Whether carnivores or herbivores, predator or prey,
The society of Beastars is one filled with primal animalistic compulsions and desires.
This social conflicts of Beastars are not purely arbitrary.
They are seemingly, in a very literal way, baked into the brains of these characters.
[smash]
This is where we get psychological...
...and horny
But the point is made that maybe there can be a better option than straightforward shame, dismissal, and ostracization;
maybe allowing certain issues to step into the light, to be explored meaningfully and treated with care,
might offer something that a deviant label never could.
So given Beastar's animated adaptation has currently only covered around the first 50 or so chapters of the story,
I guess there's still a ton of ground to cover here.
I also haven't even touched on major elements of the story,
like what the hell the "beastars" even are or my best boy Louis.
He's a cutie,
He's my best friend,
and he's racist.
[whoosh]
Folks...
I failed you...
This video was supposed to open with a very funny joke.
It was going to abruptly cut to a shot of me wearing a latex duck mask
and I was gonna make a joke about becoming a furry.
Sadly, I only made the eBay order like four business days before filming this so all I have is this
[small sigh]
[small sigh]x2
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry...
I'm sorry.
[Beastars opening ("Wild Side" by Ali)]
So instead, I'm just gonna throw up a spoiler warning here and say
Hey guys!
How about that teenage love story turning into mobster crime fiction crossed with Shonen anime?
How about them Jojo stands? How about a fucking whale?
So when we last left off, I went over the first major plot of the popular manga/anime series Beastars.
If you didn't watch it,
You probably should so you understand everything I'm talking about today
But I essentially took a look at the story up to the end of the first season of the anime and came to some conclusions
about some of the things I thought the story had to say.
Then I realized, in an insomniac haze with the sun rising beside me,
5,000 words deep with ten more pages of notes, that what I had to say probably
went beyond what could be covered in one video.
At least without having to compromise my upload schedule, or my precious sponsorships.
(more on that later...)
So I'm back, fresh and ready to talk more about Beastars
and now actually pronounce Louis the right way...
by which I mean the wrong way, because the letter S is clearly right there in the name.
Still calling him Legosi though, and there's nothing you can do about it.
And now you get to feel superior to those anime only plebs who don't get to watch this video because of spoilers.
If you'd like to laugh with them in the comments, I'll give you a brief moment to do so now
Anyway today we get to talk about such narrative developments as:
Legosi meeting a giant snake cop who promotes him to the rank of chief murder investigator,
Legosi teaming up with the panda Gouhin to become a masked vigilante,
high school golden boy Louis dropping out to become a local mob boss and trying to live life as a-
the school gets segregated due to widespread fear-mongering about-
Haru moves away to college and is forced to grapple with whether her relationship with Legosi can really work out,
the black market engages in some get out shit,
Legosi discovers the school murderer and trains to become strong enough to take him on,
Legosi summons bugs!
Legosi's Grandfather turns out to be a komodo dragon
who worked as a government agent alongside a super-spy horse named Yahya
Who takes Legosi under his wing to investigate a psychotic Leopard gazelle hybrid
N A M E D  M E L O N
We learn more about the mysterious past of the carnivore-herbivore society
The war that took place before the story began and may have set the stage for the social and political tensions the story begins with
Bill adopts a baby bird
and of course...
[Beastars opening ("Wild Side" by Ali)]
Before we start though
Housekeeping!
Remember a few seconds ago when I mentioned sponsorships?
Here's Skillshare!
So this month I decided to learn about productivity
because my life is a mess and I need help
Lucky for me, Greg McKeown had a class on just such a thing over on Skillshare
But what is Skillshare you may ask?
Well Skillshare is an online learning tool used by millions of creators across a variety of disciplines
offering classes on subjects from art, design, video production and more.
With 2020 rolling by at a frankly frightening pace,
Skillshare is rolling out to more and more classes for users to enjoy and lucky for us
They partnered with my channel to offer some exclusive deals to try out the service.
If you use the link down in the description,
You and the other first 500 people to click will get two free months of Skillshare premium membership,
making an annual subscription less than ten bucks a month.
