Hello! I have been a big fan of BEASTARS for a while. Purely enjoy it. Something started to notice in Legosi is that he is able to deal with his own problems well (sometimes), but when it comes to Haru or others he is a little on edge or oblivious to everything. To what I believe, I think he doesn’t know how to deal or fix it in a way, so he does his best to try to fix it the way he thinks is the right way. I know he is growing and learning, I find it humorous 😊 what do you think?
Totally–the Legosi the Solipsist post is really all about this exact thing–he thinks a lot, but he’s not good at reading people. When he tries to predict other people’s thoughts or behaviors he tends to fill in his own assumptions and opinions.
I think one reason it’s caused problems for him is that he hasn’t met very many different types of people, especially at Cherryton. His departure from school has really helped him in that respect–he’d never met someone who didn’t appreciate his chivalry before Sebun, he’d never met someone from another culture until Zaguan, he’d never met someone completely malicious until Melon, etc.
He does often get hurt as a result of this, but I think in the long term he benefits from it–this moment in chapter 168 is a great example. His first interactions with Bill were brutal, painful, leaving lasting scars. But he came away understanding Bill, and the knowledge helped protect him.
I think that may be part of why the manga’s constantly featuring weird new characters rather than developing the existing ones–a main theme of the story is how we benefit from building relationships with people who are different from us.
So, at this point I have more followers on this blog than any social media account I’ve ever had. It’s also the only fandom-oriented account I’ve ever run, so I’m not totally surprised.
One thing that has been surprising/interesting is...half the time someone likes one of the posts, they then go down and like a dozen more. Even the oldest posts seem to have more and more notes on ‘em each time I check. People seem to like binge-reading the posts.
Which is cool, and humbling! Like I mentioned back in my very first post, I made this blog because my desire to talk about Beastars far outstripped anyone I know. So I hope other people are getting something similar out of my little webzone
hey, i'm sorry if this is something that's already been discussed, but i just got into beastars recently, and i was just wondering something. now that we know about chimeras, and that we probably saw louis' during the second play, i was just wondering if anyone theorized about why he had wings? did i just miss/forget something? sorry for the long ask, btw
I apologize for sitting on this ask for so long–I’ve been wondering what I can say about it.
The imaginary chimeras have been another one of those things that have had a name put to them very recently, and it’s hard to tell at this point how important they’re meant to be to the story. Are chimeras and how they manifest with different characters a big part of the narrative? Or are they just some shonen kung fu shit Paru thought would be cool? Legosi’s duel with Melon may yield some answers. Or maybe not.
I actually had not noticed the moment with Louis you’re referring to, but it is interesting. My first thought is to connect it back with the Adler “angel of death” imagery. The Adler stuff is interesting on its own, I think–the narrative seems to parallel Legosi and Haru’s story at the beginning, but also diverges in significant ways. Now we have several characters who have adopted the Adler mantle under different circumstances, even recently, so it seems like it’s still intended to be important.
“Wait and see” probably seems like a copout of an answer, but at the very least we have lines to think along and keep in mind as the story moves forward.
So, I specifically already called this moment out in this longer post, but I wanted to give it its own post because it’s one of my favorite moments in the whole movie.
On a first viewing, the moment where Nick Wilde steps up to defend Judy and save her job is the big moment in the movie where we learn that maybe he’s not such a bad guy.
But the thing is, he already told us who he is--here:
When they’re running from the jaguar, bear in mind Judy’s condescended to him, blackmailed him, and put him in deadly danger twice. The worst thing he’s done to her is finesse her out of fifteen bucks. So he’d be forgiven for booking it out of here at the earliest opportunity.
But, again, worth noting that he reaches the tram car and holds the door for her.
This idiot! He sees she can’t make it, the jaguar is coming right at him, she even yells at him to GO.
The next part goes by quickly and is a little open to interpretation. The car starts moving again and he loses his grip. If he’d had another couple of seconds, would he have taken her advice and ditched her? We can’t know for sure.
But Nick’s established in the movie as a limber and agile guy, and someone who can think very fast on his feet. And if you watch the scene, he hangs onto the door for seven full seconds.
