How far would you go to save your pet?
You can check out a sample of this series for yourself below!
Author
Genre & Tropes
Info about this series
Official Synopsis (VIZ Media)
When misanthrope Ao discovers her pit bull Taika standing over the mauled body of her father, she must decide whether to forgive or forget. Ao isn’t ready to lose both her beloved father and her devoted pet, so when her mother has Taika humanized, Ao embraces the new dogperson and even brings him to school with her. There, Taika meets German shepherd Tsunayoshi, an elite police officer, who begins teaching him how to unlearn his canine behaviors and replace them with human customs. Now, to protect himself and Ao, Taika must compete with Tsunayoshi to be the first to track down the source of the mysterious traces of blood in Ao’s locker…
My thoughts on this volume (Spoilers!)
I’m a big fan of Beastars, so I jumped at the chance to read this volume! I enjoyed it so much that I feel like I read it in the blink of an eye, and it’s a rather think volume.
Our protagonist, Ao, is a high school girl who is a bit of a loner. She’s bullied at school and doesn’t really talk to her classmates, but she doesn’t seem all that perturbed by it. After all, waiting for her at home is her beloved pit bull Taika, as well as her loving father. The family dynamic we’re introduced to in the first chapter was just so lovely…so it was all the more gutting when it was ripped away.
After seeing just how much of an impact her father and pet have on her life, for her to come home to her beloved dog licking the mawled-off face of her deceased father… While I knew it was coming, it didn’t stop the shock. And that’s coming from someone who reads a lot of horror. From here, Ao has a big decision to make: report her dog and know he will inevitably be euthanized, or hide the body along with the crime and continue living on with her dog. Honestly, I can’t judge her for the actions she took after finding her father’s body. I mean, it’s her father—there’s no way she wasn’t in a complete state of shock.
Thankfully Ao isn’t left without any parents after the incident, as her mother was away on a work trip at the time. Sadly it doesn’t seem like the two have the best relationship, as she jumps at the chance to humanize Taika—something her husband and daughter were very vocally against.
Once Taika is humanized, he enters an interesting state of “dog-minded with human emotions”. Just the psychology behind how a dog would learn to manage human emotions is interesting enough, but surprisingly it seems like there’s no real orientation from them judging on how Taika behaves. We know he has all his memories from his time as a dog and he still deeply loves Ao, but he says some rather inappropriate things at times. More than anything, it seems like it’s up to the other humanized animals to keep others in check, as many humans still see them as pets.
Going back to the mystery behind Ao’s father for a moment, this is the plot that is currently moving the story forward. Taika’s humanization is just a byproduct of Ao’s mother hoping for a witness to her husband’s surprise disappearance. While Taika was indeed licking the corpses face at the beginning of the story, as he has the short term memory of a dog, not even he knows if he actually did it. Unfortunately for Ao, he was somehow able to remember the two of them disposing the body in a river.
I wonder if Taika’s memories will begin to come back as he grows more comfortable in his human body? I worry about his actions, as they’re still very much the actions of an intensely powerful dog who doesn’t know his own strength. While that may be cute and forgivable in a dog’s body, the same can’t be said in a massive dogperson’s body.
Maddies Manga 
Leave a comment