WMG / Kemono Friends

Warning, unmarked spoilers ahead!

Shoebill is actually wide-eyed.

Like so. Her bangs hide half her eyes, so she only *looks* like she's glaring intensely at you. As the link shows, this is also true of real shoebills.

• On a closer look, her eyes are actually tsurime.

Kaban's Serval is also Mirai's Serval and she suffers from memory loss.

Serval cried when shown Mirai's message. And Mirai's Serval acts way too much like Kaban's Serval. So it's likely that Serval was injured or even died and revived and was never found by the humans. Serval without any memories went back to the savannah area and spent years as a normal friend before meeting Kaban-chan.

• Judging from the manga, this seems to be the case with many of them; like Red Fox. Maybe Tsuchinoko never reverted, as she makes comments regarding the park's original purpose; but she's too much of a Hikikomori and Tsundere to properly communicate.
• That must be some hardcore memory wipes seeing how Red Fox's personality changed so much.
  • Trauma.
• Serval was reverted to a normal animal by a Cerulean, but was again exposed to Sandstar and turned into her Little Bit Beastly form. She has lost most of her memories from her time as a human, but something remained deep in her subconscious and surfaced again when she saw Mirai's hologram and remembered the sadness about her death, disappearance or departure.

  • Jossed by Word of God and the mobile game ‘’Kemono Friends 3’’: Kaban-era Serval is neither Mirai-era Serval nor Cerval. Not Alex either, as Alex is a Cerulian.

The setting is a few centuries before Adventure Time.

Inanimate objects animating will stablize in that time and no longer become Ceruleans, and males will eventually develop. "Friends" will eventually become "Princesses" to differentiate.

• Kemono Friends 1 is implied to be set in one year after the park’s closing, later retconned to be 2000 years (confirmed in the manga by a label dated August 4025). Adventure Time is set in 1000 years after what appeared to be the 1990s.

Humans naturally have Sandstar in their bodies.

This is why they were driven out of the Park by the Cerulean. This is also why Kaban didn't revert to a hair.

The hair in Mirai's helmet wasn't hers.

It was Mirai's husband's.

• Are you sure? Kaban is the splitting image of Mirai, and I don't think reversion changed Kaban's gender.
  • Theory has been Jossed by Word of God.

Mirai is dead. Possibly long dead.

Because if not then there's some serious Clone Angst that will need to be addressed in later seasons, when and if Kaban actually meets her.

• Almost certainly. Her bus was found in two pieces, one piece across the river. This is where Raccoon apparently found her hat.
  • On the other hand, we know that Mirai survived and was making recordings on Lucky at least until the evacuation was ordered.
  • Didn't episode 12 show the hat as being in the Savannah when it got hit by Sandstar?
    • She lost her hat to the wind on the Ferris Wheel in her last recording. It's not too much of a stretch to think it got blown around the island and ended up in the Savannah.
• Doubt it, the show doesn't seem like the type to pull that off. If anything Mirai would see her as a daughter considering that she looks like her husband in friend form.
  • What husband? It was her hat. Kaban looks like Mirai (which really wouldn't change how Mirai would see Kaban, but still...)
    • Theory has been Jossed by Word of God.
• According to the Kemono Friends World expo, both yes and no. Mirai survived the incident that forced all Humans to pull out of the park, but Season 1 happened 2000 years after that.

If a creature affected by the metamorphic properties of Sandstar is reverted by a Cerulean, what happens if they touch more Sandstar?

Friends either die or revert from Sandstar withdrawal

When Mirai left the park, she essentially left everyone behind. This would seem like pretty heartless thing to do unless it was for a good reason. This would also make sense with the above theory that past!Serval and present!Serval are one and the same.

• Withdrawal is implied to be a thing in Episode 12.1.

Kaban is a reconstruction of the Mighty Whitey trope.

Kaban is the only human friend in the show and quite possibly the world and an outsider to the Friend's society. But over time as she helps solve problems, save people, and end conflicts, Kaban gains the respect and admiration of the locals. Hippo's appearances and words in episode's 1 and 12 said it best when dealing with Kaban's influence in that she unified a scattered civilization and managed to help it reclaim it's lost past. Even sacrificing her escape from the park to help the friends defeat the black Cerulean an unstoppable beast that nobody else could beat alone. Reject orders and face death when she was told by the administration to evacuate. Something not even Mirai was willing to do at the end all the while expecting nothing in return. And in the end after her journey was done Kaban left to return to her homeland.

