Stories are a funny thing. For all the talk us writers speak of building strong narratives and honing our craft, it’s strange to remember that our efforts are only half the equation to an audience falling in love with a story.

The other half is the audience themselves.

When we as humans consume stories we aren’t doing so in a bubble, we all have lives, experiences, fears, loves, baggage, and traumas that we bring to the table when faced with a story, or any piece of media, that fundamentally changes how we internalize them and find meaning.

The events of a person’s life happen all around their consuming of media: the birth of a sibling, the death of a pet, the beginning of a long relationship, the memories of a failed one, events like these leave marks on our emotional growth and can tie themselves deeply to the stories we consume at the time. It can make us love them deeply, make it or too painful to even think about them.

When I first started watching Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts, the world had yet to end.

This 10 episode netflix original series follows the titular Kipo, a thirteen year old girl with purplish skin being separated from her Burrow, a human settlement deep underground, after a large earthquake. Then on she meets new friends of all different kinds as she makes her way through the Age of Wonderbeasts, a time in the distant future after the cities on the surface have been abandoned by humans and left to the now sapient animals to rule over.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kipo is a fun journey, with fun characters, alot of heart, and an incredibly memorable soundtrack; but this isn’t meant to be a review of the show, no, it’s about something that happen while I was viewing it.

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Enter the end of the world, or to a less dramatic tilt, COVID-19.

I watched the first half of Kipo in January when it first came out, but I put my viewing on hold when college started up again. I didn’t really have the time to sit down and watch a cartoon at the time. However my life, and the lives of so many others, came to something of a halt one wensday afternoon in the longest month ever, when our college dean informed us that when we went home for the coming spring break we wouldn’t be coming back. The next week was nothing if not surreal, a friend of mine’s teacher comparing it to the mood in the days following 9/11. There was just a, for lack of a better term, wall of panic between each and every person. Everyone seemed to be walking just a bit faster, conversation just a bit shorter, strained. Smiles stopped feeling real, as did classes.

A frantic packing of a dorm room left abandon two months too early, a meeting with close friends cancelled indefinitely, nights with my mom frantic on the phone with loved ones, dad watching the news passively besides her, watching the nation, the world, shut down. The world had fundamentally, irrevocably, changed.

I tried to stay calm, enjoy my spring break at home in as normal a way as possible, but as the day towards my first Zoom class drew near, my new normal became more apparent, as were the droves of people on the news and online asking the same loaded question over and over again, “So when are we getting back to normal? Two Weeks? Easter? How about right now, I’m not scared!”

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Now back to Kipo.

On the final day before the end of my break and the beginning of whatever school meant from three-hundred miles away, I remembered that I still hadn’t finished Kipo. With nothing but time on my hands I booted up my Mac i’d run dry a hundred times that week and would no doubt do so again and again in the weeks to come, and opened netflix.

Kipo’s setting of a post-apocalyptic earth stuck out far stronger than it had before, annoyingly so, but around the second half of the show, a plot line reared it’s head that hit a little to close to home.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the darkness of her Burrow, Kipo’s life was normal, and even her first few days on the surface managed to keep a certain stability to it, herself. This began to change.

 

 

Super strength, night vision, pinkish fur, and purple jaguar eyes, new aberrant traits in Kipo began to reveal themselves as their adventure, a trip to the second back-up Burrow for humans after their first was destroyed at the show’s beginning. These changes scare her, the growing implication that she isn’t totally human, is half mutant, starts becoming harder and harder to ignore.

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One episode, where Kipo and the gang are lulled into a pleasant sleep by a mutant looking to eat them, she dreams of her dead mother revealing herself to be alive. Her wayward mother gives her a complete and perfect explanation for who she is, she banishes the fear and doubt and, most importantly, she allows Kipo to return to her normalcy. She spends the rest of the dream hanging out in bliss with her mother and father, the developments in her body being of ultimately no consequence to the immutably happy status quo.

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Kipo breaks from this haze by the end of the episode, coming to an important lesson, some things in life don’t have perfect explanations. Their uncertainty carries until the final episode of the season where her and her friends arrive at the back-up burrow and reunites with her father and friends, but before we continue let me take a few moments to talk about the Burrow.

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The Burrow is an underground hideaway for the remnants of humanity after an at this point unnamed disaster ended the world above. The people here live in relative peace, afraid of the surface and having no idea that other humans, like Kipo’s latest friends and traveling companions Wolf and Benson, and at the beginning of the show an earthquake shakes this peaceful bubble to the point of popping. Part way through the show it is revealed that this was not an earthquake, but an attack by it’s main villain, Scarlamagne, a baboon intent on enslaving humanity “Just as they did to us” back when they ruled the world.

 

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Scarlamagne is a striking character, his prim and proper presentation and drenching in the iconography of old human aristocracy shows him as the “top dog” of this new world, he is living proof that the game has changed and that humans aren’t in charge anymore

The Burrow is a time capsule, a place where the last of the humans can pretend to still be in charge, still in control of their small world. Scarlamagne is their ultimate fear as he is proof of something everyone in the Burrow try to forget.

The age of humans is over, it’s the Age of Wonderbeasts now.

Sounding familiar? Back here in the real world with half the country screaming about getting back to work, to “normal” whatever that means anymore.

 

The Burrow humans try to escape this, their new reality, and so they flee to a pre-made backup burrow with relatively few casualties. When Kipo arrives at this back-up Burrow everything is identical to how it was. The attack from Scarlamaign and the popping of their bubble barely phases the people of the Burrow. Kipo’s old friends leap into her arms and welcome her back with smiles and no indication that their world had come crashing down. The bubble reformed and the the humans’ desire to not accept change and stay hidden, stay in the dark, remains strong.