A pretty great deal for all the classes they offer
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But don't take my word for it
Check out classes like Greg's and more by clicking the link down below and getting lost in your own creativity.
So in my last video I wound up concluding that Beastars is pretty much an examination of deviance.
A story looking at the many different ways society shapes and conditions the acceptable and unacceptable
mostly using abstract metaphors that don't tie the setting to any specific social issue.
Because they're cowards and they can't just say the furries are gay.
With that in mind, I'd think it makes sense for this video to be more a meditation on the many ways
this nature versus nurture,
society versus individual, stuff manifests over the course of the story.
And to do so I figure I'll structure this video on a character by character basis.
That gives me the opportunity not only to talk about a few characters who didn't get the spotlight last time,
But hopefully go over some of these specific themes and ideas
I think their particular narratives delve into.
And oh Christ is there a lot to talk about with our terrible wolf child.
[Beastars opening ("Wild Side" by Ali)]
A big part of what makes Legosi so fitting as the protagonist for a story like Beastars
is how he constantly forces us to re-examine one of the main questions of the narrative.
In how it legislates and conditions it's animal world,
is the Society of Beastars just or unjust?
As I went over before I think the first act of the story does a good job of setting up that question
Legosi does have dangerous, potentially deadly impulses.
And as a carnivore, he's not alone in that.
In fact the reality that carnivores regularly satiate their desires with occasional illegal meat consumption
is revealed to be basically an open secret as the story goes on,
and that's on top of regular predation incidents by local mobs
swept under the rug in the name of easing social tensions.
Author Paru Itagaki pretty much all but shoves it in the audience's face that there are justifiable reasons to
distrust carnivores, and to treat them differently.
And then at the same time there is Legosi,
shocked and disgusted by this behavior in carnivores
Ultimately set on wholeheartedly rejecting that part of society and of himself.
In many ways Legosi winds up hating carnivores,
something others of his species are quick to pick up on,
and so that is essentially the wager the entire story hinges on
Can Legosi overcome his primal urges and by extension
prove definitively that the society of Beastars is unjust?
This is where his story continues following the end of the animes first season
with what I've dubbed the "celibate Legosi arc"
So what you might not expect coming out of where the story left off
is how little time Legosi spends with Haru in these preceding chapters.
Pretty rapidly the plot diverges from a love story about a rabbit and a wolf
to a kind of Rocky training montage.
And according to my notes here, it is
Sick as hell
[ Doom ("At Doom's Gate" by Bobby Prince)]
Legosi discovers Riz, the carnivore who murdered and ate Tem,
and sets off the entire chain reaction of this story,
and in response, Legosi downplays all other life obligations,
school, friends, relationships in a tireless effort to personally defeat him and by extension,
to finally defeat the carnivorous urges inside of himself
This is the "who killed Tem?" plot.
See when I talked about Beastars' commentary on normative and deviant behaviors in my last video,
Something I pointed out was how frequently we're shown one of the primary ways this divide gets upheld,
internalized shame and resentment.
To make individuals conform to a highly restrictive set of behaviors,
It's far more effective to convince them to police themselves than to try to police them directly.
That's the case in our world, and it would be doubly the case in a world where the people you're talking about are
literally giant meat eating monsters designed to consume you.
so oftentimes that's what happens
Carnivores either privately indulge, self medicating their desires without ever really being open about themselves,
or implode,
engaging in acts of self hatred and self-harm in an attempt to kill a part of themselves they know they can't reveal.
Legosi is the latter, and exploring the reasons and ripple effects of this mentality is what this arc revolves around.
It's an examination of a mindset that leads people to misguidedly boil down complex societal grievances
onto individuals and individual choices.
That's right, it's the Jordan Peterson arc
"the horrors that accompany loss of faith in the idea
*pause*
of the individual"
In this case, all of Legosi's internalized self resentments, he projects onto Riz
As we discover, this isn't entirely unwarranted.
After all Riz does serve as a kind of dark mirror to Legosi's own internal narrative.
A hypothetical alternate universe Legosi who indulged in killing and consuming Haru at the start of the story.
