(Fiction Repair Concept) How to Make Tom and Jerry’s Mouse Sympathetic, Rather Than Repugnant

There's often a range of noticeable disconnects in the mind of an old-school antics-based short cartoon viewer, when the cartoon in question is a short about an animal chasing another animal for food or another hostile reason. We want intelligent beings to be treated humanely and get to keep their lives, but we understand that carnivorous animals require deaths of unintelligent – or perhaps intelligent – other animals to keep living, themselves.

 

As human beings in the Anthropocene era of Earth, we frown at meaningless killing of other sentient beings, and want everybody of our kind to be safe. We have to eat, though, so it’s fortunate that we can look at some killing of some animals and deem it fine, even though we technically could all choose to be vegetarian and still survive. That is fine if it is “humane killing” – as strange a concept as it sounds when you see it written – because the animals we eat typically don’t have intelligence to necessitate them having the same rights as humans.

Sure, they don’t need those rights because they are not like us, indeed. But cartoon animals that walk on two legs and have the brains to form complex plans are human enough that they should have rights similar to our human rights if we ever somehow encounter them in real life. That’s why I don’t think we should kill aliens who make contact with us unless they come as enemies to our race.

There are problems with humans eating meat, especially seeing as we are not obligate carnivores, but imagine if we were without any choice in the matter of eating meat, and we were like Tom from Tom and Jerry, and there were a race of things we had to eat to survive that were just as intelligent as us. What would a Tom race or a Jerry race have over the other one that gives them more right to exist than the other, other than the practical application of Jerries being able to survive on their own if all Toms were wiped out, and not vice versa? Once you comprehend this predicament – which you probably did already, long before I showed up – it’s easy to see the ethical dilemma behind the Wil-E-Coyote VS Roadrunner shorts or a similar property, and you might even feel apathetic towards what you’re watching. Because we apparently prefer watching survival over watching carnage, these cartoons will give the upper hand to the prey, and make the predator suffer terribly in almost every episode, when usually the predator’s motive is their own kind of survival.

The neat thing about Tom and Jerry that I am going to reveal today is that it actually gets pretty close to justifying an expectation of sympathy toward Jerry from the audience, and my extremely simple plan to take it all the way. I’ll let you stop wondering right now.

 

 

Jerry is a wild mouse, invading the home of Tom’s owners, with Tom certainly being a domestic cat. You could even say that Tom is trying to be helpful, by taking care of a pest that’s surely undesirable in his household. To fix it all, make Jerry a cute pet mouse who keeps escaping from his cage and getting into trouble. That way, audiences will almost certainly have as much reason to root for Jerry as for Tom, or more. Bam, that’s done.

That is what I had typed out in the draft for this post, months earlier than now. Great, now it’s broken! I’m sure past me had a plan for all that, but I came back to writing this article evidently too late, and now the whole thing has fallen apart. I have no idea what I was building up to with the first part of this article anymore.

I feel like we basically got across the information we needed to though, right? Jerry’s not sympathetic enough and he would be if he was an owner’s beloved pet instead of a pesty wild animal showing up uninvited in somebody’s house, when Tom actually is somebody’s pet. The introductory “philosophical” part of this post that my past self left here was a pretty neat read. I’m really sorry, folks! That’s gonna have to be all. Watch this blog for a near-future article that might come out! And I’ve had a lot of trouble with it so far, so hopefully WordPress’ post editor will be gracious enough to co-operate…

Yes, I do realize that Tom and Jerry was not Warner Brothers or Looney Tunes. It’s already quite clear that things aren’t working right now.

