First Impression: This Monster Wants to Eat Me

Hinako’s days run endlessly together. She rises in the morning, joins her friend Miko on the way to school, and endures another day of school and sleep. But today is a little different. Miko is unable to join her friend, and on the way to school, Hinako looks out into the sea and sees something beneath the surface—a shadow and bubbles rising. Before she can explore further, though, she is stopped by another girl with eyes as blue and deep as the very ocean she was staring into, who warns her not to fall. Hinako is nonplussed, but could it be that this girl is warning her of something more worrying than the unlikely scenario of falling over a railing? And is this meeting a key to Hinako receiving the terrible thing that she wants most of all?

Well…episode one was quite an experience. Tonally, this is going to be unlike any series you watch this season.* It’s atmospheric and almost obnoxiously slow, the kind of series that shows a graphically violent scene but has the main character poetically narrating it instead of focusing on the action. Really, this is a very slow-moving series: the “camera” pans across the classroom, slowly moves up and down the length of the characters, and transitions with care between scenes. There are long stretches with only internal dialogue, and violin and piano music fills the background almost constantly, often with discordant tones that remind you that this is supposedly a horror series (it’s not really) and that Hinako is depressed (more on that later). It’s sometimes pretentious, too, with lines like “amid hollow days, permeated by the invisible smell of unending summer” (and that’s all just in the first 90 seconds of the show). Because of the unusually methodical (aka boring, much like the manga) pace of the series and how vital the music is (and how meaningless much of the writing is), this episode feels almost more like a musical composition rather than an anime episode.

Then there’s the central relationship—spoilers ahead for episode one. While the director wants to keep you guessing, it’s really easy to figure out what’s ahead in this episode, including that the girl that Hinako meets (Shiori) is going to be her love interest and is “of the sea.” What I didn’t know was that she was going to be a mermaid—a flesh-eating one, which fits with the recent depiction of mermaids in manga and other media, and with this whole approach to yuri series where a dangerous element is added situationally or by the character’s identity (vampire is another common one), adding a new slant to the romance. Much as with vampire yuri, one character will feed on another, which is an interesting element with the potential to be problematic, including here, where the series wants to understand just how depressed and suicidal Hinako is. And ultimately, more than the pacing issues, that’s what turned me off about episode one, which tries to express how much Hinako is in need of a savior, but both does a poor job of expressing her depression (her slight voice and endless monologues feel more like a caricature of depression rather than a true expression of it) and creates the possibility of an ugly, possibly abusive relationship that will be depicted as romantic. Who knows—This Monster Wants to Eat Me may not end up as another toxic yuri series, but that’s not the impression I got from episode one. You may want to continue to tune in and see where it goes, though unless your jam is “heavily atmospheric, slow-moving yuri series”—and it might well be—I’m not sure why you would.

*The only changes in tone are with Miko’s appearances, “humorous” ones which fall rather flat, and the shockingly upbeat ED.

This Monster Wants to Eat Me can be streamed on Crunchyroll.

Twwk
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