@notkatten
Beastars has been playing with its weirdly murky boundary between predator/prey instincts, sexuality, and love for its whole run. This goes all the way back to stuff like Gouhin tossing a bunny porn mag at Legosi and telling him that if he doesn't get aroused by other rabbits he's just confusing his desire to eat Haru with other feelings and desires (I still think Gouhin's wrong about that one, and the way things developed after that seems to agree with my assessment), and Haru's initial attitude towards sex as a situation where she'd be treated as an equal instead of a weaker and more fragile animal, which seems pretty relevant to the conversation this chapter.
I'm willing to buy Haru's screwed-up way of thinking about and dealing with this as much as I'm willing to go for Legosi's mantra of "I'm just a pervert with a rabbit fetish" (Gouhin still bears a lot of blame for
that one), or Riz's delusional confusion of acceptance and predation, or Oguma and Louis' near-inability to deal with even their familial/platonic feelings (when one of the most 'affectionate' scenes between two characters in a series involves one holding the other at gunpoint...), or Legosi's mother
picking a glorified sperm donor out of a modeling catalog out of a desire for her kid to be more grey wolf than her, or...
...damn, does
anybody in this have their head screwed on straight about their close relationships? (Maybe grandpa.)
Frankly, I enjoy this sort of "people's own maladaptive psychological habits and anxieties about relationships is what threatens to fuck it all up" thing a lot more than a more standard "we're in love but society says no" plot. Yeah, it goes some odd places, but it still feels genuine.
Additionally, Haru's not the only herbivore we've seen with this sort of "if someone's going to prey on me eventually, I might as well just get eaten and get it over with" urge - look at Legosi's Merino sheep neighbor, who was deliberately putting herself in situations as close to that wire as she dared, like riding in the 'carnivores only' section on mass transit.
These people are fucked up, yeah. But it's an interesting and somewhat real sort of fucked-up feeling. (Except stuff like Melon, who's ridiculously over-the-top about it, and Jack trying to kill himself with chocolate because he'd seen THE UGLY TRUTH OF SOCIETY - this story's not perfect.)
@ehe
why is the fight with Melon being hyped up as something big when Legosi already is stronger than he is (and now has Kyuu on his side AND has trained for like months)?
Because the fight's not actually between Legosi and Melon, it's between Legosi and all the reasons he thinks Melon might actually sort of have a point, and the self-doubt and fears about the future that Melon's existence and nature impose on him. It's, for better or worse, a clash of ideals, psychology, and life philosophy instead of an actual physical contest, like most of Legosi's biggest fights. That's why Melon's so dangerous (and left Legosi handcuffed to a table): he apparently fully believes in his own nonsense. Even Riz's defeat really happened as a result of his recognition that he'd been deluding himself, gone off the deep end, and mauled and eaten his 'friend', instead of the nice story about it he made up for himself, not because Legosi physically matched him.
Take it or leave it, but that's the basic connection between ideals/psychology and violence Beastars has always run with narratively: you don't get to win unless you've beaten the other guy mentally (or gotten him to beat himself mentally).