He had time to get in if he wanted to. He was trying to hold the car for Judy.
Judy and Nick are similar kids. But while Judy’s big Want is to “make the world a better place,” Nick’s is...to be somebody’s teammate. To be trusted, and to express loyalty. To be someone you’d want in your corner.
And, despite everything, even before he’s “redeemed,” he’s already doing it.
“I’m not gonna leave you behind, that’s not happening.”
I'm dying to know what's your opinion about Kyuu and what she brings to the table. Cos I feel that she has a lot of screentime and development lately, way more than Haru. I don't even know where Haru's place is in this arc anymore. Thank you for your wonderful blog.
Thank you!
My initial, personal reaction was that I didn’t like the character, didn’t like the teen sex comedy scenarios she was putting Legosi in, didn’t like the way she was drawn (I like her face tho). And yeah, I would rather see Haru and Louis’s stories delved into further, or even side characters like Zaguan get expanded roles, rather than introducing whole new characters to occupy Legosi’s time.
But…my rule with this blog is to reserve judgement, as much as I can–Beastars loves to throw curveballs, it’s been doing it since the beginning, and things have been happening so fast lately that it’s hard for me to try to figure out what’s going on. For example, I had made a bunch of progress on trying to tease out what we’re supposed to make of the parallels between Gosha’s and Legosi’s lives, like did Gosha make mistakes that Legosi is supposed to avoid? What do we take away from the amount of tragedy he faced? And then Paru dropped a chapter where Ya7ya was like “man this guy sure is living his best life” and my whole thesis got knocked off-axis.
This isn’t really a criticism, for what it’s worth–as one of my favorite bloggers likes to say, the ending is the conceit. So until Beastars is officially over, I’m not sure we can tease out what Kyuu means to the story and why she was included (or whether it was a valuable addition). She seems to be mirroring Haru’s despondency and lack of self-worth in interesting ways, though it’s obviously led her in different directions. So while I haven’t entirely enjoyed what we’ve seen of her so far, I’m definitely interested to see what role she turns out to play.
If Legosi eats her I’m going to be real fuckin mad, though.
I tend not to be critical of Beastars (as a personal choice for this blog, not because I think it’s above criticism). But I agree with everything said here.
In particular with respect to playing to the male gaze--as a red-blooded Mostly Straight Guy, every time Paru’s tried to draw a Sexy Lady my reaction’s kinda been “haha...uhhh...”
I actually found it refreshing to have a story so much about sexuality that wasn’t remotely titillating, leaving the focus entirely on the psychodrama of sex and relationships. But Kyuu's design seems to suggest Paru isn’t NOT trying to make me horny, she’s just not great at it. So, lol.
Zootopia Takes: The Power of Really Liking Each Other
Our main event, Beastars Takes, will resume soon, but in the meantime I want to talk about one of my favorite movie relationships:
Has this been talked about to death by other people? Yes. But this is my blog and I write it for free so I can do what I want.
Note: this is not a shipping post--this is just an examination of their canonical relationship in the movie and why it rules.
At first glance, this is your typical enemies-to-friends story. I love those. But while the typical arc tends to involve two characters who can’t stand each other, who eventually develop a grudging respect for one another (often through some kind of shared ordeal) and maybe thaw into actual friendliness at the end. Zootopia packs all of that into the first half--by the midway point they are clearly not just allies, but friends, and by the end of the film they’re inseparable.
It’s important to recognize this isn’t just for the hell of it, or just to be cute--the closeness and trust they build is the linchpin of their success in the final moments of the movie.
All the reasons why, after the jump.
Something I talked about in the previous post was the messaging of Zootopia, and I don’t want to rehash it too much here. It’s a movie about prejudice, and the work it takes to overcome it. A key theme (one that it shares with Beastars, incidentally) is that friendships with those who are different from you are hard--but they are worth it.
Part 1: They Hate Each Other! (Right?)
Now...it goes without saying that when these two first meet, they bounce off each other hard. Each is seeing the other at their absolute worst.