And then Scarlamagne attacks again, but now there is nowhere to run.

It is here that Kipo’s goal, returning to the Burrow and getting back to her old life, becomes impossible. The Burrow has been breached a final time and the lord of a new age is at their doorstep, and once again the strange changes happening to her body rear up in full force, and we are treated to one of the most surreal transformation sequences I’ve ever seen:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Did I mention music was important to Kipo? Because dear god is it to this scene. The song sung as Kipo’s new inhuman powers break out once and for all, with her world literally crashing down around her, she hears a hallucination of her father sing a short little song called Purple Jaguar Eyes.

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Now throughout the story songs have been used to punctuate Kipo’s growth. Be it against rowdy Cats, Snakes, or Giant Apes, Kipo has used music to show she isn’t afraid of what’s before her, that these challenges are things she can connect to and understand, just as in flashbacks her father uses magic to teach and connect to her.

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[aesop_audio title=”Purple Jaguar Eyes” src=”http://jolineblais.net/nmd343/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Purple-Jaguar-Eye-by-Sterling-K.-Brown.mp3″ loop=”on” viewstart=”on” viewend=”on” hidden=”on”]

This final song of the season’s lyrics, while whimsical, are what’s resonated with me through this crisis, let’s break them down:

There’s a Valley of Mega-Dogs over our heads,

And we’re none the wiser like a wise one said

Until recently Kipo has lived in a blissful ignorance, in a world that had problems yes, but was still coherent, still stable. Say what you will about all that has gone on in the world, but I feel safe enough in saying that we wish we could go back in time a few months, to the first days of 2020 when the Corona-virus was just another terrible thing happening far away, a tragedy sure but, nothing that directly effected us.

Life among glow worms where nobody gets hurt

Always have a meal

Like cave moss lasagna

Maybe I’m showing my immense privilege here, but food was never something I panicked about. Like Kipo I never had to worry about where my next meal came from, when my supply line would get cut off, but now every grocery run is is a planned operation of masks and speed of careful distance and strategy that we hope we have to do every week and a half at most.

‘Til late one night there’s a boom and it’s gone, yeah

The Burrow was breached in an instant, they knew about the beasts above, but there was no way they could actually-

It got closer by the week, the virus. Every day it was on the news, reports in Boston, my state’s capital. Italy gearing up for a collapse, a cruise ship of the damned coming into California, yet it still didn’t feel…real. That was till one Wednesday before Spring break my college sent every student an email telling them that the rest of the semester would be held online…from home. Suddenly the next few days were the last I’d see my friends for half a year.

Shocked from our senses when the earth crashes in

I spent some of my last hours in Maine before heading home to isolation with a friend whose professor likened the tension in the air, the skittishness of everyone as they scrambled like rats fleeing a drowning ship for home, to the days following 9/11. The damn stock market was evaporating! This couldn’t be happening, it was a nightmare.

Something’s going on underneath your skin

Last day before leaving the first case was confirmed in Maine, a short drive away. Oh god. “This isn’t happening” I’d thought. “This isn’t happening” Kipo thought, hiding the growing fur and changing eyes in shame.

The next day I was home for Spring Break. Home till the world would stop falling apart.

It feels so good, though inconvenient

It never goes down

The way that we meant (The way that we meant)

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This is life now? Isn’t it?
As Kipo nearly  succumbs to a panic attack as Scarlamaign descends and her secret is out, her old life is simply….gone.

Is that us now? I thought, stress of the sunday night before the train wreck that is Zoom classes began, while talk of death tolls, false promises of Easter endings, and an overwhelming consensus that this was only the beginning, permeated my every thought.
I hated this, why couldn’t it just be normal? Why couldn’t the elections be the worst thing this year? Why was 2020 such hell?
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Life, isn’t going back to normal….is it? That’s the bitter pill all of us are swallowing, the one Kipo fought against the whole season. The Age of man is gone and it’s the Age of the Wonderbeasts now, Kipo the human is gone, Kipo the whatever she is now is all that she can be, what she needs to be to survive in a world with no Burrows left.

We aren’t going to live in a world without Corona, even after a vaccine is made and distributed, after ever last case is cured, we’ll never get to live in a world that didn’t have Corona, that didn’t change so fundamentally for all of us. We’ll never think about hospitals, grocery stores, cleanliness, and so many other things the same way. We are living in a new age, where the status quo is still up in the air. But when her life was free-falling, Kipo did something I think all of us can learn from. She fought back. Not against the new her, the new reality. While the rest of the Burrow humans fled, trying to find any cover from the surface they still could, Kipo fought back against Scarlamaign. They looked the changing reality before her and with her actions said, “No, this is my world, my future, and I’m not going to let this change define me, I will define IT.”

So yeah, pre-Corona isn’t coming back, normal isn’t possible anymore, but maybe that isn’t the end of the world? Maybe it just means that, whether we like it or not, we now have a new future, one that we still have the chance to take the reigns of, a stear it to something good. Because in this new Age of Wonderbeasts Kipo still has her new friends, new experiences, and a family to cling to. She has back up in this terrifying new world. And as for us? We have eachother, I have my family, my friends, neighbors, teachers, club mates, we are all going through an unimaginable change. All our Burrows broke, but we can venture onto this new surface together.

I feel this last bit of Purple Jaguar Eye’s lyrics can sum this last part up better than I ever could:

Oooh, purple jaguar eye, open up and be alive!
See the world in vivid color
There’s no turning back
So run sure-footed, newly freed!

Oo-oh purple jaguar eye
Look at what’s ahead

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For you and me