This Week in Anime

My Love is a Monster

Chris
Steve, trick-or-treating season is right around the corner, and you know what that means! It's the perfect time to talk about our favorite on-screen anime treats!

...man, I gotta remember that when anime characters say their love interest is lookin' like a snack, there's even odds they mean it literally.

This just-kicked-off Fall season brings both the af-vore-mentioned This Monster Wants to Eat Me, as well as the Furry/Human love story With You, Our Love Will Make it Through. With both you and I having been known to enjoy the odder side of these kinds of stories, that's some solid springboarding for discussion of...let's be classy and call it "niche" romance at the moment.

Look, we kicked off this year with the incest column, might as well go full "Only God can judge us."

Also, not for nothing, the yuri vore series is coming right after the end of modern boy-meets-monster masterpiece The Summer Hikaru Died's first season (with a second on the way). So it's the perfect time to provide fans of this material with a reason to go back for another helping.

And that pretty much lets us jump right into one of the core points of appeal for this kind of stuff. That is, queer people who are societally seen as "monsters" embracing that in fictional accounts of how they act out their love.

There's freedom in rejecting your humanity if the rest of humanity would deny it to you. As I've mentioned before with Hikaru, the monstrosity of it all lets it embrace the unnatural as metaphorical depictions of queer intimacy. It's what makes acts like Yoshiki feeling around inside Hikaru's insides or Hikaru literally carving a piece of himself out as an act of trust to Yoshiki feel so visceral, so raw.

Okay, not that kind of raw, but my point is you can't get to that kind of level with regular-ass real-world romance.

It provides a way for us, as viewers, to more poetically connect our own experiences and feelings to the acts being allegorized. Hikaru, baring his insides to Yoshiki's touch, connects to something many of us have felt, be it physical or emotional, which is why it can provoke the reaction it does.

Similarly, the abstractions of This Monster Wants to Eat Me and Our Love Will Make it Through would seem to provide space for viewers to project their own experiences with marginalized relationships and get similar reactions. Granted, with both shows yet to premiere as we're writing this, the "hows" are unclear to anime viewers, but look, there's a whole treatise on mermaids and eating as an act of eternal love just waiting to be written in some reviews, I'm sure of it.

I know for a fact I've remarked in this column before on the inherent intimacy of eating someone (which is probably why our esteemed editors keep recommending these kinds of assignments within earshot of me). It's probably also that sort of theming that leads to anime being chock-a-block with queer vampires.

Yu and I already touched on the inherent queer otherness of Call of the Night (and Hikaru, hey!) in this summer's offerings. It's definitely built on the odd arrangement of Ko and Nazuna's relationship and how it slots into the "niche" appeal here. I mainly bring it up alongside fellow stories of sapphic suckers like VLAD LOVE and Mayonaka Punch to illustrate the way these vampire stories can serve as a slightly more savory on-ramp into these oddities.

That is, whether it's falling in love with a people-eating mermaid or a big, burly, beast-man, a lot of the appeal in some of these sorts of romances is trusting yourself to beings who could or would easily end your life. In a passionate way, of course.

It calls to mind many things, including fellow furry-focused show BEASTARS, which also dabbled in sociological allegory and vore-based courtship.

But where BEASTARS's all-furry cast let it map out those allegories in one set of terms, Our Love Will Make it Through's incorporation of regular humans positions it to do its own thing. Also, not for nothing, it also immediately clarifies that a lot of the appeal is toward people who would like to smooch a big, sexy, dog-man.

These kinds of romances aren't not about the fantasy a lot of the time, after all.

I feel like the deeper we get into this subject, the weirder the unlicensed stuff we're going to be asking for on the sidebar. At least the commonality of furry material means it and its offshoots are available to people. I don't know if that quite includes animal-activity adjacency like all the Omegaverse manga we get over here, but it definitely includes plushie parallels like Is My Love Strange from that Young Magazine US issue a month back, to say nothing of our totally topical fave, Gleipnir.

