This Monster Wants to Eat Me

The Salt-Water Sacrament

There is a specific, quiet violence to depression—a sensation not of sadness, but of slowly filling with water until the lungs can no longer draw breath. In *This Monster Wants to Eat Me*, the ocean is not just a setting; it is a heavy, suffocating blanket that wraps around Hinako Yaotose. This 2025 adaptation of Sai Naekawa’s manga arrives at a time when animation is increasingly willing to explore the grotesque intimatcy of trauma, sitting comfortably alongside the body-horror romance of *The Summer Hikaru Died*. Yet, where other series might rely on shock value, director Yusuke Suzuki delivers a melancholic, oceanic poem about a girl who wants to die and the monster who demands she live—at least for a little while.



The premise initially reads like a twisted fairy tale. Hinako, who has drifted through life like flotsam since the death of her family, attracts *youkai* because of her "delicious" sorrow-tinged flesh. Enter Shiori, a mermaid with eyes as deep as the Marianas Trench, who saves Hinako not out of altruism, but gluttony. Shiori promises to devour Hinako, but only when she is "ripe"—meaning, when she has reached her peak happiness and maturity. This pact creates the show's central, fascinating paradox: to achieve the death she craves at the hands of this beautiful creature, Hinako must force herself to find a reason to live.

Visually, Studio Lings creates a world that feels perpetually submerged. The color grading favors washed-out cyans and deep indigos, creating a visual language where even scenes in the bright summer sun feel dampened by humidity and grief. The animation shines brightest in its quieter moments—the subtle shift in Shiori’s pupils from human to predatory, or the way the camera lingers on Hinako’s dissociation. When violence does erupt, it is sudden and jagged, ripping through the lethargic atmosphere. One early confrontation with a rival monster is less an action sequence and more a territorial dispute between apex predators, with Hinako standing in the center, paralyzed not by fear, but by a disturbing passivity.



The heart of the series, however, lies in the subversion of the "protector" trope. In most romances, the love interest protects the protagonist to save their life. Here, Shiori protects Hinako to preserve her meal. Yet, as the thirteen episodes unravel, this dynamic shifts into a complex exploration of codependency. For Hinako, Shiori’s promise of eventual consumption is strangely comforting—it provides a deadline, a guaranteed exit strategy that relieves the burden of her survivor's guilt. The series treats this suicidal ideation with startling empathy; it doesn’t judge Hinako for wanting to end it, but it methodically dismantles her logic by showing how "fattening her up" with happiness inadvertently heals her.



Ultimately, *This Monster Wants to Eat Me* is a romance about the consumption of the self. It asks uncomfortable questions about how much of ourselves we give away to survive, and whether love is inherently a form of devouring another person. By the finale, the line between predator and prey has blurred into something indistinguishable from devotion. It is a difficult, moody watch that refuses to offer easy platitudes about "getting better," suggesting instead that sometimes, the only way to surface from the deep is to let someone else pull you up—even if their claws dig into your skin.