My first impression of Beastars, as a new viewer, is that it is essentially a vampire story.
If that observation sounds a little bit strange to you, I mean it more on a metaphorical level. On a literal level, Beastars is a fantasy where anthropomorphic animals live together in civilization, but they also still all retain their species instincts as predator and prey, and this makes their civilizational efforts quite fragile, because it means that wolves must live among sheep, tigers among zebras, and so on. The carnivorous predators all possess an instinctual blood lust for their natural prey, but the rules of civilization demand the suppression of those instincts, so that everyone can live together in an unnatural state of peace. All of the predators are then faced with a choice to either resist and reject their species natures, or else to embrace them and prey on the weak as a secret taboo, or perhaps under the auspices of organized crime.
It’s really this conflict of predator psychology that makes me think of Beastars as something of a vampire story. There’s a fairly common narrative in vampire stories where a vampire character will reject their instinct to feed on human beings (perhaps they want to retain their humanity), and the drama of such stories often revolves around whether the vampire will succeed at remaining human. I think you basically get the same situation with Legoshi in episode one of Beastars, when he loses control over his prey drive one night at school and very nearly devours Haru. But Legoshi also hates his predatory nature as a curse, and he undergoes a confusing spiritual journey where he repents of his sin and his, shall we say, appetite for Haru is transformed into love.
I think that this journey is incredibly well written, and I particularly like the way that Legoshi’s predatory instincts persist and coexist together with his sincere love for Haru. There’s a really revealing scene where that a certain panda psychologist called Gohin offers a diagnosis of the true nature of Legoshi’s feelings.
Gohin claims that Legoshi’s love for Haru is really a surviving remnant of his prey drive: there remains a permanent part of him that wants to eat Haru, just as he did on the night when they first met. But that obsessive hunger has also been mutated under the influence of Legoshi’s humanity, so to speak, which is a separate part of his psyche that’s warring for control over the total personality. Legoshi cannot destroy the wolf inside of himself or its obsession with Haru, and so instead, he achieves a sort of psychological compromise by finding a different way of satisfying his infatuation, which is also consistent with his humanity or community with all creatures. This alternative satisfaction looks a lot like falling in love with Haru.
I think it’s up to the viewer to decide whether it can really be true love given its murderous origin. I think I’ll save my own thoughts on that question for another video, because I personally haven’t yet finished the show.
