WARNING! The third chapter is pretty messed up.

You remember how 90s movies taught us that love could conquer everything?

Well, that’s BULLSHIT! Even more so in “Beastars” and “Beast Complex”.

Love is not ALWAYS enough. Love can be a motivator though. But there will be problems no matter what. Sometimes, those problems CAN be so big or complex that a romance won’t work out.

Either way, love takes time and hard work.

Even more so in the world of anthropomorphic animals.

The protagonist of the third chapter of “Beast Complex” is Galom who is a camel. He is a journalist, but the newspaper he works for makes him write articles he doesn’t really feel like writing, specifically about incidents where carnivores eats herbivores. So he decides that the article he writes about carnivores being born to consume meat will be the last one before he quits journalism.

… And then, a wolf appears. Specifically a very sexy wolf lady by the name Abby. She needs somewhere to sit with the coffee she just bought, and Galom sits at the only table where there is room for one more.

And Galom(who is about as smooth as sandpaper) asks her if she ever wanted to eat a herbivore.

… Dude…

Galom naturally get’s embarrassed about his VERY rude question for a bigoted article even HE thinks is shit. Abby surprisingly accepts his apology on the condition that he treats her for dinner.

Yep, they end up going on a date. And Galom finds himself more and more attracted to Abby who is carefree and frank to a fault.

Aaaand then we find out that the story we are being told is actually a flashback.

Yep, Galom is telling some friends about his night with Abby the wolf. This is interesting and a good story-teller tool for two reasons.

First of all, we now know that Abby did not kill Galom. Since the chapter BEGINS with with a zebra getting attacked by a tiger, we could assume that was foreshadowing. SECONDLY… Why is Galom wearing a weird glove on his left hand but not his right?

Anyways, back to the story Galom is telling.

The date went VERY well, and Galom and Abby ends up in a hotel, ready to get “busy”.

… and then Abby reveals that she actually wants to eat him. She doesn’t wish him dead, but she REALLY wants to taste his flesh. She “wants” him so badly that her instincts mixes up lust and hunger.

That’s the thing about the universe of “Beastars”; the animals can’t run away from what the are.

A wolf is a wolf. It is their nature to want to eat other animals, that’s just the way it is. And when the animals in “Beastars” and “Beast Complex” are feeling extremely excited(like when they are about to have sex) they have a harder time fighting instincts.

In “Beastars”, Legosi decides to accept that it will ALWAYS be a part of who he is and tries to somehow control it by being aware and accept his instincts as well as exercise and eat well, hoping it will be enough to prevent him from eating Haru.

But it goes a bit different in “Beast Complex”.

Galom is a bit shocked by what Abby just told him. But he decides that he likes her so much that he makes a compromise of a sort.

He tells her that she can eat a tiny bit of him he rarely use. So Abby eats about half of his left hand while they make love.

… Dude.

It was implied at the end of the story that their romance did not last, but that it had such an effect on Galom that he decided to keep being a journalist as he thinks about the amazing night he had with Abby.

The fact that Galom is not with Abby anymore makes the story pretty bittersweet. Especially since he thinks of the night where he lost a couple of fingers as a wonderful memory(and it’s also pretty messed up). But the point of the chapter is that even when you are ready to make compromises, love can not endure everything… but it is still a beautiful thing.

It’s likely that if Galom and Abby’s (implied) one-night-stand had been more than just that, Abby might have hurt Galom more, possibly even eat him up.

That is naturally not a real-life problem, but that’s the point. This is a world of animals, there are different rules than those of a human world. You have to accept a different sort of logic while reading it.