And much like with his animosity towards Bill earlier in the plots,
It's the underlying feeling that Riz is in some ways represents
Legosi's darkest urges that propels him to take him down.
It's for this reason that Legosi sets himself on a pretty unusual training regimen for someone like himself
He dedicates himself to a grueling exercise regime organized by Gouhin,
but at the same time, attempts to wean himself off of eating or desiring meat entirely
While Gouhin insists that it's just not possible for a carnivore like him to get
meaningfully stronger without indulging in meat consumption,
Legosi steadfastly refuses with the claim that by doing, so he'd be a hypocrite,
As someone whose entire motivation is preserving the safety of herbivores.
And this has some extremely unexpected physical effects.
Most notably Legosi's realization that while his body has become much stronger than the average wolf's,
his attempts to train his brain to no longer desire meats
have left him totally incapable of making use of his biting force,
usually a wolf's most important means of attack
In changing everything from his appearance to lifestyle to even deeper desires,
there's the overwhelming feeling that Legosi is distorting himself.
What becomes apparent is that while before Legosi announced he would fight to change society
So he and Haru could be together,
this isn't really what he'd wound up doing.
Instead he fought to maintain society exactly as it was,
and instead direct all change to himself
To turn himself into nothing more than a tool to maintain social order.
He cleaned his room bucko.
So Legosi decides that the best way for him to fix society
is to conform to an exact image of what he was told he should be.
He doesn't care if, as Gouhin points outs,
The reality is that even status quo figures like cops and soldiers still subtly indulge in meat-eating on the side
He wants to follow the principles instilled in him to the letter
and I think there's no better way for this decision to have culminated
than with Legosi projecting all of his issues with society
onto his own perceived shadow, A severely mentally ill bear
[Beastars opening ("Wild Side" by Ali)]
In the world of Beastars a legal mandate has been set on bears specifically,
forcing them to take strength restraining drugs
to calm the fears of animals who see bears as off-putting and intimidating.
These drugs are harsh with many side effects
Including severe lethargy, fatigue, headaches, and difficulty sleeping
on top of being a strong mood destabilizer.
In a desperate bid to cover all this up Riz tries to use honey as a kind of makeshift self regulator
So to everyone around him he's seen as a quiet, cuddly, honey-loving bear
while secretly harboring deep feelings of depression and isolation.
This all changes when he opens up to Tem, an affable alpaca student and fellow member of the drama club.
For a while, Riz no longer feels the need to consume honey
simply by being able to open up to someone close to him, to feel seen and heard,
Is like an immediate weight being lifted off his shoulders.
All of this, until the morning he stops taking his pills
From the very moment he does so, his exact fears are realized.
Tem is unnerved and immediately tries to distance himself from Riz.
Riz tries to stop him, and in the process accidentally grazes Tem's arm.
Tem responds with the last phrase Riz ever wanted to hear,
"You carnivores are nothing but monsters"
Riz's support network collapses and his reality is broken and you know the rest
Riz's story is one we've all kind of seen before in media
one that looks back on someone the story has identified as a monster
and examines all the factors that led them to their monstrosity
What's worth noting here is what Itagaki chose to focus on
what boils down to a chain reaction that began at a societal level
Riz attacks Tem because Tem rejects him as a shoulder to cry on.
Riz needed that shoulder to cry on because of his feelings of isolation and alienation.
He had those feelings in large part due to the drugs he had been forced to take
which restricted him both physically and mentally.
And he'd been forced to take those drugs because of you guessed it,
society
*clown horn*
Specifically a societal perception that without them,
Riz would be too dangerous to take part in the social order.
Now you can skip as many links in this chain as you want.
In fact if you went immediately from
Society believes bears are too inherently dangerous without the drugs to
Riz stops taking the drugs and then kills Tem,
It gives you an incredibly straightforward answer to the question of why all this happened.
Skipping over any ways society may have failed Riz in the first place,
we conclude it all happened either because he as an individual failed,
or because this is just the fate of biological reality.
Of course Legosi desperately wants it to be the former.
He doesn't want it to be fate because then he too would be tied to it.
In their final confrontation, Legosi ultimately comes to a few realizations.
