Centaurworld S1E2: "Fragile Things"

The herd is pushing its way through the forest. The Rainbow Road might be magical, but it isn't reliably self-clearing, so Alpaca needs to bustle ahead of everyone else and clear the brush and chase away the pests for them. Well, ahead of ALMOST everyone else. Horse is just annoyed by the slow, overly cautious pace of the others, and is charging on ahead with growing impatience.

I still am not sure why Horse needs to wait for them at all. Maybe just in case she hits another magic barrier or something? I'd been assuming she wanted their help guiding her to a shaman, but it looks like they're just following the road, so...I really don't know. I might just have to shrug and accept them all being on this journey as a premise of the story and ignore the flimsy justification from the pilot.

As Alpaca anxiously keeps them away from not-really-dangerous-looking insects and thorny plants, she starts singing a song about how fragile and in need of protection the lot of them are, how unprepared for the rigours of this outside world. But, don't worry, she'll protect them.

How much more than the rest of the herd DOES Alpaca know? And, for that matter, how much more powerful is she in terms of magic etc that would let her defend them if they ran into a serious threat?

Regardless, Horse very quickly gets sick of listening to this. She inserts her own second verse into the song, and promptly brings it in a more...shall we say...metal direction.

Battle, glory, crushing skulls. It's not so hard; just have faith in yourself, trust no one else to defend you, and use your equine strength to fight and destroy as needed!

Horse sure reprises that "crushing skulls underhoof" line a lot. To the point where I suspect Rider made a habitual tactic of knocking orcish infantry over and having Horse stomp them. It's a reminder that despite the show's silliness and spoofiness, Horse is not just a fighter, but a killer, and that the story isn't going to entirely handwave away the gravity of this.

The song becomes a competitive duet, with Alpaca and Horse angrily singing their respective visions for the herd at each other. The herd watches, seeming to gradually be taken in by Horse's arguments if only for the sheer novelty of them.

Amusingly, the roles have pretty much reversed. Now it's Horse overwhelming the centaurs with what they perceive as her weirdness and insanity. I dig it.

The song ends with them reaching a spectacular hilltop vista.

Not sure what that column of light ahead of them is supposed to be. A shaman's lair? A pillar of fire sent by JHVH to guide their way through the desert? Could be anything!

Horse and Alpaca seem to be bonding a little over their mutual appreciation of the scenery. It doesn't last very long, though. Alpaca keeps getting more and more riled up over the incautious behavior of the others as they start following Horse's lead. And also being butthurt that everyone liked Horse's half of the song better than hers, for a variety of lyrical and instrumental reasons that they're glad to critique in detail.

After this drama has gone on for a little while, Deerhuahua declares that she needs to go to the bathroom, and runs into a bush to do so. When she announces that the bush contains a fully furnished set of facilities, including a bathroom mirror and a little bowl of breathmints just outside the entrance, several other members of the herd follow her. Horse gets more frustrated than ever before. We get some hilarious dialogue about how where Horse comes from they don't even bother eating breakfast while on a mission, let alone going to the bathroom. They're too edgy for such mundane concerns over there. It's also revealed that Horse just doesn't get most jokes.

Also, there's a little gag where they react to Horse's name just being "Horse" (for context, the others all have actual names, but I can't remember them yet so I've just been calling them all by their animal halves). Which I think would be funnier if they didn't lampshade it like this, but whatever.

Once they finally get moving again, Horse idly asks Alpaca if she's sure the shamans can help her. Alpaca reaffirms that she's sure; she's seen how powerful the shamans are firsthand. When pressed, she explains that she's actually a failed student of theirs. Ooohh, interesting. So she probably is at least somewhat more powerful than the other centaurs then, if she spent some time studying under the proper magicians. Before she can be pressed on how she ended up failing to become a sixth shaman, Alpaca freezes in place and tells them all to stop. There's a desolate valley area coming up that gives her seriously bad vibes.

When asked what about it scares her so much, she explains that she has limited precognition, and right now it's telling her that advancing through here would be a terrible idea. When Horse is sceptical about Alpaca being able to "sometimes" predict the future, she reminds the others of that time she correctly predicted that Zebra would develop a pimple on his eyelid, which they all do remember (though Zebra is too vain to admit that this ever happened and starts sweating nervously at the subject).

Anyway, Alpaca says they should turn around and head back to where they started. That's the last straw for Horse, who decides she's had enough of this and that the centaurs probably aren't worth the trouble of bringing along anyway. She irritably thanks them for their help, and says they can keep following her if they want to, but either way she's going to keep pushing ahead.

The bird is happy to see her leave and the others stop following. He's been hostile toward her all along. It's not yet clear why.

Horse moves on ahead. Alpaca tells the others that it's time to head back to their dome. The others aren't sure, though. Giraffe in particular doesn't want to abandon Horse after coming with her this far, and all the others are at least miffed at having to go back to their boring happydome to smell (and steal, in Deerhuahua's case) the same flowes they've smelt a million times. Even Bird, who dislikes Horse, would rather follow her than go back to their dreary sugarbowl. Eventually, they reach the consensus that they should follow Horse, if only because they promised her that they'd help her find the shaman. Alpaca reluctantly trails after the rest.

Just as the centaurs catch up with Horse again, a tornado touches down near the road ahead of them. This is evidently what Alpaca's precognition was warning her about. Horse isn't deterred, though. The tornado just reminds her of home, where the weather does this whenever it's not busy doing gloomy rainstorms or ominous winter mist.

Alpaca tells her that they need to take cover and hide. Horse just replies that if the shamans are on the far side of this tornado, then she's going to fight her way through it, and she encourages everyone else to do the same. She charges forward, oblivious to the fact that the wind is already literally tearing off her leg barding, and she only avoids losing it permanently because Deerhuahua grabs the pieces and stuffs them into her gluttonizer before they can blow away.

