Manga / Beastars

All I was talking about was music...and that's called jazz!

"I like tragedies. They make me sympathize with the characters...and they make me feel calm."

— Legoshi

In a world of humanoid animals, carnivores and herbivores share a society where both sides strain against their natures. Herbivores must contain their constant fear of carnivores and struggle with their natural weaknesses, while carnivores must resist their violent impulses. Despite prejudicial tension constantly bubbling under the surface, laws and taboos help both subcultures coexist.

That is, until a student at Cherryton Academy, an alpaca named Tem, is found dead—mauled by a carnivore. And most have already pictured a prime suspect: Legoshi, a wolf with a menacing appearance that belies his kind heart and meek demeanor.

Fueled by a sense of justice and a desire to prove himself, Legoshi makes it his mission to expose the true killer, only to find not only his worldview changing but his relationship with both subcultures.

Written by Paru Itagaki and published in Weekly Shonen Champion from September 2016 to October 2020, Beastars (sometimes stylized BEASTARS) is a Shonen manga series based on Itagaki's previous work, Beast Complex. In December of 2020, Itagaki announced that Beast Complex will receive a serialization starting January 7th, 2021, which includes appearances of the characters from this manga.

The manga is notable for having sleeper hit status in Japan, as it was voted 2nd best manga in the 2018 Kono Manga wa Sugoi ranking, just behind The Promised Neverland. It also landed several Best New Manga awards upon release and even won the best Shonen Manga award in the 2018 Kodansha Manga Awards. The series is published in English by Viz Media and in French by Ki-Oon.

On February 4, 2019, it was announced that Beastars would receive an anime adaptation by Orange. It began airing on Fuji Television on October 9, 2019, and was internationally distributed by Netflix on March 13, 2020. A second season aired on Netflix on July 15, 2021. A third and final season is set to release in two parts starting in 2024.

Not to be confused with Beast Wars. Compare and contrast with Zootopia, which has a similar premise but very different themes.

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Beastars provides examples of:

