I was unfair to Beastars, and I do like it

As I'm writing this, about two weeks since originally posting "On the furry canon", I just recently watched two YouTube videos about Beastars that I thought were pretty good. And, beyond that, something that has been a sticking point since writing that post is that I did really like Beastars the anime. Up until a certain point, I was really enjoying the manga as well. In the manga, though there are some aspects I have found distasteful to the point that I decided not to keep up with it as it updates, it's only really in hindsight and as I take time away from reading it that I really understand my simmering frustrations with the story. I think, in many ways, what I wrote in "On the furry canon" is unfair.

The two videos linked above talk about Beastars as A) a commentary on "deviance" and B) more generally as a commentary on structural violence. What's most deeply frustrating to me about Beastars is that, to me, almost all the pieces are there for me to see those readings. Beastars as a commentary on deviance makes a lot of sense to me. As a wider commentary on structural violence, the story does give... gestures that could point towards these ideas. I have some disagreements with the videos but overall I think the larger points are fairly well supported. However, part of the problem is, Beastars is not a story that is complete yet. And with a piece of media that is still ongoing, you can't pre-emptively assume it will stick the landing. Beastars certainly hasn't yet, and I'm not yet convinced that it definitely will.

At large, there are really interesting and thoughtful ideas that Beastars is grappling with. In "On the furry canon", I mentioned that I thought Legosi had one of the more interesting character arcs in the story. In hindsight, I think I disagree with that almost completely. As those videos discuss, Louis in particular is a very compelling character, and the story is strong when it focuses on him. Haru doesn't get much screentime after the first arc, but her character arc is thoughtful, and for similar reasons, so is Sebun's. We get brief flashes, as part of efforts to flesh out the world, of a very compelling undertone to Jack's character. In fact, if I reflect on most individual portions of Beastar, I find myself thinking they're good. Even Melon -- who, to be absolutely clear, the way the story has handled him in particular is why I find myself not wanting to return -- has readings that view his story as much more compelling than I do. But I'm not confident that the story at large has convinced me that it has synthesized these ideas successfully, and particularly whenever the story is focusing on Legosi, there are certain aspects that deeply concern me.

I am not a fan of the biological determinism I often find underpinning predator-prey narratives

I think it's worth interrogating what I meant when I said that I don't generally find predator-prey stories compelling. Additionally, I think it's good to justify a little more what I claimed when I said that world-building at times can be distracting and overjustifying telling the cool furry story an author clearly already wanted to. As I think about it, one specific thing shines very brightly to me that connects these dots. Often, predator-prey stories assert, and then confirm as part of their world-building, a level of biological determinism that I both do not find compelling and leaves a sour taste in my mouth so I don't like to see more of it. To discuss this, I'd like to briefly talk about a piece of furry fiction that I admittedly read only a little of. The little I did read, however, I disliked so much that I have never opted to return to it, even though the author's other works are some of my favorite things I've read in Furry. That is, I'd like to talk about Phil Geusz's Lapism stories.

Phil Geusz has written many works based around concepts of transformation, which is a subject I've always found very captivating. For example, in "Cheetah's Win", a washed-up baseball player nicknamed Cheetah, as a last-ditch resort to be given an opportunity to continue playing professionally, turns to undergoing a physical transformation into an anthropomorphic cheetah. The story's setup is admittedly somewhat odd; the transformation is, of all things, meant to disguise offensive tattoos on the player's body underneath a layer of fur. In fact, to avoid accusations of gaining an unfair advantage from the procedure, Cheetah and his coach scheme to have the procedure somewhat diminish his otherwise impressive physical acumen. Though the story does somewhat go into these sorts of details of physical transformation, it's much more focused on the psychological transformation of Cheetah. The pressures he must endure in order to be allowed to continue playing ball -- among them harassment over his unusual newfound appearance -- cause Cheetah to address the behaviour that nearly cost him his baseball career, and help him to become a more empathetic person. It's a beautiful story, and one of my favorite things I've ever read. It speaks deeply to the best sorts of allegory physical transformation stories can tell.

