"Maneater" (2020) Plot Synopsis
But the shark 🦈 that you actually play as is a bull shark. If you don’t know what a bull shark is, basically they are a species of shark within the requiem shark family that mainly lives in warm water environments 💦. What makes bull sharks so special is that they are the only shark species 🦈 known to science that can survive in both saltwater and freshwater 💦. They can do this because their gills, rectal gland, kidneys, and liver can control the level of salt and water 💦 in their bodies while they’re swimming in freshwater 💦. The bull sharks conserve sodium and chloride in their bodies by limiting the rectal gland’s salt-excretory process which helps get rid of excess salt while they’re in saltwater 💦.
Then their kidneys produce dilute urine, and help reabsorb solutes in the blood 🩸. The gills help take in sodium and chloride from the surrounding freshwater 💦, and the liver produces urea to help with changes in the salinity of the environment that shark goes into. It’s a pretty complicated process as you can read, a lot of biochemistry involved, but it is cool to learn how bull sharks can survive in freshwater 💦 when other shark species 🦈 can’t.
Bull sharks are also more aggressive than either great whites or tiger sharks, and are therefore more likely to attack humans than either of those two species are. Males ♂︎ of the species also possess more testosterone than male elephants 🐘♂︎ do, that’s a fact that a lot of people like to point about bull sharks that the males ♂︎ have more testosterone than the males ♂︎ of other species, including male elephants 🐘♂︎. So, if you see a bull shark, proceed with caution ⚠️ because they are a species that you really don’t want to mess with or piss off. Bites from bull sharks are not pretty, and can be fatal, depending on where it bites you, how hard, and for how long.
A kid got bitten by a bull shark near a Florida beach if I’m remembering correctly, and he nearly lost his hand ✋ , the shark bit his hand off ✋. I heard about this story from the popular Animal Planet series, River Monsters, the one hosted by the legendary Jeremy Wade. The kid was fine, he had his hand ✋ sown back on, and he was fine, he recovered with full function returning to his hand ✋ . However, despite how aggressive they can be towards humans, bull sharks are one of the few species of shark 🦈 that have been successfully kept in captivity. They can be kept in captivity, and some aquariums around the world do have bull sharks in their tanks for the public to see.
I don’t know what about bull sharks makes them able to survive in captivity whereas other sharks like great white sharks and mako sharks can’t. Maybe it does have to do their ability to survive in freshwater 💦 as well as saltwater 💦. But, most aquariums have saltwater tanks 💦, so that can’t be it. Maybe it’s the fact that they tend to stick to shallower waters than other shark species 🦈 like great whites or makos do. Maybe it’s just their general hardiness. Whatever the reason, bull sharks are among the small number of shark species 🦈 that can be kept in aquariums successfully without dying days or weeks after being introduced.
So, it does make sense why the developers of this game went with a bull shark as the playable character, the protagonist rather than the typical great white. They wanted a shark 🦈 that could enter freshwater environments 💦 no problem since a lot of this game’s open world map is comprised of lakes, rivers, bayous, and ponds, a lot of freshwater environments 💦 that it just wouldn’t have been scientifically accurate to have a great white shark or a tiger shark enter into. They also wanted a shark 🦈 that it would be believable would be aggressive and attack humans, and eat humans since humans are a food source and enemy in the game. Bull sharks don’t eat humans in real life, they just bite them, but you could suspend your disbelief and buy into the idea that one would eat humans given how aggressive this species is known to be.)
The game follows a female bull shark ♀︎ who is growing, eating, and evolving, trying to rise to the top of the food chain as the new apex predator in the underwater ecosystem 💦 of the fictional American port city of Port Clovis 🇺🇸. All so that she can get her revenge on a ruthless Cajun fisherman named Scaly Pete who killed her mom and left her scarred and deformed as a pup. But after his son, Kyle dies when his boat explodes 🛥️💥 during a confrontation with the shark, Scaly Pete wants revenge against the shark at any cost.
Even though he’s the reason why the boat 🛥️ blew up 💥 and why his son died because he lit the shark on fire 🔥, and that caused the gas tank to ignite 💥 since the shark was lying right on top of the gas tank. Scaly Pete has no body but himself to blame for why his son died. But, he’s one of those guys that doesn’t like taking responsibility for his own actions, and instead blames others for his horrible mistakes. In this case, he blames the shark for killing his son, even though the shark didn’t kill his son, the explosion 💥 did.
