Meet the Brückenbauers (Patreon)

finito! >3 Meet Bob's family~

Commonly dismissed and exploited due to their small size, rodents face a tremendous amount of negative social stigma. Most commonly they are associated with poverty, and have quite often been made into convenient scapegoats for whatever issue society is battling at the time, be it the housing crisis, disease, overpopulation, pollution, food scarcity, crime rates, clogged toilets, slow internet, etc. Historically speaking, rodents have been forced to make due with the scraps left behind by larger animals, often pushed into shoddily-made housing in poor neighborhoods and systemically denied access to quality education and employment opportunities. Despite making some headway in battling these social injustices, the stigma against rodent-folk persists, aided in no small part by wealthy special interest groups that profit off ongoing social division and culture wars.

It's a hard-knock life, but rodents persist nonetheless. Intelligent, loyal, gregarious, and hyper-adaptable, rodent-folk prioritize family above all else, blending together colonies that can consist of hundreds of biological and adopted relatives. These colonies have historically allowed them to pool knowledge and resources to make dramatic socioeconomic gains. When kindly old Granny Fran learned that young Bertie Brückenbauer's mother had died of illness, she took in the bereaved beaver kit, as she had with so many of the children in her Zoo York tenement. Bert grew to be stern but soft-hearted, a hard-worker even by beaver standards. Opening a successful bakery, Bert would make daily conversation with Wanda, a single mother that would slip into his shop every afternoon to cram her handbag full of free samples. Wanda was Bert's polar opposite, a loud, wacky, eternally perky porcupine, and she would eventually steal the man's heart, as well as half a tray of danishes. They married, and Bert was happy to carry on Granny Fran's legacy and adopt Wanda's own prickly furball Dante as his own. Wanda and Bert would eventually welcome a bitty beaver baby of their own, little Bobby Brückenbauer Jr.

Bob was a shy and soft-spoken boy growing up, often drowned out by his loud-but-well-meaning mother, not to mention bullied by his jealous older brother, whom he often found himself on the receiving end of many a porcupine quill. In response Bob develops his gruff outer shell, becoming a rodent of few words, much like his father. He doesn't really come into himself until he meets his high school sweetheart Kathleen, who is just as eager to marry and gtf away from her family as Bobby is. They're together for around a decade before their marriage crumbles with Kathleen's late-in-life realization that she is, in fact, a huge lesbian. Their break-up is painful, though they are ultimately able to realize that they still love each other dearly-albeit platonically- and remain best friends to this day. Struggling to date again after the divorce, Bob retreats back into his grumpy protective shell....at least until the day he is hired to do some much-needed repairs around one Reverend Meadowsweet's church, and the kindly, scruffy pastor and his pretty smile causes the first crack in Bob's armor....

fun facts:

-Granny Fran is still alive! >:O She's a bit senile and doddering in her old age (she's over one hundred years old!), but she's always got a dusty piece of hard candy to fish out of her handbag for anyone that asks (or doesn't ask). She may or may not know how to hide a body.

-Bert is also still alive, don't let his gray fur fool you. He and Bob mainly have conversations consisting of monosyllables and grunts, but the pair love each other dearly. His main gripe with his son nowadays is that he's not doing a good enough job fattening up his twig of a husband ("What're you feedin' this guy, junior?").

-Kathleen kept her married surname because she's very much still part of the family. Is it awkward to have your former daughter-in-law over for Feasts of Beasts every year? Wanda doesn't care. Kathy is considered her daughter in all but blood, and Kathleen very much returns the sentiment, as her own family are a bunch of humorless conservative sticks in the mud.

-Dante is Bob's big brother and he's a big smarmy jerk. Inheriting the bakery from dear old dad, he transformed it into a slick wood-fired pizzeria, which he runs to this day with his wife Toni. Dante is loud and overly-friendly like his mother Wanda, except he has a rough and teasing sense of humor that often accidentally veers into bullying. Dante is under the impression that he and his brother (whom he often refers to as Baby Bobby) are as close as brothers can be, and loves to tease the guy for being such a stiff...entirely oblivious to how Bob constantly keeps his hackles up around him. Bob views Dante as a tormentor at worst, a nuisance at best, and is always quick to squirm out of his crushing welcome hugs (he can't help it, he doesn't like being too close to those quills).

-Toni is a passionate painter, and much like her husband, is a big smarmy jerk. She can frequently be found hanging from her prehensile tail, updating the large mural that decorates the entrance of their pizza shop. She shares Dante's crass sense of humor, and still plays at being a college party girl, despite being well into her forties. Unlike Bob and Kathy (as Dante likes saying), she and her husband have very much kept the passion alive in their relationship, and are frequently seen playing tonsil hockey and pawing at each other in public. Although she and Dante love and are fiercely protective of their daughter, they often are too caught up in their work and themselves to pay much attention to her.

-Toni and Kathy are good friends, and having her as a sister-in-law is part of the reason Kathleen stayed married to Bob as long as she did. It took her quite some time to realize she might be nursing a tiny, innocent crush on openly bisexual Toni, and though she frantically declined Toni's offer to make out to be sure, it was indeed the first spark that ignited her grand sapphic revelation (sorry Bobby)

-Frankie is the only grandchild in the family. Pretty much perpetually unsupervised, she nonetheless remains a good student and keeps herself busy doodling anime OCs in her school notebooks and reading slashfics online. As she goes unnoticed by so many, even her own parents, Frankie is secretly quite lonely, but also struggles with both severe social anxiety and overactive self-defense instincts, often squeaking and puffing up her quills the second anybody gets too close. The only person she truly clicks with is her uncle Bob, whom holds quite the soft spot for her. Bob is just about the only person Frankie always rushes to greet with a quill-free hug, confusing her father Dante, who is often at a loss on how to bond with a small, awkward girl. Frankie is also of course much adored by her grandparents (Bert always has a tray full of fresh-baked treats to greet her with), and is maybe the only person alive to enjoy Wanda's off-key singing.

-Toffee is taller than all these folks and has to stoop when standing in the Brückenbauer's living room. He imagined that the parents of his beaver beau would be very typical traditional baby boomers, perhaps displeased with their son jumping from a straight marriage into one with another man-and is relieved to find these fears to be entirely unfounded. He is adopted into the family near-instantly, and immediately gets a cheese pastry jammed down his throat and is subjected to Wanda oversharing about a funny rash she's noticed in her quills. Bob finds his parents beyond embarrassing, but Toffee adores them.