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Like High School, But More So
Thoughts on Beastars by Paru ItagakiCan you believe I’ve never read any manga? Thirty-eight years of nerding, more than half of that as a self-styled otaku, and zero comic books produced in Japan! The anime adaptation of Monster got me thinking I was really missing out, so although I first learned of Beastars through a positive review of its anime adaptation, I decided to check out the manga, instead.

The novelty of the medium definitely colored my experience. As a work produced by a single artist, Beastars offers a singularity of vision that feels fresh even compared to American comics made under similar circumstances1. It also feels authentically personal. Creator Paru Itagaki embraces the book as a platform by breaking the third wall (via notes scribbled into the margins), asking for feedback, and celebrating achievements (e.g. colored pages and the anime–more on that in a minute).
These may be pretty typical manga conventions, novel only to a newbie, but Itagaki’s personality also comes through in more distinctive ways. Her line work truly feels like a labor of love from a single hand: frenetic and almost harried in early chapters and increasingly confident as the story unfolds. While this almost certainly reflects the experience of a developing artist taking on her most high-profile project, it also beautifully compliments the development of the story’s protagonist.
Similarly, while the writing revels in many shōnen tropes2, the author undermines them in ways that speak to personal experience. She pens a heroine who is “not a pure or earnest girl”3. She legitimizes her hero’s depravity. She subtly suggests that her Big Bad is himself a victim, not of some supernatural force, but of hormonal imbalance and societal pressure. By and large, the banal outweighs the novel, but the subversions are memorable.
The most compelling conflict, though (and the one that drew me in) is the will-they-won’t-they between Haru and Legoshi. The familiar tension between the awkward young adults is compounded by their fantastical anatomies and instincts. Legoshi the wolf wants to sleep with Haru the rabbit, but he’s also wracked with anxiety over his overwhelming urge to eat her. Although their courtship runs through the entire series, the provocative aspects of are resolved in the first arc. I’m not sure Itagaki should have gone deeper (things get pretty weird in those 50 chapters), but for the majority of the series, the romance is far more conventional. It’s by turns sweet and spicy, but it’s a far cry from the fever dream I signed up for.
From there, the series meanders through a handful of story arcs of differing necessity. If nothing else, these arcs continue the exploration of identity using both human terms (e.g. gender, class, race, sexuality) and animal terms (e.g. predation, species, insect/animal, land-creature/sea-creature, venomous/non-venomous). While the animal traits often serve as metaphors for the human ones, the correlations are tough to pin down. That fluidity heightens the uneasy politics of the world, but overall, it’s kind of a mess. This might be a weakness of a medium that offers such a direct link to the artist: Itagaki avowedly4 didn’t plot the complete story prior to writing. It’s no wonder the series is peppered with abandoned concepts and inconsistent metaphors5. Were it not for two compelling new characters (Leano and Melon), I’m not sure I would have stuck around for the finale.

Meanwhile, the anime adaptation appears to be smoothing out some of the rougher edges. The first few episodes are smartly streamlined, and consensus on the Internet suggests that the subsequent revisions are pretty subtle. My intellectual curiosity is spent, though; not even the gorgeous animation can motivate me to analyze the adaptation. Considering the way I got here, it’s kinda ironic that I wish I’d just watched the anime. That’s what I’d recommend to anyone who’s managed to read this far, though, because when Beastars manages to connect, it hits hard.
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My sense is that Japan’s plurality of publishers and diversity of readership promote experimentation, but that take is so ill-informed that it probably doesn’t even warrant a foot note on a blog that nobody reads. ↩︎
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You’ve got your silly plot points, cartoonish depictions of strength and wealth, and more dares to be badass than you can shake a stick at–all saturated in melodrama. ↩︎
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“Paru Itagaki’s First Long Interview”, Beastars chapter 69 ↩︎
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“My scatterbrained mind was on a life of its own in [volume 13], after I got Legoshi out of his school and wondered how the heck I was going to keep the story moving. […] I was feeling so constantly excited about [volume 15] that I was asking myself, ‘How is this manga gonna turn out?!’ Or so I remember.” ↩︎
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Modern rock music videos commonly eschew coherence in favor of vibes, making Beastars particularly well-suited for exploration in that medium. ↩︎