[ THIS POST WAS ORIGINALLY ONLINE AT THE TIME OF 2021-05-25 ON WORDPRESS, A WEBSITE WHICH I'VE ABANDONED NOW BECAUSE IT SUCKS - THIS IS THE LAST SUCH ONE TO RELOCATE BEFORE THE COMPLETION OF THE MUCH-NEEDED MIGRATION FROM THE DOOMED ORIGINAL FIGMENT AREA WEBSITE ]

I Would Love to Know Who Wawoo Is

Welcome to Figment Area. First I'd like to say that this is the first post to be published on this blog after a long time of the website being online but empty because of delays and distractions, and second I'd like to say that if you were here during that period of time by some ridiculously low-probability numbers being rolled, thank you for being here now. With a first post of any kind when I'm going into new territory, things can be a bit of a struggle because of the rules I impose on myself when this happens. Today I came up with even more rules, and then a crazy post that doesn't break any of them.

I’m going to tell you about one of the ancient mysteries of my life, one that’s been haunting and vexing me since I was very young, and is still unsolved. In 2019 I started telling far more of my friends about this than I used to, even though the mystery started in a year much closer to 2001. The mystery was the identity and origin of a giant mythological creature that can devastate villages, and probably cities. I must say, this thing doesn’t really make me feel afraid when I think about it, but the nature of the creature from a fictional standpoint is pretty terrifying, and it’s unnerving that it’s a mystery that’s been following me in the ways it does for so long.

My earliest memory of this so-called creature was of a coloured cartoon I was witnessing – which at this point could have been a broadcast on TV or a short dream, I do not know – in which it towers with its black and red stripes above a pre-colonial Maori settlement near the sea, likely in New Zealand, laying waste to the indigenous buildings around it. I believe some cartoony Maori folk came ashore on a traditional waka and noticed this monster, discussing quite direly what plans they should put into action.

Now, if you live in New Zealand like me and know about the culture, you will probably be very quick to say “Oh! It’s a Taniwha! Problem solved!” Instead of asking you to take an exercise in thinking critically, I will skip ahead and just outright explain why this simply does not bring us any closer to solving the mystery.

Taniwha are a vague idea, and do not look the same as the beast I’m describing in an web-based “Taniwha” image search even after thousands of pixels worth of scrolling down, even though the specific design of what a Taniwha looks like changes from image result to image result. I’ve always seen Taniwha as an aquatic sort of beast, with fish-like features, and they’ve always been viewed as a pretty terrifying monster, I think, but no amount of people comparing them to what’s been haunting me has ever made a difference.

The earliest memory was good enough to give me a strong description of the creature. It was like a humanoid giant with harsh red and black stripes all over, with a round but tall tiki face for a face – which was also striped the same way. The face had intimidatingly wide eyes that were probably all whiteness and pupils, without irises, and the expression was that of a violent scowl. Its arms and legs were like that of a human, only much more cylindrical, and I don’t remember what sort of hands or feet it had.

The memory didn’t go on much longer, and I never saw how the creature was taken down or how the arc was resolved. It was in fact extremely short. This is one of the reasons I think it’s likely that it was a dream, not an actual episode of something I saw on TV. I have no adjacent situational memories telling me I was in a room with other stuff happening to link it to a real situation, and the viewport of the memory was just like my other dreams about cartoons and videogames – there is no screen in front of you bordered by a monitor sitting in front of you in your reality: the screen IS the reality. This aspect of my dreams is probably one of the reasons why it was so damn scary when I was having that Monsters Inc: Scare Island dream and my player character Sullivan got hit by a car in a dead-end of an alleyway.

The other primary memory is one that clearly scared me more, as I can still remember the kind of fear I felt, though I was not in any real danger. This one was almost certainly real life, and it wasn’t a memory of watching a TV cartoon.

I was at a house owned by somebody who I think was a friend of my mother’s, and I was probably younger than five years. I was in some wooden room after probably toddling off away from the rest of the human beings, the ones who were actually adults, and then I looked up at the wall.

Oh god, this part was fucked up. There was some kind of large, black and yellow mask hanging on the wall, with a face that looked almost exactly like a live-action version of the face of you know what. This thing fucking scared me, and at some times – such as a few dozen seconds ago as I continued to write this thing – I can viscerally remember a trace of the feeling I felt. This shit was fucking scary when it happened, and I guess I walked off and tried to get mum to console me about it or something. Then the memory ended. Looking back, I think the face came from some kind of tribal mask-hybrid-shield thing, and was part of a collection.