A-B

• Aborted Arc: Imaginary Chimeras were introduced in Chapter 160, with Legosi proving to possess a natural gift in the art and begging to be trained in its use so he can use it against Melon. Its existence was completely forgotten not long after (strictly speaking we don't even know what practical use it has in battle). This is thought to be due to a combination of the series getting close to its Cosmic Deadline and the near-universal backlash it received from fans, who felt it was too outlandish for the type of series Beastars is, even within the greatly relaxed sense of realism that came with the Love Failure arc.
• Act of True Love: Several of Legoshi's actions are fueled by his love for Haru and his drive to prove that his love for her is more than just a carnivorous drive.
• Actor Allusion: In the Latin American Spanish dub, Rokume is voiced by Laura Torres, who already voiced another snake before
• Adaptation Deviation: The second season rearranged certain chapters. Most notably is Legoshi's first fight with Riz. In the manga, it happens right after he consumes a larva and regrows his original fur while in the anime he fights Riz before that. It was most likely done to give proper pacing for the anime within a given episode count as opposed to the manga which can run at its own pace.
• Adaptation Distillation: Naturally. Scenes in the manga are often altered, moved around, or left out entirely in anime.
  • The first episode was condensed from the first three chapters to fit a 22-minute runtime. One scene that was changed for time was when Els tries to pull a knife out on Legoshi in the theatre to protect herself only for it to be taken by Legoshi. It is changed to a scene where they are both outside and the struggle is cut completely.
  • The final episode of season 2 condenses a large number of chapters into one single episode. Because of this, the character Riz is slightly altered, as it downplays the side-effects of his drugs by removing scenes and cuts out many of his final thoughts and speeches about Tem, including taking back that he doesn't even remember Tem anymore and that he really still thinks about him every day, which leaves him less sympathetic compared to the manga.
• Adaptation Expansion: The city where Beastars takes place is a literal example. While it was always portrayed as a big location in the manga, where hundreds of thousands animals could potentially live, some background glimpses from the anime imply it may be even bigger than that - when at one point Legoshi and Haru visit a hilltop lookout point, the amount of buildings in the distance and the size of the visible bay area from the anime is multiple times bigger than what Itagaki originally drew.
• Adults Are Useless: Zigzagged. While there are certainly irresponsible adults from time to time (higher echelons of the law are shown to be spineless idiots who cower in fear of the Sublime Beastar), most other adults are portrayed to be fairly well-adjusted, professional and even sensible people who, while well-meaning, are either barred from helping others or are bound too tightly by the red tape of bureaucracy (the headmaster of Cherryton acknowledging these problems coming from the opinions of differing species). The cops during the Riz arc, the carnivore dorm supervisor and even the drama club leader are also perfect examples.
• Aerith and Bob: There are a great variety of names in this world. There are normal real-world names like Louis, Bill, Jack and Haru, as well as names that are more out there like Legoshi, Tem, and Els.
• All-CGI Cartoon: The anime (which is produced by Orange, the same studio behind Land of the Lustrous) is primarily animated in CGI with some 2D effects.
• All Men Are Perverts: Played for laughs. After Legoshi and Haru return to the school dorms after being AWOL the whole night following their Rescue Arc, several of his male classmates think they ran off to be lovey-dovey alone. So when Legoshi goes to a carnivore meet-up sometime later, one of the first questions they collectively ask him is "Can large carnivores have sex with bunnies". He is not amused.
• All Part of the Show: During the second performance of Adler Legoshi savagely attacks Bill and the audience is unsure whether or not it is part of the show until Louis appears to convince them that it was.
• Alpha Bitch: Mizuchi, the jilted girl bully who torments Haru.
• Always Someone Better: This quickly becomes one of the story's central themes, as almost every major character with enough screentime is revealed to be plagued with self-doubt and varying levels of inferiority complex towards individual animals, whole food chain branches or even their whole environment. Legoshi, Haru, Louis, Juno, Bill, Jack, and many others all have to deal with these demons, but for some of them the need to overcome these feelings helps them grow and gradually become stronger, better people. For some, the old insecurities are just replaced by a brand new set.
• An Arm and a Leg: Due to the difference in strength between carnivores and herbivores, it's not uncommon to hear stories about former dismembering the latter by accident, and all hospitals are required to have a transplant ward for such situations. And we learn of this when Tao the puma accidentally rips Kibi the anteater's arm off while simply goofing off with him. Neither of them takes it well.
• Anguished Declaration of Love: Haru introduced a variant when she told Legoshi she loves him back in chapter 83; in her own estimation she messed up the confession before she even finished that breath. All because with Legoshi being her Living Emotional Crutch, she revealed her other emotions consuming her at the time to him at once and admitted her increasing concern for her ex-lover Louis, which in her own words was directly linked with her growing love for Legoshi and her re-surfacing inferiority complex. All things considered, Legoshi took it much better than she thought and, instead of making a fuss about Louis, promised to do everything he can to keep her happy.
• Animal Battle Aura: Kyuu, who is a small rabbit, uses a fighting style where one simulates an imaginary self is a hybrid of themself and a different species that compensates for the traits that the user lacks. Kyuu's aura when using this style is a half panda, who is much larger than she is. When Legoshi tries learning this style his aura appears as what a possible future half rabbit son of his and Haru's might look like.
• Animal Stereotypes: Characters fit into some stereotypes while avoiding others. The wolf is a loner, but he's not normally fierce or violent. The rabbit does love sex, but she's no timid pushover and actually hates being seen as weak just because she's a rabbit.
• Apathetic Citizens: Completely averted in this setting. If you're doing something unusual, someone will always notice and all you really have to do is raise your voice to turn at least a few heads your way.
• Arc Symbol: Hands. Specifically Legoshi's hands with the big claws, which are a constant reminder of his carnivore status.
• Aren't You Going to Ravish Me?: Haru is pretty much used to guys coming to her only for sex, so she is completely baffled when it turns out that Legoshi, visiting her garden on his club's errand, not only doesn't want to sleep with her as his reward for helping her a bit but is also absolutely terrified of the idea and runs away as soon as he figures out her intentions. This was such a big change of routine for her that she actually thanked him later for being realistic about the whole incident.
• Art Evolution: As the manga progresses, readers will notice how Paru Itagaki's art develops over time. Originally she commonly used clean simple drawings in slow sections at the start of the manga, building up to highly-detailed drawings in action and dramatic scenes; which soon developed into her using more detailed drawings consistently in the slow paces and creating even more vivid drawings in her action and dramatic scenes
• Art Shift: While the anime is produced largely in CGI, there are some occasional shifts in art or even medium.
  • The first season's opening, "Wild Side", is done entirely in stop-motion.
  • In Episode 7, Haru's dream sequence is done entirely with traditional hand-drawn animation, and with a major Animation Bump to boot, courtesy of animator Yoko Kuno.
  • Louis' backstory is also animated traditionally, with the art being closer to a storybook style.
  • Multiple comedic moments also feature brief points of two-dimensional animation.
• The Artifact: The Drama Club has become much less important throughout the series. The first arc was about a play the club was putting on and the tension between Legoshi and Bill. But since then there hasn't been that much focus on it at all as Legoshi has gained other concerns and Louis left the club (and school in general). It is still a regular fixture in the story, but usually just as just a place for other plot things to occur.
• Artifact Title: Early on, it seems like the series is to be about different main characters competing for the title of Beastar. However, Juno and Louis don't take very long to lose all interest in becoming a Beastar, and while Legosi was technically in the running due to the decision to make whoever catches Tem's killer a Beastar, he never shows any interest in it either for most of the series, and is never even told he was in the run. This is briefly brought up again in the final arc, where Legosi suggests he and Louis could become Beastars together and names their team "Beastars", but this plot is not followed up on. By the end of the series, absolutely nobody has become a new Beastar, and the entire concept remains fairly unimportant in the grand scheme of the story, with Yafya even retiring from his role as Sublime Beastar, making the spot vacant, or occupied by an unknown character.
• Artistic License – Biology: All over the place, but a lot of it is just exaggerations of Real Life.
  • In real life, carnivores don't have an uncontrollable instinct to specifically attack herbivores. They have a prey-drive, which means they want to track and chase other animals, but they don’t care whether that animal has a meat-based or vegetarian diet. Carnivores overall also aren't any stronger or faster than herbivores. The most aggressive animals in nature actually tend to be herbivores, because they can better afford to get hurt than carnivores. If carnivores get hurt, they’ll starve because they can't hunt. But injured herbivores still have plenty access to food and thus a better chance of recovery. The animal instincts and biology in Beastars are mostly made up when it comes to predator and prey animals.
  • In the world of Beastars, only carnivores have good night vision. In reality both carnivores and herbivores might have excellent night vision, depending on which time of day they’re active.
  • There is a plot point that Legoshi seems to dislike his grandfather due to the fact he isn't a wolf, and Legoshi and his mother are half breed wolves (quarter in Legoshi's case rather.) It turns out his grandfather is a komodo dragon. Ignoring the impossibility of a mammal and a reptile having children, Legoshi looks like he has only inherited a few reptilian traits from his grandfather: small pupils and immunity to komodo dragon poison.
    • And it eventually comes out that Legoshi's mother developed scales similar to her father later in life that was the contributing factor to her suicide.
  • As revealed in Chapter 124, Legoshi isn't the only halfbreed in the series with the introduction of another hybrid character called Melon. A serial killing Leopard-Gazelle hybrid, who is forced to hide his heritage.
    • This was even hammered home further with the introduction of the hybrid Daycare in Chapter 142.
  • This series also gets several other things wrong about biology although some of them may be intentional. For example, it greatly exaggerates the deadliness of Komodo dragon venom. In real life they are not a very venomous species, but the series depicts Gosha has having to be extremely careful not to accidentally poison people and dripping large amounts of venom from his mouth when excited, and when he is especially upset his venom acts like Hollywood Acid. It also gets where they secrete the venom from wrong. In real life Komodo dragons secrete venom from a pair of sacks in their lower jaw, not from the upper jaw like Gosha does.
  • The series also states that herbivores cannot digest meat. This actually isn't true in real life. Many animals that are labeled as herbivores in real life are not actually strict vegetarians and will occasionally eat meat to get nutrients that plants are low in.
  • In Chapter 154, some of the history of this civilization is revealed. Apparently when the carnivores or "life animals" first encountered the herbivores or "nature animals", some form of magical "survival instinct" triggered causing the carnivores to view the herbivores as objects of protection, rather than potential meals even though the historical account just established that the carnivores would eat each other to survive. It remains to be seen how much of this account is factual versus mythical versus revisionist history but, needless to say, the current story flies in the face of established predator/prey behavior observed in nature.
  • Towards the climax of the Melon arc, some traits ascribed to some species cross the line from exaggerated to purely fantastic. Apparently, a few drops of venom from a strong komodo dragon is enough to melt a huge hole through a building wall in a matter of seconds; they can also bristle their scales like a mammal would bristle their fur. Leopard spots move on their bodies based on their thoughts or emotions. And more.
  • The Dall sheep, Pina’s, tail is pretty long as opposed to the small short tails that real-life Dall sheep have.
• Artistic License – Physics: After training with Gouhin, Legoshi finds out his jaw strength has gotten weaker when he tries to play tug-of-war with Bill. Supposedly carnivores play this game as a test of their biting strength, and try to take body strength out of the equation by both sitting cross-legged on the floor with the rope in their teeth. But realistically this would still give an advantage in pulling to the player with more body mass and strength, and if a player gets pulled over the line instead of getting the rope pulled out of their mouth, that would only show that they lost in body strength and would not demonstrate who had the stronger bite. The presence of fangs that can sink into the rope, as well as the fact that carnivorous animals have much stronger jaws in proportion to the rest of their body compared to humans, makes it even more likely that a player’s body would fail before their mouth. The fact that Legoshi fails to bite into an apple afterward is a much more indicative sign of his weakness.
• Attack the Tail: When Legoshi excuses himself from Haru's gardening shed after she tried to seduce him the second time they met, he closes the sliding door on his tail.
• Awful Truth: No matter how hard society pretends to ignore the matter, obligate carnivores have to eat meat. Louis' public acknowledgment of the fact is controversial enough to incite mass riots.
• Battle in the Rain: Is starts raining during Legoshi's fight with the leader of the Inarigumi after she gives him a major wound to the head.
• Bears Are Bad News: It turns out the killer was the rather quiet bear in Legoshi's drama club.
• Beneath the Mask:
  • Louis may be a charismatic leader figure on the outside, but his inner thoughts and behavior behind closed doors often starkly contrast with what he exhibits in public, with his motivational speech before the first performance of the drama club's "Adler" play being a prime, harsh example, but part of it starts to leak through his shell later on. It doesn't help that he ferociously guards his tragic past even from people close to him, making it very hard for anyone to properly relate to his personality and situation.
  • Haru has a seemingly sunny, can't-take-me-down disposition on the outside, but whenever she's left to her own devices, she becomes a very sad, self-loathing bunny. Without true friends, with a sleazy reputation and very bleak prospects of improving her quality of life, she often calls her existence pathetic and can be even self-destructive at times, desperately looking for something positive to reignite her passion for life.
  • A literal one with Melon, who uses a medical mask to hide his leopard jaw and keeps his eyes squinted to hide his eyes. All of this to hide his carnivorous side.
• Better as Friends: Played With. Both Legoshi and Haru treat their relationship as this at first, however, the deeper in the series they go, the more they realize how much they need and care for each other.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: So far most of the major body damage seen within the story is allocated to male characters. The worst wound we've seen on a named girl is a claw mark Haru received from a predator-frenzied Legoshi, but that heals away completely by the second time they meet and people continue to remark how perfect her body is afterward.
  • Averted after Haru sees another female rabbit mauled by a carnivore later in the series.
• Beast and Beauty: How most characters view the growing relationship between Haru and Legoshi.
• Betty and Veronica: Louis develops this dynamic with Juno and Azuki, his deer fiance he was betrothed to as a child. Both are very attractive, but whereas Azuki is elegant, refined and somewhat emotionally distant in her commitment to the heir-producing business, Juno is passionate, direct and carries her heart on her sleeve. With his current mindset, Louis's heart wants to lean towards Juno, whom he considers a breath of fresh air in his record with women, but his mind remembers about his obligations towards his family that bind him to Azuki. It's yet to be seen which girl will ultimately win, especially with all the recent developments around Louis.
  • In the end, Azuki "wins" in the sense that Louis goes through with his Arranged Marriage as planned, though he does so for the sake of the Horns Corporation that he inherited rather than love, since it's quite clear he's still smitten with Juno.
• Beware the Quiet Ones:
  • Legoshi is gentle as can be, but he's still a wolf. When pushed over the edge he is very intimidating.
  • Turns out this goes for the killer, Riz. He is the bear in the drama club, and he had few if any lines before the chapter where he is revealed to be the killer.
• The Big Bad Wolf: Legoshi is meant to evoke this archetype, much to his consternation.
• Bilingual Bonus: Louis' number when he was being raised in the Black Market is 4, which makes the number 4 a psychological trigger for him. 4 in Japanese is "shi," and it is indeed a "bad luck number" in Japanese culture, as "shi" is also the word for "death" (albeit the kanji are different).
• Bittersweet Ending: Multiple characters get positive endings, with things like Cherryton being unsegregated and Yafya rebuilding his friendship with Gosha. However, some other characters get endings that end in a bit more bittersweet note, Louis decides to marry Azuki despite being interested in Juno for the sake of Horns conglomerate, but seems to be doing the best with what he has, the Shishigumi is in prison and their attempt to reduce their sentence ends up extending it, but they have a job secure when they leave as Louis plans to hire them, and Legoshi and Haru officially start dating and, though Haru doubts their future will be easy, soon become engaged.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: It is often pointed out that this world is far from morally simple or clearly-defined and things such as social norms and philosophies rarely can properly apply to a bigger group of animals, and what is unthinkable for one person may be everyday life to someone else.
  • The Sublime Beastar Yafya is shown to believe in justice, fights for the downtrodden and shows no remorse or hesitation in killing carnivores who've eaten meat and using their bodies as literal fertilizer for his garden. It took Legoshi ripping his teeth out of his mouth as a sign of resolve to escape this fate.
• Black Market: Prey body parts are traded for carnivore consumption. This is highly illegal in-universe, although there is a corner of the city called the Back Alley Market that specializes in these contraband.
• Blood Lust: Carnivores who get a taste of flesh tend to crave it continually afterward.
  • It is later revealed that this trait can also be passed onto herbivore-carnivore hybrids, such as the case with Melon. Who by all accounts looks like a normal herbivore, except for his teeth, but carries homicidal traits that would normally be restricted to carnivores.
• Body Horror: The reason why cross-species marriages are considered taboo and looked down upon by society at large, as genetics is not that lenient regarding combining species from different trees entirely. This is something Legoshi's mother had to experience firsthand once she reached adulthood.
• Body Motifs: Since this is a World of Funny Animals, it is not limited to human body parts.
  • Legoshi, who is a wolf has several of these but the most focus is given to his hands and his teeth. His clawed hands are always there to remind him of his nature as a carnivore and he always tries to hide his sharp teeth. A recurring theme in the series is that whenever Legoshi goes through an important moment in his character development, his appearance changes in some way, often by gaining new scars. Bill the Tiger gives Legoshi scars on his back resembling tiger stripes during their fight as a symbol of how the two of them aren't so different. When Legoshi metaphorically loses his virginity by consuming a live insect in order to experience what it is like to kill something, his fur, which had been cut short at the time, instantly grows back to its normal length. When Yafya threatens to kill Legoshi if he doesn't apologize for being born a carnivore, Legoshi goes a step further and rips out his own teeth as a sign of his rejection of his carnivore nature. And those are just some of the major ones.
  • Another character who gets body motifs is Louis, mainly his antlers, symbolizing his pride, and his right foot, which represents his weakness. In an early chapter, he jokes about offering Legoshi one of his legs. Shortly after he ends up breaking his right ankle and keeps it a secret so he can keep performing despite being in agonizing pain from the injury. Later it is revealed that he has a tattoo on his right foot from when he was illegally kept as livestock to be sold as food as a child. He later ends up feeding his right foot to Legoshi to give him a power boost for his final battle with Tem's murderer, thus getting rid of the tattoo and with it moves on from his past. Whenever he sheds his antlers he tries to avoid being seen without them.
  • The villain Melon, a self-hating leopard-gazelle hybrid has his leopard spots, which he tries to cover up with melon leaf tattoos, but he keeps growing new ones.
• Brutal Honesty: Haru to Mizuchi, whose boyfriend left her after sleeping with the former.
  Haru: "YOU LOST! HOW ROMANCE WORKS IS THAT YOU'RE MORE LIKELY TO LOSE THE MORE DESPERATE YOU ARE."
• The Bus Came Back: Riz’s fate is confirmed in chapter 182, and he is shown to be on very cordial terms with Pina. Very restricted, but cordial.

