If You Like Beastars, Listen Up! Its Creator Just Launched a New Manga
Warning: Contains spoilers for Taika's Reason chapter #1.Paru Itagaki is the mangaka famous for writing both Beastarsand Sanda, the latter of which is receiving an anime from Science Saru in the fall. Itagaki is known for surreal, human-based drama with character designs and stories that often border on fetishism, if not outright being the point, and for better or worse, it’s made her one of the most iconic mangaka of the past decade, by far.
Paru Itagaki is one of the weirdest and most iconic mangaka of modern day, and there’s plenty more of her work to read. Barely a year after the conclusion of the Christmas-themed Sanda, Paru Itagaki has begun a new serialization in Weekly Shonen Champion, Taika’s Reason, and it’s just as weird as her previous works, if not more so. Anyone who’s a fan of Itagaki would be remiss to pass it up, as they’re all but guaranteed a bizarre experience from start to finish, even by Itagaki’s standards.
The Plot Of Paru Itagaki’s New Series, Taika’s Reason, Explained
Everything To Know About Taika's Reason
Taika’s Reason stars Ao, a cynical girl whose only joy comes from the time she spends with her father and the family pitbull Taika. She lives her life with the sort of mundanity one would expect from a girl her age, but everything changes when she comes home one day to find that Taika had killed her father and eaten his face. With her mother out of town, Ao is left to handle things on her own, and not wanting Taika to be put down, Ao panics and throws her father’s corpse into a river to protect Taika.
A month later, Ao is struggling to move on with her life, and things only get worse when her mother puts Taika through pet-humanization, a new procedure that gives animals anthropomorphic forms as a means of combatting declining birth rates in Japan. Ao’s mother did it in the hopes that Taika could reveal something about her father’s disappearance, and while Taika initially appears to not know anything, as soon as he and Ao were alone, Taika, with an innocent expression on his face, told Ao that they needed to turn themselves in.
Taika’s Reason Could Be Paru Itagaki’s Weirdest Manga Yet
Taika’s Reason only has a single chapter out, but it’s already poised to be Paru Itagaki’s weirdest manga by far. A signature trait of Itagaki’s style is the unabashedly weird sexual elements of her stories, and not only is Taika’s Reason primed to check off a lot of the same boxes as Beastars with its anthropomorphic animals, but Taika’s Reason having humans and anthropomorphic animals means it can be even more bizarrely sexual than Beastars' handling of romancewas. So far, it’s unknown if things will go in that direction, but knowing the author, it’s all too likely.
More than that, however, is the story of Taika’s Reason. Much like Paru Itagaki’s previous works, Taika’s Reason is a work about human drama filtered through an utterly surreal lens, but with how much more serious it seems to be compared to her previous works, the tone of Taika’s Reason, combined with the absurdity of its world, sets it up to be a weird and tense story unlike anything Paru Itagaki has ever written. It’s still too early to judge, but regardless, it would be great Taika’s Reason is just as crazy an experience as Beastars was, if not more.
Beastars
- Release Date
- October 10, 2019
- Network
- Fuji TV, Netflix
- Directors
- Mie Oishi, Daiki Kato, Keiya Saito, Atsuyuki Yukawa
Cast
Sayaka SenbongiRadio DJ (voice)- Chikahiro KobayashiLegoshi (voice)
Beastars is an animated drama series set in a world where anthropomorphic animals coexist. The story follows a wolf, grappling with his predatory instincts, amidst the backdrop of a murder mystery within their school, exploring themes of societal roles and identity.
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