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EP. REVIEW: BEASTARS Season 2

With that in mind, do we have any idea what Paru Itagaki's actual authorial intent on Beastars is? I get that her always wearing a chicken mask at public events may make asking direct questions along these lines difficult, but I have read where she does ever so politely try to downplay comparisons between her Beastars and Zootopia as well as the corollaries between its themes and western - TBF American - intersectionality politics.

I love Beastars if I just take it at face value, as a story of horny furry teens working out their issues, with some political jazz thrown in for garnish. And that's how I usually approach it, just sitting back and enjoying the hell out of the ride.

But if I think about what it might be trying to say, it seems in-your-face obvious that it's a metaphor for boys being natural predators and girls being natural prey. And that boys have to go through hell to suppress their natural predatory instincts to coexist with girls and treat them as people instead of prey. That's a message I can't quite sign on to.

There's certainly some truth in the predator/prey relationship between men and women in human society, but to propose that that's the natural state of things which civilization tries to temper, rather than a result of socialization in a patriarchy, would be terribly depressing if I bought into it.

As far as I can recall, the only named female carnivores we see in the anime (I know there are a couple un-named ones seen in the backgrounds, and more in the manga, though I haven't read it) are Juno and Shirley, and neither of them seem to have the same "gotta suppress my instincts/physical strength" issues as the male carnivores, though Shirley's got her own issues about herbivores to deal with.

On the flip side, we have Louis learning how to be a predator, which does at least support the socialization argument. But this would be a very different series if it was about Juno falling in love with, say, Mizuchi's bunny boyfriend (Mizuchi was the harlequin rabbit who was always bullying Haru).