Skip to main content

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.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Update on life and projects

 Hey blog again, I've been trying to keep up with college of late and so I haven't been here. That being said, I'd like to take the opportunity to let you know how things are going in life and the pandemic and whatnot. I've been working with my friends and boyfriend ( Orlando , Curt , and Malcolm ) to turn Pastel Bears into a graphic novel and so my output of writing samples hasn't been at the level where I'd like it to be. I'm more focused in learning the ropes of production and seeing a project to completion in some capacity. Here's the first image I'm posting publicly about this project, some key art or a poster, either definition fits. Art by ImpossibleSnail on Twitter. Logo by  failedDEXsave . Beyond that I've been keeping up with school work and investing in my professional career going forward as a writer, looking into editing services and commissioning artists outside of those I'm already working with (such as above). Always somethin...
Post a Comment
Read more

Pastel Bears Prose

 Hey blog, I've been doing some prose writing for some characters / story arcs in the world of Pastel Bears , one for the main character Deep Dish and one for the antagonist Victor. Just want to put these pieces out into the world in case anyone wants to read them. Koala "Bear"   - from the perspective of a koala that's actually a "drop bear", or carnivorous koala and his journey to control his carnivorous, or even predatory instincts. Predatory Expectations  - from the perspective of a polar bear with a carnivore supremacist father, the weight of his crushing expectations to be the perfect apex predator starves himself and goes mad, losing himself to his instincts, and ultimately being cut off from his father / renounced as his son.
Post a Comment
Read more

Screenwriting Journey

As a programmer, which I used to want to want to be, I guess this would be the place I would say Hello World. I'm a screenwriter now so let me just start off with a FADE IN: OVER BLACK CHYRON: HELLO WORLD! FADE TO BLACK or something similar in a 12 point Courier font in Final Draft. But I just wanted to be out and open about coming into screenwriting. My name is Jacob Gregory Dammons, I was born in 1998. I grew up in Michigan, moved with my mom to New Jersey in the middle of high school, graduated in 2016, and attempted to go to college that year. I only attended for a semester. I saw a private school with high employment rates post-graduation and figured that it didn't matter how much debt I racked up, if I got through school I could just pay it back because of these high employment rates. That made sense to me then. I dropped out after one semester. Afterwards I was mostly aimless for the next several years, moving around with disparate family members...
Post a Comment
Read more