It has been a long time coming, so long that I don’t know when or why I added it to My List on Netflix, but I finally started watching Centaurworld. I do remember that it got a bit of buzz when it first released, with people saying how unexpectedly good it was and how the visuals from the clips being shared didn’t really represent the show as a whole, but the furor subsided, I stopped watching things regularly, and now it’s 2026. I’m finally trying to get through the whole show before my Netflix subscription ends a few days after I’m writing this and it’s been surprisingly engaging. I mean, I expected to enjoy myself, given how much convincing I need before I’ll actually save a show on a streaming platform’s list thingy, but I didn’t expect to find such a neat little story wrapped up in the bright colors and over-the-top-but-not-quite-absurd silliness. I wasn’t entirely sure what I expected, to be honest. I mean, I thought there’d be some kind of framing narrative wrapped around the show to set up what I knew about it–a horse gets stuck in a magical world of centuars–but I didn’t expect the framing narrative to become the narrative. I expected some goofiness, but I didn’t expect songs ranging from second-hand-embarrassment-makes-this-difficult-to-watch to beautiful but uncanny forewarnings of something so dire and evil that it seems like it surely couldn’t exist in this chipper little show. I expected noodle-limbed, physics defying characters, but found myself in a world with a strong and coherent set of underlying rules that guided the way its denizens moved through it even if it was different from what I’d expected from a “standard” world. It really was an exepectedly interesting show for the first whole season and while I’m only a couple episodes into season 2, my hopes for it remain high.

When I hit play on the first episode, I was immeiately presented with a semi-realistic cartoon world–meat-space-normal proportions, things look the way you’d kind of expect by default, but with a drawn quality to them that cleanly conveys action and emotion–that reminded me of the better-funded and more “real” looking episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra. It took a few minutes to establish this horse and rider, do some solid, swift worldbuilding (magical artifact, invasion by burning-and-pillaging non-human foes, a war effort slowly losing ground), and then the horse (eventually named Horse) is zapped off to centaurworld where she finds she can talk just in time to be confronted by an overly friendly cast of cooky characters. We get some “my-little-pony-esque” saccharin magical bologna, a safe little world held inside a barrier, and a clear protagonist who is struggling to deal with the disparity between her war-torn world and action-oriented life and the goofy world and sedate lives of the people she meets while on a quest to find her rider and get home (not necessarily in that order). This model of the show is built up and them immediately smashed on the ground, even as it keeps making tongue-in-cheek jokes about the way the world seems to be.

All it takes is a bit of attention paid to the background as the show moves through its first couple episodes to show that maybe everything isn’t–or at least wasn’t always–the way it seems now as the herd of various ‘taurs (giraffetaur, zebrataur, birdtuar, etc) must embrace in friendship so they can pass through the bubble that rebuffed Horse when she was on her own via a series of commedic bits that would only exist in a cartoon world. You see, they don’t pass through the bubble, the character trying to prevent everyone from leaving the place where it is safe (but kind of boring) actually releases the magic, suggesting that maybe she actually knew what she was talking about when she cautioned everyone against the dangers of the outside world. And while it takes a while for the show to encounter any actual dangers, it immediately becomes apparent that the bubble was a tightly controlled place of comfort and safety as the oddballs that infest any world emerged to minorly inconvenience the main cast. The show carries on, introducing new elements and unveiling more and more details as it goes: the odd rocks in the background, hidden behind forest overgrowth, are actually the remnants of burned-out homes; the character who is brushed off as a smothering worry-wart has a traumatic flashback (not shown to the viewers as anything other than her being rendered unable to move forward) that eventually reveals her smothering protectiveness is born from loss and the knowledge of just how dangerous the world can truly be; and even the odd tendecy for characters to break into song in-world, with the music being a magical side-effect of just living in centaurworld (which is mentioned like its a joke, but it is still consistent with the worldbuilding), is weilded against them as a strange, dire-portent is delivered via one of the most catchy and haunting songs.

