Beastars, Season Two – The Unbearable Lightness of Being a Beast

 

If there’s one thing I admire about the Beastars anime, it’s that they were able to take the manga and divide it into well defined seasons. The manga was never written with television in mind, manga rarely is, but season one of Beastars felt like it had a beginning, middle and end. Although not everything got resolved at the end, especially the mystery of who devoured Tem, the season concluded in such a manner that if there was only ever going to be one season, that one season didn’t feel like it left anything dangling.

I think, to me, when watching the first season, I didn’t feel cheated out of knowing who murdered Tem because this plot thread wasn’t given the same importance as it would’ve if Beastars was, say, a crime drama. In fact, as time went on, the murder of Tem was brought up less and less, and didn’t have a lot of importance on the overall plot of the first season. It was there to demonstrate the rift between herbivorous species and carnivorous species, and that there still exists a gulf that may never be crossed between them, despite their best efforts. Herbivores may try to reach across the aisle and show carnivores kindness once in a while, and carnivores may try to be as gentle as they can with their weaker friends, but sooner or later, a carnivore’s will erodes away and he devours someone close to him.

This begs the question: if being friends with an herbivore always ends up leading to the herbivore being hurt, why even bother?

In a way, that’s a self-defeating way to look at it. The only way for society to change is for its people to be willing to change. There had to be someone in their world’s past who stood up and said that he didn’t want to eat herbivores any more, or an herbivore that decided he had a dream that one day his descendants would be equals with the carnivores, and those ideas had to have spread, leading them to the point where the society of Beastars is now, but it’s clear from both the first and second seasons that things are still tense between the two sides. It’s hard, when you’ve evolved into a species meant to be eaten, to try to help forge a new society with those who evolved into species meant to eat you.

As the cold opening for episode seven of season one, the anime adapted chapter twenty of the manga, which was a lighthearted look at how food is made for carnivores and which read a little like a chapter of Paru’s other manga, Beast Complex. It was a welcome look into what it took to keep carnivores from turning on and eating their fellow students.

But things weren’t always so lighthearted in this world, as later episodes of the first season demonstrated. The Black Market exists in this world and is somehow tolerated because apparently all the meat provided is sourced as ethically as you can source meat in this world.

At the end of the first season, Legoshi demonstrated that herbivore lives mattered when he rescued Haru from being eaten by the lion mafia, but the pair tried to sleep together and it went about as well as you’d expect when Legoshi is as clumsy in love as an adolescent wolf trying to walk, whose limbs are too big for his body.

Season two puts a renewed focus on Tem, the murdered alpaca from the first episode. Legoshi is given the task of finding out who murdered him, and… okay. I know it’s likely my fault for watching all the promotional material released for the series instead of going into it completely blind, but I really wish that the Japanese trailers hadn’t spoiled the surprise that the first episode wanted to build up to. If you don’t want it spoiled, go and watch the first couple episodes of season two and then come back, they were literally just uploaded today and won’t take more than about 46 minutes.

Have you done that? Good. The Japanese trailer shows off the snake named Six-Eyes to such an extent that when I watched the first episode and realized that I was supposed to be wondering what that strange rattling noise Legoshi can hear was, and that the talk of ghosts was supposed to lead me to a different conclusion, I was a little disappointed that the first big “surprise” of the season was spoiled quite a bit. I realize that maybe Japanese Netflix expects that its audience likely already read the manga and knew what was coming, but the pacing of the episode makes it feel like we weren’t supposed to already know who Six-Eyes is until she shows up at the end.

The structure of the English trailer treats the second season like something new to be teased and assumes that we haven’t been reading ahead. Six-Eyes shows up in exactly one shot and we only see part of her face in close-up, which is perfect to obscure her involvement in the season. We can then play along with Legoshi as he meets her for the first time.

The Japanese trailer also makes a big deal about solving Tem’s murder, but admittedly I thought that I was going to be playing along, only to be taken by surprise when it turned out to be a background character that had largely been ignored all this time. I don’t even remember if there was any deliberate foreshadowing of this in the first season. While that can be slightly disappointing, I fully admit that I might’ve held unrealistic expectations regarding the role the murder investigation was going to play in the series. In my defense, the second episode of the new season establishes the stakes: whoever solves Tem’s murder becomes the next Beastar. I therefore had the expectation that the investigation would have more of a cat and mouse aspect than it ultimately does.

Not only that, but the revelation comes earlier in the series than I expected, but then I suppose unmasking the killer isn’t the end of the story. In a world where the relationship between those who are made to eat others and those who are made to be eaten by others is exceedingly complex (so much so that it’s the title of Paru’s other manga), it’s also important that we understand the relationship Tem had with his killer, and the lengths his killer was already having to go to in order to fit into society.

Everyone struggles to fit in. Lions have to drastically alter their faces until they exist in an uncanny valley of attempted softness in order to appease those around them and get elected mayor, and bears need to take supplements in order to purposely atrophy their muscles so that they don’t accidentally hurt their friends, and that’s just for example. It’s interesting that carnivores go to great lengths to force themselves to be weak in order to be allowed to function in society, but deer like Louis try their hardest to appear as strong as carnivores and it’s all just a cycle of two sides chasing one another for approval, believing themselves as the lesser and wanting to be good enough for the other. Ironically, both sides are trying to live up to the way they see the other as being.

A good example of carnivores deliberately trying to hide their strength in front of their herbivore friends comes in episode six of season two, when the carnivores engage in a style of tug-of-war where jaw strength is tested instead of upper body strength. When the game is proposed, most of the carnivores in the drama club are very reluctant to play this game in front of their herbivorous friends. Then, episode seven establishes that carnivores either don’t like to, or are possibly forbidden from, mentioning to herbivores that they take pills to atrophy their muscles. There seems to be a lot about how different species live that doesn’t get talked about, whether out of fear, shame, or because the subjects are taboo.