Firstly he admits to himself what's already been expressed here,
that much of his burning hatred for Riz was born less out of disgust for Riz himself,
but more out of his own internalized hatred for his carnivorous impulses.
Without the love and care of those around him, Legosi's story could have been identical.
As a result of the drugs and his treatment by those around him,
Riz was left alone with his increasingly disturbed thoughts.
The tragedy is in the various systemic failures to do anything about it beforehand.
Building off that realization Legosi comes to an even greater epiphany,
that his carnivore side itself is not something so deplorable.
In reply to Riz's remark that carnivores have claws and fangs to prey on other animals,
Legosi poses an alternative answer,
that rather carnivores have claws and fangs to protect the ones they love.
His carnivorous nature, his carnivorous drive,
are not the inherently shameful things he was trained to think of them as
Just as well, they can be a tool to keep others safe,
precisely as he chooses to do by taking on Riz.
Only now, he's not doing this to defeat his inner carnivore
He's doing it simply to prove that his more hopeful view of how carnivores can integrate in this society isn't so misguided.
This culminates in Legosi doing probably the most thematically fitting thing
he could have done after having such a change of heart,
he finally eats meat, only in this case both consensually, and with good reason.
Yep, it's it's consensual vore
Consensual vore folks
Knowing his friend has no chance of winning the fight against Tem's killer,
Louis ultimately offers up his own leg to give Legosi that last bit of strength he needs to fight on
I know that sounds incredibly weird,
but it's honestly presented as this very touching beautiful moment, and I think it actually works.
Listen Beastars ain't the real world.
I went over all this in the last video,
but I'd be careful about the extent to which we try to imprint too much real-world logic to a story that
really goes out of its way not to be analogous to any specific real world issues.
Comparisons can be drawn and oh, I'll be drawing them,
But I don't think Beastars is saying anything about the validity of consensual cannibalism here.
What it's more an observation of, in my view, is the idea that new forms of relationships
can be found in what may otherwise seem like almost biologically necessary antagonisms.
Think back to old, pseudo-scientific remarks about how
"everyone prefers to be with their own race"
"Men and women just can't get along"
The kind of vague appeals to biological essentialism
that got racists examining skull shapes and gays banned from the military.
"Carnivores and herbivores can't get along"
"That's just the way they're built"
Itagaki offers us plenty of reasons to be led to believe this is true.
A few chapters after this we'd even get a subplot involving Haru's college friend getting her face eaten off
after rushing into a relationship with an overly enthusiastic lion.
This stuff is not rare nor, even that uncommon.
But in the end, Legosi proves what he ultimately set out to do,
that it is not a foregone conclusion.
He shows that not only could there be a way for carnivores beyond simply suppressing large chunks of who you are,
but maybe a system where carnivores are conditioned this way
is actually a big part of why these conflicts keep repeating.
Maybe even while acknowledging the full reality of carnivores and their desires,
up to and including them eating meat,
there's still a chance for something constructive.
Something built not out of fear and dominance, but unexpectedly empathy and compassion.
Legosi abandons his attempts to reach a peaceful quiet life simply by conforming to a toxic status quo
and instead turns his attention to a new question.
Fully accepting himself as a misfit who doesn't quite fit within society,
what new way of life could he find that's right for him?
Okay, I think that's enough on Legosi for now.
Let me just just spin the wheel here and
Ho ho ho ho!
[USSR Anthem]
How do I talk about Louis?
*gunshots*
Well for starters,
He's a bigoted abrasive bourgeois snob who's also
somehow one of the best characters in Beastars.
I don't make the rules folks.
Where Beastars winds up taking Louis as a character is probably one of the most unexpected
and brilliant things to come out of the manga
Long story short, Louis joins a lion mafia as an opportunistic businessman
and somehow comes out of it...
...woke.
As a contrast to Legosi's time spent idealistically searching for some new paradigm of carnivore society,
Louis starts off here the epitome of a pragmatist.
A young man trying to build an empire to call his own and find his own source of power
by any means necessary.
Even if it includes engaging in black market trade with the meat of his own kind.
