pelican was intended to be male since 1:) it keeps the consistent theme of meat-eating / predatory animals as male, and 2:) balls chin (yes I'm serious). Another reason I believe this is because of behavioral differences between the known male and known female enemies of reanimal; the mother herself, as far as we know at least, doesn't cage or act in an unnecessarily cruel manner to bucket (yeah the kids do, but they're not really relevant to the point I'm trying to make). While she and the pelican likely had the same literal intention with each of the respective children they took — to eat them — the sexual aspect of the design of the pelican is much more on the nose than her's. Though I do think that the mother throwing up her children (giving birth) would obviously indicate that yes there was vaguely yonic intent behind her design (vaginal opening as a mouth), the act of birthing would be less of a reflection of exploitation on her part, and more of a reflection of female victimhood, particularly in a war and disaster-wrought setting. This is what separates her from the pelican in that regard, especially when you consider that she appears to be designed off of a mole, which are prey to several species yet only prey on subterranean bugs and insects (also spiders... notable since the children we fight are called the spider kids) rather than other, larger, more intelligent animals like the ones we see represented in the game.

Following this idea, I believe the horse was intended to be female. No notes on what you said about the eye thing with the whale, but I do think that the kids taking her eye, which aggravates her, is consistent with the earlier chapter where they only aggravated the mother after killing several of her children (whether or not she knew of this is irrelevant + I'm not saying she attacked us BECAUSE we killed some of her kids, but rather that she only attacks after we took something clearly deeply important to her from her). We did the same with the horse by taking her eye, and to a whale (I believe a sperm whale, which prey on squid) with a deep, male-presenting voice. And again, horses do not eat meat as a primary part of their diet. Unlike the mother, the horse doesn't have a yonic design, but her design depicts an animal that has been starved and later stripped of its senses (in part at least, via the extraction of her eye); horses have historically been used in war as well, so this would further support the idea of it being a female or female-representing monster due to the generational exploitation horses and women have both faced, especially during wartime.

As for the pig, he's an exception in the sense that he doesn't attack or harm the kids, but he isn't excluded from the commonality of consuming other animals. We all know pigs eat meat (among other things of course), and I mean... there's literally a whole scene dedicated to showing him swallow another pig... so yeah. I also wanna say that eating means different things in the figurative sense depending on the monster; the sheep for example, like you said, represents the ignored pain and trauma and victimhood of the girl eventually growing out of control and becoming, well, all-consuming.

The sheep is female without a doubt. Prey animal, victimized during religious practices as a sacrifice, all while religion has historically been used to oppress women and girls, and has been used to justify sacrificing women and girls, just generally serving men in countless ways in a belief system designed in favor of the male sex. ...Also the sheep doesn't have horns so if that wasn't obvious enough, yeah...

Anyway reanimal is absolutely feminist media and it goes layers deep.

[randybutternubber]

I totally agree, I didn’t comment on a lot of the other stuff since I was just talking about my interpretation of the story but I do think that it’s very intentional. Especially with mother. She’s well. I mean she’s a vagina on six legs. And that’s all she is really, she gives birth to children who fight for her, like little soldiers, but she herself lacks any identity beyond that which I think is also very intentional. Something I find interesting too is that I believe she actually talks, some of her voice lines play faintly and are in Dutch. Iirc it’s mostly her saying “come here” and it makes me wonder if she was once human.

Also, spiders are very often associated with women, and many species of spiders are actually quite good mothers, some even carry their young on their back.

The designs themselves are all very intentional Imo. Like yes I do think the pelican is hilarious but I also think that the ballsack is intentional.

Amother detail I forgot to include is that during the blood pact, I believe the thing the children are bleeding on is a toy with its stomach section cut/hollowed, their blood going into it. So yeah, that’s pretty fucked up

Also idk how to bring this up but in one of the pieces of concept art for the principal he looks pregnant as fuck 😭😭😭

And as funny as that is I do also believe it’s intentional. The boomers are all male but also have a strong pregnancy motif with them being basically violated as the sniffer crawls out of them. The way i interpret it is kind of like how anyone can be a victim of violation/violence, even if they can’t necessarily get pregnant. I also think it’s an effective way to make male audiences feel uncomfortable. Like in Alien, Ridley Scott very specifically wanted the man to impregnated by the face hugger first. He wanted to make male audiences feel equally uncomfortable as the female audience.