It’s details like these which make me wonder just how much Paru has figured out about her world, since it doesn’t feel like it’s made up as she goes along. The world of Beastars is very well realized, with characters and details that all fit well together. Even seeing the murder of Tem from the point of view of his killer, the scene comes together very well and feels more like a tragedy that could’ve easily been prevented by those involved. Then again, later episodes establish that the killer’s point of view might not be reliable, as the longer it’s been since the murder, the more sanitized the events in his memory become.

To be fair, the studio making the anime is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here and has a lot of material to work from. They can also look ahead and see where the manga went, and this can inform how they write each season of the show. As an example, they likely figured out well ahead of time how they were going to write the full murder scene when the time came to show it, so they were able to better depict Tem’s side of events in the first episode of season one. In the manga, not only is Tem a lot more defiant to his killer, his killer is depicted as a very different species, but in shadow because we’re obviously not supposed to know who they are yet. Still, it’s harder to develop a mystery when you give away Tem’s killer as canine based in the silhouette used, then reveal later on that the killer is someone with a much different build, muzzle shape, et cetera. The anime was able to work from the knowledge of who actually killed Tem and made the ultimately correct decision to obscure his body a bit better than the manga did.

So when it comes to the anime, they’re working from a position of strength and can draw upon the entire future of the manga in order to write each current season.

One of my favourite scenes from the current season comes in the third episode, where Louis is forced to eat meat. The scene makes the viewer feel each excruciating moment as Louis struggles with his emotional and physical reactions to the sight and smell of what was once a living being, and is probably the best litmus test for whether or not you’re on board with the anime. If you feel the scene drags on for far too long, maybe this anime isn’t for you, but if you feel the scene is paced perfectly for what it’s trying to accomplish, then I have some good news regarding the rest of the series.

But be that as it may, it does feel like there could’ve been a thirteenth episode this time, since the second season’s conclusion is a little unsatisfying. It rushes a couple details for the sake of concluding the story where it does, and I really do think that there should at least be a third season so that the Beastars anime doesn’t end like it does. Not only that, but the promise from this season’s second episode goes unfulfilled, giving the overall plot of the series no payoff. The name of the show is Beastars, but other than a few mentions here and there, the plot has yet to really focus on the making of the next Beastar. And Legoshi finds Tem’s killer, so… is he or is he not the next Beastar?

It doesn’t feel like there’s going to be a third season, either. The first season ended by promising a second, but the second season doesn’t end with that same promise. I guess this is because when making a show with Netflix, it’s hard to know if you’re going to be allowed to fulfill your creative vision. Some shows on Netflix don’t even make it to two seasons any more, so it kind of feels like a miracle that the second season of Beastars exists.

It’s unfortunate that this is how a studio has to treat making a Netflix show these days, going into each season under the assumption that it’s going to be their last, even if it’s only the first. I would like to see more seasons of Beastars because the English voice cast is just as amazing as the Japanese cast and it’d be a shame if they couldn’t all work together one or two more times. Maybe, if we do get a third and fourth season, if Netflix wants even more seasons, they could either adopt Beast Complex or consult with Paru on original story arcs. I honestly don’t have a lot of faith in Netflix doing that, when they can’t even keep their original shows going for more than a season or two any more, but if they really wanted to make more, I would definitely watch as many episodes as they do make.

In the past, I’ve been a bit perplexed that in Japan, most anime can’t seem to hold on to one theme song. If a season lasts 24-26 episodes, then it’ll change songs about halfway through. If a season lasts 12-13 episodes, then its second season will feature a different theme song. It’s often that I’ll come into a series and the first theme song is perfect for the show, but inevitably the theme song gets changed and I find myself wishing they’d held on to an opening that was utterly perfection. The second theme song is almost always a step back in quality and doesn’t do the series justice.

For a few examples of this, the first opening of Toradora! was called “Pre-Parade” and was the perfect opening for the show. Compared to that, “Silky Heart” seemed a little less… unique, I guess you could say. It was definitey trying, but I wasn’t drawn to it as much as I was the first theme song. Then there’s “Guren no Yumiya,” the original opening to Attack on Titan. It’s absolutely perfect for a series where humanity was literally fighting for survival against an enemy that towered above in both stature and might. Titans were frightening and the opening theme reflected that. I didn’t get the same sense from “Jiyuu no Tsubasa,” the second theme song. There were elements of the original theme there, but the second theme song felt more like a standard shonen anime theme song. It’s like things were turned down a notch from before. I know that as the first season continued, the battle against the Titans stopped feeling as hopeless, but the theme song didn’t need to change.

With all that said, season one of Beastars had the perfect opening, “Wild Side” and season two of Beastars somehow also has a perfect opening. This is that rare anime where I don’t miss the first opening because the studio managed to come up with two songs that fit the series perfectly. “Kaibutsu” is that rare follow up to an opening theme that is different enough that it doesn’t feel like a rehash and yet doesn’t sound like they cheapened out and just went with something generic sounding. The sound of Beastars was somehow captured twice.

Overall, I was mostly satisfied with the second season of Beastars, especially in comparison to the first, but I’m still left wanting more from the way things were left. I wonder if there’s any chance of a third season, and if it’ll be able to aspire to the quality of the first two. There’s still plenty of source material left to adapt, and even if they plan on stopping once the manga concludes, that still means there’s about two seasons of material left. Netflix being Netflix, I don’t want to get my hopes up, but if season two of Beastars does well, then… maybe?