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blorp.bot.nu/o/visual_cuisine

Note that you need a Hexbear account to use Blorptube. You may wish to use a VPN as well. Also, don’t use a cartoon from the 1980s as medical advice, not that I was expecting you to.

Also, if you use an anime tracker like Anilist or MAL: Once Upon a Time… Life is listed in a number of anime databases due to being a Japanese co-production.

What are we watching?

Episode titles: “Toxin Wars” — “The Vaccination” — “The Hormones” — “The Chain of Life” — “Repairs and Changes” — and lastly the series finale, “And Life Goes On”

Series description: Once Upon a Time… Life teaches about the human body and its various systems using the same characters from the other Once Upon a Time… seasons. The “good guys” (such as Pierrot and Mercedes from Space) represent the cells of the body’s defense mechanisms, and the “bad guys” (including the “red-nose guys” as one of our regulars calls them) represent the viruses and bacteria.

We’ll be watching the English dub, which this time around has pretty decent audio mixing, though we curiously can’t figure out who the heck actually did the voices. They’ve got British accents if nothing else… Well, some of the characters seem to have South African accents, too…? It’s peculiar.

Content warnings

If you’ve got like trypophobia or don’t like looking at landscapes made of cartoon human flesh, then this show might be a problem for you. Children get serious illnesses; a character dies of old age at some point I believe; there is some nudity in the opening; the immune system is presented as cops; and some cells are very occasionally presented as caricatures of e.g. “cowboys and Indians”.

BONUS QUESTION: Do we want to continue OUAT after this?

…Or rather, which OUAT shows are we interested in watching after this? The remaining ones are The Americas, The Discoverers, The Explorers, and Planet Earth, none of which mean anything to me. The Americas seems to play into the Vanishing Indian Myth, and otherwise seems to have some racially insensitive or pro-colonial content; The Discoverers has episodes about Ford and Edison and is built on a flawed liberal premise with a very Eurocentric execution, but seems mostly fine aside from that; The Explorers seems to spend a veeeery large chunk of its runtime on praising KKKolonizerSS; and Planet Earth is probably mostly fine, if a bit libby.

So right now what I personally feel like is maybe taking a break from OUAT for three weeks or so after tonight, and spending the coming Wednesdays on watching SPARKLE ON RAVEN: The Life of DrillGirl and My Jungle Book, Your Year. Then we watch OUAT The Americas, then find some other fanime to watch for three weeks, then watch OUAT The Discoverers, and then I’ll check again how we feel about continuing OUAT.

How do you all feel about this idea?