FOXSYLVANIA

(Advisory: Some adult content!)

With a title such as “Mating Season” and a cast of anthropomorphic cartoon animals, you may rightfully have a suspicion of what the show is largely about. Your second clue comes with the realization that the new 10-episode first season show on Netflix is produced by Titmouse, the same studio that gave us Kevin, about the anthropomorphic tuxedo cat trying to find himself in the big city after his human owners break up, and essentially dump him in an animal shelter…

“Kevin” is Shakespeare, however, compared to “Mating Season.” This show is RAUNCHY, and definitely NOT FOR CHILDREN! I cannot shout that from a sufficiently tall enough building. Not only do the denizens of an anonymous forest have sex, but they have it often, and with others outside of their own species! Struggling a bit to relate a somewhat sanitized version of a central occurrence in episode 1, a hyperactive, highly sexualized male raccoon named Ray winds up sharing intimacies with a flirty female skunk, and in the aftermath of that, they wind up with a “copulatory tie,” joined together at the genitals until later in the episode…

(Pictured above; Ray, Josh, Fawn, and Penelope…)

Now I do know that raccoons are stereotypically among the bad boys of the furry fandom, and that the fandom has always had a “yiffy” component, but I worry a bit that some outside of the fandom are going to see all of the highly sexualized animals on parade here, and think that’s mostly all that the fandom is about. It took us a long time, for example, to put the CSI episode featuring fursuits behind us…

The artwork in Mating Season is good, as is characteristic of Titmouse studios, and far better than most of the mass-produced cartoons on television. We need to consider, however, the messaging conveyed by such an adult cartoon. The show is unapologetically vulgar, and emphasizes shock value at the expense of character development. It’s strangely reassuring, however, to learn that I am still capable of being shocked, almost to the point of feeling violated as a furry. I do not enjoy wallowing in the mire; we furries are better than this! 😼

I mean, Rigby the raccoon of Regular Show (below) would be shocked by Ray the raccoon, and that’s saying something! 🙀

Now in all fairness to the series, episodes beyond the initial one do seem to be slightly tamer, and we can sense the closeness of the animal community. There’s quite a variety of different species represented, such as Penelope the lesbian fox, her straight friend Fawn the deer, Josh the bear deserted by his mate, Dylan the wolf, and Summer the lesbian hound, who has an intense but doomed relationship with Penelope. So beyond the sexuality, the series deals with relationships, and the difficulties inherent in them. For example, the wolf moves in with the deer, but they split up as the wolf urinates everywhere to mark his territory, and invites his pack to a real “animal house”-styled celebration of the full moon, complete with drinking and howling….

Now this is cute; furries are actually directly referenced in the series (I believe in episode 3), and some of the animals play at being human! Turn-about is fair play, I guess. So perhaps I was initially too harsh on the series out of my initial shock, and Mating Season can be quite funny and clever if you’re OK with the vulgarity and strong sexual content…it’s just not for everyone, and definitely for adults only…