C-D

• The Cameo: Benny the saltwater crocodile from one of the chapters of Beast Complex appears as the owner of a restaurant Legoshi visits with Gosha to break up a disagreement between him and a group of carnivore birds.
• Canine Confusion: While some dog breeds have been bred for intelligence, wolves tend to be much smarter on average. Legoshi is shown to be a bit slow on the uptake or has to be outright told something for him to understand it, with it not being clear if this is the norm for wolves or just how Legoshi is.
• Carnivore Confusion: The Central Theme of the manga. All animals are sapient (except for bugs), so what issues arise in a society where herbivores and carnivores biologically wired to eat herbivores intermingle more-or-less peacefully?
  • Sea life is no less sapient but has far fewer hangups about the predation situation. Eating and being eaten are part of the natural cycle of life, and either fate is accepted calmly. Believing in reincarnation helps.
• Cats Are Magic: Feline species are more in touch with the supernatural than other species. They can instinctively sense when they will die soon. They also can use divination to locate things they are looking for and for deciding who their leaders should be.
• Cement Shoes: The lion yakuza at one point tries to kill Legoshi by tying him to a weighted chair and throwing him off a cliff into the ocean. He survives by getting a shark to rescue him using sea speak phrases that a seal taught him.
• Chastity Couple: Haru and Legoshi in the early chapters, who haven't even kissed despite how close they grew to each other.
• Chekhov's Gun: When Legoshi finds himself in a life or death quiz show, he tries to reflect back on everything he's learned in school but all he can recall is silly moments with his friends. He manages to do well in the quiz when it turns out further exploring those flashbacks offers insights into the answers for all the questions he's asked.
• Chick Magnet:
  • Louis' charisma makes him really popular among the school ladies and chances are he could date almost any girl there, no matter their diet background, if he just showed some interest. Which he never does.
  • Pina, probably even more than Louis since he actually revels in female attention and reacts to their hailings, often resulting in massive "sqweeee!"s heard from the sidelines.
  • Surprisingly, Legoshi as a minor example. Aside from Juno's blatant crush and Haru's growing fondness of him, many girls who spend enough time with him to see past his society-assigned stereotypes, show signs of mild attraction to him.
• The Chosen One: The meaning of the manga's title. "Beastars" are an elite group of young animals who, through their remarkable deeds and reputation, have the potential to shape and improve the society once they become adults. Beastar is an official title, and those who carry it are chosen by the ruling bodies of society. Traditionally, Beastars are periodically selected from the best-regarded high schools' (Cherryton among them) fresh graduates. Within the setting, Louis and Juno actively compete to earn the title, but unknown to them, many figures working behind the curtains think Legoshi is also great Beastar material and subtly push him into taking actions that may bring him closer to being eligible for evaluation.
• Cliffhanger: A trope the series has become infamous for, with many chapters often leaving the readers with thrilling, ambiguous images on their last page.
• Club Stub: Haru is the sole member of Cherryton's gardening club, as all the other members graduated a few years ago. The fact that she's an outcast at school thanks to her reputation for sleeping around has also prevented her from recruiting more members.
• Color Failure: Legoshi has such a horrified reaction to briefly thinking he ate Haru in his sleep, that his fur turns pale white. Notably, it actually stays that way for a while afterward and when Legoshi gets in trouble with the police in this state he opts to go into hiding until he sheds his white coat and goes back to normal.
• Connected All Along: Tem's killer was also a very good friend, a bear who felt so comfortable and happy around Tem that he stopped taking the medication he uses to suppress and control his strength. In a twisted way, Tem's death was triggered by friendship and happiness.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist:
  • The Starter Villain of the Drama Club Arc, Bill, is by all accounts a pretty normal teenager, and his actions, while morally reprehensible, aren't seen as truly evil in society, especially considering that while he was a villain, he would only use rabbit blood (with consent from the rabbit themselves, in one case) and attack Legoshi in retaliation; subsequently, Bill is treated as not a villain and more of a colleague of the main characters. On the other hand, the first Shishigumi Boss of the Meteor Festival Arc is truly evil— he actually kidnaps, kills, and eats herbivores, is in bed with the city mayor so he turns a blind eye to his business, plans to harm both Haru and Legoshi, and is much older than Bill.
  • Whereas both Bill and the first Shishigumi Boss are relatively simple and straightforward characters, with the latter being particularly flat and unsympathetic, Tem's killer, Riz from the Murder Incident Solution Arc, is a villain who gets a lot of screentime dedicated to what led him to kill and is given more sympathy than expected with a Freudian Excuse. Much like the other villains, his philosophy on eating meat diverges from Legoshi's, but he is the first to make Legoshi consider that the physical necessity of carnivores to eat meat is not inherently an evil thing and that the way society treats carnivores is not justified, and where Bill and the Boss thought of the act of eating meat as simply a way to sate a physical urge, Riz has a Consuming Passion, and the act of eating meat to him is considered important and intimate.
  • Whereas Bill, the first Shishigumi Boss, and Riz were all carnivores, Melon is a hybrid of a carnivore and a herbivore. The three previous villains were able to at least feign politeness, and, in both Bill and Riz's cases, they were decent people at heart. Melon, however, is an Ax-Crazy sociopath that revels in creating chaos and pain to the society around him. Where the three of them mostly planned on a small scale and had only self-interest at the plots they were a part in, Melon wants to destroy carnivore/herbivore relationships to make money off of the frenzied carnivores. And unlike those before him, eating meat is something he does out of spite and to humiliate his carnivore underlings, rather than enjoyment or physical necessity since he can't taste or digest meat properly.
• Consuming Passion: The series frequently blurs the line between the violence of predation and sexuality. When Legoshi catches Haru outside the theater and clings to her, it would be easy to mistake his predatory musings for sexual excitement. Similar things happen in multiple instances with multiple characters.
  • For carnivores, the ability to kill is seen as a sort of rite of passage not unlike losing virginity. Legoshi tries to understand Tem's killer's perspective, even noting that he "has something he doesn't", by starting small and eating a larvae raw; and afterward, he shows textbook examples of a freshly non-virgin male (he's in pure bliss following the consumption, his fur grows back, he gets more confident).
  • Even strip joints run on this sort of logic. One particular stripper notes that the crowd (which is made of mostly predators) gets more and more frenzied while she (an herbivore) does her thing on stage, and uses that power to her advantage.
• Crapsack World: The Beastars world is brimming with enough speciesism to rival real-world racism, but also in the Beastars universe prey animals can be murdered (and eaten!) any time a predator loses control of their violent urges. It's a rough world for small animals, but the discrimination against predators isn't insignificant either. Compounding this, it's shown that a lot of the people with the sway to improve society would rather either enforce corrupt practices to maintain a semblance of order, or unload the responsibility of doing so onto other parties, such as the eponymous Beastar.
• Creator's Culture Carryover: Despite the setting looking like a typical Western city, especially the city which the story takes place (Cherryton), all the on-screen text is in Japanese, the prices are all in yens, and some characters sports Japanese names, Haru included.^note Through it could be explained, from a Japanese POV, that all the characters are named with more or less stereotypical names for pets in Japan, hence why there's lots of characters with odd-sounding names.
• Credits Jukebox: While the general structure remains the same (they start with Legoshi sitting on a bench and end with a rotating shot of him looking at another character), the song and visuals of the ending credits change depending on the tone of the episode. There are 4 different endings taking turns.
• A Day in the Limelight: A few chapters are basically one-offs focusing on another character,
• Death by Origin Story: The only times we see Tem alive are in flashbacks taking place before he is murdered in the first chapter.
  • Legoshi's mother, who is first introduced in a flashback through a portrait visible during her own funeral wake.
  • It's also somewhat implied that Legoshi's grandmother has died not long after starting a family with Gosha, which could explain her never appearing outside of Gosha's and Yafya's shared flashback. And considering Yafya's remark on how seemingly impossible a wolf getting impregnated by a komodo dragon is due to biological differences, she might have actually died at childbirth. It turns out that she actually died by kissing Gosha on the mouth in an act of foolish sentimentality.
• Deuteragonist: Despite Beastars ostensibly being "The Story of A Wolf and a Rabbit" as the title of the final chapter will tell you, the deuteragonist is actually not Haru, but Louis. You could actually count the number of times Haru appears in the last 70 chapters on your fingers.
• Didn't Think This Through: A constant problem with most of the characters is that they throw ideas out without thinking, Legoshi being the most obvious culprit of this.
• Death Glare: Legoshi is scary to herbivores by default, but he gives some serious death glares when provoked.
• Designer Babies: In-Universe, domestic dogs and cats were created like this during the war 100 years ago. Dogs in particular have been genetically modified from wolf DNA to be exceptionally intelligent and capable of learning, to such an extent that the five smartest animals in Cherryton are all dogs.
• Does Not Know His Own Strength: This is a frequent problem in the Beastars world. Carnivores are overwhelmingly strong so all it takes is a lapse of focus for them to do real harm. It's not uncommon for them to accidentally rip an herbivore's limb off! Though thankfully, reattachment surgeries are very accessible and have high success rates.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: The act of eating meat and a predatory nature is constantly tied with sexuality within the story. There are many instances of characters talking about eating meat that come across as them really talking about sex. Due to eating Louis's foot, Legoshi is put on a criminal registry that restricts him from marrying herbivores and will cause many schools and jobs who look at his record to turn him away. Sounds a lot like he's a registered sex offender, doesn't it?^note It should be noted, however, that Japan doesn't have a sex offender registry like in some western countries, and this topic is quite a hot problem to discuss there, not that really matters anyway, since in Japan, ex-convicts or people who did really serious crimes by Japanese standards, like using drugs, are traditionally shunned from society, both formally and unformally. See also Creator Provincialism above.
  • During his third year in school, Jack gets put in a special class only available to the school's top 5 students that tells the full history of their society. What he learns depresses him a lot but he's forced to bottle it up and smile. So in private, he starts cutting onions to let out his pent up emotions and feel something.
• Doom Magnet: Legoshi, who attracts new problems so often it already became one of his defining traits.
  • Haru also slowly becomes one. Aside from her constant bullying issues and first, nearly fatal encounter with Legoshi that kicked off part of the plot, she also was abducted and nearly devoured by the first leader of the Shishigumi gang, and recently was designated by Melon the killer hybrid as the one herbivore he too wants to eat. And he's not aware yet she's Legoshi's girlfriend, which, considering their current animosities, might screw her up even more if he finds out.
• Drama Club: A number of the main characters are in Cherryton School's drama club.
• Drama-Preserving Handicap: Soon after Legoshi begins his hunt for Tem's murderer, he comes down with a cold that keeps him from using his strong sense of smell. This allows the murderer to attack Legoshi while staying out of sight to avoid being immediately identified by smell.
• Dress Hits Floor: In the anime such a shot is added during Haru's attempt to seduce Legoshi in the Gardening Club once she finishes taking off her uniform to accentuate the impact of the situation for the poor wolf, who was so lost in his thoughts he didn't even notice her undressing in the first place.
• Driven to Suicide: Legoshi's mother killed herself, but it is not publicly known why only that she started acting strangely after marrying his father. It is later revealed that after committing herself to live as a true, beautiful wolf to fit in with society, she began developing scales similar to her father. Upon this, she set out to have a child that was more wolf than herself and by the time she killed herself, her back was covered in scales. What seems to have pushed her over was Legoshi still inheriting traits, such as his expressions, from his grandfather that made her actually kill herself.
• Driving Question: A more open-ended example than most, but one nonetheless- are herbivores and carnivores actually incompatible with each other not only in terms of societal equality, but in their capability to enter a romantic relationship? Just about every major character in the story grapples with this question, from Legoshi and Haru with their interspecies relationship, to more minor cases like Bill and Aoba's struggle with their predatory nature. This becomes an even bigger problem later on, as Legoshi encounter the ivory trader Melon who is a predator-prey hybrid. Melon's life is a living hell due to having the genetics of two completely different species, and displays to Legoshi very clearly that his love for Haru might result in a child shunned by society and scarred by contradictory DNA.
• Dude Looks Like a Lady: Dem the swan and Pina the goat. The latter even smells like one, but it turns out he just likes to make out a lot with girls, so their scent rubs off on him.
• Dysfunction Junction: Most of the characters are mentally off-kilter in one way or another. This makes sense as they are unstable teenagers with the addition of animalistic urges and capabilities. This goes double for the drama club, which only recruits by scouting out students with unique or traumatic backgrounds.