This is the series that gave us plushie transformation skinsuit NTR with a catgirl. "Regular" romance just isn't going to hit the same after that.

Gleipnir works because it is committed to a lot of what worked about the stories we've already checked off, even if it was a lot more campy than, say, The Summer Hikaru Died. Monsters stand in for those who feel ostracized, with otherworldly actions abstracting intimate acts. I mean, just barely abstract, though, as Claire entering Shuichi is pretty clearly about him getting pegged. Again, these things are so often built on trust.

I agree. Gleipnir came out in 2020; it's high time for a follow-up season.

The abstraction that accompanies these "weird" romances does lend itself to denser societal and psychological themes. But it also paves the way for stories to cut loose and have fun with their own audacity while also being a bit more freed from said scrutiny. Which is to say, speaking of seemingly sexless objects that get people inserted into them, let me use this chance to bring up robo-boning. I hope Bang Brave Bravern awakened something in more people.

Like I said in reference to the furry/human show: facilitating these fantasies is as part and parcel to the experience as the denser psychological stuff. This is the part where I expose myself and bring up that, as a known Transformers fan, I've got my own robotic romps I'd be begging to see licensed, including J-Decker from the Brave series, which bestows the robots with handsome looks that would do Obari proud and grants them girlfriends accordingly.

Also, Shonen Jump's My Boyfriend is a Metamorphormer one-shot from 2023 really oughta get translated, if only because this was the story that made me question if someone sitting in the driver's compartment of their cybernetic significant other counted as vore-adjacent. Just to bring things back around to previous subjects.

See, like vampires and furries, it's impressive how many of these niches can count as sub-genres of their own if you dig around enough.

Doin' it with dragons is another one that could be its own subsection (hey, that Final Fantasy Tactics remaster just came out, so go ahead and play Beowulf's subquest if you want to see him take the coward's path on that subject!). And it highlights how human-nonhuman hookups make up so many of what we consider out-there romances—not with no good reason! But that belies that these sorts of lopsided, trust-based danger romances work between ostensible humans as well, as in series like The Executioner and Her Way of Life demonstrating how wanting to murder someone can be just as romantic as wanting to eat them.

Violent instigations aside, these kinds of relationships often ring sweet because of how they change the characters. Menou and NANA, realizing that Akari and Michiru might mean that their targeted populations aren't unilaterally murder-worthy, are pivotal points in developing their worldview. They represent the real-world idea that to be loved is to be changed, and sometimes that includes changing your preconceived notions. While also still dedicating yourself to their death in one way or another, at least a little bit.

Since I know we've necessarily been focusing on the queer couples in this situation, I will also acknowledge that Angels of Death does a version of this dynamic too, with ostensibly straight couple Zack and Rachel.

Pupa naturally came up in the aforementioned incest column, but it still merits another mention here because it's great*.

*not actually great, but absolutely the only thing like it, which is basically the same thing in this case. Also, another one that's tragically currently unlicensed.

It's like me with Candy Boy, which just barely belongs in here itself.

There are a lot of out-there romance stories out there, and some of them aren't even based on setups that are physiologically impossible and/or illegal! We've hardly even touched more straight-up fetish stuff like the drooly dalliances of Mysterious Girlfriend X or the surprisingly sweet S&M of Nana & Kaoru (shout-outs, as always, to Jean-Karlo!)

Especially since everyone's mileage is going to vary on whether those should be counted as "niche" or "weird". But that's why anime's beautiful: because this kind of material can sit comfortably on a shelf just waiting to get one-upped by interspecies furry romance or hungry lesbian mermaids.

Love is an ever-changing expression. As long as we've got megahits like Delicious in Dungeon making mainstream audiences aware of the good words of monster girls and eating your loved ones, I feel like we'll keep getting closer to the revolution you dream of.

Now we just wait for the real sign of a breakthrough: promotional food and snack tie-ins.