See even from the beginning Louis has had many of the same anxieties
about the limits of his biological reality as Legosi,
albeit from kind of the opposite perspective.
Well all this time Legosi's anxiety is centered around being seen as some kind of intimidating bloodthirsty monster,
Louis' main concern is seeming,
well, frail.
A thin framed red deer these worries would justifiably be on his mind regardless,
but two things strongly accelerate the concerns,
Louis' future and his past.
For much of his life Louis has had his entire life road map essentially planned out for him.
His father is a mega rich CEO of a large corporation.
Louis eventually will inherit the family business as well as the family fortune.
He will also, ideally, become the next beastar.
Wait, have I even said what beastars are yet?
So basically they control the world.
It's like a-
it's like the world or-
They-
they control-
they're just a bunch of animals that control the world.
That's the beastars
They're just animals
they control-
On the other hand where Louis was set to end up is certainly not where he'd originally began.
As it's revealed towards the end of his first arc,
Louis is not actually the biological son of his father Oguma,
despite them sharing the same species.
Rather Louis was an orphan set to be sold as infant deer meat on the black market
Before being plucked and chosen to act as heir to his adoptive father's fortune.
In simple terms, Louis has lived life on the top and on the bottom,
as a defenseless child to prey to the whims of whatever hungry carnivore comes passing through,
and as a man set to become one of the next great world leaders.
What all of this ultimately means is that, though he meets Legosi on a certain intersection of alienation,
He has a far more nuanced and complex understanding of something we don't really get from other main characters...
C L A S S
[USSR Anthem]
Particularly jumpy, commie viewers of my channel
might have noticed a bit of an avenue for Marxist analysis
When I pointed out Legom's subplot, selling her eggs for school cafeteria consumption.
She is essentially both the worker and the means of production.
And on further analysis, we can see how this crops up in a lot of different contexts in Beastars.
One later subplot for instance,
centers around a group of cow employees at a milking factory,
and their issues are being forced to take debilitating drugs which caused them to produce more milk.
The struggle, as pointed out by producer Nicola,
is that they wind up only being seen by upper management as suppliers,
effectively treated the same as meat, simply a means to an end to get a product.
And then there's the literal meat,
people, often times children, who offer up their bodies willingly or otherwise to be put for sale in the black market.
This is how Louis started his life and it's a world he dives into headfirst with the Shishigumi mob arc
"Do your best to struggle in the shallow light. I'm going to fight my battles differently"
This is what Louis announces on dropping out from school,
and beginning his business relations with the ruthless black market crew, the Shishigumi mob
What Louis is looking for more than anything else is an opportunity to achieve strength, true strength
and as the son of an affluent billionaire, he knows the real way to get there,
capital.
Louis' plan is simple,
he will exploit the very thing he felt so ashamed of,
the reality of his relatively soft, frail, herbivore body,
to become the new face of the fearsome Shishigumi crew,
and open up new business relations that might not otherwise have been possible.
Where otherwise the Shishigumi would have issue building connections with the often skittish market workers,
and especially the more upmarket clients,
now there is Louis, a well-spoken unintimidating deer to help sell the crew and their underhanded dealings.
This involves anything from the sale of herbivore meats to even the aforementioned get out shit,
with carnivores offering up their body parts to be sold as cure-alls
and aphrodisiacs by elderly mega-rich herbivores.
It is in many ways
The furthest thing we could imagine from Legosi's own perspective.
Not only is Louis fully accepting all of the harshest realities of the carnivore-herbivore society,
He is actively promoting and profiting from it.
Yet from all this, Louis comes to his own kind of epiphany.
See the thing is, what Louis decides to do with the criminal Shishigumi
is actually not that different to what he was being prepared to do with the world-leading beastars.
He was being primed to become a new face of high ranking government.
To become a new representative to help sell social and economic policies to the public
as we saw even very early on in the story and is alluded to throughout,
many of these policies are deeply oppressive and deeply questionable.
Forced drug usage to quell social unrest,
restrictions on interspecies marriage,
segregation,
and as we saw from the-
As we saw from the lion mayor, this even includes permissiveness towards kidnappings and murders
if it becomes politically expedient to do so.
and that would be Louis' job, to be the new friendly face selling these things to the public.