E-H

• Endangered Species: Apparently the harlequin rabbits, such as Mizuchi, are in danger of becoming extinct, so she claims each same-species relationship^note nevermind that harlequin rabbits are a breed, not a species, including hers, is extremely important for the survival of the species, and thus Haru is being truly assholish for trying to break it apart with her actions, stating she is partly responsible for their potential future doom.
• Enemy Within: Legoshi sees his baser wolf instincts as this. In the iconic scene where Legoshi catches Haru outside the theater his instincts manifest as a scary hallucination.
• Entertainingly Wrong: When Louis sees Legoshi walking through the black market with a bag full of meat, he naturally assumes that Legoshi was planning to eat it, which depresses Louis as even if he didn't really like Legoshi, he figured Legoshi was a "better" carnivore, not a slave to carnivore urges. In reality, Legoshi is using the meat as training to suppress his carnivore urges, spending hours at a time sitting a room with slabs of meat to dull his senses and desire for it. After completing this training, he buries all the meat with headstones that have their names (he took the time to find out the name of every corpse he bought).
• Everyone Knew Already: This is Louis's reaction when Legoshi comes out to him as an herbivore fetishist.
  Louis: Seriously? You just figured that out now, you dumb dog?
• Everyone Went to School Together: It turns out that Yafya, the first Beastar that we are introduced to, was best friends with Legoshi's grandfather when they were both teenagers. They planned to become Beastars together to protect society, but Legoshi's grandfather dropped out when he fell in love with Legoshi's grandmother (and got her pregnant).
• Evolving Credits: The ending of the anime's first season changes every episode. All of them shown so far follow the same pattern of scenes.
  • "Le Zoo" is very jovial, with an upbeat song, tinted blue, showing Legoshi going through his daily life in Cherryton. It ends with the scene where he meets Haru on the rooftop.
  • "Sleeping Instinct", on the other hand, is very menacing, having bombastic rock music, tinted red, showing Legoshi struggling with his feral instincts. It ends with the scene where he's about to attack Haru near the fountain.
  • "Marble" is much more melancholic, tinted yellow, showing Legoshi's thoughts on his relationships, and the relations between herbivores and carnivores. It ends with him meeting Louis, rather than Haru.
• Experimented in College: Played with. As the narration indicates, sex and relationships between animals of different species is something that is seen as a brief experiment during the youth, but that eventually people will grow out of it and date exclusively within their species. Part of the series central conflict is this is not the case for none of the main characters, who realize they are exclusively attracted to people who should be just an experiment.
• Eyes Out of Sight: Collot's eyes are always covered by his hair. This isn't surprising since he's a sheepdog, and this is quite common for sheepdogs even in real life.
• Fan Disservice: Haru is forced to strip naked for the mob boss, who intends on eating her.
• Fanservice Cover: The cover page for Chapter #31 has Haru, Juno, and Shiira posing on a bed in lingerie along with the following text:
  "A Sexy gathering of female animals!"
• Fantastic Racism: Mostly between herbivores and carnivores, but it happens within the groups as well. Herbivores are commonly seen as weak and timid. Carnivores are considered unstable and violent. This extends to the perception of interspecies relationships, especially herbivore/carnivore ones, which face heavy scrutiny & discrimination from both camps due to the percieved power inbalance inherent to them and the possibility of producing hybrids. Naturally, hybrids themselves are considered freakish by society at large due to how unpredictable their mixture of traits can be.
• First Girl Wins: Legoshi admits that part of the reason he feels Haru is special is because she was the first girl to treat him as a male rather than simply a wolf or carnivore, and while her actions at the time were misguided, he still liked the sensation.
• Foreshadowing:
  • After Louis orders Legoshi to be the lookout while he helps Tem's replacement rehearse his lines, he says, "If I promised you to give you my leg, you’d drool and accept my proposal, wouldn’t you?" At the conclusion of the murder investigation arc, Louis lets Legoshi eat his foot to help him defeat Riz.
  • Early on, Kai tells Legoshi that everyone in the Drama Club is recruited based on having an unusual past or big secret. Legoshi dodges Kai's question of what his secret is and instead ponders on what the seemingly perfect Louis' secret must be. It isn't until Chapter 33 that it's revealed Louis' secret is he was an orphan raised as livestock in the Black Market, and it isn't until chapter 73 that it comes out Legoshi's secret is he's not entirely a wolf, being part komodo dragon due to his grandfather being one.
  • In Chapter 32, the Meteor Festival prep faces a power outage. Almost instinctively, the carnivores of the Drama Club gather together the herbivores and surround them, keeping them safe. This seems to go against every convention established thus far about carnivore-herbivore relations, though at the time it's explained to be a natural reaction thanks to the recent kills. Over 120 chapters later, it's revealed through Jack that carnivores have an instinctual desire to protect herbivores that goes back to an almost prehistoric era.
• Fully Absorbed Finale: Beast Complex chapter 14 stars Legoshi and Haru one year after the ending of Beastars, giving us a bit more resolution to their relationship.
• Fully-Dressed Cartoon Animal: Applies to majority of the central cast of characters in the series.
• Funny Background Event: Every single time Haru and Legoshi discuss their relationship or show each other affection in public places, every animal that can see or hear them is instantly drawn to them with perked ears, and mouth and eyes wide open, sometimes almost hanging over them to absorb all of the exciting and interesting bits. Legoshi begins to notice and is not amused, though this is justified seeing how just about everything about these two interacting is unique and odd against the in-story social norms.
• Furry Reminder: Along with the usual talk about carnivores and herbivores, there's also a number of animal-related activities for each species to partake in. Alongside Bio-Week at the school (where students get to spend time in their natural habitat such as lizards in a humid environment, polar bears in a very cold room, and wolves looking at a fake moon), canines are able to go to a facility that has a ball-tossing machine and are also pre-disposed to chasing balls and ball-like objects.
• Girl Posse: Mizuchi the harlequin rabbit and her two friends. They bully Haru relentlessly.
• The Greatest Story Never Told: All of Legoshi's involvement with Riz gets censored out of the news due to the small fact that he ate his friend's foot in a consensual act. Worried that predators might latch onto the story to justify eating others, the police edit the story that is released to the public so it is simply that Louis was the one who learned Riz was the killer and dropped out of school to investigate it before confronting him on New Years and getting his foot eaten by Riz. But the act itself has not gone unnoticed by those in high society.
• Great Offscreen War: About 100 years prior to the events of the series there was a one year war between Herbivores and Carnivores. Not much is known about the specifics of the war, and even in-universe the true history of the war is only reserved for top students to learn.
• Green-Eyed Epiphany: For a long time Legoshi is severely on the fence with his feelings for Haru. It's not until he sees her getting along with Louis that he decides he is in love with her.
  • Later on, Haru learns to utilize this to get his attention when he tries to ignore her; just mentioning she might meet up with another male in his earshot instantly focuses his entire attention on the rabbit.
• Hands-On Approach: Haru quickly notices Legoshi is desperately trying not to invoke this with her. The only exception is when she explicitly gives him her permission to do so.
• Hard Truth Aesop:
  • Pacifism is noble, but it only matters coming from someone who's strong enough to defend themselves, as Gosha tells Legosi. Furthermore, there are times where you're going to have to fight if you want to protect yourself or others you care about.
  • Not every evil deed can be explained away with a Freudian Excuse. Legosi vainly searches for a reason behind Melon's mass-murdering, only to realize that there is none.
  • No matter how uncomfortable they are, societal and systemic problems need to be brought into the light so they can be properly discussed and solved.
  • Differences between groups aren't just skin deep, and societal progress can't be made without understanding that.
• Hate Sink: No character has earned such a hatedom as Melon’s father, introduced in Chapter 188. Previously, even the most despicable people were understandable and sympathetic, to a degree. This guy? You’d have to look very carefully to find someone who at the very least is indifferent. Characters themselves note that there's something off-putting about him even before they have a real conversation with him, and once he speaks his mind, he manages to incite Gosha into a murderous rage. Even the narration text seems to despise the guy!
• Head-Turning Beauty: Juno the wolf and Shiira the cheetah attract a lot of male attention wherever they go. Haru the rabbit also qualifies whenever her admirers spot her before diving into the Cherryton's gossip mill.
• Heartbeat Soundtrack: The anime adaptation would sometimes have a heartbeat playing during more dramatic or tense moments involving Legoshi and Haru.:
  • In the first episode, Legoshi's wn heartbeat is heard as he's tightly holding Haru and is struggling not to eat her which results with his claws cutting her arm.
  • Near the end of Season 1, after Legoshi saves Haru from the Shishigumi gang. Haru takes him to a Love Hotel for the two to rest for the evening. As the two are resting in their room, she begins to act seductive with him. The music during that scene is tense and quiet to empathize the sexual tension between the two only increasing. Eventually, Legoshi's heart begins beating when he starts tightly holding Haru the same way he did from their first interaction.
    Haru: "I can hear you're heartbeat."
  • A different heartbeat soundtrack is also heard when Haru and Legoshi are seconds away from having sex before both of their animal instincts abruptly ends this moment.
• Heinous Hyena: Gouhin makes Legoshi fight a mangy, Ax-Crazy meat-addicted striped hyena in the back-alley. Averted with Legoshi's roommate Minugo, who's just as nice as the other 701 Canines.
• Heroic Second Wind: A oddly dark one. During their fight on New Years, Legoshi has had the shit beaten out of him by Riz and barely able to stand. During a distraction, Louis is able to help him hobble away. When it is clear that Legoshi plans to return to the fight despite the fact he can barely walk, Louis tells Legoshi to eat his foot for strength. Legoshi returns to the fight fully recovered with his mouth covered in blood.
• Hidden Depths: Many characters are not what they seem at first due to roles and stereotypes assigned to them by society shrouding the full extent of their personalities.
• Hollywood Acid: When Gosha hears that Legoshi may be in danger, his venom becomes as corrosive as xenomorph blood. A single drop of it turns the soup it landed in purple, then eats right through the bowl and the table, and then through several floors, then all the way into an underground tunnel, and through a water pipe.
• Honor Before Reason: Legoshi attempts to deal with the murderer himself rather than involve the police with his personal investigation or even denounce him to the police when he discovers the truth behind the killing. Several characters point out it would be really easy and more productive to call the police, but Legoshi refuses this due to a mix of his honor as a carnivore and someone who loves herbivores, his attempt to prove Louis how much he's grown and took responsibility for his strength, an attempt to understand the murderer, and an attempt to avenge Tem.
• Horrible Housing: The Hidden Condo is an old apartment complex in a very noisy area within walking distance of the Black Market. The walls are thin, the rooms are cramped, the restrooms are communal and have no baths. It also is one of the few housing complexes willing to rent out to predatory offenders, meaning there's a good chance your neighbor might eat you.
• Humanoid Female Animal: Averted. In this series the males and females are equally anthropomorphized.
• Humanizing Tears: Louis has an emotional breakdown in Beastars at the height of his character development. Louis tries to dissuade Legosi, who is in terrible condition, from returning to a fight that could possibly end with the latter being killed. Despite Louis' best efforts, Legosi is determined to see the fight through to the end, and something he says triggers a memory of Ibuki saying something similar before he died. Upon realizing that nothing he says will convince Legosi to stop the fight, Louis angrily tells Legosi do what he wants, but to leave him out of it. Louis tries his best to keep his cool-headed persona and remain detached, but inside he questions why he feels hot. Finally, he tells Legosi to go as tears pour from his eyes. Louis finds himself puzzled, and at first mistakes the tears for rain. However, when wipes his face, more tears spring forth. The sudden emotional display catches Legosi off guard. Legosi, being the kind wolf he is, offers to stay a little while longer with Louis while the latter loses his composure completely, collapsing to his knees. It is apparent that crying is a new experience for Louis, as he comments on how the tears feel, and even mentions that it is likely the first time he has ever cried. Louis is left unable to stop crying and it takes quite awhile for him to calm down.
• Hybrid Discrimination: Those who are half species or even herbivore/carnivore hybrids are often looked down on since most of society advocates a pure species society. There's even a purebreed supremacist who targets half-breeds. Interspecies marriage only became legal recently, but government still pays same species couples to have children to encourage people to breed with their own species. And here are laws that restrict what species are allowed to marry, although those laws may actually be partly for safety reasons rather than discrimination, such as it being illegal for a carnivore convicted of a predatory offense to marry an herbivore.
  • Legoshi's mother kept the fact that she was a hybrid a secret and pretended to be a normal pure bred wolf. But when signs of her mixed heritage started to show through, she quickly got herself pregnant due to the fear that nobody would want to mate with her if they could see she was a hybrid and would never be able to have a child. As the signs of her hybrid status got more visible she stopped leaving her room for fear of being seen before she eventually killed herself.
  • Melon, who was visibly a hybrid as a child, was bullied by other children for being a hybrid, and this contributed to him becoming a psychopath. As an adult he hides his nose and mouth with a surgical mask when he is hiding his evil nature so that people will think he is only a normal gazelle. When he isn't hiding the fact that he is a bad guy he doesn't bother to hide it because it makes him more intimidating.
• Hybrids Are a Crapshoot:
  • Leano is half wolf and half Komodo dragon. As an adult, she was slowly turned into a grotesque patchwork of fur and scales over the course of years which drove her to suicide.
  • Carnivore/herbivore hybrids are born without sex drives and with a dangerously low appetite, and tend to use pain and violence to simulate those things.

