Reasons to Love: Centaurworld

The art style is strange, the storyline is weird, and it's only two seasons. It's nonsensical, it's a musical, every character is problematic, and I love it to bits. You have been warned. Others hate it because of those things. I like it like that.

Centaurworld is an Isekai story in which our heroine, Horse, is thrust into a world she does not understand. This other world, of course, is one vastly different from the one she was used to.

The trick is that Horse is an actual horse. She's even animated with the help of James "that horse guy" Baxter. At least in the starting episode. The narration intro to a world torn by war is by Horse. It took me a couple of watches to realise this.

I might be a bit thick.

Given that Horse is too used to war and battle, it's no surprise that she loses some sanity points when everything is the opposite of everything she knows. She even has new abilities completely unfamiliar to her. Like... the power of speech.

Then she meets a group of natives and this is where most adult audiences turn off. The zaniness is off the charts in five minutes or less. Not helped by the first character we meet in Centaurworld being Derpleton. The cloud-cuckoolander of the group.

Me? I admire that they showed off peak weirdness in the first ten minutes of Centaurworld exposure. We're seeing all this through the perspective of Horse and it's supposed to be jarring. It's supposed to be strange and off-putting and weird. So every single member of The Herd is at their maximum. They even have a musical number in which they show off their abilities.

Yes, the characters are tropes. Yes, there's the "sassy gay POC" as part of The Herd. Yes, there's the comedic kleptomaniac. They're dysfunctional, but they all have their reasons for being how they are. The substance comes after the audience gets used to the surface.

This is not a case of "it gets good after the 374th season". It's a case of, if you pay attention, it's pretty darn good. The seeds are there. The roots become part of the discovery. It becomes whole if you pay attention. And it's all in a sugar coating of silliness and musical numbers.

If you know how to look: it's the story of a patchwork family who found each other, adopted a stranger, and helped her defeat the forces of cowardice and selfishness with the power she had inside her.

Heartwarming.

But because it's presented in a silly, Adventure Time style of animation, because there's musical numbers, because there's comedy... people don't want to look that far.

Take another look.

See the story behind the sugar. See the meaning behind the silliness. And enjoy the musical numbers because they fucking slap.

Yes, it's weird. Embrace the weirdness. Look below the surface.

It might be worth the effort.