Wolves, Cats, Rabbits, Bears, Foxes, and Black Panthers, Oh My!
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Warning:
There will be spoilers for the OSL comic series Wild Beast Forest House.
Content Warning: There maybe references to abuse, blood, sexual assault, violence, sexual harassment, self-deprecation, racism (within the context of species), mentions of murder, manipulation, PTSD, gun violence, forced body modification (cat human was declawed), animal abuse (humanoid animals), kidnapping, death (including animal death in the form of humanoid animals), suicide, orphans, breakups, theft, extortion, peer pressure, dubcon, mentions of bullying, cheating (not between the main couple), drugging, and arson, as they appear in the comic.
Synopsis:
Yule is a domesticated cat. He escapes his life of confinement and runs out into the forest, seeking not only a certain place but also a certain person. The place? Wild Beast Forest House. It’s a home for wild animals who need peace from their inherently violent and animalistic world. The person? Ragnar. He’s a wolf that Yule met and rescued years ago when they were both children.
Yule wants freedom and to express the love he has harbored all this time.
But things aren’t as simple as finding the house and falling in love. The Wild Beast is a home for wild animals, which Yule is not, and Ragnar is much more unapproachable than Yule had anticipated. Thankfully, he is given a position at the house so he can earn his keep there and get closer to Ragnar at the same time. But just because Yule escaped his old home doesn’t mean he left everything behind. On the contrary, a certain person he thought he had left for good comes for him, and it may just put the house and all the people in it in danger.
Review:
Before we get into the art and such, I do want to talk about the quality of the writing in this. Now, I started reading this on Webtoon ages ago, and then it was licensed by TokyoPop, so I decided to wait and give it a read once they had all come out from there. I am not sure how much of this was due to the initial writing quality, the poor editing quality when adapting to print, whether any translation work was done, or whether this was written in English to begin with for this release. Regardless, there are some glaring quality issues here. In particular, the word “rifle” is misspelled as “riffle” several times, and that sucks much of the intensity and drama of these gun-having scenes out of them. The third volume also suddenly features long swaths of short, entirely text-based scenes, and the writing is very, very clunky. Regardless of how it ended up this way, it could’ve used some editing.
But beyond the quality issues, the art in this is rough. There are very cute panels, don’t get me wrong (especially the very funny ones with Yule and his coins), and this art style really lends itself to the softer, smaller character designs. On the other hand, the beefier characters look really rough. Their bulky bodies sometimes look very strange and disproportionate to their heads. But the real issue is the heads themselves. Specifically, the faces. There are many sloping or oddly shaped faces. The style generally has a bit of an antiquated look, but it is just really inconsistent, and I’m not a fan. When it is cute, it is very cute, but those moments are much rarer than I would like.
Now, let’s get into the story. The story tries. It tries really hard to be something serious and intense, even thriller-esque in some cases, but the overall world, paired with the soft art style, makes it feel more melodramatic or silly than serious (and the misspellings didn’t help). The first arc is the better of the two, with Yule getting away from his human Owen and confirming his feelings for Ragnar. That makes sense since, based on the author’s notes, this arc was the original story. It is very superficial, but it is a decently satisfying narrative.
The third volume, which is where the second arc happens, though, is just bad. It makes an effort to get some side characters together and to give Ragnar more of a backstory, but it ends up introducing some of the most half-hearted villains I’ve seen. The villains are a pair, two people from Ragnar’s old wolf pack. The top is mute and just a loyal, obsessed muscle man for the bottom, who wants revenge against Ragnar because he peer pressured Ragnar into sex and then was rejected by him the next morning. He does some wild stuff like drugging people, setting fire to the house, what have you, but where this really falls short is in the backstory for the big guy. This is where the short text-only segments happen. I imagine these portions exist because there wasn’t enough space in the final volume to actually draw out the scenes, but the way they are shoehorned between sections of the comic disrupts the pacing and just highlights the quality drop between the two. The first arc wasn’t great, but at least if it had ended there, it would’ve been satisfying. This was just an unfortunate showing.
Results:
This was very disappointing. I’m not going to pretend this was something I was really looking forward to reading because it wasn’t, but I was still looking forward to seeing how TokyoPop adapted it. Unfortunately, it was a huge miss on pretty much every front. The editing is unfortunate. The story and pacing are mid to poor at best, and the art is soft and sweet but so inconsistent that it is hard to enjoy. I would not recommend this one.
Have you read Wild Beast Forest House? If so, what do you think? Do you agree with my assessment? Do you not? Let me know, and comment below!