Now obviously that isn't to say Louis is ever entirely comfortable with his actions.
Most symbolic of this is his keeping up appearances by faking enjoyment of consuming meat,
even if in reality it's something that's slowly killing him from the inside
but once again,
This is him at his deepest state of nihilistic pragmatism,
fully resigned to the idea that there's evil all around him and he is powerless to change it.
"Winners and losers... That's all there is to it"
Co-ed Juno cries out to him that how he lives his life isn't up to society
and at the time, this is a notion he barely entertains.
One realization changes all of this,
Louis realizes he likes carnivores.
As I've said one of the most immediate apparent things about Louis' character is that he's a bigot
This is kind of expected given his initial mindset of simply following whatever status quo truths he's been handed.
Realizing that somehow, despite this, Louis feels a kind of camaraderie with these lions,
completely changes his perspective.
The epiphany he comes to is that despite the profound differences between himself and the Shishigumi,
in everything from biology to life experience,
There is still a strange kind of bond that unites him to the mob.
They have all been used as tools of a system.
They have all been treated, essentially, as meat
Whether that's as the product, or as the salesman,
It's an experience that rings true for all of them.
Louis realizes through his experiences with the Shishigumi that a new kind of solidarity is possible,
class solidarity.
"Coexistence and co-prosperity is achieved through mutual conflict"
Ironically Louis' mobster subplot winds up arguably making a way stronger case
for peaceful coexistence between carnivores and herbivores than Legosi's.
Because while Legosi's off trying to debunk bio truths about
the supposed inevitability of carnivores to succumb to their desires,
Louis winds up revealing one of the most effective means to build social solidarity,
mutual alienation, mutual class conflicts
grants Louis a bond between the Shishigumi that immediately
transcends the thin line of racial prejudice he originally lived by.
what he realizes is that despite his grim childhood experiences,
it was never really carnivores as a rule that he disliked.
Legosi demonstrates to him that carnivores are entirely capable of escaping
that monstrous archetype he'd built up in his head.
And now by actually working alongside the exact types of people who would have been putting him up for sale,
he realizes the truth, that all of them were being used as cogs in a machine.
Individuals just looking for some kind of safety, some kind of security,
someplace to belong in a society that hasn't made room for them.
These divisions were largely the result not of inevitable truths,
but of specifically engineered systems and structures.
Yet despite them Louis and the carnivores can find some new way to unite as comrades.
He also ends up with a wolf fetish.
Okay, let's take one more spin on the wheel here and see what we got.
[("Girls Just Want To Have Fun" by Cyndi Lauper)]
Haru is the best. Isn't Haru the best folks? Yeah. Yeah she is
Screw you mean commenters at the bottom of the website I read the unreleased volumes of the manga on.
With the characterization of Haru I think Paru Itagaki really did something special primarily
I think she wrote a character whose dynamic and surprising in the way
I absolutely did not expect when she was first introduced.
And maybe more interestingly,
She was also written in a way that I feel combats one of the most troubling interpretations of Beastars
I've seen in various discussions.
So yes,
today we're going to talk about the pedophilia reading...
Christ
So after I released my last video, I got more than a few comments
recognizing something that had been increasingly on my mind as I finished editing.
and I just kind of shoved it to the back of my head because,
A. I really didn't feel like going back to writing and recording to talk about it, and
B. I don't really want to talk about this at all in a fun media analysis video.
Look folks,
fascism, eugenics, and cults are one thing-
but the thing is, I really don't want to just run through this whole analysis
without ever addressing it because I do think it's legitimate.
So yes,
I'd totally think that Beastars especially based on the reading of it I gave in my last video,
can be Interpreted as a commentary on pedophilia.
Legosi is a large mature looking male with a shameful deviant desire to consume a small female student.
He is quite literally a predator.
I think if you specifically look at Beastars with that reading in mind,
you can find a lot of things to tie those elements together and maybe even something valuable
like as an aside, yeah,
as Beastars directly points to,
I do think it would be good to find ways to allow people suffering from those desires
to be able to speak openly about them and to get some kind of therapeutic help.
especially as an alternative to a lifetime of self-hatred, self harm,
and eventually predation.