He straight up goes scorched earth on that fish, poisoning Sapphire Bay (one of the locations within Port Clovis) ☠️, and loading his second boat with military-grade equipment including torpedoes. This is truly when a man ♂︎ is at his most dangerous. You take away his child (son or daughter), he’s got nothing to lose, and by the end of this game, Scaly Pete has nothing left to lose except his own life which he doesn’t care about anymore. He’s willing to sacrifice himself if it means killing this shark. So, it comes a cat and mouse game sort of to see which one can get revenge on the other first, the shark or Scaly Pete? Inspired by the 2006 open world Jaws game, Jaws Unleashed, Maneater (2020) is an open world RPG from the perspective of a shark 🦈 that is sure to please the senses, including the appetite.
Because like that Daryl Hall & John Oates song said, she’s a maneater and she will chew you up, or rather, she’ll use her razor sharp serrated teeth to slice your flesh up into bite-sized chunks small enough for her to swallow to be more precise. So, watch out. I can’t believe they didn’t use that song in the actual trailers. Instead, they used “Mississippi Queen” by Mountain which is a good song. I understand why they used that song. They used it because the game takes place around the Southern United States 🇺🇸, and features a Cajun character, as well as other characters with southern accents like those you’d find in Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. The Deep South. A region that borders the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, and where bull sharks are known to live. In fact, bull sharks have been known to travel pretty far inland up the Mississippi River to states like Missouri, Tennessee, Arkansas, Iowa, and probably Illinois too. Bull sharks have been spotted in the Mississippi River on multiple occasions.
(These are the flags of Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama. The flag on top is the Florida flag, the first flag in the middle is the Mississippi flag, the second flag in the middle is the Louisiana flag, and the flag on the bottom is the Alabama flag.)
Bull sharks also live in the waters 💦 around Australia 🇦🇺, Cuba 🇨🇺, the Bahamas 🇧🇸, Mexico 🇲🇽, Nicaragua 🇳🇮 (in fact, one of their nicknames is the Lake Nicaragua shark because they travel up the rivers to get to Lake Nicaragua, presumably to breed and give birth since bull sharks give birth to live young), India 🇮🇳, the Philippines 🇵🇭, Papua New Guinea 🇵🇬, Thailand 🇹🇭, Malaysia 🇲🇾, Singapore 🇸🇬, Indonesia 🇮🇩, Brunei 🇧🇳, Timor-Leste 🇹🇱, Fiji 🇫🇯, Madagascar 🇲🇬, South Africa 🇿🇦, Mozambique 🇲🇿, and many others. But, this is an American game 🇺🇸, so of course it was going to set in America 🇺🇸, and the main region of the US 🇺🇸 where bull sharks are known to live near is the South. Although some do live along the East Coast as well. They also used that song because Scaly Pete’s boat 🛥️ is called the “Cajun Queen,” which is sort of like “Mississippi Queen,” but not quite, since Cajuns don’t originate from Mississippi, they come from Louisiana. Although one of the lyrics in the song mentions Louisiana and a "Cajun lady ♀︎." Maybe that's what they're going for by using that song naming Scaly Pete's boat 🛥️, the Cajun Queen.
As you can see, they’re a very unassuming and nondescript shark species 🦈. They aren’t distinctive or flamboyant like other shark species 🦈 such as great white sharks, tiger sharks, shortfin mako sharks, whale sharks, basking sharks, frilled sharks, goblin sharks, hammerhead sharks, cookiecutter sharks, carpet sharks, epaulette sharks, sawfish, chimaeras AKA ghost sharks, and even sand tiger sharks. They could easily be mistaken for reef sharks like blacktip reef sharks and whitetip reef sharks, and lemon sharks. They also don’t show their teeth like say, great whites or makos, or sand tigers do, instead their teeth are hidden by thick gums. The one in this photo has its mouth closed, and you can’t see any teeth at all.
It’s only when they’re about to feed or bite that they do show their teeth and their teeth are pretty gnarly. Their teeth are a lot like great whites’ actually where they’re more triangular, pointed, and serrated. So, if a layman saw this shark, they probably wouldn’t be able to positively identify it as a bull shark, and they probably wouldn’t immediately assume that it was dangerous unless they were already afraid of sharks. Galeophobia, the fear of sharks 🦈.
But, I wish that they had used “Maneater” by Daryl Hall & John Oates, given that’s also the title of the game, and the shark is a female ♀︎. I’d like to think that title of the game has a double meaning, in that it’s about a man-eating shark 🦈, but that shark 🦈 is a female ♀︎, and the fisherman she wants revenge on is a man ♂︎. So in both a literal and figurative sense, the shark 🦈 is a maneater. She’s a woman shark 🦈♀︎ who’s out to kill the man shark hunter ♂︎ who killed her mom, and left her all scarred up.
The game is narrated by an unseen and somewhat mysterious character named Trip Westhaven (voiced by Chris Parnell) who is the host of the short-lived in-universe reality TV show also called Maneater, which is sort of like the framing device for the main story since every time we see Scaly Pete, he’s being filmed and interviewed on his boat 🛥️ by an unseen camera crew and it’s almost like a documentary. And the narration during gameplay is supposed to be Westhaven and a camera crew observing the shark in its natural environment acting out its natural behavior.
