Melon

"It's strange, isn't it? Carnivores and herbivores should get along, yet their children are treated like freaks."

- Melon venting to Legoshi.

Melon (メロン) is the primary antagonist of the Revenge of the Love Failure arc in Beastars. He is first introduced as a faux elephant therapist, killing them and using their tusks for ivory to make quick money.

Appearance
Melon is a half-breed, gaining characteristics from both parents. He is a gazelle but with the jaw, claws, and eyes of a leopard.

He wears a surgical mask in public to hide his leopard features.

Because of his life as a half-breed, Melon develops leopard spots on his body gradually which he chooses to hide with tattoos of melon leaves.

On the eve before Rexmas, his body grew bigger and more muscular and his tail grew longer and thicker, looking more like a leopard than a gazelle, and many more spots have appeared.

Personality
Melon's modus operandi is sociopathic, ruthless, deranged and cunning individual who hides his murderous peculiarities beneath a veneer of affable innocence and seemingly childlike curiosity. His knowledgeability in psychology has granted him a wealth of the inner workings of how people's minds work, which compliments his deceptive nature and has led others to be seriously injured or killed, from murdering an elephant with a large syringe to almost killing Legoshi with a bullet to the stomach. Melon's cruelty and sadomasochistic characteristics are displayed when getting tattoos and brutalizing legoshi and the shishigumi as his inability to taste meat and hybrid nature further depreciated his already broken mind. As the new head of the Shishigumi, Melon is cruel and harsh towards the members, unlike Louis, who is firm, yet kind to them. He seems to be a masochist, since getting a tattoo from a sloth excited him immensely, making him blush and stick his tongue out in pure bliss. Melon claims that getting inflicted with pain is the only way for him to feel alive since he can't taste anything due to his hybrid nature along with the contradictory senses he's constantly bombarded with.

Melon hates his leopard heritage and tries to cover his spots with melon leaf tattoos. When his body went through a dramatic change, he tried to gouge his spots out but couldn't because his claws were not as developed as a carnivore's. Desperate to stop changing, he shot off the hand of the leopard Madaragumi leader, claiming feline's claws should be capable enough of gouging out his spots.

Equipment

 * Cleaver: Melon may have stolen it from the Black Market. He cut Dolph's neck using it.
 * Gun
 * Knife

Skills and abilities

 * Blood Loss Resistance
 * Psychological Manipulation: Melon can manipulate others easily. He uses a surgical mask and closes his eyes to disguise as a herbivore, which always works. He used this disguise to get a job as a therapist for elephants and making them believe he was helping them, only to murder them later.
 * Masochistic properties: As stated above, he seems to be a masochist, so injuring him only makes him fight harder and crack more one-liners.

Trivia

 * Melon is a dark counterpart of Legoshi if he cannot handle his carnivore instincts.

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Melon Мелон