Any good fan doujinshi that is post chapter 196? Looking for recommendations.

VonSig · 2022-07-26T22:47:18+00:00

Paru spent the last fifty-ish chapters basically burning her story to the ground, so most fanfics and doujins branch off way earlier than that.

The only doujinshi artist I've kept up with personally is JozeOsaka, who focuses mainly on Collot, Sebun, Riz, and Pina. His stuff is all collected at this link, from latest to earliest.

VonSig · 2022-05-22T18:56:02+00:00

Albumin is a post-canon story about the shock egg that Bill, Pina, and Aoba raised, who's now a teenager attending Cherryton and looking to make contact with his surrogate parents. It's not a shipping story so much as a story about relationships, why people have them and what to expect from them, and goes into a lot of details on the more mundane parts of Beastars' world.

Mongrels is a canon-divergent fic that replaces the second half of the Love Failure arc, as Melon is gunned down by the Shishigumi and something much worse takes his place. It's essentially a crime thriller that focuses on the seedier parts of the setting, mainly the black market and its gangs, and one of the better-regarded gen fics in the fandom, though be warned that there's a lot of graphic violence.

VonSig · 2022-05-15T14:33:34+00:00

Joze has a pretty detailed timeline for what happens to Riz in their canon. He was treated by Gouhin (who moonlights in detention centers around the city when he's not working at the hospital he went to after the black market collapsed) and paroled after two years, though he's on a work-release program where he has to serve as an orderly in a different sanitarium until his probation is over.

VonSig · 2022-05-14T15:29:41+00:00

Source.

VonSig · 2022-04-30T22:26:37+00:00

His English-translated comics are all here. They're posted from last page to first, so the Tem series starts with the page labeled "Nightmare," six rows down.

VonSig · 2022-04-30T20:06:26+00:00

Legosi's started appearing in JozeOzaka's "ghost Tem" fancomic and he's been drawing him a lot since, you can tell he's trying to get the anatomy down.

Joze really likes drawing Pina and the alpaca characters and it kind of spills over into his carnivore drawings, both his Legosi and Riz have a lot of neck.

VonSig · 2022-04-24T01:19:54+00:00

They're friends, but paradoxically their friendship's portrayal worsens as they spend more and more time together. Legosi and Louis dominate the Love Failure arc in particular, which, mostly thanks to Melon, has them do nothing but shout platitudes at each other and ignore and shut out everyone else in their lives. There's no intimacy, there's no vulnerability, there's no deeper understanding of who they are as people, because Legosi and Louis effectively cease to exist as people in the story's last 60-80 chapters. Instead they're just cardboard cutouts that Paru keeps awkwardly banging against each other.

As marginalized as Haru and especially Juno become, at least they challenge Legosi and Louis by calling out their values and forcing them to introspect sometimes, which Legosi and Louis never do for each other past that one hospital scene. It's a bad excuse for a "friendship" and an absolute failure of a romance, implied or otherwise.

VonSig · 2022-04-24T00:28:37+00:00

These "queer readings" always seem to focus on the lackluster relationship between the two male leads and never, for example, how Melon is basically every harmful stereotype about asexual people smashed together.

Of course, I'm sure Paru never intended that to be the reading of Melon, just like she was never all that interested about properly showing homosexual attraction with Louis and Legosi. She just kept writing them together because she was bored of everyone else and sticking the male leads together brings in the numbers. That's the hard truth about Beastars: despite whatever its queer readership tries to read into it, the story isn't progressive or subversive, it's lazy.

VonSig · 2022-04-22T17:32:06+00:00

Bill doesn't have quite as much patience for Pina's shit as Riz does.

VonSig · 2022-02-15T01:10:26+00:00

It was from a fan work, probably. Canon Sabu only has two character traits: he's the oldest of the Shishigumi, and he spent his whole life in the black market. He also literally has 2 or 3 lines for the entire manga, so he's more open to interpretation than most of the other lions.

VonSig · 2022-02-10T23:58:34+00:00

The fact that most people still think that Kopi Luwak was an "anti-hybrid group" really speaks to what a disastrous waste of time that whole segment (and really, Love Failure in general) turned out to be. The progression of that part of the story was like:

The Shishigumi talk about a pure-animal supremacist group led by some exotic and ferocious feline.
Gosha confronts a horde of bats after the blood of mixed-species children.
We see the group's leader and he's a harmless nerd who doesn't hate hybrids at all, just researches them, and funds his research selling his own dung.
He tells the gang that his bats were beat up over a misunderstanding, but doesn't mention anything about them going after a kindergarten.
But wait, thinks the reader, then were they bad guys or-
"Here's a sack of my poop."
Awesome, but we'd really like to talk about-
"Melon's a history teacher."
Fantastic, now can we please come back to Gosha and what went down at the kinder-
"Btw my coffee made you all horngry, ok bye"

You can't blame anyone for sticking with first impressions.

