every single time I indulge in another piece of media and come back to cookie run I am smacked in the face with the fact this is a post-humanist xenofiction, and one of the most incredibly deceptive ones at that
for those who don’t know the terminology: xenofiction is a term that is used to refer to stories which have no human protagonist and take place through the lens of a perspective of said nonhuman protagonist (although humans can be involved in the story). A good example of this would be the Warrior Cats series, which is about a group of…you know, cats doing warrior things. (I never read the books be kind to me)
The term post-humanist in tandem also means exactly what it means as well: a story that features not just an absence of humans but the effects of their completely depleted presence on the setting as well. A common way to identify this trope is to look for stories which feature apocalyptic settings, where usually the absence of humans is the main driving force of the narrative/setting (although not all apocalyptic stories can be considered post-humanist—for example, the fallout stories may have settings which feature an apocalypse that happened sometimes in the past, but they aren’t post-humanist in their entire structure because the narratives still center humanity as a very present force that is surviving and trying to lift itself out of extinction).
The way Cookie Run fulfills both of these categorical requirements is pretty obvious: not only do cookies themselves comment on how they don’t know what humans are, the narrative also features a plethora of reasons to suspect that humanity has gone extinct wherever the cookies live save for a few who have like 5 lines total. The Wizards all died out centuries ago, the witches exist in a max population total of Three, and it’s implied via how populated Earthbread is that humans have been gone for long enough that Cookies have reliably built established societies that stretch back more than several human generations.
The xenofiction aspect is also helped by the manner of which Cookies talk and the narrative themes of which the story is structured around. They talk about their deaths not as killings but as “crumblings”, their houses and homes are made of sweet, sugary confections, they don’t know what real meat is outside of Lobster Cookie, and it’s implied via the City of Wizards story that the Cookies were created to be vessels for human’s dreams and their innate desires, as good or as bad as they may be. Whether that desire is to serve as an archivist in a forgotten library deep within the City of Wizards, or if that desire is to feast upon a deliciously crunchy (and sentient!) snack.
And that in itself is what I mean when I say that Cookie Run is a “deceptive” post-humanist xenofiction. One of the core tenets of post-humanism in storytelling is the assumption that humans are a single species when the scale of the universe (or our planet) is taken into account. Most posthumanist works either focus on humans as being a stain on the planet as a whole in service of some greater, theoretical eco-librium (the planet’s rejuvenation in the wake of an apocalypse for example) while others merely assert humanity as just another cog in the machine when it comes to alien politics and ways of life (all tomorrows, bar the ending).
Cookie Run on the contrary, is designed to be a celebration of humanity. It was created with humans as the creator gods in mind who are no more evil than your average race of fantasy beings (bar the witches, but even then you can make the argument they didn’t intend for the Cookies to come to life, because they are technically eating life powder simply to sustain themselves) who quietly vanished from the world and left the remnants of their exploits behind, along with all of their distinctly human messes, like love, war, pain, elation, sorrow, hope, etc. The cookies were created not just with the audience in mind of how people could find a Cookie who looks like them that they can emphasize with, Cookies were created to be vessels of humanity and carry the innate value of life along with them, and to foster it wherever they went. (Of course they weren’t given this as an innate purpose, but they arrived at their own conclusions of how to approach life just as humans do when we gain consciousness)
The Cookies were created to wholly embody humanity and all of their possibilities, as a story which tells of the creative passion and fervor that comes with defining your own existence as someone who is alive, which ties into the core themes of the story regarding the bravery of living and facing your day to day. The Cookies were made to be eaten in some cases, to serve in others, but we all have expectations put on us we don’t necessarily want to fulfill. What should make the flour, dough, sugar and water we formed with our hands and brought to life any different if it could walk, sing, and speak its mind? Are we not allowed to believe some parts of us will live in forever in the art we create from the colors and shapes we see around us, which is one of the fundamental parts about being human there is?
tldr cookie run is a post-human xenofiction that says art lives forever so long as there’s someone alive to experience and embody it, whatever that may mean
