palestine will be free

Demo: There is a lot of iconic Scottish animals admittedly LMAO. In the early days I threw around rams, squirrels, and pine martens, particularly that last one as I pivoted to the team being mostly carnivores. Eventually I went with the Scottish wildcat (aka the highland tiger) because they're simultaneously very important to Scottish culture and very endangered. Endangered animals are touched on in Beastars but not really explored beyond the implication that it's seen as basically "immoral" for one to date outside their species, like they're singlehandedly responsible for their entire lineage. Kind of an insane thing to put on a person, but there are parallels to this irl; my brother-in-law is Scottish, and tries to pass on his traditions onto his children, but this leads to a lot of my family seeing him as an 'other'. But if he DOESN'T do that, he would be othered by his blood family. It's a damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't situation. I can only imagine how much more difficult this sort of thing is for Black Scots. While the game does keep it to a minimum to avoid obvious racism, Demo's existence as a Black Scot is treated as an joke ("the Black Scottish Cyclops, now extinct!" - thanks, Spy). Its also something he's insecure about, it's something that has resulted in pressure being put upon him in a family built on tradition. A lot of fanon seems to place the blame of this on his family sucking by external standards, but to me I do think it's just. Systemic racism. Lol. It can be extremely hard to tackle the topic of race in furry AUs, but I don't want to just ignore how Demo's background fits into his character just because I'm turning him into a cat. I wanted to make him something that would still impact his worldview, his relationships, all that, so I went with a Scottish wildcat. Hopefully that all makes sense. Be sure to research how to help save the wildcats + please support Black creators who I'm sure are doing more with Demo than I can LMAO

Heavy: The natural choice for Heavy always feels like a bear. If you look at my old tf2 furry art, you'd see I made him a bear, and I still draw some iterations of him as a bear. A while ago, though, @eggbagelz was talking to me about the concept of Heavy being a reindeer herder and I really liked that. The more I thought about it, I grew more and more attached to the imagery of him as a reindeer. Deer are really interesting because even though they're seen as frail, and they are, they're also able of FUCKING you UP. Reindeer have been documented GORING wolves that try to eat them. I think they also exude this air of sturdiness that really suits Heavy - they are built to fight and to protect their herd. Eventually, this all led to making him the only herbivore, because, in a world as bigoted as Beastars, why would an herbivore ever be on this kind of mercenary team? The answer was clearly "if they were built like Heavy". People in-universe underestimate Heavy because he's slow and not fluent in English; in this au, they underestimate him because he's a deer. They forget he has a massive fucking gun actually

Engineer: I went through a billion options for this guy as well, which seems to be pretty universal for furry aus of these guys. There's so many iconic Southern US animals; prairie dogs, cow breeds, armadillos, various foxes and dogs, bobcats, lots of birds and lizards, etc etc. I'll admit my final decision of coyote is maybe a bit boring? LMAO this one was more based in Beastars worldbuilding, I guess. Engie, despite being a qualified supergenius, is clearly treated like kind of a dumbass in some voicelines just because he has a thick accent and works a manual labor job. Specifically, I wanted to make him something that people "talk down to". In Beastars, no species is treated like that quite as much as the wild canids, possibly due to the introduction of modern dogs leading to false perceptions of wolves/coyotes/etc as "the bad ones". In the real world humans love wolves, we love painted dogs, we love referalized dogs like dingos, we're generally fine with foxes, but most people are off put by coyotes. Coyotes are pests. Coyotes are killers. Ignore that they're as intelligent and only as likely to kill something as any of the other wild dogs. Hell, even the average DOMESTIC dog. A wild dog in Beastars must walk a careful line; dehumanized if too complacent, labeled as "aggressive" if too mean. One of my favorite traits of Engie is the fact that even though he's clearly Not fine, he just kind of goes "yeah sure okay" to every situation. This is a very "wild dog trying his best" mentality to me, in the context of this worldbuilding. So. Coyote.

I'm posting this again it kills me bye