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A review by kukushka
Brave Chef Brianna by Sam Sykes
2.0
I really don't know how to feel about this one. I absolutely love the artwork, first of all. It's colourful and expressive, and all the characters felt recognisably unique (granted, this is a little easier when so many of the characters are monsters...).
I also liked the representation of anxiety. It's shown graphically as a little black cloud that appears when Brianna is feeling overwhelmed. As her anxiety attack ramps up, the little cloud grows until it eventually obscures everything around Brianna.
Lastly, I just liked the representation of food service work and restaurant ownership. As hopping as the restaurant is, it still ends up at a slight loss (which is celebrated as a victory). The specificity of that environment added a nice touch to the story.
Unfortunately, a lot of the story just didn't sit well for me. For one thing, a central plot point is that Brianna is adding illegal ingredients to her food and then serving it to customers without letting them know. She does this knowing that it is against monster tradition to eat flour or sugar. This is on par with serving pork to Muslims while letting them assume that it's chicken. Not cool.
The other issue is that the big baddie of the story, Madame Cron, is coded as a WoC. She serves traditional, functional monster food, which loses out to Brianna's imported human food. I'm not reading this SJW stuff into it, by the way - Cron is explicitly shown as having had a history of being oppressed by humans, and having been an activist in her past. And now, the message of the story is that she needs to let go of all that resentment because monster racism is over, and she needs to just let her neighbourhood get gentrified by the nice blonde woman with her non-ethnic cooking that everyone loves.
It would have been one thing if Brianna learned a valuable lesson about respecting Monster traditions, but the lesson is all Madame Cron's (who is seen taking down a "no humans allowed" sign from her restaurant in her last panel). I just don't know what to make of all that, but it doesn't sit well with me.
I also liked the representation of anxiety. It's shown graphically as a little black cloud that appears when Brianna is feeling overwhelmed. As her anxiety attack ramps up, the little cloud grows until it eventually obscures everything around Brianna.
Lastly, I just liked the representation of food service work and restaurant ownership. As hopping as the restaurant is, it still ends up at a slight loss (which is celebrated as a victory). The specificity of that environment added a nice touch to the story.
Unfortunately, a lot of the story just didn't sit well for me. For one thing, a central plot point is that Brianna is adding illegal ingredients to her food and then serving it to customers without letting them know. She does this knowing that it is against monster tradition to eat flour or sugar. This is on par with serving pork to Muslims while letting them assume that it's chicken. Not cool.
The other issue is that the big baddie of the story, Madame Cron, is coded as a WoC. She serves traditional, functional monster food, which loses out to Brianna's imported human food. I'm not reading this SJW stuff into it, by the way - Cron is explicitly shown as having had a history of being oppressed by humans, and having been an activist in her past. And now, the message of the story is that she needs to let go of all that resentment because monster racism is over, and she needs to just let her neighbourhood get gentrified by the nice blonde woman with her non-ethnic cooking that everyone loves.
It would have been one thing if Brianna learned a valuable lesson about respecting Monster traditions, but the lesson is all Madame Cron's (who is seen taking down a "no humans allowed" sign from her restaurant in her last panel). I just don't know what to make of all that, but it doesn't sit well with me.