Thanks for stopping by Anime Rants. I am finally over my stomach virus and I’m quite excited for New Year’s Eve. I don’t have a thought-provoking introduction this time, but rest assured, these episodes are awesome. Without further ado, let’s continue reviewing Beastars Final Season.
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Episode 5: In the Food Chain
Episode Rating: 8/10
The first thing I’ll comment on is the fact that we got to see a lot of familiar faces from the drama club in this episode. It was good to see the old gang. I even missed Pina a little bit. Anyway, Bill is handling the segregation as best as he can. As carnivores are being blamed for it, he feels indignant. Bill also confesses to feeling more comfortable around fellow carnivores. However, he also says he still loves his herbivore friends. Legoshi smiles slightly as he realizes that Bill is changing for the better as his relationship with herbivores continues.
After meeting Bill, Legoshi encounters Louis. They chat for a bit and Legoshi gets to see Louis’ new prosthetic leg. The most interesting part of this conversation was when Legoshi admitted he was driven by his herbivore fetish more than a sense of carnivore responsibility or social justice. Louis agrees that Legoshi is a “perverted wolf” – presumably because he’s exclusively interested in small, cute herbivores as romantic partners. However, Louis isn’t judging Legoshi harshly. He reassures the wolf that protecting what you love is “justice.”
I don’t fully agree with Louis’ perspective, but I understand that he was trying to make Legoshi feel better. The whole scene is even more interesting considering that Louis is now aware of his own weird fetish and how it’s shaping his love life. Just as Legoshi likes herbivores, Louis likes carnivores. I also don’t agree that having kinks and fetishes makes someone perverted. Perverse acts are those done without consent, in my opinion. They have nothing to do with preferences or kinks.
Moving on, let’s talk about Deshico the civet and the new drug he’s spreading around the underworld. Every moment spent with Deshico was painfully awkward and gross. I love learning about civets and their relatives, so I was bummed out that the only civet character is so annoying. However, his complete shamelessness is also sort of bad-ass, especially when he’s talking to a table full of literal lions. Anyway, Deshico is contracting the Shishigumi to help him spread a new drug.
Known as melda, the new drug is made from a combination of other substances – including a stimulant called kopi luwak. Just like in the anime, there’s a real delicacy called kopi luwak, and it really is made from fermented civet excrement. Civets have been used in Asian countries for centuries for their distinct musky scent glands. Humans are so damn weird. Anyway, the other ingredients of Melda include blood gathered from bats and ivory dust from herbivore horns. Both of these are potent psychoactive substances when used by carnivores.
In the last section of this episode, Legoshi goes to have dinner with Yahya at his penthouse apartment. The wolf quickly finds out that the horse is a Beastar. The two animals enjoy a meal of suspiciously delicious carrots. After some conversation about Beastars and society, Yayha reveals that a Beastar can have almost any wish granted when he earns the title. Yahya’s wish was to use crooked carnivore corpses as fertilizer for his carrots.
The vindictive horse cultivated a new kind of carrot with meat-like properties, explaining his immense strength. Yayhya is a herbivore supremacist who wants to punish carnivores. He stomps on Legoshi and demands for him to apologize for being born as a carnivore. Yahya actually wants Legoshi on his side, I think, but he also doesn’t want to make it seem like he approves of a wolf who devoured part of his friend.
Legoshi has a totally normal response to all this. Not only does he apologize for being born a carnivore, but he also tears out his own fangs. While he probably disagrees with using carnivore bodies as fertilizer, Legoshi still regrets eating Louis’ leg on some level. He never wants to eat meat again. I guess that’s why he took such a drastic action. We’ll find out more in the next episode.
Episode 6: The Guy Born in Spring
Episode Rating: 9/10
By pulling out his teeth, Legoshi stated that he had “earned the right” to punch Yahya in the face. He didn’t hold back. If Yahya had been a normal herbivore, his head would be in pieces like a broken watermelon. As things are, the strong horse is back on his feet in a moment. Surprisingly, he finds Legoshi bowing to him. The young wolf apologized for being violent, but insisted that Yahya’s use of carnivore bodies is morally wrong. Then he hurried out of the apartment. Personally, I think Yahya fully deserved that punch.
This episode contains the extremely short character arc of Ai the Tibetan Desert Fox, which definitely deserves mentioning in my opinion. Despite her story being only three scenes long, Ai and her character arc are well-written and emotionally stirring. She is a Tibetan Desert Fox who devoured a live rabbit and then got caught by Gouhin. She stayed with him for a few days and despite acting crazy at first, she eventually opened up about her crime. I loved the scene where she said she was turning herself in. I hope she starts dating Gouhin when she gets out of prison.
Side Note: Ai’s design was apparently quite different in the manga. That’s what I heard going around on Reddit, anyway. But since I have never read the source material, I cannot confirm this, and I don’t know why the change was made. I assume Ai’s original design was a lot less off-putting.
Besides Ai, there’s a lot more to discuss in this episode. For example, there’s Haru. She seems to be doing well in college and continuing her friendship with Ako and the other rabbit girl. While most of her classmates in culinary science are not interested, Haru is genuinely passionate about learning to cater food to many species. She wants to open a restaurant of her own someday. But things are not always bright and hopeful for Haru. Her complex feelings for Legoshi are constantly on her mind.
When Ako and her lion boyfriend Eado are making a show of being an interspecies couple, Haru points out that they’re only dating to be trendy. (For the record, she feels bad about this later, and wants to apologize.) Ako angrily storms away with Eado following closely. She, for one, is serious about her relationship with Eado. She dares him to kiss her, and he reluctantly obliges. The kiss was actually starting to look very sweet and genuine as the scene cut away. But it’s Beastars, so we can’t have nice things.
Eado gives into his instincts and “accidentally” starts eating Ako, severely injuring her. This scene destroyed me. It was so well-executed. It’s set up so that you think the couple are sharing a sweet, romantic moment, only to cut to Ako lying in a pool of blood while Eado is being dragged off by cops, screaming for someone to save his girlfriend. That genuinely upset me, and I am here for that. As an emotional masochist, I love me some Beastars shenanigans.
As Haru watches someone clean up the blood from the attack, she realizes that she’s in love with Legoshi despite the danger and almost certain misery of an interspecies relationship between a large carnivore and a small herbivore.
The last thing to mention is that, in this episode, Yahya started tracking down the murderer who killed those elephants some time earlier. He discovered the culprit is a gazelle named Melon. We only got to see Melon for a moment, but he left quite an impression. He’s flamboyant, and definitely seems like the queer-coded villain type. As he know, he’s a complete psychopath, but he’s sure got natural charisma. Melon lures Yahya into a potentially deadly trap at the end of the episode. To be continued.
~Thank you for reading~
Written by 7Mononoke
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