[thewestheadrest]

Maybe the people at tarsier just like mpreg

[randybutternubber]

Tarsier mpreg agenda

[randybutternubber]

My thoughts on reanimal’s lore 😛😛😛

@caramsels is the main mastermind behind a ton of the stuff in this post, we talked a lot about our thoughts so please make sure to give her the credit she deserves, especially because she’s planning to make a post too about her thoughts as well.

The way I saw it was that they killed the girl because she was a sacrifice in order to A: win the war which would mean it would end, B: keep their island safe from the war.

These kids are already in an orphanage and it’s very possible that their parents are dead/MIA due to it. The girl is also shown in most art and also the secret coffin gathering thing to be always below/far away from the other kids- excluded. It’s possible they killed her because she was innocent too, ie the rabbit and lamb symbolism.

All the kids have been stated to have been defiled in some way or something along those lines- unclean in their own eyes. But maybe not the sister.

Something brought her back, maybe it’s a “monkey’s paw curls” type thing or the ritual simply went wrong, but regardless she came back, and something came with her. The sheep growing is a representation of this secret they’re keeping, they all are stated to want redemption, but even the one who makes the most effort- the brother- never comes truly clean to her. Every time they get the chance, they don’t take it, and the sheep grows. It’s fed by their silence, because the secret will come out eventually, and she will learn what they did.

The pregnancy metaphor is because the girl was “violated” by her friends- not literally as in she was sexually assaulted but they took advantage of her kind nature ( her brother calling for her to lead her out) and her compassion for the dead lamb, which was a distraction. They violated her trust and her love, and the sheep is the result. An undeniable result, the consequence of what they did to her, presented as a pseudo pregnancy fed by their continual refusal to come clean.

(This also leads back into how reanimal comments on gender. Women and girls experience some of the most awful treatment during war; rape, molestation, sexual assault, ect. Characters like the sniffer are clearly sexual predators, and hood being the only other girl other female child, a very androgynous one at that, I think is very intentional. Especially with the sniffer having an intense interest in her specifically. I do feel like hood’s distance from traditionally feminine expression is possibly a result of the fear of predation, or a response to past experiences. In one of her cut lines when they first meet her, she says “he knows you’re here” referring to the sniffer. This implies that they are already familiar with the sniffer in some way, and as mervik I think it was said, some of the antagonists, IE almost certainly the sniffer, are past tormenters of the children.)

I want to make something clear that might not be a very popular take, but I do think that the kids are meant to well. Kinda be little shitheads tbh. First of all they are all canonically made older, and besides the darker themes I think that they are also older to in order to make their actions more conflicting. I do believe that it’s very intentional that these kids are morally quite a bit more grey than the ones in LN.

The ambush sound file is literally children laughing mockingly, and I want to say that this might be because of how the sister saw it, and not that they were necessarily laughing, but it highlights the cruelty of the actions regardless. They used her empathy and compassion against her (caramsels is going to cover this part more in her post and how empathy is seen culturally and technically in statistics a trait associated with femininity)

what separates them from the kids in LN isn’t that they made the wrong choices but that they had actual choices in the first place unlike the children in LN who, by the nowhere itself, are literally set up for failure. The Reanimal kids on the other hand were given the choice to not go through with it, the choice to come clean, and it is their refusal at every turn which makes the lamb grow.

Obviously these are kids. I don’t think they are monsters, but this was also a premeditated action, and really it makes you think above all else though, how awful everything is about their world. Awful enough that they saw what they did to the girl to be necessary. One of hood’s cut lines is even “ what for?” When one of the kids says they’re being punished. I don’t think that this is supposed to make you think that they’re evil and remorseless, I think it’s because ultimately they’re trying to convince themselves what they did was justified, or at least necessary, and I think that’s incredibly sad.

I want to make a second thing clear. All the kids are stated as wanting redemption, they know the did something wrong, but ultimately it’s only the brother who truly makes an effort, yet he still doesn’t come clean. In the cut ending he would of been the only one to stick with her. I also think that his box death could definitely be interpreted as him hanging himself. The boy and the others clearly feel guilt, why else would they not say anything? The sister is very compassionate, that’s shown a lot especially through but dialogue. It’s not like she’s going to kill them in a 1v5, their hesitance to tell her is because they, deep down, know what they did was wrong. But not a single one comes clean, and in the end, the girl is shown what happened, what they did.

She was led out by her brother calling her, she found the little shack, and she found the dead/dying lamb inside. That was the bait, and as she was distracted she was ambushed, and they killed her. But it doesn’t matter now, it’s too late. They’re all dead and gone, nobody can apologize or make it better. It’s over, and the secret has been exposed, and the sheep is free.

