can’t have any pudding

I actually have an entire write up on why I don’t like how Zootopia portrayed animals living in a city, and why if you want to have different species, predator and prey, living in harmony, socialism is the only way to go: https://teddit.net/r/fantasywriters/comments/nmepba/comment/gzpfet8/

Also, shameless plug for my own original universe that has predators and prey living in socialist harmony!

I’ve actually had wanted to write something like this before Zootopia, and I was really excited for the movie because I thought it would be exactly what I had been thinking of. However, I was kind of disappointed at the worldbuilding as they seemed to gloss over a lot of details that would need to be worked out if different species were to live together, such as infrastructure: they only made passing references to smaller sized fixtures for small animals, whereas realistically it would be everywhere as small animals would outnumber larger animals. Foot or so wide walkways would snake throughout buildings to allow small animals to get to where they need to go, stairs would have differently sized steps running parallel with each other for different leg heights, and since Zootopia seems to be an extremely car-centric city (based on American cities I guess), they would have to figure out a road system that allows different sized cars to drive in their own areas without crossing much, because having a mouse drive a toy sized car in the exact same lane as normal sized cars, which is what the the film portrayed, would be extremely unsafe. I also found the scene of the mineature town of rodents really ridiculous, as it seems to me that they’re just segregating the small animals because they can’t figure out infrastructure that’s inclusive of everyone, so your freedom of movement is severely limited if you’re a mouse because outside of placed designated for you, everywhere else has fixtures that are far too big. Plus, it’s also really dangerous because a large animal can just come in and kick down your inadequately reinforced miniature entire city if they were, say, running from a cop. Basically, the infrastructure in Zootopia seems to be designed for medium sized animals like Judy or Nick, and you’re kind of screwed if you’re a large animal like a buffalo or especially if you’re a small one like a mouse.

As well, they never addressed issues such as large animals needing physically more resources than small animals, so in a Western free market system like Zootopia seems to have, what would happen? Say you have a white collar intelect-based job like programming or engineering (so, since we’re assuming every animal is equally intelligent, all species can do it just as well). Let’s say that it pays a fixed X a month for everyone. Well, a smaller animal would have more disposable income from that as they would need less food, water, and wouldn’t need to rent as large a house, which would also cut down on utilities, so small animals would be more successful in this case not because of differences in skill, but because of resource usage. But if larger animals start demanding higher wages to cover their living expenses, capitalism is going to have none of that and they’ll think of excuses to higher the smallest animals possible.

Finally, I really didn’t like the black and white “predator” and “prey” politics in Zootopia. Animals are generally predators of some species and prey to others. Plus, why wouldn’t there be conflict between different species of prey animals? Tentions from previous conflicts that arose from competition for similar food sources would still be a thing, not to mention good ol’ fashioned racism.

This is why I modelled my world as a strongly socialist society, because aside from fairy tales about animals living in harmony where they just magically have all the resources they would need, it would be the best at prioritizing equality between species, which is a major theme I want to explore. I also really want to add in a sci-fi aspect and explore the development of technology that might be too powerful for their society to handle (I’ve always been really interested in combining sci-fi with cute fantasy animal societies like Warrior Cats or Redwall). I also want to explore the concepts of this technology falling into the paws of rival nations of predators that seek to use them against the UT and restore the natural relationships of predator and prey.

Probably. In the US, depending on the jurisdiction, wearing a mask in public is illegal, I believe as either public nussiance or public mischief, and I think the context is if you cover your face, you’re automatically suspicious and masks also have ties to gangs.

No, I’m not joking.