Judy can’t stand Nick because he takes every bit of optimism she has about this world and throws it back in her face. She want to use him as a prop in her vision of an equal society, where “not all foxes” are crooks. He laughs at her. He humiliates her. All he has to do is walk away, but he takes his time. He twists the knife.
For his part, Nick sees a laughably ineffectual bunny who condescends to him and threatens him with jail for the crime of...humiliating her. She may not personally be a threat to him, but she wields the institutional power of the ZPD--a power he has plenty of reason to be afraid of--and she does it irresponsibly.
On first viewing, Nick inarguably wins this exchange. He avoids arrest, reads her to absolute filth and leaves her stuck in cement.
And he makes her really sad. Nice!
But, and I don’t pretend to be the first person to have pointed this out, on second viewing it’s obvious he can guess her story so well because it’s basically his story. The only difference, in his mind, is that he’s accepted the reality that he’ll never be allowed to live the life he wants, while she is still vainly pursuing hers.
I don’t know about you, dear reader, but the people I’ve met who have always most pissed me off are the people who remind me of things I hate about myself. The people who seem to embody the flaws I’ve worked to minimize. Nick’s naive hope is what has brought him the most pain in his life. He sees this bunny full of the same naive hope, surmises that she’s facing the same failures he did and yet stubbornly refusing to learn from them. It’s irritating.
Pictured: irritation.
Maybe I am projecting, but if Nick is anything like me, he probably didn’t walk away entirely happy from this exchange. Yes, he “won,” but he was also reminded of everything about himself that he least wanted to think about.
Part 2: They Are Not Very Good at Hating Each Other
So, the thing about Judy is, she is naive. By default, she assumes people are her friend. But she’s not stupid.
Nick assumes she is stupid, not least because she hasn’t wisely given up on her dreams like he has, and...he learns that she maybe not so fun to pick on after all.
So they wind up doing the first part of this enemies-to-friends routine, allies of necessity.
So, naturally, because he is Him, he makes it his mission to torment her.
In fact, we get two whole scenes where all he does he does is watch her struggle and make this face.
The first read of this behavior is that he’s just enjoying the failures of someone he hates. He says as much later. But I would also argue--from a viewer’s perspective--Judy is ridiculously entertaining and charming throughout these encounters. She wears her heart on her sleeve, and it’s hard not to like people like that.
Is there more happening here than just schadenfreude? I won’t pretend to know for sure. But worth considering.
By the time they’re investigating the limousine, his sabotage has diminished into something more like gentle trolling. And you can’t see this face, in context...
...and tell me she isn’t starting to like him, at least a little bit.
He’s also starting to help! By the time they’re past the minor detour of almost being murdered by a mob boss, he’s entirely cooperative, helping her conduct interviews and look for clues. The movie doesn’t call particular attention to this, but it almost did.
Finally, let’s look at Nick’s behavior when they’re being chased by a rabid jaguar. He could have absolutely booked it, with no regard for the cop who was blackmailing him into helping her.
These moments go by so quickly, but they’re hugely revealing of his true character, even before he defends her in front of Chief Bogo.
He picks her up when she falls.
More importantly, when he gets to the skytram, his first instinct isn’t to jump in--it’s to hold the door for her:
He sees she can’t make it, and she even tells him to leave without her. He doesn’t. He holds the door until he can’t anymore, and as a result he’s nearly killed.
Nick is a good boy.
Part 3: They Are Friends Now
She save his life, so he saves her job. This is a key story beat, and it’s a Disney movie, so there’s not a lot of subtlety (except how the specular highlights in Judy’s eyes fade as Bogo asks for her badge--the light literally goes out of her. Go watch).
But it’s such a sweet moment of teamwork--he was contemptuous toward her from the start because she believed in herself. This is the first time she’s simply given up in the whole movie, and he steps up. Because he believes in her now.
And she believes in him! Or, she wants to.
Judy’s supportiveness here is sweet, but it’s also still a little selfish. It’s not that different from their interaction at the ice cream shop, really: she wants to meet a fox who defies stereotypes, who is easy for her to like. Someone who ticks all the boxes to prove her family wrong.