This show knew what it was doing from the moment it started, reeling you in under the guise of silliness, and then revealed that this was a world still recovering from a massive collective trauma. The only characters who don’t remember it are the ones who were born after the recovery process was well on its way, but the various neuroses and weird behaviors they all exhibit start to make sense when you consider just the kind of world they must have been born into. Is it strange that someone might develop a bit of kleptomania in a world where nothing was permanent and everything could get taken away from you at a moment’s notice? That a nervous, frightened character with a degree of competence he seems unable to intentionally bring to bear might be stuck in his childhood after clearly losing some family and the childhood he continues to play out even though it’s eventually revealed that he’s in his forties? It slow rolls all of these little revelations perfectly, timing them out so the sense of dread builds and builds and builds as we watch Horse slowly get warped into a cartoonish reflection of her original form by the world she now finds herself in, and find community after community engaged in some kind of strange behavior that reflects the kind of “an entire community acts one way” type stuff you found in children’s shows or things like He-Man and the broader Masters of the Universe franchise not because the people in them lack depth, but becaue they’re all trying to cope with the trauma their entire world went through. This even gets explicitly named as such, right as the first season nears its end, though it is done so quickly in a silly little song that it is easy to miss if you haven’t already clued in to what’s going on behind the scenes (which anyone could be: it’s pretty obvious at this point).

As the last few episodes play out, a repeated song about The Nowhere King (the catchy, haunting song I previously mentioned), the strange powers available to so much of the powerful people in the world, the ruins of the past barely hidden beneath overgrowth, and the dire portents of some of the characters we’ve met but aren’t a part of the main narrative set up what is really going on. You see, the show played on your expectations. It set you up to write this show off not as something like the actual content of My Little Pony episodes but what they’ve been mocked into becoming in memes. It sets up the layer of saccharin fog in order to make you stumble later on when you notice that the downhill slope you’re on has turned from a gentle incline into a slide you have to run with or fall down. The third-to-last episode deals with suicide and despair. The second to last episode reunites Horse and her rider and makes it clear that all of this is still real and nothing’s going to snap back to the way it used to be. The final episode brings it all home in one of maybe the best villains I’ve only just barely glimpsed. “I forgive you for making me this way” is a line I’ll never forget as it hints at what horrors might have been done in the name of love or acceptance. A heroic moment is twisted by a villain willing to do anything it can to get away and fulfill its goals. Our expectations of action and change and a war are frustrated by the reality that these are difficult things to address. Even full knowledge of the situation is denied to us as the one character who could have maybe explained everything chooses not to act but to run away from the problem, suggesting that they might bear some responsibility for the devastation visted on the Human realm and that will be coming to every world sooner rather than later. Or, at the very least, that they’re aware of what is going on and can’t bear to be a part of it.

I suspect the second season is going to answer all of these questions. The stellar structure of this series makes it clear that this is not a long story. I suspect that it was probably only going to be the two seasons it is from the very beginning given how everything is clearly tied up and paid off in a way that hints at a bit more to tie up and pay off just a bit further down the road, so I’m interested to get deeper into Season 2 so I can see if this sense of structure actually exists or is just a coincidence that I’m reading too much into. I mean, unlike with Sea of Stars, I’m not halfway through it and unable to put away the dread I feel that all of this excellent, subtle storytelling and structure was just a coincidence that won’t be wrapped up in any kind of satisfying way, but that experience was so rough that I’m still a little nervous about trusting anything that feels this subtle and clever. There’s only one way to find out for sure, though, and I’ve only got a couple days left to do it, so I better get cracking. And you should too! It’s a fun little show that rides the line between comedy and seriousness very well, that never leans too far in any direction, and does it all on a fairly compact timeline. I’d definitely recommend it for now and will probably rewrite this before it goes up if the second season fails to deliver [it absolutely delivered], so at least you’ll be getting a full evaluation of it.