Although, the shark does do a lot of things that are kind of unnatural for sharks 🦈, like she doe things that sharks 🦈 in real life can’t do, and she has abilities or features that sharks 🦈 in real life don’t have. Like all the evolutions that you gain throughout the game like sonar, the shark gains the ability to use sonar and echolocate similar to dolphins 🐬 or whales 🐋. Amphibiousness, meaning that the shark 🦈 can go onto dry land for long and sustained periods of time, even longer than epaulette sharks (or “walking sharks” as they’re sometimes called).
Bioelectricity ⚡️, you can give the shark bioelectric powers ⚡️ including bioelectric fins ⚡️, a bioelectricity body ⚡️, and even bioelectric teeth ⚡️ which electrocute prey ⚡️ when they bite into it. Sharks 🦈 can sense electric fields ⚡️in the water 💦 with electroreceptors that scientists call Ampullae of Lorenzini, which are those little holes on sharks’ 🦈 snouts. But, they can’t produce their own electricity ⚡️ and use it as a weapon to kill prey like an electric eel ⚡️, which aren’t actually eels BTW, but that’s an aside. No sharks 🦈 that we know of can do that. Shadow set, where the shark gains metal-like armor plating and shadow-like abilities to evade enemies and be more stealthy I guess, as well as emit clouds of poison ☠️ to kill enemies with. That’s a bit more useful than just stealth. That’s something real-life sharks 🦈 don’t have and can’t do. Bone armor, obviously, the shark can gain a bony armor around its body to reduce damage, and also bone teeth? How the heck does that work?
Obviously no shark species 🦈 known to science has bony armor like that, nor do they have bony skeletons. Sharks’ 🦈 skeletons are made out of cartilage, the same stuff that your ears 👂 and parts of your nose 👃 are made out of, which puts them in the category of cartilaginous fish along with rays, skates, and chimeras. Of course, the shark gains even more abilities in the Truth Quest 🔎 DLC, including the ability to shoot a radioactive beam ☢️ out of her mouth similar to Godzilla’s atomic breath ☢️. No shark 🦈 that scientists know of in real life can do that.
But, obviously Maneater isn’t a documentary in-universe. It’s a reality TV show, which centers around two perspectives, on shark hunters 🦈 and their lives as they try to hunt sharks 🦈, and on sharks 🦈 themselves as they try to survive and climb to the top of the food chain, which more often then not means coming into contact with humans. They show sharks 🦈 eating people on camera for network television. No wonder the show was canceled, it was pretty much a snuff show. Westhaven even admits that’s the reason why his show was canceled in the Truth Quest 🔎 DLC that he showed real-life death 💀.
Westhaven seems to be the kind of guy who lacks any morals, like he lacks a moral compass and lacks integrity, as he just cares about what he thinks would look good on TV, and doesn’t really care about the subjects he’s focused on and their wellbeing, whether they be human or shark 🦈. And he’s really just filming all of this stuff for his own amusement and doesn’t understand or care how television works and doesn’t care that much about ratings as he doesn’t seem to understand why filming people getting eaten by a shark 🦈 is bad and is not appropriate for television and why the network execs shut him down. He kind of shrugs it off, and retreats to the Internet where he starts doing a podcast 🎙️ or starts livestreaming or whatever just like every other disgraced TV host nowadays, which is how he ends up where he is in the Truth Quest 🔎 DLC. Speaking of which…
He’s also a wackadoo conspiracy theorist 🤪 who evidently believes in things like the Illuminati, Satanic cabals, one world government AKA new world order (NWO), Insectoid aliens, Moon landing stuff 🌕. You know? The usual things conspiracy theorists believe in. But, he is right about the top secret scientific experiments on marine life going on Plover Island. So, on the conspiracy theorist scale, he’s more like Bernie from the MonsterVerse where he’s a “good” conspiracy theorist who was right about one thing. Even though in real life, there are no “good” conspiracy theorists, just evil ones like Alex Jones.
I’m not even sure if Alex Jones believes any of the stuff he says, or if it’s all just for the money 🤑. But, he lost his show and he’s about to sell off his properties to pay the families of the Sandy Hook victims who he owes money 💵 to after he was found guilty of defaming them by saying that Sandy Hook was a hoax. So, I guess if it was all just for the money 💵, then it was all for nothing because he’s about to lose everything for the vile stuff he's said on his show, InfoWars, and other equally horrible people he promoted like Paul Joseph Watson, the crazed apocalyptic Islamophobe from Britain 🇬🇧.
