Forum › A Monster Wants to Eat Me discussion

F94f4454-2d43-4522-a33a-00c2b6de5666b
joined Jul 24, 2020

if ayame is some sort of mythical being too, our girl hinako be collecting supernatural creatures like pokemons huh XD

Nobody
joined Aug 17, 2019

Personally, I doubt the "bad" girl to be a Mermaid.

Japan has their version, yes, but in the power totem, they are around the middle. So, would a Mermaid actually be enough to challenge an Inari?

Thus, I think she is actually some sort of water dragon, that would explain why her level.
Of course, it could be just as told, and I am just overthinking it.

Dynasty
knight heron
joined Mar 26, 2021

sorry everyone ...... it came to my attention that I originally uploaded the chapter with a page (page 61) missing ...... naturally, that's a page that makes Miko and Shiori's conversation make much less sense when it's missing ............ I've put it in now, so if you're like The immaculate and feeling like you missed something .... you did, sorry.... hopefully you can see this message x_x

Avatar
joined Aug 29, 2019

sorry everyone ...... it came to my attention that I originally uploaded the chapter with a page (page 61) missing ...... naturally, that's a page that makes Miko and Shiori's conversation make much less sense when it's missing ............ I've put it in now, so if you're like The immaculate and feeling like you missed something .... you did, sorry.... hopefully you can see this message x_x

Woo, more content!
Thanks for the update.
Makes it a bit clearer what they're talking about.

joined Mar 7, 2017

Hinako in this sense may be read almost as a monster in and of herself, where monster suggests not necessarily a predatory entity, but an affect produced in the sociocultural imagination, a figure both alien and familiar, for it suggests in its plight what we shall one day face, or might have faced, a potential tragedy that must be cordoned off, explained away or profoundly personalized lest it become too universal- in short, an abjection, just like the pale hands reaching up from the beach, neither dead nor alive, but somehow all the more unsettling for it.

I think you're onto something important here. The English translation of the title uses "monster", which definitely works, but I think it kinda obscures a key theme of the story. My Japanese is very rudimentary but I find it interesting that in the Japanese title the term used is hito de nashi, literally "no person" or more appropriately in context, "inhuman". In dictionaries the word is defined as referring to a person who lacks human compassion and kindness; a ruthless, cruel or merciless individual. Not to be too harsh on the translators though; "An inhuman being wants to eat me" isn't exactly a catchy title.

Although Hinako is human, I think the central theme of this story is her struggling with that fact, as society hesitates to treat her as one. I think there are a lot of parallels one could draw here to Osamu Dazai's monumental classic No Longer Human.

last edited at Jun 22, 2022 6:03AM

joined Oct 10, 2016

savage smelly monster
Said kitsune/inari that also wants to murder Hinako, even more than Shiori

last edited at Jun 24, 2022 3:55AM

Ykn1
joined Dec 20, 2018

sorry everyone ...... it came to my attention that I originally uploaded the chapter with a page (page 61) missing ...... naturally, that's a page that makes Miko and Shiori's conversation make much less sense when it's missing ............ I've put it in now, so if you're like The immaculate and feeling like you missed something .... you did, sorry.... hopefully you can see this message x_x

Thank you! ^_^

The immaculate
joined Mar 19, 2020

So what was shiori saying. I know miko knows she wants to die but I feel like I missed something at the start of the conversation

Shiori knows that Miko is aware of Hinako's death wish, which is "the thing that would make her happy". Shiori's openly told Hinako that she's willing to grant her wish under certain conditions, while Miko apparently hasn't "openly" acknowledged that wish.

While Shiori says that "what [Miko] want[s] and what Hinako wants are complete opposites", she's referring to Hinako's death wish (to be at least blissfully ignorant in death) and Miko's wish for her to survive (in order to live a happy life). Shiori is envious of Miko's determination in face of such a stark disconnect between their desires and the continued frustration of Miko's efforts to make Hinako happy.

I'd say it's hinted at both here and in Miko's inner monologue on page 29, that Shiori may have "given up" on that method of trying to make Hinako wish for a happy life, despite essentially wanting just that.
She has chosen to, basically, bait Hinako into spending time with her and letting her get close in order to reach a point at which Shiori would feel inclined to eat her once she's found her will to live.
All the while she's deliciously ambiguous about whether she's serious about wanting to eventually eat her or if it's truly just a ruse to lure her out of her shell.