But, and this is a big but,
that is not at all my reading of Beastars,
and a big part of the reason why is the depiction of herbivores, and most importantly Haru.
Moe is an extremely common archetype in Japanese media,
especially manga and anime.
Typically what it describes is a character, usually a woman, who is defined as childlike, sweet,
endearing, pure, and virginal.
As TV Tropes surmises, a character that instills in the audience the irrational desire to adore them, hug them,
protect them and comfort them.
"When you're on a chicken bender,
grab a box of chicken tenders!
bok bok bok!"
As she's introduced to us,
That's basically Haru, a cute diminutive student of Cherryton Academy,
maybe a little on the sassy side, but ultimately not too far off that Moe type.
And that's undeniably is how she's immediately perceived by Legosi,
even if it's mixed in with a weird impulse to eat her
He even meets her with a glomp.
That underlying idea of her character continues to persist, right up until the point where Legosi meets her again,
and she immediately propositions him.
In reality Haru does not, in any shape or form,
resemble the pure sweet virginal archetype readers may have expected.
For starters, she's not a virgin.
She is a sexually confident adult who has no issue speaking openly
crudely, and assertively,
even if it makes the men around her feel emasculated or uncomfortable.
Paru Itagaki has herself acknowledged this,
talking about how she'd assumed readers would take an immediate dislike to her for this reason,
and has expressed relief that people understand her even if she isn't a pure or earnest girl.
In fact, Haru's personal struggles are almost entirely defined by the fact that her perceived status as a sweet and innocent little girl
differs so tremendously from how she acts and perceives herself,
Even as the story sees her graduate from high school and head to college.
In her own words, she realized that from a very young age,
the animals around her would always see her as if she were a little baby in need of protection.
She would always be seen as a pitiable defenseless creature,
and pretty much the only time she'd be seen as an adult worthy of respect as an equal
would be while fucking.
Rather than a person deserving of her own bodily autonomy,
She would be seen as something for other people to project their own desires to be seen as masculine and dominant.
I mean, that's basically how Legosi's initial crush on her starts off,
even if it grows into something much deeper later on
I think it would be pretty lazy to try and shrug off the assertion that Beastars
has some fairly creepy undertones by just saying,
"umm well, actually the story clearly states that Haru is 18 which makes her a year older than Legosi anyway,
and uhh well you see in Japan the age of consent is actually even lower, so even if she was under-"
The fact is, at the beginning of the story,
she's still clearly coded that way in her small cutesy design and how she's perceived by Legosi.
What Paru Itagaki managed to do wasn't just make excuses for this unfortunate framing,
but freely embrace it and turn it into some pretty incisive feminist social commentary.
Being infantilized because you're a physically small person is actually an incredibly common problem,
especially with people who present as more traditionally feminine.
My spouse is one of them!
They're three years older than me. Please leave me alone.
Also, they're non-binary, could I get some N-B rights in chat?
In much of the world especially in Japan,
the fetishization of perceived female sexual purity is also a massive problem,
resulting in a lot of slut-shaming, and a lot of bizarre treatment of women in the public eye.
In the Japanese music industry, idol culture gets this particularly bad.
In 2013, popstar Minami Minegishi had to shave her head as an apology to fans
after breaking band rules about not being seen spending time with boyfriends.
This extreme, restrictive social pressure is rife.
And I just think it's really neat how Itagaki managed to take one of the most seemingly
problematic elements of Beastars and turn it into a sincere critique of how
society attempts to package women into convenient boxes with the depiction of Haru.
We get another element of this with the subplot centered around Sebun,
a sportswear company employee who winds up living next door to Legosi.
She too is largely infantilized by her mostly carnivorous co-workers,
nicknamed Lamb-Chan and treated as little more than a cute subordinate by the rest of the staff,
that is until Legosi decides to stand up on her behalf and call out the behavior for what it is.
And in response,
Sebun is utterly frustrated because this is the dichotomy she's so sick of.