I-K

• I Can't Believe It's Not Heroin!: Meat has this effect on carnivores, and once they get a taste of it, they ferociously crave for more, often suffering greatly and acting out-of-character when they can't have it, or deciding to get it at all costs, even if they have to commit illegal acts or even murders to get another taste.
  • Kopi Luwak coffee is similarly dangerous for them - herbivores find it nice and calming, but meat-eaters, especially those who already have actually tasted meat, get ther apetite strongly stimulated, looking at every herbivore around like they were their next meal and forcing them to heavily restrain themselves until its effects wear off.
• I Just Want My Beloved to Be Happy: Legoshi starts fearing for Haru's safety so much that he starts to avoid her, thinking that she would be happier if he never interacted with her again. This does not amuse her in the slightest.
• If It's You, It's Okay: Food-chain-based variant. Haru's slowly coming to the realization that entering a carnivore-herbivore romantic relationship is very dangerous, if not suicidal, for the latter, and as a result for a time thinks of completely severing her ties with Legoshi before it's too late. But then she also admits that even with that in mind, he means too much to her to give up on him so easily; and after hearing what he's been through recently, she decides she definitely wants to try romancing him properly. Considering their individual and shared experiences, she believes that if someone could pull such a love off, it's definitely them.
• Imagine Spot: Incorporated into the first opening of the anime, which itself is a alternate version of Legoshi's plot-triggering predatorial attack on Haru. Once he has her cornered and everything indicates he's about to eat her, the scene changes its tone completely (including night becoming sunny day) and Haru and Legoshi become entranced with one another, quickly joining in a happy dance. Once they finish, the Fade to White shifts back to a crying Legoshi sitting next to bare rabbit bones and a pool of blood. This indicates to viewers both Legoshi's struggle to have a happy relationship with Haru versus what his carnivore instincts can pull on him if he's careless, but also how carnivores might perceive the act of killing and devouring prey in their minds. Which, to a certain degree, was exactly what Riz went through when he murdered Tem.
• Imminent Danger Clue: Legoshi is sent by the drama club to arrange some flower decoration with the gardening club as part of preparations for their play. Just as he is about to enter its premises, he senses a familiar scent. And of course, to his horror, the moment he goes inside he sees Haru, the would-be victim of his predatory rampage. He immediately freaks out and tries to flee.
  • This happens again later in the story. When he's resting in the school library with his head between his arms, he picks up her scent right next to him. He considers pretending to be asleep to make her go away, but she, at this point extremely pissed at him for ignoring her for a while, won't have any of it.
• Incompatible Orientation: Haru and Legoshi. Not due to different gender preferences, but rather different species, natural prey-predator dynamics, and incompatible instincts stirring from them. She is very afraid that if she attempts a serious relationship with him, these factors will prevent them from being happy together.
• Innocently Insensitive: Some carnivores from Sebun's workplace constantly call her 'lamb', something that is a source of irritation for her. However, when Legoshi comments on the fact, it's implied they weren't doing it out of malice as one calls the nickname tasteless on reflection.
• Intergenerational Friendship: Louis shares this dynamic with the lions of Shishigumi gang during his stay in the Backalley Market.
  • Legoshi becomes the poster child of this trope, who seems to have a natural talent for befriending anyone in the city no matter their age, as long as their life views and goals don't clash too much.
• Internalized Categorism: This is the crux of much of the character drama in the story. There are herbivores and carnivores that hate what they are and come to believe the other group to be superior. For example, Louis often laments his lack of physical ability and resents carnivores for the great strength they are born with.
• Interplay of Sex and Violence: Best exemplified when Legoshi and Haru hide out in a love hotel. It looks like Haru is going to get to take Legoshi's virginity, but they end up in a weird situation where Haru seems to be trying to submit for being eaten. They break themselves out of the carnal urges, but it ruins the mood for the sexual urges.
• Interspecies Romance: It isn't unheard of in the world of Beastars, however the more significant the differences between species involved are the more perverse the relationship is considered. Two canines of similar size could conceivably get together without trouble, but herbivores dating carnivores are nearly unheard of.
  • Deconstructed with Legoshi and Haru's first attempt at intimacy, forcing them to confront the difficulties of an interspecies relationship. They do want each other but Legoshi is more than twice Haru's size so he has to be careful not to hurt her and both of them have instincts that get in the way of their intimacy.
• Interrupted Declaration of Love:
  • Played with in Legoshi's case. When he realizes he loves Haru, he tries to confess to her, but she distracts him on purpose due to a hunch he wants to tell her something very emotional, and she just doesn't have the will to hear him out right then seeing how her relationship with Louis is starting to fall apart at the exact same time. He finally is able to let her know at the end of the Meteor Festival.
  • It seems Haru tries to confess to Legoshi as well during the festival but is rather rudely stopped mid-sentence by Juno's master plan that utterly destroys their intimate moment. It worked, and she didn't try to do it again since then, even after receiving Legoshi's and acknowledging his feelings.
• Intimidation Demonstration: Riz scratches huge gashes into the ceiling with his claws to intimidate Legoshi. It's so effective that Legoshi (who went head-to-head with a gang of lions) is frozen in fear.
• Japanese Ranguage: A shocking amount of official things such as merchandise and the popularity poll have Louis spelled as "Rouis". But even worse than that, they tend to render Haru as "Hal".
• Karma Houdini: Gouhin. He stormed Shishigumi's mansion together with Legoshi to save Haru from being devoured, and in the process gave several of its members a heavy pounding (as well as crossbow and potentially machine gun wounds, if he actually fired that weapon like the manga suggests), yet seemingly came out of the whole ordeal without any consequences whatsoever despite being very easy to track down as a well-known animal in the Backalley Market and his opponents surviving to tell the tale. This probably resulted from Shishigumi not being particularly bothered by the night's outcome, seeing the new situation as a chance to reinvent themselves with Louis' help.
• Klingon Promotion: Turns out this happened to Louis. After killing the lion boss of the Shishigumi, he became the new head.