When he starts being more foxy, later--self-identifying as a predator, showing his claws, challenging her--we learn that her supportiveness is conditional.
Am I being too hard on her? Sure. She’s been in bunny country her whole life. She’s new to this and she’s trying. But that’s where she’s at.
But still! They’re friends now. They’re no longer pretending they don’t like each other. Judy’s openly encouraging, Nick is fully in her corner, and we get a few cute sequences where they keep being more and more impressed with each other.
He’s still not above affectionately messing with her, and she’s getting worse at pretending to dislike it.
And he trusts her enough to let her flush him down a toilet...
Which gives us this heartbreaking shot where he thinks she’s drowned. He cares a whole lot about this bunny.
She likes him too! Enough to want to team up on a more permanent basis. This is pretty standard-fare enemies-to-friends stuff now, but considering where we started, and considering they’ve known each other for all of two days? Not bad!
It’s clear this moment means far more to him than it does to her, too. It’s actually taken very little persuading from Judy to get him to step up and be brave and helpful and trustworthy. The fact that he’s turned around and opened up to her so fast suggests he’s been ready for an opportunity like this for his entire life, and never got it. I mean, look at his face.
The foundational flaw in her worldview is still there, though, and it’s about to do almost-irreparable damage to their whirlwind friendship.
Part 5: Fuck!
So Judy gives her press conference, and gives a great example of why police usually answer every question with “the matter is currently under investigation,” or “we’re not prepared to comment further at this time.” Honestly, though, this is on Bogo--I had coworkers who once did some press interviews, and they spent over a week doing media training. They didn’t even break a major kidnapping case. So, you know.
So she repeats some weird race science stuff she assumes is true because someone in a lab coat said it, which is amusingly similar to how race science (or “race realism”) often propagates--people with low-rent doctorates from crappy universities write a bunch of scientifically shoddy material and people say “well, he has a PhD!”
And then Nick has a PTSD flashback? I don’t want to be irresponsible and make an armchair diagnosis, but also...that is absolutely what is depicted on screen.
You’re not immediately “better” after something like this, which is why I cut Nick a bit of slack when he basically blows up their friendship.
Judy...doesn’t get it. It’s completely heartbreaking, because she likes him, and doesn’t understand why he’s mad, and isn’t self-reflective enough to stop and think maybe he has a point. Not until it’s too late. He tests her, and she fails.
Their friendship has always been a little inequal. He’s trusted her with everything, shown her his deepest vulnerabilities. She’s never trusted him completely.
So he leaves.
I don’t want to impugn her professionalism by suggesting she wouldn’t have quit the force if she hadn’t had that friendship-ending fight, but, you know. Maybe.
This is the second time she gives up, and this time he’s not there to pick her up again.
Judy is intensely goal-oriented, and I don’t think she realized what Nick’s friendship meant to her, as the first person in the city who truly believed in her, until it was too late. Judy is sweet and well-meaning but emotional intelligence is not really her strong suit (which is actually cool to see in a female Disney protagonist, imo).
So, while it would have been nice for her to track Nick down immediately and apologize, I think it makes sense for them to spend time apart. Her own self-perception has been shattered, and she needs time to figure out how she went so wrong.
So when she does come back, she delivers one of the best animated apologies I’ve ever seen. Only AtLA compares, in my mind.
Part 6: They Are Much Better Friends Now
Nick forgives her, because of course he does.
(Sidebar--people talk about how he kept her carrot pen the whole time they were apart. He also kept his handkerchief from Ranger Scouts, AND he only wears shirts that match the wallpaper in his mother’s house. He desperately needs a hug.)
Credit to Nick also, who can’t fight and has no police training whatsoever, who has multiple times been almost killed helping her out, now agreeing to help her out again. She’s not even threatening him with jail this time!
We, the viewers, are then rewarded with this great montage of them being best friends.
She’s finally stopped pretending not to be amused by his shenanigans.
(One other sidebar here--Nick is canonically a really gentle character. For all their adventuring, this is only time in the movie he gets physical with anyone: to protect the bunny. Again, he definitely can’t fight and immediately gets smacked across the room. But it’s the thought that counts, right?)