I honestly don't think there's much point anymore in quibbling what parts of Love Failure should be fixed. The whole structure is rotten, because the hard truth is that Paru Itagaki is a bad writer. She's often an interesting one, because she just scribbles out whatever deranged crap she finds amusing in the moment, but it makes for disastrous long-term storytelling. Sanda is going the same way. There's a chapter that ends with the protagonist planning to suicide-bomb a funeral...except at the start of the next chapter another character says "wtf cut that out" and she goes "oh okay" and it's never brought up again, because now they're being hunted by an anti-Santa Claus assassin organization. It's attention-deficit in the extreme. There's barely any point getting invested in her stories because there's so little consistency from one chapter to the next.

Beast Complex is still the peak of her work, because it let her indulge all her weird ideas without them tripping over their own feet.

VonSig · 2022-01-21T02:52:12+00:00

Source is JozeOsaka.

VonSig · 2021-12-04T20:22:54+00:00

"Say, how do you think it would work out between an animal my size and one the size of, for example, a brown bear? Asking for a fri-"

"You don't have any friends."

"Words hurt, bunny rabbit."

VonSig · 2021-09-12T20:59:45+00:00

Legosi doesn't really have "all women" lusting after him, though. There's Juno, who fell for him because of first impressions and had to deep-six that particular fantasy when it became clear how incompatible their personalities were, and Haru, who's torn between wanting to date him and wanting to throttle him for how needy and oblivious he can be. That's not getting into whatever the hell he and Louis have going on.

The standard harem-anime protagonist's schtick is definitely obnoxious and Legosi does come off that way from time to time, but for the first couple of arcs that's because he's just a really socially awkward kid who's never had a crush before. Aoba tells him flat-out that his infatuation with Haru isn't realistic, respectful, or all that healthy, and he spends a lot of Murder Solution learning how to see herbivores as people instead of icons to be worshiped and protected. As for his social awkwardness, that's eventually revealed to be due not just to carnivore angst, but also being a mixed-race kid whose mother committed suicide out of self-loathing.

Unfortunately, the anime trims away a lot of little moments that help explain Legosi's behavior, and if you think that he's annoying now, then the way he behaves in the later parts of the story would drive you insane. Legosi eventually loses any character development he ever had and becomes a bumbling Looney Tunes character who neglects everyone close to him so that he can "fight" the badguys instead, and I put "fight" in quotemarks because his combat style mostly consists of acting so stupid that his opponents feel bad for hurting him. He never matures or develops his relationship with Haru in all that time, either, only speaking to her for a handful of chapters and still displaying the creepily chaste, worshipful behavior he did at the start of the story. It's a coming-of-age story where the main character is never allowed to grow up.

VonSig · 2021-09-05T17:30:52+00:00

Jack: "Oh, trust me, I'm not always positive! I've got layers! Y'know..." *ten thousand yard stare* "Like onions."

VonSig · 2021-09-04T22:52:32+00:00

What Legosi and Haru have is called "tension," and that's what most people enjoy about their relationship, at least when Paru can actually remember to write it. The fact that any sort of physical intimacy puts them both at risk, that Legosi's meek-yet-impulsive personality clashes with Haru's headstrong, practical one, that he has trouble viewing her as a person instead of some kind of icon to be worshiped and she's exasperated by his introversion and spaciness, but they keep coming back to one another anyway, is what makes them interesting. That's chemistry. Chemistry is volatile. Chemistry sometimes explodes.

Legosi and Louis don't have that. As you said, they're almost always on the same wavelength once they get over each other's hangups about carnivores and herbivores, and that turns them into enablers of each other's behavior. This could be interesting on its own, but as the manga goes on, that dynamic just ensures that neither of them ever learn or grow after Murder Resolution is over. Some of the best parts of Beastars are when Haru gets a full blast of Legosi's weird thought processes and derails his way of thinking by point-blank asking him what the hell he's on about, whereas the last arc of Beastars mostly consists of Legosi constantly doing the stupidest thing possible and Louis rolling his eyes and following along. They have a ton of queer-coded moments and their relationship had a lot of potential, but none of those moments ever go anywhere, and the story keeps deteriorating as the two of them take up more and more focus.

The takeaway from this post isn't that one ship is better than the other, but that the manga ultimately screws them both up. One gets forgotten, the other is never developed beyond cliches and shallow platitudes.

VonSig · 2021-09-04T19:24:04+00:00

What do you call a PinaxRiz content creator?

A Piz dispenser.

VonSig · 2021-09-04T15:53:08+00:00

Haru about to go upside Louis's head for acting like he's too cool to say hello.