L-N

• Last One's Ploy: Mizuchi is a Harlequin breed of rabbit that is very defensive of her boyfriend (the only other Harlequin at her school). She bullies the character Haru for getting her boyfriend to cheat with her, for which she accuses her of trying to sabotage their relationship and make Harlequins go extinct.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler: Minor case, as important characters that show up later in the series, can be seen drawn on various volume covers, typically a volume after they are introduced. This trope goes full force in regards for Melon, whose true nature is usually seen on display in various drawings Paru makes to advertise the manga.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: In Chapter 79 Juno wonders if Legoshi and Haru are having a shoujo-like manga romance, which is not too far off the mark.
• Letting the Air out of the Band: Episode 7 has the background music do this when Juno and Legoshi are practicing her dancing in the Drama Club studio. While Juno starts getting excited being so close to Legoshi, when he brushes it off as a sort of biological synchronicity rather than mutual attraction, the formerly upbeat background music sloooowly peters out.
• Let's Meet the Meat: Animals who are desperate for money will sometimes sell parts of their body on the back alley market. When Legoshi and his friends first stumble into the back alley market the first animal they meet is a guy who is selling his own fingers and has a price tag hanging from each finger. Sometimes even carnivores will do this because carnivore meat supposedly has medicinal properties. At one point when Louis the deer has to go to the back alley market alone, he wears a huge price tag on his back to keep any carnivores from bothering him. When Legoshi and Haru attempt to sleep together for the first time, her body becomes confused and she start trying to shove herself down his throat. And during Legoshi's final battle with Tem's murderer, Louis willing allows Legoshi to eat his foot to give him a power boost. And before that, in order to understand what it is like to take a life, Legoshi consumes a live insect and then has a conversation with the insect's spirit, who isn't bothered by the fact that Legoshi ate them. It is also stated that sea creatures have no fear of getting eaten because they believe in reincarnation.
• Love Confession: Legoshi finally manages to profess his love for Haru at the end of Meteor Festival, and while she does not say she outright loves him back, she acknowledges his feelings and promises to wait for him while he's working to become stronger for her.
  • She eventually tells him she reciprocates his feelings during one of their one-on-one talks.
• Love Hotels: Legoshi and Haru are forced to stay in one of these after they miss the night train back to school.
• Love Hurts:
  • Juno can't convince her crush Legoshi to return her feelings no matter what she tries, and his casual behavior around her even after she confessed to him keeps causing her grief. Made even worse by the fact that she can't make herself un-like him due to his good nature and looks.
  • Haru, big time. Her first love Louis frankly tells her they can never be an official couple and being friends with benefits is the best they can (covertly) do together. Legoshi, who really wants to be with her, unintentionally causes her great emotional turmoil by being loyal and considerate yet also being a completely different, seemingly incompatible type of animal, tearing her apart inside every time she tries to decide whether to get romantically involved with him or not.
  • Legoshi, when he distances himself from Haru after deciding he needs to become stronger to protect his herbivore friends; her especially. Just a single thought of her makes him miserable due to how much he misses her during his training time.
• Love Triangle: Legoshi comes to love Haru, Louis is friends-with-benefits with Haru, and Haru is caught in the middle.
  • And now we have Haru and Juno competing for Legoshi.
• Male-to-Female Universal Adaptor: Due to the existence of hybrids in the Manga's setting and the nonrestrictive nature of interspecies reproduction, there are very few cases of malformations other than the interspecies traits inherited from both parents. Besides a few neurological behaviors and sensation defects.
• Master Actor: Despite his young age Louis is just that good. Outsiders come to the drama club's performances just to see him.
• Master of the Mixed Message: Legoshi and Haru both dabble in this due to how unusual and complicated their relationship is.
  • Legoshi has fallen in love with Haru pretty quick, but due to his poor social skills, he often has problems with accurately communicating his intentions and motivations to her, up the point where he later emotionally hurts Haru due to being unable to explain why he distanced himself from her in a way she can understand.
  • Haru has a really hard time sorting out her feelings for Legoshi because of him gradually becoming both her best / only friend and Second Love candidate. She can't decide which role she wants more, as long he's simply by her side, which also means she's having difficulties deciding which angle to emphasize when talking to him. It doesn't help that due to how emotionally dependent on him she becomes later on, she can be moody and send him contradicting signals within the same conversation if he deprives her of his presence for too long. And Legoshi's own communication problems certainly don't help her in making up her mind either.
• Mature Animal Story: A series that deeply explores the psychologies of teenagers in a world where predator and prey co-exist. There are mature themes, sexual scenes, and lots of violence.
• Meaningful Background Event: Legoshi is discussing lighting with Dom while some others in the drama club are messing around in the background, and then someone's whole arm (accidentally) gets torn off, socket and all.
• Mix-and-Match Critters: Later into the story it's revealed that vastly different species, including carnivores and herbivores, can conveive and have children. Legoshi himself is actually part komodo dragon via his grandfather Gosha, though since he's mostly wolf he barely inherited anything from it besides his eyes and immunity to venom. His mother was a more apparent — and disturbing — example, as while she looked like a normal wolf in her youth, by the time she became a mother she was aging into an odd wolf/reptile mishmosh. Gosha also helps out at a daycare specifically meant for hybrid children of all kinds, and then there's Melon, a gazelle/leopard hybrid whose nature makes him quite unstable due to his conflicting instincts.
• Motif: Legoshi and Louis have a recurring motif of darkness and light, respectively, and meant to contrast them with each other. This includes their drama club roles (Louis is the star actor, constantly under the spotlight, while Legoshi works with lighting, being in the darkness during plays), the fact that Louis is a day animal (deer) and Legoshi is a nocturnal animal (wolf), Louis is introduced as a character in broad daylight while Legoshi is introduced as a character during the night and hidden in shadows, etc.
• Motivation on a Stick: Played with. Those who want Legoshi to join the competition for the Beastar title covertly goad him into solving the mystery behind Tem's murder. Seeing how he already made a name for himself by saving a herbivore from certain death, they think this will be a great milestone for his reputation, and while Legoshi isn't interested in pursuing the title at all (and isn't even aware that he's being groomed for it), telling him he can prevent further herbivore deaths is a suitable motivation in itself.
• My Girl Is Not a Slut: Played with. Legoshi is fully aware of Haru's rich sexual life thanks to intel passed by his clubmates, but he is far from treating her as worthless and firmly believes she's probably a nice girl with some issues. Turns out he is very right on the matter.
  • Louis is also fully aware of Haru's activities and doesn't mind if he's not her only ongoing sex friend. Until he starts wondering if Legoshi is among the others, which spikes up his interest in the matter considerably.
• My Instincts Are Showing: Very common in this universe, characters are always dealing with their natural urges from the benign (tails wagging when happy) to the dangerous (carnivorous urges).
• My Eyes Are Uphere: Inverted with Legoshi. Since he is twice the height of Haru, he often bends over or kneels when talking to her to make sure they have eye contact, sometimes amusing her when it's clearly doing so is physically uncomfortable for him.
• The Needs of the Many: It's revealed that the mayor covers up quite a few herbivore kidnappings by the Shishigumi because he believes revealing it to the press would further damage carnivore and herbivore relations. As the story progresses it becomes clear that all levels of authority function on this to some degree; an entire Ministry of Beast Harmony exists to cover up information as it feels is necessary to benefit animal society. Notably they opt to keep the existence of Melon a secret as to not hamper the rise in Carnivore-Herbivore friendship and marriage.
• New Transfer Student: Both Juno and Pina arrive as first years.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Louis' choice to have Legoshi eat his foot so the latter can defeat Riz not only gets Legoshi a criminal record that puts a severe hamper on his life, but also causes Legoshi to start craving fresh meat due to getting his first real taste of it. Though to be fair, they had no chance of winning otherwise.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Played with by what Juno did during the Meteor Festival. When she presented Legoshi's heroic deeds to the attending animals, her main objective was to tear away Legoshi from Haru for her own romantic benefit, with improving carnivore reputation in the herbivore eyes being only a secondary goal. Still, the public did not know of the former, and what she did successfully gave carnivores a significant approval boost.
• No Biochemical Barriers: Whilst difficult to produce, cross-species hybridization is possible between animals. Though it may take a while to produce a viable offspring with the willing subjects, seeing as how it's heavily implied that Gosha and Toki had many activities in bed before they were able to conceive their daughter Leano.
• No Medication for Me: The Reveal behind the murder of Tem that kickstarts the story invokes a particularly chilling fear: if someone ever decided to skip their prescribed medication out of a misplaced sense of self-confidence (a rationale Tem's killer possessed), they might commit a psychosis-induced murder.
• Nobody Thinks It Will Work: Once it becomes obvious that Legoshi has a thing for Haru, several people try to discourage him from pursuing her because they think that it's too unconventional of a pairing to work out, or alternatively, Legoshi is misinterpreting his feelings for her.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: While Legoshi did what was right in taking down Riz, the fact that he used a last-ditch power boost made out of Louis' foot to continue fighting landed him in deep trouble that potentially will hinder him for the rest of his life.
• Nonhuman Humanoid Hybrid: While not uncommon, hybrids between species have shown to have to look extremely odd, which in result in shunning if not straight bullying from pure breeds. This is apparently very common in children of carnivore and herbivore relationships.
• The Nose Knows: In a world of anthropomorphic animals, many characters use their sense of scent to help with their everyday tasks, but no one does it on-screen more often than Legoshi, whose nose at times becomes a plot device; especially when it comes to Haru, whom he can accurately detect and track just using her scent. And sometimes, he can determine what happened to her recently when he can sense her scent on other animals.
  • However, extensive sniffing in public can be seen in this world as obscene, especially if you're doing it to another animal.
  • Juno also uses her accurate smell sometimes, but mostly to spy on Legoshi: she sniffed Haru to determine if she had sex with him when they both went missing.
• Not So Stoic: Both Louis and Legoshi usually are calm and collected, but once something truly irks them, it's better not to be on the receiving end of their emotions.
• Not What It Looks Like: At one point Legoshi and Haru have a rather heated argument while waiting for a train together, and since she's a small rabbit and he's a big wolf, everyone around them quickly assumes he's assaulting her. Thinking fast, Haru orders Legoshi to scatter to avoid getting him arrested, and they end up hiding in the station's bathroom until their chasers lose their trail.
  • After Legoshi drops out of school and moves into an apartment, Haru is given his address by Jack, but when she goes to see him, she sees him walking into his apartment complex with a female sheep. It's clear she thinks something must be going on between them, but she is really just his next door neighbor.