Per the post title, more visual evidence of them really liking each other.
Judy trips on a dead body, and here we get the second time in the movie that Judy tells Nick to leave without her, and he won’t--this time, he refuses explicitly.
Which then gives us the opportunity for the big moment--the culmination of all this care and intimacy and trust.
In order to con Bellwether, she lets him stalk her, and bite her throat. This has been often pointed out, but it’s important--throughout the movie, Judy’s wriggling rabbit nose has been used as a signifier of fear and suspicion. It wriggles when she’s spying on Nick at the beginning. It wriggles like hell when he confronts her after her press conference.
Not here. Doesn’t move. It’s a great, clearly intentional animation choice that tells a close observer (or more likely, a repeat viewer) that she’s completely unafraid.
She trusts him.
I could write a whole other post about how well-scripted this movie is, how every scene is doing half a dozen different things, but the way the personal and the professional come together here, the way the threads of prejudice and friendship and the police case all tie together in this moment. It’s good shit.
This is basically where things end, in terms of character development, but we get a bunch more shots of them clearly adoring each other:
So there it is.
To sum up, certainly not suggesting this movie invented “characters liking each other,” or anything like that. But it goes above and beyond in portraying a friendship that’s not just one born of circumstance, one that’s authentic and unmistakably loving. Characters who enjoy spending time with each other, regardless of what’s going on around them.
I hope everyone is able to experience friendships like that. I absolutely treasure the few I have.
Appendix: The Shipping Thing
I hope I’ve made all this ship-agnostic, which was my intention. I personally like the ship, and I think the reason it resonates with people is because that love and trust and closeness is clearly there, and a romantic relationship creates a lot more easy opportunities for dialing those things up even higher.
I would also argue, if pressed, that the amount of teasing and physicality that happens reads as pretty flirty. If they were humans I knew in real life, I’d definitely think there was something going on there. But I’m an American, where touching and emotional intimacy tends to be read as romantic. Also, animals are a lot more cuddly than humans. So who knows? I think it’s perfectly reasonable to read them as platonic friends until the end of time.
But, one way or another, they love each other a lot. Shout out to this, one of the most emotionally rewarding relationships I’ve ever seen in a cartoon.
So, it sounds like people are largely positive on me doing some Zootopia posts on this blog, and I wanted to talk about this tweet I saw the other day:
I’ll punt on explaining why Beastars isn’t “Dark Zootopia”--that’s a great topic for another post. But I would like to talk about why this popular yet stridently uninformed tweet is so, so wrong. Why the shock collar draft was not better, actually.
And obviously, I’m not writing several pages in reply to a single tweet--this is a take that’s been around since the movie came out, that the “original version was better.” It’s been wrong the whole time.
Let’s talk about why!
Part 1: “Because Disney”
Let’s start with this--the assumption that the film’s creators wanted to make this shock collar story and “Disney” told them to change it.
That’s not how it works.
I try to keep stuff about me out of these posts as much as possible, but just for a bit of background, I’ve worked in the animation industry for about half a decade. I know people at Disney. I have a reasonable idea of how things are there.
There is this misconception about creative industries that they’re constantly this pitched battle of wills between creative auteurs trying to make incredible art and ignorant corporate suits trying to repress them.
That can happen, especially in dysfunctional studios (and boy could I tell some stories) but Walt Disney Animation Studios is not dysfunctional. It’s one of the most autonomous and well-treated parts of the Disney Company.
The director of Zootopia, Byron Howard, isn’t an edgelord. He made Bolt and Tangled. He knows what his audience is, and he’s responsible enough not to spend a year (and millions of dollars in budget) developing a grimdark Don Bluth story that leadership would never approve. It wouldn’t just be a waste of time--he would be endangering the livelihoods of the hundreds of people working under him. Meanwhile, Disney Animation’s corporate leadership trusts their talent. They don’t generally interfere with story development because they don’t need to. Because they employ people like Byron Howard.