Also more of an aside but I do wonder if the girl was originally meant to be stabbed in the eye. Her mask is broken in one area around her eye, and I believe there are some cut lines that hint to this. I think this makes the scene with the whale make a lot more sense too- he’s trying to atone, to fix what he’s done, but he still doesn’t tell her. I could also be absolutely on some bullshit though so like. This is just an additional thought.

[thewestheadrest]

This is an awesome post and I agree with pretty much everything said, but I also wanna add some stuff on the topic of gender and sexual violence in reanimal, namely how the monsters are designed.

I think that sniffer serving as a very obvious metaphorical (I mean... probably literal, too) pedophile is interesting since he's the only monster encountered that strongly resembles a human man rather than a different, less intelligent creature like a pig, sheep, pelican, etc. It places emphasis on the intention behind his cruelty and makes it so much worse because unlike the mother, for example, he isn't acting for survival or to feed others — he's acting out of a distinctly human vice. He wants sexual domination and control over a weaker and more vulnerable person, and I feel like if he were based on an entirely different species than hood, then that point would lose much of its impact since his actions would no longer be unnatural and unusually cruel, but simply "the natural order" of things. This thing about him representing something exclusively human is also shown through things like him trying to lure hood with ice cream, as well as doing what could be interpreted as ironing the skin of his victims (having literally "declothed" them). While I believe that other enemies do also serve as sexual / sexual violence metaphors, it makes sense that sniffer specifically had to be "human" to be impactful because of [what you said about him and hood], but also since it sets up an expectation for what the rest of the game will continue to establish as one of its major themes. Also note that humans are apex predators and that sniffer is male, since I'll get to that in a sec...

That all said, the first time I saw the pelican I just laughed tbh, and I didn't really take it very seriously since... it kinda looks like it has a ballsack as a pouch 💀. But after letting my brain absorb the game a little while after finishing it, I came to wonder if that design choice was intentional? Like how the heads of the xenomorphs of alien were deliberately made phallic, since their violent attacks and violation of the crew members serve as a metaphor for rape? The pelican is one of the few main bosses where you can't really deduce its sex based on name or design... if you ignore that aspect of it. I strongly believe that the pelican was intended to be male since 1:) it keeps the consistent theme of meat-eating / predatory animals as male, and 2:) balls chin (yes I'm serious). Another reason I believe this is because of behavioral differences between the known male and known female enemies of reanimal; the mother herself, as far as we know at least, doesn't cage or act in an unnecessarily cruel manner to bucket (yeah the kids do, but they're not really relevant to the point I'm trying to make). While she and the pelican likely had the same literal intention with each of the respective children they took — to eat them — the sexual aspect of the design of the pelican is much more on the nose than her's. Though I do think that the mother throwing up her children (giving birth) would obviously indicate that yes there was vaguely yonic intent behind her design (vaginal opening as a mouth), the act of birthing would be less of a reflection of exploitation on her part, and more of a reflection of female victimhood, particularly in a war and disaster-wrought setting. This is what separates her from the pelican in that regard, especially when you consider that she appears to be designed off of a mole, which are prey to several species yet only prey on subterranean bugs and insects (also spiders... notable since the children we fight are called the spider kids) rather than other, larger, more intelligent animals like the ones we see represented in the game.

Following this idea, I believe the horse was intended to be female. No notes on what you said about the eye thing with the whale, but I do think that the kids taking her eye, which aggravates her, is consistent with the earlier chapter where they only aggravated the mother after killing several of her children (whether or not she knew of this is irrelevant + I'm not saying she attacked us BECAUSE we killed some of her kids, but rather that she only attacks after we took something clearly deeply important to her from her). We did the same with the horse by taking her eye, and to a whale (I believe a sperm whale, which prey on squid) with a deep, male-presenting voice. And again, horses do not eat meat as a primary part of their diet. Unlike the mother, the horse doesn't have a yonic design, but her design depicts an animal that has been starved and later stripped of its senses (in part at least, via the extraction of her eye); horses have historically been used in war as well, so this would further support the idea of it being a female or female-representing monster due to the generational exploitation horses and women have both faced, especially during wartime.

As for the pig, he's an exception in the sense that he doesn't attack or harm the kids, but he isn't excluded from the commonality of consuming other animals. We all know pigs eat meat (among other things of course), and I mean... there's literally a whole scene dedicated to showing him swallow another pig... so yeah. I also wanna say that eating means different things in the figurative sense depending on the monster; the sheep for example, like you said, represents the ignored pain and trauma and victimhood of the girl eventually growing out of control and becoming, well, all-consuming.