O-R

• Official Couple: Haru and Legoshi as of Chapter 122... at least in her eyes. Legoshi, while playing along, still thinks he's unworthy of her even if he loves her very much, and delays their Sacred First Kiss until he becomes the partner (he thinks) she deserves. And probably until he figures out how to deal with his legal ban on marrying herbivores that are still binding at the time.
• Off the Wagon: Legoshi, after he ate Louis's foot, now craves meat more than he ever did in his life. He essentially is going through withdrawal, which has caused him to distance himself from all the herbivores in his life for fear of giving in and attacking them.
• Once More, with Clarity: When we first see the moments before Tem is killed, he calls his assailant a monster with what looks like hate in his eyes. Fast forward to the killer's flashbacks: Riz is still told that he's a monster by Tem, but Tem doesn't actually hate him and accepts Riz for what he is before being eaten. Subverted when it turns out the first chapter was accurate and Riz repressed it to make believe that his relationship with Tem ended positively.
• Older Than They Look: Yafya doesn't look like he should be any older than his 30s. He certainly is in peak physical condition, able to cave in a metal storage tank with a single kick. Yet it turns out that he is a few years older than Legoshi's grandfather.
• One Cast Member per Cover: The manga begins with Legoshi on issue 1 and Louis on issue 2, going on through every major and quite a few minor characters.
• One Dialogue, Two Conversations: Happens during Legoshi's proper introduction to Haru. After he helps her in the gardening club, she asks what he'd like to get as a reward for his efforts. He just keeps mumbling incoherently, struggling to think of something not stupid to say, but with her past experience, she assumes he's clumsily trying to ask her to sleep together and starts undressing. By the time he pulls himself together, she has jettisoned everything but her underwear.
• One-Steve Limit: Downplayed. There are two "Tem" in the story, though one is written as "Tem", the alpaca member of the Drama Club that is murdered at the beginning of the manga, and the other is "Ten", the leader of the Inarigumi gang.
• Only One Name: This seems to be the norm in the world of Beastars, as nobody introduced so far has a last name.
• Open-Minded Parent: Haru's father, who seems fairly progressive and laid back about interspecies relationships.
  • Also, when he sees Legoshi for the first time, he assesses him only based on his manners and not his species; and after he figures out the wolf is more than a friend of his daughter (even before Legoshi blurts it out in his face), he is cool enough about it to encourage him to visit the household again when he can.
• Open Secret: The existence of the "Back Alley Market" is considered a secret and hush-worthy whenever it's brought up outside its area, however, everyone knows it exists and is either looking the other way or visit it themselves in private, depending if they are herbivores or carnivores.
• Out of Focus: Generally speaking, Legoshi, Louis, and Haru are the only three characters that get regular focus throughout the story, with occasional Days in the Limelight given to other characters as well as the Arc Villain. Characters that aren't immediately relevant to the current arc are often Commuting on a Bus.
• Overly-Nervous Flop Sweat: Happens to Legoshi when Haru first tries to seduce him.
• Painted CGI: a CGI cartoon designed to look like traditional anime. It uses flat colors with outlines drawn over CGI models. It also incorporates other hand drawn special effects, such as trailing colors, smoke, and painted-looking objects.
• Pairing the Spares: Surprisingly averted with Juno and Louis, who crushed on Legoshi and Haru respectively before the latter made it obvious that they love each other and nothing's about to change that. However, the slowly blossoming attraction between Juno and Louis is portrayed in an organic, realistic way where due to circumstances they gradually evolved from being social rivals, to earning mutual respect, to starting to genuinely care for each other as friends, which is also helped by their individual experiences not involving each other. Currently, Juno openly admits she's in love with Louis despite her better judgement, while he's starting to consider he might be slowly falling in love with her as well by observing his own reactions to her in contrast with other herbivore women. It's still up in the air whether he will actually do something about it though, seeing how his planned Arranged Marriage is still a thing and it has already gotten in the way of his love life with Haru before.
  • Ultimately, Louis decides to go through with his arranged marriage for the sake of the Horns Corporation. Notably, this isn't necessarily treated as Downer Ending as Louis does respect his eventual wife even if he doesn't particularly love her, and does not seem embittered by the choice. Also he had become the President of the Corporation after his father's unfortunate passing, and after his speech on Rexmas he likely did not want to rock the boat anymore than he already had.
• Parental Abandonment: Legoshi's mother killed herself when he was twelve, and his father never knew he existed, so his current legal guardian is his maternal grandfather.
• Parenting the Husband: Legoshi is just a year younger than Haru, but she often feels like she needs to be both his love interest and unofficial mother to (try to) control his random quirks and behaviors.
• Parents for a Day: Happens in one chapter when Bill discovers a live fetus inside of an egg he cracked open while making a meal. After wondering if it would be ok to eat it since it would probably die anyway and deciding against it, he keeps it alive with the help of Pina and Aoba for a few days before handing it over to the police. This leads to some Character Development for Bill.
• Perspective Flip: Chapter 77 re-visits Tem's murder from the POV of his killer. Though with some significant additions and differences to the way things play out and to the context of Tem calling predators "monsters". If Riz the bear's memory of the event is to be believed, it was a tragic case of misguided good intentions going terribly wrong, not a premeditated murder.
  • As we find out later, Riz's account of the event was not to be believed as he outright admits that he was painting over the event in his head to seem better than it was, and that the original version that the audience saw was indeed what happened that night.
• Pixellation: Used to blur out Legoshi and Haru kissing in Juno's imagination of what they get up to together.
• Please Kill Me if It Satisfies You:
  • Haru's thought process when Legoshi catches her in the beginning, due to her being depressed and unwanted at the time.
  • This happens again much later with Melon's mother, after she reveals that she ate his father and named him due to her desire to eat him. She allows Melon to kill her without putting up any form of resistance.
• Posthumous Character: Tem, who is murdered in the first chapter, appears occasionally via flashbacks.
• Power of Trust: When Kibi the anteater (the same guy who earlier briefed Legoshi on who Haru is) gets seriously injured by a puma in the drama club, he screams at other carnivores to stay away from him when they offer to carry him to the infirmary. He instead asks Legoshi to help him get there.
• Predators Are Mean: The prevalent stereotypes of Carnivores. We meet a few belligerent carnivores but Legoshi, Jack, and many others are proud to avert this expectation.
• Predator-Prey Friendship: These do happen in the setting but they can be very tense and shaky because both predators and prey have to get past their instincts to consume and to flee respectively.
• Predation Is Natural: The main argument of carnivores like Bill who give in to their urges to consume prey.
• Pseudo-Crisis: Itagaki sometimes uses this in tandem with Cliffhanger maneuver- an event seen on the last page of a chapter seems shocking or dramatic only to turn out to be something trivial or overblown by a character being part of the situation but not having enough information about it. However, there are times where such moments lead to more serious and plot-related developments.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits:
  • Early on it's revealed that the Drama Club only recruits students with special circumstances such as body issues or difficult backgrounds, with the standard for membership being an interest in "showing [their] way of life".
  • The Hidden Condo residents are (mostly) rather unusual. They range from a gerbil who has an eagle freeloader, a taxidermist pig, an albino crow, a bear who writes novels under the guise of a rabbit, and a teenage predation offender.
• Readings Are Off the Scale: Oguma, on his deathbed, reveals that he really does love Louis by explaining that he calculates the monetary value of his relationship with everyone that he knows, but when he tries to calculate the price of his relationship with Louis, all he gets is an error.
• Real Is Brown: There's a lot of bright, yet muted colors in the show's palette.
• Really Gets Around: It might be easier to count the males who haven't slept with Haru.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Legoshi seems to be a magnet for these:
  • Bill does this many times when he gets into an argument with Legoshi about how true carnivores should behave or what it means to be a grown-up.
  • Louis dishes out one to him when berating him for shunning his own nature and remaining in life's sidelines rather than embracing the power and possibilities he was born with as a carnivore.
  • The only time Haru is truly mad at him as a person and has an argument with him, she tells him that being a large carnivore, he will never understand how it feels to live in constant fear for your life the way any small herbivore including her does. They reconcile shortly afterward and even spend a pleasant evening together, but her words stuck with him for a long time, leading him to question his attitude regarding herbivores.
  • Interestingly, as the story progresses, Haru also begins to aim more and more of these at herself, both in her inner monologues and when spending time with Legoshi, the first person ever she can safely and honestly vent out all of her life-long insecurities too.
  • But Haru also got one off on the bullies who liked to put her down for her promiscuous nature:
    Haru: Listen here. I have some advice for poor, nice you. YOU'VE LOST! In romance, getting desperate means certain defeat. You can keep that dumb fight forever for all I care. I'll have fun watching from afar, so just keep going to your heart's content. I'll watch you all split up due to stupid grudges and go extinct from it, and enjoy every moment of it. Then I'll grieve for you along with the dinosaurs at the Meteoroid Festival. There's no point in trying to come at me in groups. How about you take it out on a rabbit girl who's more fun to pick on? I don't have anything left to lose. Unlike you, I'm free!
    • Of course, this one was muted because Legoshi was approaching the other girls from behind Haru, with his mere presence scaring them off.
• Relationship Reveal: In Ch. 17 we learn that Louis and Haru are seeing each other covertly.
• Relationship Sabotage:
  • Mizuchi the harlequin rabbit hates Haru's guts because she thinks the white bunny drove a wedge between her and her boyfriend on purpose, and it seems many girls at school feel this way about her.
  • Once Juno discovers Haru may reciprocate Legoshi's feelings, she is willing to orchestrate schemes designed to separate them and undermine their bond in the public eye, as shown during the Meteor Festival. Haru even admits that while she thought she was done with being affected by bullies, Juno's tactics really sting her.
• Relationship Upgrade: Haru and Legoshi start their social life together as fast friends, but slowly evolve into a full-on official romantic couple made stronger with every obstacle they overcome.
• Remember the New Guy?: Riz, Tao, and Dolph are formally introduced to the reader in Chapter 59 after lingering in the background of the Drama Club up to then. They function as normal, named characters thereafter. Riz, in particular, becomes rather important.
• Repression Never Ends Well: Riz the brown bear suffers horrible migraines as a result of medicine he takes to keep his strength in check. He keeps this in check using honey, but the migraines do exacerbate Riz's aggressive nature, something he fights to keep in control. Unfortunately a slip up with his medication left him unprepared for rejection by his friend Tam the alpaca, resulting in Riz devouring the other student before the story began.
• Rescue Arc: Legoshi takes it on himself to rescue Haru when she is abducted by The Shishigumi, a gang of lions.
• Rescue Romance: The fact that Legoshi went through a lot of trouble and wounds to save Haru from being eaten alive definitely scored him additional points in her book, to the point where she deemed the evening they spent together afterwards one of the most important memories in her life.