I think that's what she means with "But if you understood why [Hinako let Shiori into her heart], you wouldn't be able to be her friend anymore.": She's chosen to become a monster so she can approach Hinako from this angle and honestly play this rather wicked game of offering death as a reward for learning to live.

Oh thanks yeah that’s exactly the thing I don’t think I was comprehending. The extra page also helped with that

Screenshot%202024-01-18%20181127
joined Jun 21, 2021

Wee woo. WEE WOO!

Avatar
joined Aug 29, 2019

Still lovin' it.
Thanks for yet another great chapter, Knight Heron.

It's so great that there's still so much ambiguity about Shiori's endgame.

Also I wonder what the "nice lady's" deal is. The way I understood Shiori, she smells of suicidal urges but for some reason shouldn't anymore? Like, does Shiori have any reason to think that she's overcome those urges, or has the nice lady actually committed suicide/died and returned, and should therefore not smell of being suicidal anymore?

Ykn1
joined Dec 20, 2018

Now I wonder whether leaving Hinako alone there in the end was a trap for the, as described above, "nice lady". In any case, we'll probably learn what's the deal with her the next time.

welease.wodger
joined Oct 2, 2021

"Nice lady" having some ulterior motives.
Fair chance she's gonna get ganked by mermaid and foxy.

Bard_smol
joined Jun 12, 2021

Would be nice if the obvious foreshadowing was bait and she really is nice, without quotation marks, just with complicated circumstances of her own.

Ykn1
joined Dec 20, 2018

Would be nice if the obvious foreshadowing was bait and she really is nice, without quotation marks, just with complicated circumstances of her own.

Based on Shiori's comments, she's certainly not an actual monster, at least.

Onee2
joined Apr 28, 2022

oof that explanation that Shiori gave Hinako I think hurt me as much as it did her. Surely she can't mean that even if that's what it started out like right? Now the entire rest of this series even if it ends up being not true here and just something she's trying to use to bait the "nice lady" I'm going to be thinking in the back of my mind if she truly even likes her... And here I was thinking they've gotten so close over the last 5ish chapters.

joined Mar 26, 2021

Another monster? At some seems like it but human can be monster too so who knows. For sure she is suspicious and Hinako saw in her her mother and that girl, her expression was like she knew that and now what she's up to I would like to know.
And for that question Hinako asked I think Shiori thinks of her as a (eatable) friend

Download%20(11)
joined Jan 27, 2016

Lmao she is falling for the sea monster

Chad%20narukami
joined Feb 28, 2022

I'm hoping for a funny bait and switch

joined Jan 13, 2021

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.

(y)
joined Jan 9, 2017

Shiori "no I don't want to be friends with my food, and btw to my sensibilities you reek"
Hinako she's perfect

joined Jul 5, 2019

Shiori dragging Hinako away so that the others won't see her scars in the bath was a pretty heartwarming scene

last edited at Aug 3, 2022 12:20AM

President%20and%20new%20hire%20profile%20pic%202
joined Sep 27, 2017

Shiori dragging Hinako away so that the other won't see her scars in the bath was a pretty heartwarming scene

Just unfortunate that it was shortly followed by her being cold x_x

7c3371fc-1218-42e3-9009-8520d7f626fa
joined Sep 15, 2020

I think what the nice lady is a widowed mother who lost her children from a similar accident, who’s been simply going through the motions of life, but internally scarred from her reality. And upon finding Hinako, she finds a kindred spirit in her tragedy. I don’t think she’s necessarily a monster like Miko and Shiori, but perhaps a human like monster who has been engulfed by her grief and become utterly inhuman. I’m not sure what kind of monster but something along the lines of perhaps a stalker or maybe murderer. Interested to see exactly what’s up with this lady.

Yonagi%20doesn't%20care
joined Sep 26, 2016

Anyone else playing around with the idea that the lady is trying to bad touch Hinako?

4a988c9f-5d1b-45ec-9cf6-77d69949c95c
joined Jul 30, 2022

I bet the eating part willl be you know.... segssss hehehe aren't we all waiting for that i hope this won't be a depressing ending

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