Asking for my mother’s help with identifying which of her friends’ houses this happened at in a more modern conversation reveals that nobody I know has the ability to track this mask down again. Not willing to let me make a fool of myself, I searched the Internet for a picture of this thing, and did not find anything.

So, lots of time passed and I turned 23. I was finally waking up to the fact that I could consciously search for the solution to this thing. Who was it, what was its species called, where do I go to see the images of it that I remember? To this day, I don’t know. But telling people the story about it and hoping they would know something has brought me closer.

The start of me telling the story and hoping somebody would know something seemingly happened in 2019 during the time I was living with my oldest brother in Australia, and so did my next hint, though it was dubious. I had a dream about some casual friendly scenario with cartoonish Maori characters and some kind of “tiki restaurant”, and this concept we call a dream, this active authority on all things mysteriously weird and weirdly mysterious, was kind enough to bless me with its mystical interpretation, giving me two words that I could finally use to name the beast, and the beast’s species:
Wawoo – The Specimen
Wakawuwu – The Species

From that day forward, even though the dream didn’t empirically prove anything, I started using these words to describe it all. Then, I could finally articulately ask myself… Who was Wawoo?

More time passed, and I was living in New Zealand again. I still didn’t know what the cartoon I remembered was, but I was soon to find out. When talking to a certain cool woman who I used to visit, I finally found out that somebody knew about a cartoon that looked the way the cartoon in my first Wawoo memory did. Enter Tamatoa the Brave Warrior.

This bloody thing and its characters basically looked just like the first memory of Wawoo did, even though I noted a brightness of colours that I didn’t quite remember being part of it. This friend of mine told me that it was basically a lost work, and that some people she knew really wanted to watch more episodes of it as there were only three obtainable episodes left. I’ve always been no good at finding episodes of TV shows that were lost to time, but I cheekily emailed a YouTube video essayist called Saberspark some info about Tamatoa the Brave Warrior, thinking that if it’s as interesting to him as the other weird cartoons he frequently gives a review, I might have an easy shot at getting somebody to find more episodes for me, or at least finding out some things I didn’t know about the show. It was a very cheeky move.

Within the week, I watched all three available episodes of Tamatoa the Brave Warrior. It was a simple, child-friendly, not top-tier collection of TV episodes, with durations of about 10 minutes. I’m glad it was more than just clips, though, as full episodes would just about be the only right way to experience it. It’s just a cutesy show about pre-colonial Maori people living in New Zealand, enjoying life. Nothing scary so far.

One of the three remaining Tamatoa the Brave Warrior episodes had a pointedly interesting name. It was called The Taniwha. Naturally I had to watch this one as well, and for some reason I feel like it’s the one I watched last.

That is the Taniwha from the episode, being looked at by a Maori kid and a talking Tuatara. Sorry buddy, but you are not Wawoo, even if your face is really scowly and red. There’s no striping, no black, no mass destruction or strong villainy in the episode, and even the height is too lowballed to match. I think we’ve got a game of comparing an oven to a volcano here.

So that was it. The most recent piece of progress toward figuring out who Wawoo is and where to go to see his feature again was a 2019 hint about a cartoon show with 3 available episodes, and I’ve come no closer since then. Seeing a Taniwha that tries and fails to be Wawoo was disappointing, but I’m very grateful for the fact that I now know what the show Tamatoa the Brave Warrior is, as this has been a massive step forward in figuring this thing out. It gives me an extra bit of closure that I didn’t have before.

Maybe I will find out what the memory was some day, and I’m hoping for it. Maybe more episodes will be discovered and posted to the website NZ On Screen, and I’ll see the episode with the terrifying rampaging beast in it. At least, that’s possible if the scene wasn’t just a memory of me sleeping and dreaming…

 

 

 

[ THIS POST WAS ORIGINALLY ONLINE AT THE TIME OF 2021-01-11 ON THE ORIGINAL FIGMENT AREA WEBSITE, WHERE IT WAS ALSO THE FIRST POST ]