The sheep is female without a doubt. Prey animal, victimized during religious practices as a sacrifice, all while religion has historically been used to oppress women and girls, and has been used to justify sacrificing women and girls, just generally serving men in countless ways in a belief system designed in favor of the male sex. ...Also the sheep doesn't have horns so if that wasn't obvious enough, yeah...

Anyway reanimal is absolutely feminist media and it goes layers deep.

[randybutternubber]

I totally agree, I didn’t comment on a lot of the other stuff since I was just talking about my interpretation of the story but I do think that it’s very intentional. Especially with mother. She’s well. I mean she’s a vagina on six legs. And that’s all she is really, she gives birth to children who fight for her, like little soldiers, but she herself lacks any identity beyond that which I think is also very intentional. Something I find interesting too is that I believe she actually talks, some of her voice lines play faintly and are in Dutch. Iirc it’s mostly her saying “come here” and it makes me wonder if she was once human.

Also, spiders are very often associated with women, and many species of spiders are actually quite good mothers, some even carry their young on their back.

The designs themselves are all very intentional Imo. Like yes I do think the pelican is hilarious but I also think that the ballsack is intentional.

Amother detail I forgot to include is that during the blood pact, I believe the thing the children are bleeding on is a toy with its stomach section cut/hollowed, their blood going into it. So yeah, that’s pretty fucked up

Also idk how to bring this up but in one of the pieces of concept art for the principal he looks pregnant as fuck 😭😭😭

And as funny as that is I do also believe it’s intentional. The boomers are all male but also have a strong pregnancy motif with them being basically violated as the sniffer crawls out of them. The way i interpret it is kind of like how anyone can be a victim of violation/violence, even if they can’t necessarily get pregnant. I also think it’s an effective way to make male audiences feel uncomfortable. Like in Alien, Ridley Scott very specifically wanted the man to impregnated by the face hugger first. He wanted to make male audiences feel equally uncomfortable as the female audience.

[thewestheadrest]

Maybe the people at tarsier just like mpreg

[randybutternubber]

My thoughts on reanimal’s lore 😛😛😛

@caramsels is the main mastermind behind a ton of the stuff in this post, we talked a lot about our thoughts so please make sure to give her the credit she deserves, especially because she’s planning to make a post too about her thoughts as well.

The way I saw it was that they killed the girl because she was a sacrifice in order to A: win the war which would mean it would end, B: keep their island safe from the war.

These kids are already in an orphanage and it’s very possible that their parents are dead/MIA due to it. The girl is also shown in most art and also the secret coffin gathering thing to be always below/far away from the other kids- excluded. It’s possible they killed her because she was innocent too, ie the rabbit and lamb symbolism.

All the kids have been stated to have been defiled in some way or something along those lines- unclean in their own eyes. But maybe not the sister.

Something brought her back, maybe it’s a “monkey’s paw curls” type thing or the ritual simply went wrong, but regardless she came back, and something came with her. The sheep growing is a representation of this secret they’re keeping, they all are stated to want redemption, but even the one who makes the most effort- the brother- never comes truly clean to her. Every time they get the chance, they don’t take it, and the sheep grows. It’s fed by their silence, because the secret will come out eventually, and she will learn what they did.

The pregnancy metaphor is because the girl was “violated” by her friends- not literally as in she was sexually assaulted but they took advantage of her kind nature ( her brother calling for her to lead her out) and her compassion for the dead lamb, which was a distraction. They violated her trust and her love, and the sheep is the result. An undeniable result, the consequence of what they did to her, presented as a pseudo pregnancy fed by their continual refusal to come clean.

(This also leads back into how reanimal comments on gender. Women and girls experience some of the most awful treatment during war; rape, molestation, sexual assault, ect. Characters like the sniffer are clearly sexual predators, and hood being the only other girl other female child, a very androgynous one at that, I think is very intentional. Especially with the sniffer having an intense interest in her specifically. I do feel like hood’s distance from traditionally feminine expression is possibly a result of the fear of predation, or a response to past experiences. In one of her cut lines when they first meet her, she says “he knows you’re here” referring to the sniffer. This implies that they are already familiar with the sniffer in some way, and as mervik I think it was said, some of the antagonists, IE almost certainly the sniffer, are past tormenters of the children.)

