Is BEASTARS Worth Reading? Review & Where to Read

Overview

In a society where carnivores and herbivores live together under an uneasy truce, Legoshi is a wolf, a member of his high school's drama club, quiet and self-conscious about the predatory instincts he works constantly to suppress. When he meets Haru, a small white rabbit with a reputation she didn't ask for, his feelings for her collide directly with everything he's been taught about controlling himself around prey. BEASTARS, by Paru Itagaki, ran in Weekly Shonen Champion from 2016 to 2020 and won the 2018 Manga Taisho Award.

What it does well

BEASTARS could have played its premise for cute animal-crossing gimmicks, but instead it takes the biology completely seriously, and that commitment is what makes the series work. Legoshi's attraction to Haru is tangled up with real fear of his own instincts — the possibility that wanting her could mean wanting to hurt her — and the manga treats that tension as genuinely frightening rather than glossing over it. It's an unusual, uncomfortable way to talk about desire and self-control, and BEASTARS commits to it fully instead of softening it for easier reading.

Itagaki's art carries a huge amount of that weight. Her character designs are sharp and slightly off in a way that keeps the animal cast feeling genuinely alien rather than cute, and her sense of layout and page composition is some of the most distinctive in modern shonen manga. The supporting cast helps too — Louis, the ambitious deer struggling with his own status anxieties, and Juno, direct and unwilling to play the passive love interest, both get enough space to feel like they're carrying their own stories rather than just orbiting Legoshi.

Where it falls short

The central metaphor is intense by design, and that's not going to land for every reader — the show doesn't flinch from the uncomfortable overlap between hunger and desire, and some scenes sit right at the edge of what a squeamish reader will want to engage with. Later arcs widen the story's scope in ways that occasionally dilute the tighter, more claustrophobic focus of the earlier volumes, and the worldbuilding raises social and biological questions about this society that the manga doesn't always follow through on completely.

Verdict

BEASTARS takes a premise that could have been a gimmick and turns it into something genuinely strange and affecting. If you're open to a story willing to sit in real discomfort to say something true, it's one of the more distinctive manga of the last decade.