Kemono Friends takes place in the same universe as RWBY

It takes place long before the events of the latter, the Friends are the ancestors of the Fauna, the existence of Dust is due to The Sand Star's influence on the land, and the Cerelions will eventually (whether naturally or not) evolve into the Creatures of Grim.

• Kemurikusa is more likely.

Season 2 will feature the main cast stranded at sea.

A lot of art for season 2 shows Kaban and co. in their Japari boat which suggests that they will be in the sea for a good while. It would also make for some cabin fever jokes and Serval hallucinating that Kaban is a Japari bun.

• Jossed.

There will be new Friends in future installments, species not featured in the game.

As the JRA X Kemono Friends collaboration just created three new horse Friends that are exclusive only to the anime, not to mention PPP has gotten a royal penguin that wasn't featured in the game. And since the series has become very popular, there are now opportunities for more never-before-seen Friends to be made. New animals such as orcas, toucans, parrots, and sharks. Maybe even more extinct animals like non-avian dinosaurs and pterosaurs, and more cryptids like sasquatches or lake monsters.

• Confirmed.

Japari Park is actually an experimental Incubator human/animal crossbreeding facility.

The 'Bators wanted to exploit animals for their emotional abilities along with humans both to maximize Earth's total emotional output and also because animals have less control over their emotions, but discovered that only humans have the proper brainwave structure to counteract universal entropy, so they were testing out how to place animal emotions into human brainwaves by creating Forced Transformations. Further research showed a certain human society with a strong love of cafes staffed by cute young girls as well as moving drawing-shows about cute young girls representing everything from battleships to fighter planes to guns; so they came to the conclusion that placing their crossbreeding facility on an island off Japan along with a combination zoo/Maid Cafe to let people encounter the so-called "Friends" would be a great way to raise money for their efforts on Earth.

• And of course Ceruleans are the Friends' Witch forms.

Sandstar is actually Gem tech.

The Sandstar is a device Gems created to more easily mass-reproduce, however it was a failure, as all Gems that were made this way came out corrupted, so it was left abandoned on Earth.

However, it had a completely unexpected effect on organic life, something the Gems had never even considered testing it on. While all Gems made from inorganic material come out corrupted, the 'Gems' made from organic life form without issue.

This is why there are no 'male' Friends, they haven't become 'human,' they're organic Gems.

All humans are now Friends.

Friends are pretty much immortal, reverting to their original animal form if they die instead of actually dying. The Cerulean actively hunt Friends to absorb their Sandstar, reverting them to their original forms. Humans fled the Park in order to escape the Cerulean outbreak probably because they have become Friends and didn't want to lose their newfound immortality.

• Again, a valid observation on information shown in the Kemono Friends World exhibition. Kaban is a Human Friend while Kyururu is a Human with Friend-like characteristics.

The reason why the franchise doesn't have Friends based on Mesozoic animals yet.

Due to the iconic status of dinosaurs, they're probably being saved for something big, such as a special event or a theatrical film.

• Giant Penguin, also coming from an extinct species, said that she used to see Dinosaur friends when the park was still open.

How the Friends in season two can destroy Ceruleans with seemingly great ease

They all learned a technique similar to the Panzer Kunst move "Hertza Haeon" from Battle Angel Alita: They know how to send a vibration into the bodies of the Ceruleans that reaches the core and destroys it.

The planet Kemono Friends is set on isn't Earth, but an abandoned colony planet

The planet was set up as a zoo, but was abandoned when there was an interstellar war (not unlike the Texas Colony in Gundam). The faction that won in the end set up a surveillance satellite to ensure that the enemy won't use the planet as a base. When some of them smuggled in primitive weapons (the B-2 bomber, bombs and the P-3 Orion plane, because any modern weapons would be detected too easily), the satellite saw that and destroyed them using laser weapons from orbit. There was an orbital battle for the planet and since the enemy couldn't conquer it, they used a bioweapon out of spite that twisted the Sandstar of the planet to bring forth Ceruleans and Beasts.