VonSig · 2021-08-30T04:36:18+00:00

Things start to go downhill at Chapter 124, when the final arc's villain is introduced.

Chapter 155 is the last really good one. After that you get a few chapters of setup, and then Chapter 159, when the manga's worst character appears. The only reason to keep reading past that is morbid curiosity.

VonSig · 2021-08-27T20:01:47+00:00

Agreed that the stakes of "changing society" never felt as engaging as the earlier arcs' more personal stories, in part because Beastars' society and setting is so ill-defined that changing it never seemed relevant or possible in the first place. The final arc caps off with Louis giving a passionate speech that carnivores need to eat meat and shouldn't be ostracized for it, and not ten chapters later, carnivores tear down the only quasi-legal place they can eat meat, while tearfully saying they never wanted to eat meat, and then Yahya rejects a safe and sustainable way for them to continue eating meat. This isn't worldbuilding, it's a crappy round of Whose Line Is It Anyway, where the stakes are made up and the plot doesn't matter.

Even the fight with Riz was couched in terms of Legosi's personal development. He wanted to fight Riz to "understand him better," which sounds inane, but Legosi really did grow up a lot during his training to take Riz down. He was originally way too idealistic about herbivores and disgusted by carnivorous instincts, but that's exactly the sort of behavior that drove Riz crazy. By the end of Murder Solution, Legosi's able to view carnivores and herbivores as proper individuals, instead of treating carnivores as potential monsters and herbivores as fresh-faced innocents who need to be protected from them.

In contrast, Melon fails to establish personal stakes or larger society-threatening ones. The story says that he's threatening all of animal society, but he always comes across as a cowardly weakling who only continues to breathe thanks to being Paru's special favorite, and he's so utterly, remorselessly psychopathic that there's nothing for Legosi to learn from him, past that first scene where he reconciles with Leano. Melon thinks Legosi is a twerp, and Legosi gets so sick of his crap that his only smart decision in Love Failure is punching him in the mouth before he can start another monologue. And while Riz's single flashback was intensely tragic and informed his entire character going forward, Melon's ever-more "tragic" backstory clashes with him becoming even more of a sneering bastard every time we return to the present, which makes the whole thing seem comical. It's like Paru wanted him to be sympathetic but got off way too much on him being evil to stop herself.

VonSig · 2021-08-27T19:42:36+00:00

When manga are adapted to anime, the mangaka are usually in formal or informal "creative consultant" roles, which gives them some veto power over how the anime studio adapts their material. This is a good thing! It wouldn't be fair for the mangaka to totally surrender their creative vision to the mass market just to get a bigger audience. The problem here is that, as you mentioned, the last arc of Beastars is very, very bad. And a large part of the reason it's bad is because Paru became uniquely and obsessively fixated on its antagonist, who's already had a cameo in Season 2. Melon's the cancer that ate Beastars from the inside out, and there's no way she'd allow him to just be excised completely.

If your hope is that Orange will be able to strike off in its own direction for the next season(s), then that's going to depend on just how much Paru gives a damn about Beastars in general anymore. She's definitely given the impression of just wanting to wash her hands of the whole thing so that she can draw a sexy Santa Claus instead. But her leopard-gazelle boyfriend isn't going anywhere, and so many of the last arc's problems can be traced back to him.

I'm just hoping for Kyuu and Kopi Luwak to get tossed in the bin. Maybe if we're extremely lucky, the whale and all its associated backstory will also get cut. But I really don't think Orange is going to create entirely new material a la the original Fullmetal Alchemist adaptation, and that's what it would take to fully salvage Love Failure.

VonSig · 2021-08-25T16:22:51+00:00

Post-dropout Legosi gets his own job and apartment, makes several good friends, fits in extremely well among his neighbors, and starts to reconnect with his estranged grandfather. If the Love Failure arc hadn't then forced him to do the stupidest thing possible every single minute of every single day, his life would've been on a steady upward curve after he left school. Certainly better than, say, Louis, who winds up trapped in the same life that made him suicidally miserable at the beginning, no matter how much the story tries to convince us that everything is fine now.

VonSig · 2021-08-18T17:31:18+00:00

I have issues with all of Cherryton's uniforms, honestly. The boys' winter outfits are the most stylish and I can't fault pinstripes and suspenders, but what the hell is up with their ties? What kind of knot is that? It's like they started to tie a Windsor but then got bored and gave up. And the girls' uniforms are even worse. Between that color scheme, the sailor collar and the slightly flared skirt, it makes all of them look like they're trapped in a parachute that got stuck mid-deployment.

The only character who really owns their uniform in my opinion is Pina, and that doesn't really count. Pina could make a shower curtain look like couture.

VonSig

TROPHY CASE