S-Y

• Samaritan Relationship Starter: Legoshi convinces some bullies to back off of new girl Juno who is pretty immediately smitten with him.
• Sacred First Kiss: Haru and Legoshi almost finally have one in the Backalley Market, but he holds back, telling her he wants to kiss her only when he truly becomes a person she deserves to be with.
  • They finally manage to do it in chapter 173.
• Sapient Eat Sapient: This is an illegal but unfortunately common occurrence. Carnivores, willingly or not, do kill and eat sapient herbivores.
• Scared of What's Behind You: Haru, a rabbit, is minding her own business until Alpha Bitch Mizuchi, another rabbit, and her posse start bullying her. After getting fed up with her, Haru starts dressing down Mizuchi over how much of a loser bitch she is. During this rant, Mizuchi and her posse gain expressions of sheer horror, before running away absolutely terrified, which Haru thinks was because of her tearing into them verbally. Then she finds out the reason they ran away was because Legoshi, a big, intimidating wolf, was coming up behind her.
• Self-Made Orphan: Melon, who killed his mother with an iron when she finally chose to address his status as a hybrid (after his asking of why he got his name), and admitted to him that she predated his father.
• Self-Serving Memory: The opening pages show Tem the Alpaca being hunted by an unseen predator that he seems to have seen as nothing more than a fellow classmate and spends his last moments yelling that predators are lesser creatures, nothing more than monsters. When we finally learn Tem's killer was Riz, the bear in the Drama Club, the flashback to that time shows us that they were good friends. And in his last moments, instead of insulting Riz, Tem says that they are still friends before Riz accidentally kills him. Of course, this is all through the memory of Riz who is clearly unhinged, so it may not actually be what happened. It turns out this is exactly the case.
• The Series Has Left Reality: Among the things that are included in the final arc: Supernatural Martial Arts, Ghosts, a government conspiracy surrounding a whale that singlehandedly ended this world's equivalent of World War I, Legosi tanking multiple point blank grenade blasts at once... honestly if this trope were about listing all the ways in which a grounded series goes off the deep end Beastars would probably deserve its own page.
• Shameful Strip: Doubling as fan disservice when the Shishigumi boss forces Haru to strip for him. He claims that the rush of blood will cause her meat to taste superb.
• Shared Universe: With Beast Complex, Paru's previous manga about an animal world.
• Shipper on Deck:
  • The reason Gouhin helps Legoshi save Haru from Shishigumi is that he is by then convinced that the wolf's feelings for the rabbit are genuine and he's worth the support.
  • Minor example with Kai the mongoose and Dem the swan, who think Juno and Legoshi would be a wonderful couple, and as a result sometimes help her in her attempts to win him over.
• Shock Value Relationship: A rabbit friend of Haru in university dates an Asiatic lion just so they can stand out as an herbivore-carnivore couple. It doesn't end well.
• Shout-Out:
  • Haru refers to Louis as Bambi in chapter 26.
  • The very popular mobile app Beastbook, which acts like a fusion of Facebook and Instagram.
  • Legoshi's name is one to Bela Lugosi, who was the original werewolf in The Wolf Man (1941)
    • Bill, a tiger, might get his name from Bill Watterson, the creator of Calvin and Hobbes.
    • Likewise, Sally, a minor squirrel character, might get her name from Sally Acorn.
  • Imaginary Chimeras, the recently introduced visual/psychological manifestation of one's battle aura that combines the user's species with a species they feel strongly attached to, has been instantly compared to the Stands from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure.
• Single-Target Sexuality: Haru adopts this attitude as of the newer chapters of the story. She starts rebuffing males asking her for sex (a major departure from her long-established modus operandi), claiming that she's done with randomly sleeping around because she has found someone whom she wants to give her heart to. That someone quickly proved to be Legoshi, and she's adamant in her conviction ever since.
• Single Woman Seeks Good Man: Both Haru and Juno (and few other girls not interested in him romantically) admit that while Legoshi definitely has his set of quirks, he is nonetheless strong, gentle, caring and reliable.
• Sliding Scale of Cynicism vs. Idealism: A common theme in the manga that is crystallized nicely in the relationship between Legoshi and Louis. Legoshi is naive but believes that a positive outlook and hard work can help bring herbivores and carnivores together. Louis comes to believe that herbivores and carnivores are destined to be at odds and all that matters is finding power for oneself.
• Small Role, Big Impact: Most people don't even know or remember the name of that one goat character (it's Zoe, by the way) at the beginning of the series who couldn't remember their lines, which is what both lead to Legosi meeting Haru, AND is the one who stopped Legosi from eating her.
• Smart Animal, Inconvenient Instincts: Carnivores and herbivores both have troublesome instincts to deal with.
  • Herbivores have an instinctual fear of carnivores that can make interacting with them difficult.
  • Predators can lose control of themselves and involuntarily attack and eat herbivores. This can happen even to extremely gentle carnivores like Legoshi. Predators who indulge in meat eating can become addicted to it similarly to a drug addiction.
  • When Legoshi and Haru attempt to have sex for the first time, her instincts become confused, causing her to attempt to shove herself down Legoshi's throat. This stops them from trying again for a long time.
  • The villain Melon's life is a living hell due to him having inherited a combination of instincts from being a hybrid. He has the same instinctual fear of predators, but also has urges to kill herbivores, though lacks the urge to eat them because he has no sense of taste (and since eating meat is often compared to sex, this treated similarly to lacking sexual desire, which is also a problem he has).
• The Social Expert: Legoshi unintentionally became this in the field of interspecies romance for Juno and Louis due to his stubborness and success in romancing Haru despite all the obstacles their relationship faced at every single turn. Juno outright asks him for advice when she realized she's falling for Louis, and as Louis realises he too may have a thing for her, in his mind he often calls out to Legoshi when he thinks about her. Haru also has the experience and wisdom earning her the title in that field, but she tries hard to reign her opinions in because she thinks they will do more damage than good if voiced out loud.
• Somewhere, a Mammalogist Is Crying: A hippopotamus student is occasionally grouped with the carnivores. While hippos occasionally scavenge on carcasses and are hyper-aggressive, they are primarily herbivores.
• Spiritual Antithesis: To Zootopia. Both stories deal with the tension that exists between predators and prey animals in an animal-dominated world, and how the characters deal with it. However, thematically they are quite different. In Zootopia, there is a historic tension between predator and prey, but the creative team has set up a world that gives predators a reason for not desiring to eat prey anymore. They allow them to eat meat for protein as fish and bugs did not evolve into sapience and the city was founded by a joint decision of the evolved predators and prey. Also there is no evidence in the film that predators are struggling to contain their base instincts and it takes a Psycho Serum to bring out their savage side. In Beastars, different species really do have different urges, with predators having to learn to control their predatory urges or otherwise indulge in them on the down-low. It's a society where the Vegetarian Carnivore trope is enforced, prey animals have a constant awareness that they could be eaten and it's unclear why these evolved predator and prey would choose to live in close contact with each other under these conditions.
• Stacy's Mom: Played with. A 12-year-old Jack thought that Legoshi's mother was very pretty, but that that impression was based on her funeral portrait displayed during her wake.
• Stalker without a Crush:
  • The school's security guard started following Legoshi after becoming intrigued with how...unusual he is. Notably, he actually realizes he's being followed for about a week, and actively asks his stalker to show themselves before everyone thinks he's crazy (he had mentioned that he had been hearing weird noises to his roommates, which just creeped them out.)
  • And now that Legoshi is an ex-convict who actually committed a crime to stop another criminal, he's also under the watch of the police who are really curious what he will do next.
• Star-Crossed Lovers: Legoshi and Haru, though it takes a bit before Haru truly returns Legoshi's affections. The idea of a carnivore and an herbivore, especially of such different sizes, getting together is socially pretty looked down on, though not illegal. However, Legoshi does get legally banned from marrying any herbivores due to getting arrested for eating Louis's foot.
• Starfish Language: Pun notwithstanding, it's revealed at one point that sea creatures are also sapient in this setting, complete with their own societies and a unique belief system revolving around a "circle of life" despite being non-anthropomorphic. However, they don't speak anything resembling a language. Instead, they communicate using small streams of bubbles in different elaborate patterns that can be translated into specific phrases and words.
• Stating the Simple Solution: Multiple times do characters say that Legoshi should just call the police on the murderer once he finds out, but he refuses on the grounds that he wants to square off against him himself, both as a way to avenge Tem and a way to understand him better. After Pina gets kidnapped, he is the one to end it all and call the police himself.
• Stop Motion: The anime's first opening is animated in stop motion, as opposed to the rest of the series being entirely in CGI with some 2D effects blended in.
• Super Mode: After Legoshi eats Louis' foot to turn the tide during his duel with Riz, he returns to the fight visibly bulked up and reinvigorated, which the narration describes as him entering "Super Beast Mode".
• Tempting Fate:
  • At least two herbivores taunted Legoshi into biting or eating them on separate occasions, complete with putting their hands into his mouth, either for their own amusement or to prove their superiority. They were lucky they tried this with Legoshi; carnivores such as Bill would most likely accept their invitation.
  • Riz the bear began to feel so comfortable, happy, and at peace with himself while chatting with Tem that he decided to stop taking the medication all bears are required to use to control their vast strength. This would turn out to have disastrous effects for both of them.
• Tender Tears: Haru is prone to this whenever her emotions pile up. Also, sometimes Legoshi and Juno.
• These Are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know: While both carnivores and herbivores are given a general knowledge of the war between the two groups, only those with high marks are given a full scope of said history. We don't know the true nature of this history, but apparently it's shown to have a negative effect on those who learn it. From what Jack explains in Chapter 154, one thing about it was the war was taken far more seriously by the herbivores rather than the carnivores and a blue whale appeared and stopped the war.
• Title Drop: Happens in chapter 158, when Legoshi asks Louis to help him capture Melon and become the Beastars together. Louis promptly laughs at how dumb and forced the title Beastar sounds pluralized. This occurs again in chapter 190 when it's revealed that Legoshi named the team he represents (which is basically just him and Louis) "Beastars".
• Transplant: Legoshi and Haru have been characters Itagaki has drawn for years; the first comic she ever made was about them, and Legoshi has made appearances in the animal manga she made before Beastars, Beast Complex. It's only now that they're fully fleshed out.
• True Companions:
  • Legoshi and his canine roommates at the Cherryton dorms are tightly-knit group of friends and a true pack. While Jack tends to get the most spotlight out of all of them due to his longer record with Legoshi, all of them really enjoy each other's company and like to spend time together even after Legoshi drops out of school, making sure to visit him regularly and spend quality time with him when possible.
  • Louis quickly developed such rapport with the Shishigumi gang after he became their new boss. They may be morally-questionable gangsters, but they still treat him like a genuine member of a loving family and were crucial in making him slowly change his attitude towards carnivores, something especially visible in his later interactions with Legoshi and Juno.
  • Legoshi, Haru, Louis and Juno are gradually becoming one more group like this. Despite their sometimes rocky beginnings of individual interactions, they are currently all on very good terms and both enjoy each others' company and are willing to assist one another as much as they can when needed. Suffice to say, currently each one of them is in love with one other member of the group (or slowly getting there) and treats the others as reliable friends, up to the point where they can talk about their love problems with them.
• Unintentional Final Message: The story opens with Legoshi trying to give Els the love confession that Tem wrote but was too shy to send. Els is grateful for the letter, and Legoshi's efforts end up helping to change her biases against carnivores.
• Vegetarian Carnivore: Since meat is illegal in this society (as all animals except for insects are sapient), carnivores normally eat plant or dairy-based protein. Chickens are paid for their unfertilized eggs and supposedly cows get a deal for their milk to be sold as food.
• Vomit Discretion Shot: Played with. In chapter 143, Louis vomits while trying to have sex with his fiancee. While the act of him vomiting is on full display, both his mouth and the vomit coming out of it are heavily pixellated.
• Wacky Marriage Proposal: Wacky in how completely out of nowhere it came for the target. When Legoshi's and Haru's bond hits its so-far rock-bottom due to the former purposefully ignoring the latter during his anti-carnivore physical training with Gouhin, she finally managed to force him into a conversation and explaining why he abandoned her. However, her strained emotional state combined with his usual poor communication skills made him feel like she was about to cut their ties for good, so in a desperate move, he asked if she would marry him after they both graduate. This seemingly backfired at first as she furiously stormed off moments later, but might also have become a trigger for them to start mending their bond little by little.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: Many minor characters get the non-lethal version of this: they get introduced in a new chapter that seemingly focuses on them, only to reveal that their main purpose was additional Worldbuilding or introducing a new part of the setting where the main characters are about to do something, and they never get mentioned again. Probably the most notable example so far is Cosmo, a herbivore stripper from the Backalley Market whose main meta-goal was showing the progress of Louis' integration into the Shishigumi and his resulting influence on the Market. After her first two chapters, she completely vanishes from the story.
• "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: The final chapter includes snippets of what happened to the major characters of the story. Louis is now the Horns CEO and is making the best out of a bad situation with his relationship with Azuki, The Shishigumi is working to try to reduce their sentence so they can go back to Louis, who intends to hire them, Gouhin was hired by a normal psychiatric clinic after the closing of the Back-Alley Market, Cherryton has ended their segregation after Louis' speech, the 701 canines are graduating, with Jack going to a particular highly-regarded college to change the way dogs work in society, and Haru and Legoshi start dating.
• Will They or Won't They?: The main drive of the story once Legoshi meets Haru, with a heavy emphasis on analyzing the internal and external factors that contribute to the direction in which their relationship evolves.
• World of Funny Animals: This world is populated entirely by anthropomorphic animals. There's a particular focus on the tension between carnivorous and herbivorous animals, and how that would impact this kind of society.
• Writers Cannot Do Math: Legoshi and Kyuu resolve to fight Melon on the last Meat Loving Day of the year, which is said to be on Friday, December 25th. However, in an earlier chapter, Legoshi got a tattoo of the current date, "July 5, Wednesday". In a calendar year where July 5th is on Wednesday, the last Friday in December is the 30th.
• Wrong-Name Outburst: Haru shouts to Louis when Legoshi finds her in the dark. Oops.
• You Are Better Than You Think You Are:
  • Several characters tell this Legoshi quite early in the manga after properly interacting with him. In fact, the first one to do so was a herbivore.
  • Most people despise Haru due to her sexual activities, and her past makes her feel worthless at times, but Legoshi makes it clear (when he actually gathers enough guts to talk to her straight) that he holds her in high regard and spends time with her because she is important to him.
  • Turns out Haru thinks the same of him. Sometime after meeting him, she figures out he's the one who attacked her at the beginning of the story, but she didn't reject him because at that point she already truly appreciated his presence in her life, even when she acknowledged all of his quirks and oddities (and also because she wasn't particularly opposed to the idea of getting eaten at the time).
• You Are Not Alone:
  • One of Haru's biggest fears is that she will always be friendless and will never experience true, mutual love. Legoshi's increasing presence in her life may give her hope of invoking this trope.
  • Legoshi is really bummed out that some of his classmates don't mind indulging in their carnivorous instincts once in a while as they think it's only natural and in their minds Legoshi is the freak for restraining himself. Then Aoba the bald eagle, with whom Legoshi rarely interacts, admits that he shares the wolf's beliefs, as one time he potentially could have a go at eating meat, he thought of all his herbivore friends and refused. Legoshi is so moved by the confession that he starts crying on the spot.
• You Are Too Late: While Pina did a great job by bringing police to the fight between Riz and Legoshi once he un-hostaged himself, had he arrived just minutes earlier, chances are Legoshi wouldn't have been forced to commit a serious offence to defeat the bear, and doing that caused him a lot of long-term trouble almost instantly.
• Younger Than They Look: Sanu, the pelican, leader of the drama club, looks like a middle-aged, balding man with small wrinkly eyes and glasses. One could easily mistake him for a teacher running the drama club, but officially he's about the same age as Louis and Haru.
• You're Not My Type: Mizuchi the harlequin rabbit's boyfriend admits he's actually very unhappy in his relationship and would rather be with someone like Haru (minus sleep-around tendencies); the only reason he doesn't break up with Mizuchi is their species' endangered status that she most likely constantly guilt-trips him about.
• You Mean "Xmas": Rather than Christmas, there's Rexmas, which celebrates the resurrection of a T-rex after the meteor impact that had seemingly killed all the dinosaurs.

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