But even then, I still don’t think that Westhaven is that great of a guy. In fact, I think he’s a terrible guy, as bad as you can get. But, whatever, he’s an antihero, and this is a game where you root for the antiheroes, the characters that would normally be the bad guys in other movies and video games, and would be bad guys in real life. Like, Westhaven would be a bad guy in real life. He’d be one of those people that we would consider to be an asshole because he is, even in the context of the game’s story.
Plus, he’s a goldbug, like he’s obsessed with gold and other precious metals and at one point says, “My friends, hide your gold, silver, and palladium. It won’t be long before the NWO makes the holding of precious metals illegal.” That just makes him worse in my opinion because I hate goldbugs, they’re stupid as hell. Just as stupid as libertarians quite frankly, and a lot of libertarians are also goldbugs, like Ron Paul, father of Kentucky senator, Rand Paul. I wish that the good people of Kentucky would just vote that guy out of office already because Rand Paul, despite calling himself a libertarian, has gone full MAGA 🇺🇸. I don’t like his father either, but Rand is the one in the power that can affect policy in this country; for the worst in my opinion.
Westhaven acts as the guide through the game, and he provides a lot of the game’s humor with his witty, cynical, and snarky commentary, as well as drop some shark facts 🦈 occasionally that may or may not be true. Westhaven doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who does due diligence to make sure the scientific facts he’s stating are accurate or not. One of the highlights of Trip Westhaven’s snappy narration include, “The shark is now a teen. We can expect much angst, ennui, and poor decision making,” “The shark is now an adult and she should probably spend less, save more, and start researching indexed mutual funds,” “400 million years of evolution, and yet the shark is eaten by somebody’s future luggage,” “Prosperity Sands features glittering white beaches, fenced off for the sole enjoyment of the ultra-rich, mega-rich, and super-rich,” “While they appreciate human sacrifices, the eldritch gods of yore are seldom enthused about being summoned to Port Clovis,” “It should go without saying that a shark on land is unquestionably dangerous to humans,” and “Blah, blah, blah, ‘late-stage capitalism.’” There’s much more than that, but those are the ones that I can actually remember off the top of my head.
That’s way larger than what bull sharks in real life can actually grow to. Most bull sharks can only grow up to 2.4 meters, or 8 feet long, and 2.25 meters, or 7 feet, with females ♀︎ growing larger than males ♂︎. The largest bull sharks recorded have been around 11 feet or 3.5 meters, and 13 feet or 4.0 meters. So, real life bull sharks don’t get anywhere close to being 30 feet. This is just a thing for this game. And this Mega form is the one that you have when you finally defeat Scaly Pete, and some of the other more difficult bosses in the game, some of the more difficult APEX predators.)
But, the fun doesn't stop there because if you purchase the DLC expansion pack, Truth Quest 🔎 or the APEX Edition which comes with the base game and all DLC included, you get an additional shark adventure 🦈 to sink your teeth into. In the Truth Quest 🔎 expansion, our plucky shark protagonist—who doesn’t have a name BTW, she’s just referred to as the Bull Shark—finds herself in a neo-noir detective story where she discovers a top secret underwater research facility 🤫💦 called Plover Island, “Site P,” where they have been experimenting on the local wildlife, creating some irradiated mutants using radioactive chemicals ☢️. She takes it upon herself to destroy the facility’s technology, and fight the hunters that defend the facility, as well as new wildlife that she never encountered before, and the irradiated mutants created at Plover Island that have abilities like bioelectricity ⚡️, bone armor, shadow set, and the ability to emit radiation ☢️.
But in so doing, the shark accidentally releases the new apex predator, a mutant mosasaur-like creature called MOLOCH, which threatens to upset the natural order. So, she must undo her mistake, and set things right by killing MOLOCH and saving Port Clovis’s local underwater ecosystem 💦. Luckily, she’s been mutated herself, and has become the Atomic Shark ☢️, a new irradiated mutant form that allows her to emit radiation ☢️ like Godzilla. It also changes her appearance to resemble more of a hammerhead shark than a bull shark like she actually is after becomes irradiated and mutates into the Atomic Shark ☢️. So, she’s more than tough enough to take down MOLOCH, and save her home.
(This is the poster for the APEX Edition of Maneater, which has the Truth Quest 🔎 DLC already included. As you can see this poster shows the shark in its mutated irradiated Atomic form ☢️, shooting some radiation ☢️ from its mouth just like Godzilla. Only the Atomic Shark ☢️’s atomic breath ☢️ is green instead of blue like Godzilla’s typically is. She also has a more hammer-shaped head like a hammerhead shark. Below her in the water 💦 is who I can only assume is MOLOCH, the main antagonist and final boss of the Truth Quest 🔎 DLC.)
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Introduction to APEX Tiger Shark Boss in Maneater (2020) 🦈
If there was one
The living garbage disposal of the ocean, the Tiger Shark.
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