TwoKinds

URL: twokinds.keenspot.com
Creator/s: Tom Fischbach
Run: 10/03-current
Schedule: W/Sa
Section/s: Ch. 15, "Haunted"

Website: The site's great, as it's a simple design but also fully featured. There are 10 character images spread around the site, which makes it colorful and unique, and gives it something of a personality. It's a lot more likable and interesting than a generic, blank background, anyways. The comic also has its own forum and chat room, and it's certainly unusual for a webcomic to get popular enough to generate its own community to this extent.

Writing: A few reviews I've seen have focused on comparing the comic's various species, but I'm not as interested in that. Instead, I'll cut to the chase: TwoKinds is a furry porn comic, and its appeal hinges on how interested readers are in its sexual aspects.

TwoKinds is one of the most popular furry webcomics, consistently coming in at No. 1 on Keenspot, TopWebComics, and The Belfry, and this success seems highly related to the attention the comic simultaneously gives to several niche audiences. For example, the creator manages to cater to the bestiality, pedophilia, and transgender fetishes all at the same time with Natani, a 13-year-old transgendered furry who's shown topless in two separate scenes in the chapter (1, 2, both links NSFW). There are multiple transgendered characters, and even a character who changes her species, and, when reading this stuff, it feels like the creator's just randomly throwing these features into the comic in order to include as many unusual fantasies as possible.

There are a few methods the creator employs to try to make his fetish porn comic seem more palatable. The first is that even though nudity's common in this comic, the creator never draws nipples or vaginas, which, I guess, is supposed to make it seem less like softcore porn. What happens, though, is because it isn't "porn," it gives the creator the excuse to draw lots and lots of nudity. Reviewer The Luigiian writes, “I have never seen a single furry comic with this much sex in it. This literally has more sex, more nudity, more sex scenes, more suggestive dialogue, and more transgender/transspecies/anthropomorphic bestiality porn than any other non-pornographic furry comic I have ever seen." What personally stood out for me is this page (NSFW), as the creator somehow manages to fit nudity and sex into a Christmas comic.

The second method's that even though his sexy furry women all look like children and range from 10-to-13 years old, the creator tries to hand-wave the creepy child porn aspect by vaguely alluding to it not being their "real" age. This age thing seems like a gimmick to me, though, because even though the comic's main focus is on showing sexy images of these furries, the "real age" thing's barely brought up. Going through the whole website, as well as the comic's wiki, I wasn't able to find any indication of what these characters' "real age" is supposed to be, and going as far as to Google "what are keidrans real age" brings up several multi-page forum threads full of fans debating their various theories. Some readers might not have a problem with the ambiguity, but I think when you're dealing with an extremely sensitive and taboo subject like child porn, it's worth being a little more specific about it. It's at least sort of ironic that the characters in the comic are outraged by someone drawing child porn while the comic's creator seems indifferent towards his own sexy drawings of childish characters.

The third method's highlighting a sense of racial prejudice towards the furries, which gives the impression that people who disapprove of human-furry relationships (i.e., bestiality) are similar to racists. I expect that this approach is pretty appealing to the fetishists who read the comic, as instead of treating their sexual deviance as something to be ashamed of, it portrays them as victims. It gets pretty weird, though, when sex slavery's involved, as that sort of thing doesn't work as well when the point of the comic's to portray furries in a sexy way. Sort of like what DrShaym wrote in his review of Devil's Shine, the creator's thought process seems to be, "I know! Let's have her get raped! It's both tragic and sexy! Genius!" The creator also offers Trace and Flora as a sort of ideal couple, which is another way to present bestiality as being socially acceptable; however, having Trace get Flora pregnant just comes off as creepy, and it doesn't make sense anyways since they're different species. I see how their relationship could be very appealing to some people, though, as Flora's basically the "sugoi kawaii nekomimi catgirl" from anime, as reviewer Cody Baier puts it, while Trace, in his black T-shirt and khaki shorts, looks like a character out of a gaming webcomic, and it'd be easy for a male fan to imagine himself in Trace's place.

As far as the bits of story sandwiched in-between the fetish scenes go, they don't seem particularly important or inspired, as if the creator's in a rush to get back to drawing sexy stuff. However, thanks to the About and Cast pages, I was able to understand what was going on and keep track of who's who, which is somewhat impressive considering that the comic has hundreds of pages and a lot of characters.

Art: It's pretty good, and the creator's improved a ton in the nine years he's been drawing the comic. He's especially capable at drawing sexy furry women, which he's obviously had a lot of practice doing, and his DeviantArt site has some particularly erotic stuff. The art has a few flaws, such as an overreliance on close shots and a lack of expressiveness, but it's generally of a high quality, and I can't really expect much more from a twice-a-week manga webcomic. I also really like the cover, which is actually an animated GIF that changes after about 10 seconds.

The main issue I have with the artwork's similar to what I complained about in my review of Bittersweet Candy Bowl, which is that, while the writing deals with dark, adult, and possibly creepy stuff, the characters look like cutesy preteens. All of them have big heads, huge eyes, and childish physiques, and I'd guess that they're about 11 or 12 years old if the Cast page didn't list their actual ages. This plays out especially awkwardly in the scene with 13-year-old Maddie being sexualized, as, since the adult characters look like 13-year-olds, the creator has no choice but to make Maddie look like she's about 6 years old in order to make her seem like a younger character. Then you have stuff like this 13-year-old getting groped, and while it's supposed to be something funny happening between two adults, having it happen with these childish-looking furries is kinda off-putting. And a similar situation comes up when 10-year-old Kathrin, a former sex slave, screams at 13-year-old Natani to show herself naked, which is just weird.

Overall: I understand that there's a big demand on the Internet for furry porn, and I don't think I'm as judgmental about it as some other reviewers are. What ruins TwoKinds for me, though, is that the creator tries to cram so much different fetish material into one story that he's created a total mess out of what could've been a pretty neat concept. Bestiality's one thing, but when you're combining bestiality, pedophilia, transgenderism, nudity, and sex slavery in a single page, you're just taking things too far, and any appeal the comic might have seems insignificant compared to how disturbing it can be at times. People are inevitably gonna read something like TwoKinds as a sort of guilty pleasure, but it shouldn't be regarded as a serious artistic work.

2/5