Transformation is also at the heart of the Lapism stories. This set of short stories, collected at one point to a book called The First Book of Lapism, focus on a near-future Earth setting similar to the one inhabited by Cheetah. In it, the sort of genetic engineering that allowed Cheetah to become an anthropomorphic feline has been developed but prohibited worldwide, with one exception. One specific religion had developed in the time between genetic engineering's creation and its prohibition. Known as "Lapism", it is centred on meditations by its adherents, who first wear regalia like bunny ears and false buckteeth, then physically undergo transformation, of how presenting as an anthropomorphic rabbit causes them to be more peaceful and friendly, like the stereotypes we might hold of their wild counterparts. Despite genetic engineering's prohibition, they are allowed to continue their transformations in the USA and elsewhere, due to protections accorded to religious practice in those jurisdictions.

On its face, in fact, I actually find this concept very interesting -- I am interested in the ways that, for example, modifying one's body may have effects on one's psyche. Further, I am interested in questions of asking oneself if there are ways to interact with the world, to see one's place in it, other than the standard way we do now as humans. To be honest, if I did return to the story now, perhaps I would be able to approach it more openly. But, what turned me away originally, and what gives me pause now, was some of the language that I recall of the Lapists describing their meditations. To my (possibly flawed) memory, I seem to remember the Lapists discussing a belief that, though they recognized at times the need for violence and could act on it, overall, they were inherently more peaceful and friendly than humans, because of their bodies. They discussed how this made them better, for some definition of the word. They discussed that, in particular, their being prey animals and weak caused them to bind together more cohesively, sometimes expressed in impulsive and undeniable urges to hug one another.

It's these meditations that highlight a deeply concerning line of thought for me: were I given a similar opportunity to the Lapists, I would not become an anthropomorphic rabbit. I would not become a peaceful, gentle creature. I would become an anthropomorphic coyote, an animal who, certainly in the way society views at large, is a nuisance, a pest, a violent creature that invites destruction to follow them. The coyote, in the eyes of the rancher, is an evil being, one they are in conflict with, who preys on their herds. Sure, rabbits can be similarly destructive to crops and agricultural products, but they have a bright and cheery public image. The coyote does not. In the eyes of the Lapists, am I wrong for desiring this? Does this public image make me a devil? Would encouraging me to undergo such a transformation be wrong? After all, rabbits aren't the only animals that live cooperatively with others. Coyotes experience what is known as a fission-fusion society, freely joining and separating from packs as needed for purposes of finding food. In fact, coyotes do something rabbits do not; they have been known to specifically partner with other non-coyote animals -- badgers -- for mutual benefit during hunting. But the truth is, I don't know what the Lapists would make of me, because the thought that somebody could potentially look at me so harshly for these aspects of myself were enough for me to decide I didn't want to engage with the story any longer.

And perhaps I am being too restrictive in my view of the Lapism stories. Perhaps their thoughts are more complicated than "it is in the nature of a rabbit to be a gentle beast, and thus as rabbits ourselves we shall also be gentle". It is certainly true that things such as one's body do have some role to play in the way we view ourselves, the way we interact with others, and so on, much as we may or may not like all the manners in which this occurs. And this is the complication that I feel with predator-prey stories as well. After all, I feel no particular interest in eating other sentient beings. Perhaps this is because I am, of course, human, not Beastars-style carnivore. But the central tension of a story being a canine struggling with something that not only is alien to me but seems counter to the way I approach the world is... offputting. You can argue that's the point, and that there is value in considering worlds so different from our own, or biologies so foreign. But, it's worth questioning, I think, how much those "biologies" are in fact based on reality, or are more the product of our own beliefs and values ascribed to non-human morphologies. After all, though Beastars draws a hard line between carnivores and herbivores, in reality, this would make no sense. Dogs, wolves, and other canids are not obligate carnivores; they eat other things too. Where do omnivores get classified, particularly when those omnivores only rarely eat other animals? Most glaringly, pandas, despite Beastars claim to the contrary, are not carnivores. If not actual biology, where did these ideas come from in Beastars?