Howard and the other creative leads of Zootopia have said a dozen times, in interviews and documentaries, that they gave up on the shock collar idea because it wasn’t working. They’ve explained their reasoning in detail. Maybe they’re leaving out some of the story, but in general? I believe them.
But Beastars Takes, you say, maybe even if Disney didn’t force them to back away from this darker version, it still would have been better?
Part 2: Why Shock Collars Seem Good
I will say this--I completely sympathize with people who see these storyboards and scenes from earlier versions of the movie and think “this seems amazing.” It does! A lot of these drawings and shots are heartbreakingly good, in isolation.
I love these boards. They make me want to cry. I literally have this drawing framed on my wall. Believe me, I get it.
But the only reason we care this much about this alternative draft of Zootopia is that the Zootopia we got made us love this world and these characters. You know what actually made me cry?
Oh, yeah.
So let’s set aside the astonishing hubris of insisting Zootopia’s story team abandoned the “good” version of the story, when the “bad version” is the most critically-acclaimed Disney animated feature in the past SIXTY YEARS.
“But Beastars Takes!” I hear you say. “Critics are idiots and just because something’s popular doesn’t make it good!”
Fair enough. Let’s talk about why the real movie is better.
Part 3: The Message (it is, in fact, like a jungle sometimes)
This type of thing is always hard to discuss, in the main--a lot of people don’t want to feel criticized or “called out” by the entertainment they consume, and they don’t want to be asked to think about their moral responsibilities. But it’s hard to deny that Zootopia is a movie with a strong point of view. Everything else--the characters, the worldbuilding, the plot, grows out from the movie’s central statement about bias.
And the movie we got, with no shock collars, makes that statement far more effectively.
To dive into the full scope of Zootopia’s worldview and politics (warts and all) would be a whole post on its own, so I’ll just summarize the key point of relevance here:
Zootopia's moral message is that you, the viewer, need to confront your own biases. Not yell at someone else. No matter how much of a good or progressive person you consider yourself to be--if you want to stand against prejudice you have to start with yourself.
That’s a tough sell! For that message to land, we need to see ourselves in the protagonist.
Judy’s a good person! She argues with her dad about foxes. She knows predators aren’t all dangerous. She’s not speciesist. Right?
Ah fuck.
Let’s fast-forward to the pivotal scene of this movie. In an unfortunate but inevitable confluence of circumstances, Judy’s own biases and prejudiced assumptions come out, and she shits the bad.
Nick, who’s already bared his soul to her (against his better instincts), is heartbroken. But not as heartbroken as he is a minute later when he tries to confront her about what she’s said, and she makes this face:
Whaaaat? Come on, Nick. I’m a good person. Why are you giving me a hard time?
People like to complain about this scene. That it’s a hackneyed “misunderstanding” trope that could be easily resolved with a discussion. They’re wrong. Nick tries to have a discussion. She blows him off.
This isn’t Judy acting out of character, this is her character. Someone who identifies as Not A Racist, and hasn’t given the issue any more thought. This is not only completely believable characterization (who hasn’t seen someone react this way when you told them they hurt you?) it’s the film’s central thesis!
Yes, Nick somewhat provokes her into reaching for her “fox spray,” and her own trauma factors in there, but she’s already made her fatal mistake before that happens.
(As an aside, people also make the criticism that the movie unrealistically deflects responsibility for racism onto Bellwether and her plot. It doesn’t. All the key expressions of prejudice in the film--Judy’s encounter with Gideon, her parents’ warnings, the elephant in the ice cream shop, Judy’s early encounters with Bogo, Judy's views on race science--exist largely outside of Bellwether’s influence. She is a demagogue who inflames existing tensions, she didn’t invent them. Bogo literally says “the world has always been broken.”)
So, anyway. But we love Judy. She’s an angel. She also kinda sucks! She’s proudly unprejudiced, and when her own prejudice is pointed out to her she argues and doesn’t take it seriously. This is bad, but it’s also a very human reaction. It’s one most of us have probably been guilty of at one point or another.