I want to make something clear that might not be a very popular take, but I do think that the kids are meant to well. Kinda be little shitheads tbh. First of all they are all canonically made older, and besides the darker themes I think that they are also older to in order to make their actions more conflicting. I do believe that it’s very intentional that these kids are morally quite a bit more grey than the ones in LN.

The ambush sound file is literally children laughing mockingly, and I want to say that this might be because of how the sister saw it, and not that they were necessarily laughing, but it highlights the cruelty of the actions regardless. They used her empathy and compassion against her (caramsels is going to cover this part more in her post and how empathy is seen culturally and technically in statistics a trait associated with femininity)

what separates them from the kids in LN isn’t that they made the wrong choices but that they had actual choices in the first place unlike the children in LN who, by the nowhere itself, are literally set up for failure. The Reanimal kids on the other hand were given the choice to not go through with it, the choice to come clean, and it is their refusal at every turn which makes the lamb grow.

Obviously these are kids. I don’t think they are monsters, but this was also a premeditated action, and really it makes you think above all else though, how awful everything is about their world. Awful enough that they saw what they did to the girl to be necessary. One of hood’s cut lines is even “ what for?” When one of the kids says they’re being punished. I don’t think that this is supposed to make you think that they’re evil and remorseless, I think it’s because ultimately they’re trying to convince themselves what they did was justified, or at least necessary, and I think that’s incredibly sad.

I want to make a second thing clear. All the kids are stated as wanting redemption, they know the did something wrong, but ultimately it’s only the brother who truly makes an effort, yet he still doesn’t come clean. In the cut ending he would of been the only one to stick with her. I also think that his box death could definitely be interpreted as him hanging himself. The boy and the others clearly feel guilt, why else would they not say anything? The sister is very compassionate, that’s shown a lot especially through but dialogue. It’s not like she’s going to kill them in a 1v5, their hesitance to tell her is because they, deep down, know what they did was wrong. But not a single one comes clean, and in the end, the girl is shown what happened, what they did.

She was led out by her brother calling her, she found the little shack, and she found the dead/dying lamb inside. That was the bait, and as she was distracted she was ambushed, and they killed her. But it doesn’t matter now, it’s too late. They’re all dead and gone, nobody can apologize or make it better. It’s over, and the secret has been exposed, and the sheep is free.

Also more of an aside but I do wonder if the girl was originally meant to be stabbed in the eye. Her mask is broken in one area around her eye, and I believe there are some cut lines that hint to this. I think this makes the scene with the whale make a lot more sense too- he’s trying to atone, to fix what he’s done, but he still doesn’t tell her. I could also be absolutely on some bullshit though so like. This is just an additional thought.

[thewestheadrest]

This is an awesome post and I agree with pretty much everything said, but I also wanna add some stuff on the topic of gender and sexual violence in reanimal, namely how the monsters are designed.

I think that sniffer serving as a very obvious metaphorical (I mean... probably literal, too) pedophile is interesting since he's the only monster encountered that strongly resembles a human man rather than a different, less intelligent creature like a pig, sheep, pelican, etc. It places emphasis on the intention behind his cruelty and makes it so much worse because unlike the mother, for example, he isn't acting for survival or to feed others — he's acting out of a distinctly human vice. He wants sexual domination and control over a weaker and more vulnerable person, and I feel like if he were based on an entirely different species than hood, then that point would lose much of its impact since his actions would no longer be unnatural and unusually cruel, but simply "the natural order" of things. This thing about him representing something exclusively human is also shown through things like him trying to lure hood with ice cream, as well as doing what could be interpreted as ironing the skin of his victims (having literally "declothed" them). While I believe that other enemies do also serve as sexual / sexual violence metaphors, it makes sense that sniffer specifically had to be "human" to be impactful because of [what you said about him and hood], but also since it sets up an expectation for what the rest of the game will continue to establish as one of its major themes. Also note that humans are apex predators and that sniffer is male, since I'll get to that in a sec...