I am interested in what Beastars has to say about things like how different bodies play into the ways we interact with each other. But when it leans too strongly into this specific aspect, I often find it hard to engage with. And in other ways, biology seemingly strictly determining who people are occurs in the show, in ways that makes me deeply uncomfortable for similar reasons to the Lapism stories. In this world, if I were a part of it, would the world consider me a monster? Certainly, from Legosi's perspective, it would. And much of his arc is spent... fighting, sometimes literally, against the "realities" of his biology he does not like.

And it's not just "being a carnivore" or "being an herbivore", but in particular how the story approaches two characters, Melon and Legosi's mother, that gives me pause about what it has to say about the relationship of biology to who people are. As those YouTube videos argue, there is a reading that, in fact, it is society that has caused Melon to become the person he is, not his biology. And I can see the pieces ready to be put together for that understanding. But the manga hasn't said that, not yet. The text of the manga so far has only suggested that biology is responsible, and we are given a lot of evidence that this is what it believes. And, to be clear, the fact that interspecies children do end up with traits from both their parents is really deeply indicative of this sort of belief. Unlike in BNA, where beastfolk with different species expressions can have children together who just happen to be one parent's species or the other, in Beastars, the ability for people to have children that share traits across species lines deeply complicates whatever arguments can be made in favor of the reading that biology is not chiefly responsible in these issues. The story clearly shows that carnivores have biological impulses to eat herbivores, and that herbivores have biological impulses to give up and be eaten by carnivores. There has to be one hell of a justification if the explanation for this is genuinely "society decided to force carnivores to eat herbivores as a means of stirring up tensions to cause them to oppress each other", as the YouTube video hints may be the case. But further than that, it is only natural to assume that, with these strong biological impulses, something must break down when a child is born to the mating of an herbivore with a carnivore. The rules of the "biology" break, and instead of questioning the conceit of the "biology" itself, the story's answer is to declare that these children will go insane in unspecified ways, usually eventually either killing themself, or others, or both. Even just aesthetically, given that all the animals are very clearly of one species not of multiple, it's clear that this is a society that values species not admixing. The story of Legosi's mother is that, due to her mixed species parents, she goes insane and commits suicide for looking at all like anything but a normal wolf. In the face of these sorts of things, and the ways being the offspring of multiple species is depicted as very much not a graceful synthesis of the two, there becomes a strong argument that the society would desire pushing for the different species separating out and only have children amongst each other. On the other hand, BNA explicitly rejects the notion of separating out by species as being in any conception "ideal" in its final act. So compared with that, small hints that, perhaps, these biological ramifications are a lie their society has concocted for unknown reasons, despite the fact that we also physically actually see them in the story... these small hints are not enough to satisfy me.

Beastars hasn't stuck the landing... yet

All this said, I can acknowledge that, maybe Beastars can circle back on these ideas in a way I will find satisfying. There are pieces, currently not especially well formed, but present in the story, that could turn the narrative on its head. And while I am quick to point out that Beastars shouldn't get praise for a landing it hasn't made yet, it's also unfair to knock it too much for issues it still may be able to address. Frankly, it's a much better written story than I gave it credit for with my comparison to FurAffinity works. Though, I'll grant, there are in fact some very good stories on FurAffinity anyways, so maybe this is one of those diamonds in the rough. It has weak elements for sure; for one, its pacing in the last hundred or so chapters has been bad. But I was overly harsh in the rest of my evaluation of it, and I felt it might be good to return to it and cop to that. That being said, I think I do stand by my original statement that the story "feels difficult to recommend for me beyond 'Oh, it's a furry anime.'"