Look at Zootopia’s society, too--it’s shiny and cosmopolitan, seemingly idyllic. Anyone can be anything, on paper. But scratch too deep beneath the surface and there’s a lot of pain and resentment here, things nobody respectable would say in public but come out behind closed doors, or among family, when nobody’s watching. It’s entirely recognizable--at least to me, someone who lives in a large liberal city in the United States. Like Byron Howard.
Wow, this place is a paradise!
Wait, what’s a “NIMBY”?
Part 4: Why Shock Collars Are Bad
So, with the film’s conceit established, let’s circle back to the shock collar idea. Like I said, it’s heartbreaking. It’s dramatic. It’s affective.
It also teaches us nothing.
If I see a movie where predator animals are subjected to 24/7 electroshock therapy, I don’t think “wow, this makes me want to think about how I could do better by the people around me.” I think “damn that shit’s crazy lmao. that’d be fucked up if that happened.” At a stretch, it reminds me of something like the Jim Crow era, or the Shoah. You know, stuff in the Past. Stuff we’ve all decided couldn’t ever happen again, so why worry about it?
The directors have said this exact thing, just politely. “It didn’t feel contemporary,” they say in pressers. That’s what it means.
If anything, the shock collar draft reifies the mindset that Zootopia is trying to reject--it shows us that discrimination is blatant, and dramatic, and flagrantly cruel, and impossible to miss.
And...that’s not true. If you only look for bias at its most malicious and evil, you’re going to miss the other 95 percent.
The messaging of this “darker version” is--ironically--less mature, less insightful, less intelligent. Less useful. Darker’s not better.
Part 5: Why Shock Collars Are Still Bad
So what if you don’t care about the message? What if you have no interest in self-reflection, or critical analysis (why are you reading this blog then lmao)? What if you just really want to hear a fun story about talking animals?
Well, this is trickier, because the remaining reasons are pretty subjective and emotional.
The creators have said that the shock collar version didn’t work because the viewers hated the cruel world they’d created. They agreed with Nick--the city was beyond saving. They didn’t want to save it.
The creators have said that Judy was hard to sympathize with, not being able to recognize the shock collars for the obvious cruelty they were.
Fuck you, Judy!
But we haven’t seen the draft copies. We haven’t watched the animatics. We have to take their word for it. Anyone who’s sufficiently invested in this story is going to say “well, I disagree with them.” It doesn’t matter to them that they haven’t seen the draft and the filmmakers have. The movie they’ve imagined is great and nobody is going to convince them otherwise.
But the fact remains that the shock collar movie, as written, did not work. And, if behind the scenes material is to be believed, it continued to not work after months and months of story doctoring.
There’s even been a webcomic made out of the dystopian version of Zootopia. It’s clever and creative and well-written and entertaining and...it kind of falls apart. The creator, after more than a little shit-talk directed at Disney, abandoned the story before reaching the conclusion, but even before then the seams were beginning to show. How do you take a society that’s okay with electrocuting cute animals and bring it to a point of cathartic redemption? You can’t, really. The story doesn’t work.
Does that mean people shouldn’t make fanworks out of the cut material? That they shouldn’t be inspired and excited by it? Hell no. This drawing is cute as hell. The ideas are compelling.
But I suppose what I’d ask of you all is--if you’re weighing the hot takes of art students on Twitter against the explanations of veteran filmmakers, consider that the latter group might actually know what they’re talking about.
Sometimes I see bad Zootopia takes like this one getting traction and it makes me desperately wish I’d called this blog “Beastars and also Zootopia takes”
Though maybe there is some meat to dig into about why Beastars is not “dark Zootopia,” nor is it “how Zootopia should have been.”
What do y’all think? Space for occasional Zootopia content here? It’s my first love and I could talk about it forever.
2 of my favorite characters in Beastars are Haru and Gosha. They both have this kinda toxic tendency to identify themselves based on what society label their species like "weak herbivore" or "dangerous reptile". Gosha accepts that and lives his life quietly as he should. While Haru is like "ok, sure, I'm just a trivial being and gonna die anytime soon so why don't just live the hella of my life?". She has come such a long way from that mentality and the lastest chapters just ruined everything.