I very much doubt that Horse was this reckless back on her homeworld, no matter how over-the-top dangerous it is there. Like, she's bouncing off of the centaurs so hard that it's pushing her to become a more extreme version of herself, to counter or defy them.

...oh my god I literally wrote this exact arc about a Cardassian on Risa once lol.

Zebra, Deerhuahua, and Giraffe (with Bird clinging to his neck) follow Horse toward the storm, too quickly to hear Alpaca's final warning. That's not a tornado they're running straight into. It's a taurnado.

As if on cue, the taurnado extends its other three legs and manifests in full.

I mean. We've already seen that there are centaur-fish, centaur-apples, centaur-trees, and centaur-mountains. So, really, this is just a logical progression. I think?

I'm not sure what makes a centaur-shaped tornado worse than a normal one, tbh. Maybe just that it has four vortexes instead of one? It seems to spend a lot of time reared up on its back pair, though.

Horse starts galloping in a wide circle around the taurnado ahead of the others. Discordant music starts, and a song begins. Horse confidently singing about how fearless and unstoppable she is. And then a...backup choir?...interjected about...wanting to eat her soul?

Oh.

Oh god.

The taurnado is singing. In a ghostly chorus of gospel-ish voices. About how it wants them to join its collection of thousands of damned souls swirling around in the stormcloud it extruded itself from. In fact, "it" is actually a "them." The hive begins swerving its vortexes directly toward the mortals, attempting to suck them up and add their souls to its collective.

...well. That's one thing I never actually thought this show would do. Be legitimately scary. Like, no joke, this is something I'd expect to see in an actual dark fantasy/horror work, centaurish aesthetics aside. The voice work here is REALLY effective, too. And the lyrics of the taurnado's part of the duet are...well:

“You shall not leave our side...
You see you have no place to hide...
You can’t escape from us;
You were all made for us.”

It's not quite as existentially horrifying as Bird's face, but it's close.

Horse keeps fighting the wind, not noticing until too late that every piece of saddle and barding on her body has been torn away and sucked up by the demon. In her own half of the duet, she urges the centaurs to keep following her, daring them to prove themselves strong and courageous and worthy of independence. It isn't until they're most of the way past the taurnado that the Generica Totem gets torn off of Horse's neck. Horse faltered, dropping back from song into speech and turning to try to recover it.

As the Artifact flies past the others as it's drawn toward the nearest vortex, Deerhuahua locks her eyes onto it and starts stammering about how she HAS to take the shiny again. Goddamnit Deerhuahua! If she was trying to recover it because she knew Horse needs it then this could be noble (if foolish), but no, it's literally because "shiny." She lets go of her hoofhold to grab the artifact, which lets the wind pull her off the ground and up into the vortex.

Her babbling and screaming becomes musical, much smoother than she normally is in songs. Gospel-ish. As Horse and the others call after her, she sings back that she is now of the sky. She will dwell in the clouds forever more; she is theirs, and they are hers. As she sings, the ghostly chorus progressively syncs itself to her voice until she's just a part of it, while her body flies up into the storm.

Alpaca fires a high-force barrage of minimes from her hoofs, knocking Deerhuahua out of the vortex and seemingly snapping her out of the taurnado's spell in the process. Whether or not the storm has assimilated several dozen alpaca-homunculus souls to make up for the deerhuahua one it lost is a question I'm not sure I ever want to see answered.

The other centaurs run over to recover the dazed Deerhuahua. While they're all bunched up and not holding onto the ground very tightly, the taurnado snatches the whole lot of them. Alpaca surrounds them in a pink force field bubble straight out of Steven Universe (was that a power she demonstrated during the magic song last ep? I can't remember...) and - just as they're being sucked in, Horse kicks the bubble as hard as she can. The centaurs are ejected out the far side of the vortex due to the excess force, and Horse quickly runs after them. They're outside of the Deertaur's range now, so, with a final angry verse at being denied, it retracts itself back into the haunted stormcloud overhead.

...

So.

That kind of thing isn't toootally out of line with some of the "shit gets serious" moments from Adventure Time. Stuff involving the lich, mushroom war, etc got about this dark. But I don't think it - or any other show like it that I've been exposed to - managed to pull it off with this degree of style. The voice, the musical style, it all combined to make the taurnado much scarier than the sum of its parts.

I'm seriously tempted to use a facelifted version of this thing in DnD now. A gigantic undead air elemental with 10 levels in bard, or something.

...

Horse is riding high on victory. The others are...in significantly worse shape. And Alpaca is not happy with how insensitive Horse is to that.

She's also a little miffed that Horse literally kicked them harder into the taurnado. I'm not sure if I can fault Alpaca for this, honestly. Horse made the correct tactical choice, but the optics from inside the bubble were probably not very clear, and may not have painted Horse in so flattering a light.

The fact that Horse is being so oblivious to Zebra and Giraffe trembling in post-traumatic paralysis, Bird laying unconscious next to them, and Deerhuahua still in a semi-catatonic state as her soul tries to work its way back into her body doesn't help her case either.

Horse brushes Alpaca off, and demands that Deerhuahua give her her Artifact back. Deerhuahua is just barely conscious enough to comply, while also writhing on the ground and whimpering about "cold" and "eternity." Horse takes it back, and tells everyone that it's time to keep moving. Holy shit Horse wtf.


I'm very surprised that I'm having this much to say about BOTH episodes of THIS show. But, coming up on 2.5K words and only just barely at the halfway point. I guess the second half of this will have to go up tomorrow.