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, as his mother is a leopard and his father is a gazelle. He has the general appearance of a gazelle with the jaws, claws, and eyes of a leopard.

He wears a surgical mask in public to hide his fangs and the leopard spots on his face. Most of the time, he keeps his eyes closed.

Since he is half-leopard, Melon gradually develops leopard spots on his body as he ages, which he chooses to cover up with tattoos of melon leaves.

On the eve before Rexmas, Melon's body grew larger and more muscular, his tail grew longer and thicker, and more spots appeared all over his body, making him look more like a leopard than a gazelle.

Personality
Melon is a sociopathic, ruthless, deranged and cunning individual who hides his murderous peculiarities beneath a veneer of affable innocence and seemingly childlike curiosity. His knowledge in psychology has allowed him to gain a deeper understanding of how people's minds work, which in turn allows him to more easily manipulate people. As a sociopathic villain, Melon often hurts others without remorse, seen when he almost killed Legoshi with a bullet to the stomach and when he murdered an elephant with a syringe.

Melon's sadomasochistic tendencies and cruelty are most prevalent when he is getting tattoos, as well as brutalizing Legoshi and the Shishigumi. As the new head of the Shishigumi, Melon is cruel and harsh towards the members, unlike Louis, who is a firm yet kind leader. Melon 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 being 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 could not 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, believing a feline's claws would be capable 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 himself 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 for their tusks.
 * Masochistic properties: As stated above, he seems to be a masochist and also sadist, so injuring him only makes him fight harder and crack more one-liners.

Trivia

 * Melon may be considered as a dark counterpart of Legoshi, if the latter could not handle his carnivore instincts.
 * Due to his unusual heritage, he has very little appetite for food and sex. The only strong desire he experiences is the urge to kill.
 * The first time Melon committed murder was when he was nine years old. His classmates were bullying him, urging him to jump off of the school building to see if his feline traits would protect him. He instead pushed them off the roof and killed them.
 * No matter what he eats, everything tastes like sand to him.
 * Despite this, he was very interested in eating Haru after meeting her for the first time.

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Melon Мелон