The fact that it's only when he speaks up, as a tall mature looking male,
that the situation's taken seriously,
that's part of the problem.
It isn't just the fact that casting Sebun in this infantile role was wrong,
It's that, even in addressing it,
yet again that social conditioning of only really taking the tough male figure seriously has to be employed.
With the introduction of Kyuu,
Another small herbivore for Legosi to be weird about,
this time one completely capable of showing him exactly
how wrong he is to treat herbivores as inherently defenseless creatures that need to be protected.
It seems like this is something Itagaki is going to be tackling more head-on as the series reaches its conclusion.
But we're not finished yet, and I have a few closing thoughts
starting...
[Beastars opening ("Wild Side" by Ali)]
The Melon arc is one that is really only beginning to reach its peak at time of writing this video.
So far it's turned out to be the most pointed example I can imagine of that same core theme Beastars is built around.
Where does society end and the individual begin?
Melon is by all accounts
Haru and Legosi's nightmare scenario, a disturbed and psychotic carnivore-herbivore hybrid animal,
supposedly born with none of the appetite for meat, but all of the desire to kill,
or at least that's the mythology that's been built for him.
Is this the inherent fate of a hybrid animal?
Is it the result of his disturbed upbringing?
Is it because of the way he was never given a place in society,
seen as a predator by the herbivore kids and prey for the carnivores?
As of now neither Legosi, Haru, nor the audience have these answers.
But with this, alongside further elaboration of the effects segregation has had on Cherryton school
I think it's plain to see the questions of how society influences behavior will be getting greater and greater focus.
So far it seems to be reinforcing everything we learned from the Riz story.
That in attempts to curtail perceived undesirable behavior in only the most blunt short-sighted ways,
that exact behavior may in fact only be accelerated, and maybe that's partially by design.
Without interaction from carnivores, herbivores quickly become paranoid and distrustful.
While without interaction with herbivores,
carnivores are able to largely ignore real-world considerations of their relationship with meat.
Far from these behaviors being either biologically predetermined or simply a result of individual choices
Itagaki seems to very much be leading towards the idea that
a lot more of this than once assumed stems from specifically chosen institutional structures.
And hey did I mention the revelation that once carnivores and herbivores
lived in absolute harmony for thousands of years prior to a global conflict that may have
actually set the stage for the paradigm of bigotry and mistrust seen in the current day,
casting the entire notion of these behaviors as ingrained and inherent into doubt?
No?
well, yeah.
But folks I think I'm finally all Beastar-ed out for now
So I just want to leave on a few closing notes.
Beastars is so far, really really incredibly good.
I mean I wouldn't be spending an hour talking about like, an Adam Sandler movie I didn't care for.
And I think a big part of why I like it is in its strong desire to really target
bigotry as something structural, not just individual.
Issues arise from complex multifaceted places,
not just singular bad dude showing up to cause trouble,
even if it might seem so from first glance.
The series certainly doesn't shy away from acknowledging more strict,
biological determinist, or individualist positions.
And I think that keeps it from feeling like this extremely heavy-handed sermon,
but really the more I've delved into it, the more I've seen the many ways Itagaki has tried to highlight the
complications and occasional absurdities that form modern-day conflicts
I mean
That's the reason why I'm somehow able to talk about sexism, racism,
mental illness, and class conflict in a series that doesn't often directly address any of those.
It's an incredibly open and inviting resource to introduce people to concepts of alienation and systemic critique
and honestly, if that's something you're interested in doing for others,
there are certainly worse places to start.
For now that's it for me.
But hey, maybe once the series does finally wrap-up
I can go for a triple dip and take one final look at Beastars,
a wild, deviant, furry masterpiece.
And also, I did actually get that duck head delivered on time.
I just said the thing at the start because I'd already written the opening before I did.
[The Jordan Peterson Song ("Goodbye Dr. P" by Philosophy Tube)]
Hey folks, thanks for watching. I hope you enjoyed my deeper dive into Beastars
If you liked the video,
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Other than that I'll see you all next time
Thanks again for watching
Love you all and stay safe.
Oh God damn it, I forgot to talk about Jack again!