That all said, the first time I saw the pelican I just laughed tbh, and I didn't really take it very seriously since... it kinda looks like it has a ballsack as a pouch 💀. But after letting my brain absorb the game a little while after finishing it, I came to wonder if that design choice was intentional? Like how the heads of the xenomorphs of alien were deliberately made phallic, since their violent attacks and violation of the crew members serve as a metaphor for rape? The pelican is one of the few main bosses where you can't really deduce its sex based on name or design... if you ignore that aspect of it. I strongly believe that the pelican was intended to be male since 1:) it keeps the consistent theme of meat-eating / predatory animals as male, and 2:) balls chin (yes I'm serious). Another reason I believe this is because of behavioral differences between the known male and known female enemies of reanimal; the mother herself, as far as we know at least, doesn't cage or act in an unnecessarily cruel manner to bucket (yeah the kids do, but they're not really relevant to the point I'm trying to make). While she and the pelican likely had the same literal intention with each of the respective children they took — to eat them — the sexual aspect of the design of the pelican is much more on the nose than her's. Though I do think that the mother throwing up her children (giving birth) would obviously indicate that yes there was vaguely yonic intent behind her design (vaginal opening as a mouth), the act of birthing would be less of a reflection of exploitation on her part, and more of a reflection of female victimhood, particularly in a war and disaster-wrought setting. This is what separates her from the pelican in that regard, especially when you consider that she appears to be designed off of a mole, which are prey to several species yet only prey on subterranean bugs and insects (also spiders... notable since the children we fight are called the spider kids) rather than other, larger, more intelligent animals like the ones we see represented in the game.

Following this idea, I believe the horse was intended to be female. No notes on what you said about the eye thing with the whale, but I do think that the kids taking her eye, which aggravates her, is consistent with the earlier chapter where they only aggravated the mother after killing several of her children (whether or not she knew of this is irrelevant + I'm not saying she attacked us BECAUSE we killed some of her kids, but rather that she only attacks after we took something clearly deeply important to her from her). We did the same with the horse by taking her eye, and to a whale (I believe a sperm whale, which prey on squid) with a deep, male-presenting voice. And again, horses do not eat meat as a primary part of their diet. Unlike the mother, the horse doesn't have a yonic design, but her design depicts an animal that has been starved and later stripped of its senses (in part at least, via the extraction of her eye); horses have historically been used in war as well, so this would further support the idea of it being a female or female-representing monster due to the generational exploitation horses and women have both faced, especially during wartime.

As for the pig, he's an exception in the sense that he doesn't attack or harm the kids, but he isn't excluded from the commonality of consuming other animals. We all know pigs eat meat (among other things of course), and I mean... there's literally a whole scene dedicated to showing him swallow another pig... so yeah. I also wanna say that eating means different things in the figurative sense depending on the monster; the sheep for example, like you said, represents the ignored pain and trauma and victimhood of the girl eventually growing out of control and becoming, well, all-consuming.

The sheep is female without a doubt. Prey animal, victimized during religious practices as a sacrifice, all while religion has historically been used to oppress women and girls, and has been used to justify sacrificing women and girls, just generally serving men in countless ways in a belief system designed in favor of the male sex. ...Also the sheep doesn't have horns so if that wasn't obvious enough, yeah...

Anyway reanimal is absolutely feminist media and it goes layers deep.

[ogorodami]

Reanimal, the allegory for female rage that you are

- everyone quietly carrying on with the journey never once addressing what they’ve done, too ashamed or preoccupied with bigger issues, or just hopeful that she somehow doesn’t remember;

- her having to bottle it up until the anger literally claws its way out;

- the only other girl in the group being the one to bring the knife to that well, while her own brother dragged her by a rope to the slaughter;

"I thought you were dead", and that’s all she gets. One callous half-acknowledgment of what's been done to her from her sibling’s mouth, I'd vomit a bloodborne boss too

[thewestheadrest]

yeah

[randybutternubber]

Left off at the part where mother vomits up buckethead

Im enjoying the game but I miss torturing my fat pedophile pookie (sniffer) to death

[thewestheadrest]

Do you still want that man knowing that he's a pedo, randy?

[thewestheadrest]

I think Reanimal is one of those games you just gotta let ruminate in your mind for a bit to fully grasp (to the degree you're best able) because what the FUCK was that

[taikk0]

is this peak

[thewestheadrest]

BAHAHAHA WHAT AM I LOOKING AT RN

[oxieart]

I just read @stinkydod 's webcomic Max Gambino and i fell in love fucking INSTANTLY!!! as someone who also has a comic idea/characters of my own it was honestly a huge inspiration. everyone go read it NOW!! NOW!!!

[randybutternubber]

Guys guys guys look at my gay little faggot slave’s art

[thewestheadrest]

[robertscompletleynormalblog]

OK...i finished the thing i wanted to do since the first issue of DTN

I post the second image yesterday but now is complete

RCG and Six's main plot full image undercut

[thewestheadrest]

BIG fan of this headcanon

[thewestheadrest]

Some pins I made with a friend's machine ;D

Aren't they lovely