Pastel Bears, My Namesake

Checking in here again,

I've been writing non-stop whittling away at my Bob's Burgers SPEC and my pilot for "Pastel Bears" and I thought I would talk about my pilot here and why i have it as my namesake for this blog.

Logline: "When a lazy koala gets roped into a routine at a failing gym, a personal trainer whose job is on the line helps him unleash his hidden instincts."

READ HERE

It's a half hour adult animated comedy that touches on sexuality, bear subculture, carnivore/herbivore social dichotomies, predatory/prey power dynamics, identity, and the like.

I'm very queer, as everybody should know. I'm into guys, big guys especially. As long as I can remember, I've had that fascination which led me to discovering the bear subculture and getting into those aesthetics. But as you should know, bears in the LGBTQ+ community--the ones who fly underneath the bear flag at least--can be racist, hold values that align with toxic masculinity, and aren't inclusive as their flag was initially conceived. That is, to be inclusive of bears of all fur pattern.

So, in the modern age of furries, gay men identifying as other animals as well as bears (otters, wolves, bulls, etc.), I thought a story surrounding bears would using the color of animation to bring an anthropomorphic queer story to life-- with bears as the focus of course. As I said before, there were certain...issues with the bear community that always caused a disconnect. I wanted to manifest this disconnect into a plot. 

That being said, my furry persona, or fursona, is a koala. Koalas are often called koala "bears". There is also an Australian myth of the carnivorous "drop bear". There is also the ancient, extinct megafauna, marsupial lions (Thylacoleo carnifex), which are supposedly a cousin to the koala. Struggling with ARFID-esque symptoms affecting my diet, I hardly eat vegetables. I'm often berated for that. I enjoy the hell out of meat, and so I'm fairly close to a carnivore in those respects. And so the picky diet of the koala, combined with the ancient history of "drop bears" / marsupial lions ... I thought to myself:

"What if a koala "bear" was ACTUALLY a bear? And what would that mean?"

Hence Pastel Bears, a bear but not quite. A bear that is empathetic, denounces toxic masculinity and embraces an inclusive environment, and isn't afraid to show emotion. A softer bear.

And that is who I want to be, a softer bear. A Pastel Bear.