WALL OF TEXT: BEASTARS

 

WALL OF TEXT: BEASTARS AND THE NARRATIVE FUNCTION OF UNCONVINCING RELATIONSHIPS. Now that the whole series is out I feel comfortable talking about the Zootopia Disney is too chicken to make. (SPOILERS AHEAD! I WILL NOT HOLD BACK! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!) A world with tangible prejudice on display. A reality where predator and prey live in uneasy harmony, and carnivores struggle with predatory instincts. Throughout the series, we are presented with Legoshi and Haru as the main couple. Wolf and rabbit. Predator and prey. But I think most viewers (and readers) can tell their relationship is not that strong. When we see them on screen, they don’t share much time together, they don’t talk about much, and Haru often gets angry at Legoshi for no apparent reason. Meanwhile, Legoshi has a much stronger connection with Louis, a red deer. Louis offers his leg for Legoshi to eat to give him strength to defeat a more dangerous foe. Within the context of this story, it means Louis and Legoshi metaphorically made love. Meanwhile, after a year of dating, Legoshi hasn’t even kissed Haru once. The story should be about Legoshi and Louis, and yet it keeps forcing us to accept Haru and Legoshi as the emotional focus. This unconvincing relationship dynamic didn’t work in the Twilight series. I remember it was obvious that Bella and Jacob had the stronger connection, and yet the narrative keeps forcing us to accept Bella and Edward as a couple. This was enough to make me give up reading the rest of the series. In Beastars, the unconvincing relationship works because it reinforces the internal logic of the series. Twilight failed to establish Bella is under the influence of a vampire’s charm to explain why she is drawn to Edward. She’s just a flighty teenage girl making a bad choice, so the unconvincing relationship comes across as a flaw. Beastars makes it clear that the hunger impulse is a metaphor for affection, which means Louis and Legoshi are the real couple of the series. In subtext. It’s a brilliant tactic because it compels the audience to project the truth onto the series based on its internal logic instead of correcting for a flaw, as in the Twilight series. It is a whole other level of audience engagement. The up-front relationship appeals to a wide audience. Straight people see man and woman interacting awkwardly, and they identify with that. The queer community sees what the story is really about. The homosexual subtext not just between Louis and Legoshi but between Legoshi and Jack and Legoshi and everyone else. By denying the audience the real story onscreen, each group sees a different story, and those who recognize the subtext are engaged precisely because they can project what’s really happening back onto the screen/page, as if they are in on a secret. It demonstrates something that seems lost on writers nowadays: an implied story can be more potent than what is plain and obvious, so long as it is thematically consistent. It can engage the audience in exciting ways, and writers can learn much about this from Beastars.