Beaststars Season 2 Review: Feminist Vegetarian Theory On Crack

The first time someone heard I was binging Beastars, I was jokingly called a Furry. However, the meat of the show is far from romance and sex. No, its about meat.

In my last year of college, I had a class on Feminist Vegetarian Theory. I myself am not vegetarian, but the theories hold a ton of truths about the assigned roles of food and gender. They are oddly intertwined, and its fascinating.

In enters Beastars, and I am certainly not the first to say there is way more to the show than meets the eye. What they say is true, it is Zootopia for adults. In a world of predators and prey, the sociological dynamics are disturbing but also mirror some truths about our own society. There are black markets where predators buy meat. Stronger predators take strength suppressants. The lion mayor had facial surgery to look less scary to herbivores. Herbivores live in a state of fear and weakness while predators are often seen as dangerous and unpredictable.

The first season was all about Legoshi, the wolf, falling for a dwarf rabbit. The show immediately explored that there is a grey in Legoshi's mind of whether he actually loves her or wants to eat her. His conclusion is that he wants to protect her, but in the second season, she has very few scenes.

The second season focuses on Legoshi the wolf as he tries to capture the predator who ate one of the students at his school and Rouis, a deer that decides to command a gang of lions that are a force of the black market. Legoshi, through great training and detriment to his own health, gives up on meat while Rouis actually begins to eat meat in an effort to be equal to the lions.

Despite the dwarf rabbit Haru not being big in this season and her being one of my favorite characters, this season felt better than the last. The graphics felt less awkward and the story was more exciting. It pulled me back to my college days when we talked about the absent referent (which is the absence of the actual process of meat's creation), the gender politics of meat (the idea that meat makes a man), and feminine meats versus masculine meats (for example, turkey versus beef).

My personal reading of the season is that Rouis desires masculinity and Legoshi desires femininity. This does not necessarily mean they want those traits within themselves, but they want to have access to those worlds. Legoshi doesn't want meat because he does not want to be feared. Rouis, on the hand, desires the strength that meats assigns people.

Despite Haru the rabbit not being a big part of this season, sex and and its relationship meat were still explored. For example, there is a herbivore stripper in the black market who is the most popular due to the fact that she is a herbivore. She has to dance in a cage to make sure the customers do not attack her while she dances, and everyone seems to love her for the fact that she is equated to meat while also being an object of sex.

There is also the relationship between Rouis and Legoshi, which certainly has homosexual tension. The two have more physical proximity to each other than any other characters, and seem to have romantic interest in each other that is also supplemented by envy. By the end of the season, Rouis consents to Legoshi eating his leg in order to have the strength to beat another predator in a fight. Strangely enough, the opponent predator seemed envious of their relationship as though they had a special bond he could never have with his prey.

The second season's greatest flaw was its lack of female characters (notably Haru). It is strange that femininity and vulnerability seems to be desired by Legoshi and unwanted by Rouis but unexplored in its role with actual female characters. After all Haru's role in season one was more than a romantic interest. She was incredibly small and often seen as weak. She admits that she feels empowered mostly during sex, and so she has sex with a lot of people. During sex, she is not seen as fragile or small. That is a daring character I wanted to see more of. The second second let me down in this way, making her only a background romance for Legoshi's journey.

In the end, I am excited for season three. I hope it combines what made this season better, but give us more Haru and other female voices to the predator/prey society.