I decided to check out the graphic novel Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees based on a rec by the same peeps who'd recced Nice House on the Lake, which I really enjoyed.

Beneath the Trees was recced with a description (paraphrased): it's a horror mystery set in a world of Sylvanian family-like anthropomorphic talking animals. The main character, Samantha Strong, is a brown bear and a serial killer who takes care to only murder victims outside her small town, i.e. don't shit where you eat, that kind of thing. But when another serial killer starts doing Hannibal Lecter-like murder displays in Sam's town, she has to get on the case and find the killer before the police look too closely and catch her instead.

I loved the weird little world of the novel, because although it's populated by talking animals, there are also regular animals, like there are pet dogs, wild bears and raccoons, and the sapient population still eats meat. Among the sapient animals there are families of the same species, but there are also interspecies couples (one prominent couple is a pig and an owl) though I don't recall if any of the interspecies couples have children. The world is never explained and honestly that works better for the story.

The art is also quite lovely like, it has watercolour softness of certain kinds of children's books about talking animals, but not hyperstylized cartoonyness that would be more the norm when a story is about the deliberate clash between its visual style and the gory subject material.

I definitely enjoyed the story overall, and I'm so glad it's a properly completed story, but it's a day later and I'm not thinking about it anymore, which is not what happens with stories I really like. So there's something missing somewhere, and I think it's because the story's pretty straightforward and what it says on the tin, and there's not as much digging into Sam's headspace as a serial killer and ( spoilers ) I think it just didn't go just slightly deeper/eerier, so the story doesn't haunt me as much as it could have, though I still enjoyed the read for what it is.

I'm 38 episodes into 189 for Aryana and I'm so mad because the channel I had been watching the show on has been deleted! Not all is lost, because another official youtube channel uploaded the whole series a month ago (it's the same one that had the whole Raya Sirena series), BUT the old channel had (1) stats and comments accumulated over NINE years, so I could see which episodes were popular and read the comments that came with them, and (2) two-sentence episode summaries in English under the video, which had been SO helpful in letting me follow the show without having to audio translate everything, plus they were written well - succinct and not spoilery for any big twists in the episode.

It's just my luck that the rights transferred or whatever happened that the old channel was deleted while I was still making my way through the show. >:(

Storywise Aryana has hit her fourteenth birthday and we have finally reached the first full mermaid transformation. All the relatively mundane soap opera drama is presumably gonna take a bit of a hit as we now deal with Aryana and her family's freaking out, and I actually like that because the mundane stuff was annoying me. I'd last posted that I enjoyed Aryana's dynamic in her fancy school, but then the show upped Megan's bullying of her that even Bebet fell for Megan's propaganda and temporarily ditched Aryana, so we got multiple episodes of Aryana crying and being ostracized.

The third love interest boy still hasn't shown up yet either! I've been wishing he would because the Hubert vs. Marlon stuff has been agonizing, but in a soap opera way that I can't hate on. Hubert has confessed his feelings and got a positive response from Aryana, but that fell apart because Marlon knows that Hubert has another agenda about Aryana. Marlon is being very annoying about it, but he's not wrong! Hubert is suspicious! Is this why they added a third boy? I will be curious to see how that goes.