<Contain personal inferences and hence spoilers so refrain from reading if you have yet to watch episode 8>
This anime has got me pausing the videos many times to think about what could have happened next.
What's best is how episode 8 made me thought about it through the long night and I find this really impressive for a mystery/detective anime show. :)
Due to the analogy of using animals to describe ''Children of the Forest'' and references to Esperanto languages like Purastelo and Vengenta , it's easy to get intrigued or confused.
So basically if you have watched - it's about Naoko Serizawa 's aunt wanting to find out about her first love. After unsuccessful attempts with private investigators and such, she gave up - until First Love Research Group from their school got her aunt to once again investigate about her true etc.
So what was the ''The Children of the Forest'' all about?
In the anime we were told that it has a group of 8 people, Benjant(The bear) , Lions, Wolf etc, excluding the birds.
In my opinion, it could have referred to a political group, where Benjant is part of unwillingly.
Serizawa's aunt told Chika and his friends that Benjant always referred himself to being Venganto - meaning Revenge.
From this, we could see that Benjant is unwillingly part of the group and really poisoned the other mammals to death. But why?
Benjant might not have really liked the group's way of thinking, I was thinking he got into the group based on family background(Bears are part the predator group in real wilderness)
Reasons I thought of include:
#1 Revenge for his family/friends that could have died while being part of the group
#2 End the nonsensical political views that the group had, which has various negative impacts of the whole community(forest). (This makes sense to why the aunt said that ''The birds always went there to cause commotions'')
There were main two things that led me to thinking this :
#1 When Naoko Serizawa 's aunt (as portrayed as a young girl) was lost in the forest - she saw the lion conducting a speech about wanting to expand the forest and such, indicating dictatorship among the strong(the predators)
#2 When Chika and Haruta arrived at Hanamaki station to stop Serizawa's aunt from meeting Benjant, Chika spotted a poster about Hanamaki
'' Welcome to Hanamaki of Ihatov! Ihatov is a name given by the japanese poet Kenji Miyazawa, meaning the ideal hometown from a man's imaginary world ''
There is a theory that it could have been an Esperanto pun on the ideas of Ihatov, a joke exploiting the different possible meanings of the word. So is it really an ideal hometown?
This shows how Hanamaki could have different ways of how society functions, and well, it could been all about flowery speeches with no actual establishments done to create an ideal society.
All in all, I find it really nice how the anime used analogies and set people thinking - forming different views of the situation. It speaks about Humans emotions (seeking revenge) and the dark side of the political world, sparking underlying resentments and such. A truly fulfilling episode!!