I don’t know if I would say ruined? I think what the last couple of chapters (including Chapter 167 today) have really clarified is that Haru’s problems aren’t just personal problems, they’re also structural problems with society. She sees herself a certain way because that’s how she’s been told to see herself.
Beastars has always had a huge element of social critique–artists and authors don’t tend to spend a lot of time building a complex fictional society unless they have opinions about how a society should and should not function.We’ve been shown already that Melon is intensifying social divisions and animosity, and if Haru’s view of herself is reflective of society, then it makes sense that would take a bit of a nosedive right now.
On the other hand, I do understand wanting to see her gain more agency as a character and not just be a narrative device. She’s consistently been deprioritized & made very passive which is definitely a bummer.
Welp, looks like we’re talking about Haru again. Sorry, Gosha.
Two warnings up front--one, this is spoiler-heavy for Chapter 166. Two, this is going to contain some frank suicide talk below the jump.
So, one of the enduring struggles for me with Beastars is that it centers a lot of nuanced and often strange emotions. It’s difficult, I imagine, for some of Paru’s intent to make it through the language barrier. As good a job as HCS typically does, it’s hard not to wonder whether I’d see things differently if I was reading the original text.
This has been particularly noticeable in Chapter 166, where the (very) rough translation out of the Beastars Discord diverged wildly in tone from the HCS translation that came a couple of days later.
In the Discord translation, Haru seems despondent, neglected by Legosi, backsliding into depression to the point of suicidal ideation:
In the HCS version, she seems more bemused than anything:
And her promise to let Melon eat her is...a joke? A flirtation? A genuine promise? It’s kind of unclear. I originally conceived this post based on the Discord version, and this new more cavalier translation gives me some hesitation.
Still, I think there’s still a grain of something here. I’ve mentioned before how the raison d’etre of Beastars is to express human experiences through a bizarre prism. Is Haru depressed and suicidal? Or is this her “herbivore mindset?” Is there a difference? (spoiler: no)
I think this chapter, in both versions, makes it more clear than ever how much Haru’s feelings about herself as a rabbit--her difficulty believing that anyone could value or want her as an individual, her lack of a concern for her own existence--mirror the feelings of someone with suicidal depression.
I’ve seen complaints, particularly regarding the Discord translation, about seeing Haru so dispirited with respect to Legosi and her own life, particularly when the last time we saw her was this sweet moment back in 149:
It was cute! And she looked...ambiguously happy, right?
Yes, it is jarring, but it shouldn’t be surprising. Particularly, I would say, if you’ve known people who are suicidal. They can be social and outgoing. They can smile all the time. They can even talk about dying casually. Like it’s funny.
A literalist interpretation might suggest that this is because she’s a herbivore, this is rooted in biology, that it’s just the way things are. But I don’t think we’re meant to believe that, any more than we’re meant to believe that all hybrids are doomed to be psychopaths because Melon said so.
Remember, this is a comic that had us believe that carnivores eating herbivores was the natural order of things for 153 chapters before revealing that it’s rooted in historical events. This is the story of a world that is corrupt, where things are not as they should be.
Haru is not okay, because her world is not okay.
Legosi deserves a mention here, too, because the centering of his perspective I think is the main reason why this stuff came as a surprise to so many people. Because, good lord...my boy, my darling boy, is not a good listener.
I love Chapter 149. It’s adorable. It’s romantic. But Paru has demonstrated, from the beginning, a fairly unromantic view of relationships.
That’s not to say callous, or cynical. But--perhaps ironically for such a melodramatic comic--she recognizes that big, melodramatic gestures in and of themselves are not a basis for a relationship.
This is what a relationship looks like, most of the time:
If these two had had more of this, I suspect Legosi (and the reader, by proxy) wouldn’t be nearly so out of the loop with respect to Haru’s feelings. He’s not at all to blame for the state of her mental health--that’s not how this works--but it is his fault that he doesn’t know about it.
Haru is not okay. And I don’t think she’ll suddenly become okay if he takes Melon out of the picture, or gets his record expunged. At some point, they are going to have to start tackling this together, if they are going to work.
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