There's something wonderfully poetic about Hinako gradually falling for Shiori, moving from thanatos (death drive) to thanatos (romance option), because those churning, coruscating emotions she now lets emerge from a heart both drowning and surfacing are so deliciously, poignantly human, enchanting in both Shiori's briny eyes and our invested-for-the-past-15-chapters ones. The stench of rot-in-life recedes, the tides of gloomy pasts retreat, and a child beached upon her scars begins to breathe anew, and yet that movement is seduction to predators, to those that'd snap this fledgling rebirth up and turn, with flicks of silver tails, back into a darkening blue. As Hinako rises from numbness, discovers her pleasures and pains, so too does Shiori the longer she's stained by land and light, dreading the imposition of names and fates, and of a value that is not meat. She crows selfishness, sings avarice, pledges allegiance to appetites, but whether they stem from a self increasingly less certain of its role, or are defined by her relations to other swiftly changing as well, the center cannot hold, cannot keep from leaking, taking on a fluidity of symbol and form that is, ironically, the very image of her swirling home.
Miko has already revealed a monster's potential, their capacity to grow just like their prey, each defining the other as not-itself, and yet, in evolving and changing, necessarily altering their opposites, until one suspects the line is merely one in the sand, vulnerable indeed to the wash of a tide, which so blurs sand and salt and swirl as to recreate the very bloom of life. Shiori jeers at this and is yet unsettled, disturbed by the success of her own venture, because Hinako was only human insofar as a monster wanted to eat her, and if her humanity grows self-contained and self-transcendent, moving to love both herself and others, including the very creatures who aspire to end her, then wherefore the monster, how now the prey? Shiori dreads eroding, falling as Miko did from her demonic estate, and yet even as Miko's tales are bound to her tails, every bite reducing the potential of her story, rendering more ineluctable the return of her beasthood, so are Shiori's possibilities multiplying, each scale a star, each drop a cosmos, vulnerable to interpretations she dreads and rejects, for in being a looming Other, nightmare on the waves, she is powerful. To eat is to consume and yet to be textured, to savor a flavor and alter your humors, to be blessed and poisoned, rend flesh to feed hearts, and with every chapter, those profound contradictions of life and nature grow more prominent, further disrupting that quaint little casting of Hoods and Wolves and Toothy Grandmas sketched at the opening of this tale. But in such an age, perhaps that is the very loam that'll give these drifters on times and tides their long-desired fairytale.
P.S: I love how Miko deals with the profoundly unsettling knowledge that her bestie/ward/divine-subject is dangerously attracted to an unfathomable fiend by acting like a stock romcom rival- "You're in her death wishes, I occasionally convince her of the value of life and friendship in a cruel and senseless world. We are not the same."
P.P.S: Not in the mood to speculate on MILFistopheles until we know more, but I like how she eerily echoes Hinako's mother, continuing the theme of all the monsters being bound to Hinako's past even as they do seem to have unique histories and tales of their own (Naekawa-sensei should really pen more spinoffs in the Tabeverse); it places the story in this fascinating space between being a tale of 'encounters' in a fictional world w/ detailed mechanics and traits to which the lead is a spectator and new actor, and a more personal psychodrama wherein all supernatural elements are largely meant to be interpreted as projected figments of a central character's imagination or psyche. In some sense, it mirrors how we take folktales and myths stemming from their unique sociocultural settings long before us and yet also find traces of resonance and meaning in them that lets us constantly adapt them in innovative new ways to the circumstances and concerns of our times, playing our own part in fostering their immortality, simultaneously making those myths our own even as we find, interpret and express reflections and aspects of ourselves in those very adaptations.
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