The Emperor’s New Groove | Brinens and Things

comparativelysuperlative:

theunnumberedsparks:

In the Emperor’s New Grove animals are sentient. Squirrels can talk and so can insects. There’s a scene where a fly gets caught in a web and then cries out for help because it knows it will die. Killed by probably another sentient being for survival.

When you think about this type of relationship going on in the entire world, the true horror might dawn on you. There are millions of sentient creatures with short lifespans and most of them die savagely. They are literally forced by their natures to hunt each other or else they will die. Until society invents a way to feed everyone ethically, reconciliation, cooperation, and peace are impossible. No wonder humans have a legup.

It’s an incredibly horrifying implication.

Wow, that’s terrifying. And there’s only one person who can fix it.

No, not Gandalf. Yzma. Yzma can fix this.

Whatever else she can do, she can turn things into other things without worrying about details like “conservation of mass.” This doesn’t solve all the problems, because it only works within the animal kingdom: Llama potion turns the Emperor into a llama, the same potion turns a potted plant into a llama-shaped potted plant. (Human to octopus still works, so it’s not about composition, but there is some kind of constraint here.)

What she can do is manufacture meat for whatever animals can’t go vegetarian. She has potions to turn things into whales. (Come to think of it, it’s kind of impressive that those have even been discovered.) Pick the largest animal that’s tasty for the carnivores, and mass produce that potion. Use it on recently-dead mammals, or insects if that works. Macabre? Absolutely. It’s transmogrifying the bodies of sentients in order for more people to be able to eat them. But it’s also saving countless lives.

Now we have to get the animals to go along with this. Fortunately, they’re sentient. And Yzma has authority to negotiate as the Emperor’s advisor. Think they’d agree to eat only meat that died of natural causes in exchange for full citizenship rights? Uh, if there even are citizenship rights in a country where the Emperor can tear down your house at will. Still, they’ve clearly got stuff to gain. Maybe everyone agrees not to kill sentient prey in exchange for protection from their own predators, and the people at the top of the food chain go along with it because it’s enforced by a shape-shifting superpowered Royal Guard.

The eventual solution is to use those transforming potions to make everyone biologically capable of vegetarianism. It may take time and research to figure out how to change, say, a jaguar, to make them vegetarian without also giving them an unprecedentedly bad case of dysmorphia, but that’s what the Secret Lab is for. And you can’t tell me this is outside the scope of what transmogrification can do.

Then you get to work on the optional upgrades. Don’t like your body? Try another one! You can be a llama permanently if you want to for some reason, and once everyone accepts that the nonhumans here are sentient it won’t even be weird! Your species would be about as significant as your clothes, and a lot easier to deal with.

And that’s just with animals that currently exist. Wanna be a kraken? Want the eyes of a hawk and the thumbs of a human? Want wings? Our friendly neighborhood alchemist can probably make vials for those eventually. She can likely even isolate the immortality from that one species of jellyfish.

Only problem: Yzma’s evil.
Darn.

#A Connecticut Yankee in Emperor Kuzco’s Court