Eat Manga Review (Spoiler‑Free)

The Girl From the Other Side author Nagabe may be best known for their dark fantasy series featuring a young human girl and her inhuman companion, but they have also written a number of anthropomorphic boys’ love one-shots. The latest of these titles is the single volume Eat, featuring a stern law professor, a black wolf named Lufria, who secretly derives immense pleasure from watching others eat. When one of his students, the towering horned beast Gulla, suddenly bites him, it unlocks Lufria’s deep, burning desire for more.

Though it’s told primarily from the perspective of Lufria, Eat features a couple of chapters from Gulla’s point of view, allowing each character’s inner thoughts to provide more background and context to the story. Lufria is a notoriously strict professor who doesn’t tolerate tardiness or inattention in his class and sits alone in the college cafeteria, silently observing the students eat their food. Gulla immediately makes a poor first impression when he lumbers into class late, and when he approaches Lufria later to ask for a printout he missed, his overpowering hunger results in him biting Lufria on the neck.

While assaulting a professor would end in expulsion in any other situation, something unexpected happens—Professor Lufria has long wished to be eaten, and though he is initially shocked by the turn of events, he is also thrilled by the possibility of someone who may actually grant his forbidden desire.

To Eat or Be Eaten

Eat is thematically centered around the fetish vore, a.k.a. vorarephilia, broadly considered the desire to consume or be consumed by another. Unlike “soft vore,” where a victim is devoured alive and whole, “hard vore” is more focused on the visceral aspects of eating or being eaten. While Gulla’s interest in “eating” Lufria is never fully explored, Lufria dreams of being torn apart and killed, making Eat lean more towards hard vore concepts—at least, from my limited understanding of vore as an internet denizen and the additional research I did for this review.

What is not as easy to characterize about Eat is its publisher-defined classification as a boys’ love manga. Both Gulla and Lufria are men, but Lufria mentions multiple times in the narrative that he doesn’t “swing that way,” and any erotic feelings he experiences seem to be derived specifically from his fetish for being eaten, not the individual doing the eating. Of course, BL readers are probably used to this sentiment rearing its ugly head, along with other problematic themes between sexually and/or romantically involved characters such as age gaps, power imbalance, and past trauma. So, in that sense, Eat fits right in with the BL heavy hitters such as Junjo Romantica and Super Lovers.

It is worth noting that in contrast to Lufria, Gulla is initially driven by his strong desire to eat anything and everything, including “rare” meat, but his feelings towards Lufria do evolve throughout the narrative. Ultimately, however, readers such as myself who come to this book specifically from an interest in erotic or romantic BL and not due to a specific interest in vore may be left feeling dissatisfied.

The topic of contentious BL aside, every page of Eat is overflowing with Nagabe’s signature style and charm. This alone kept me hooked, along with my (perhaps naïve) niggling questions such as, “Does Lufria really want to be killed and eaten, to the point that he would allow his own life to end?” And apart from Lufria and Gulla, there really is only one other character—someone from Lufria’s past who appears partway through to stir up some drama, but overall, this single-volume story remains focused on the protagonists’ predator/prey relationship dynamic without any major distractions.

Predator and Prey

Perhaps the most compelling aspects of Eat is its focus on contradictions. Lufria is a wolf, a natural predator, but he ardently longs to become someone else’s prey. He is also a prime example of gap moe—in class, he comes off as stern, unapproachable, and harsh, earning him the nickname of “The Killer,” but his desire to be eaten reveals a whole different side to him. While it is unclear exactly what type of bovid Gulla is, he was born a herbivore, destined in nature to become prey to something like Lufria, but here he desires to taste flesh for himself. For anyone who loves a dynamic that flips expectations on its head, there is a lot to enjoy here.

While Eat is not for everyone, there is enjoyment to be had even if you’re turned off by the idea of vore or themes of assault. I did not go in as a fan of vore, and I might not have come out as one, but Nagabe continues to delight with their anthropomorphic characters, gorgeous art, and unorthodox themes. If the upcoming Smell is any indication, it looks like Nagabe has even more of that in store for us.

Credits

Story and Art: Nagabe
Translator: Adrienne Beck
Letterer: Vanessa Satone
Cover Design: Nicky Lim
Copy Editor: B. Lillian Martin
Proofreader: Dave Murray
Production Designer: George Panella
Senior Editor: Jenn Grunigen

English Edition published by Seven Seas Entertainment, Inc. in 2025.

If you liked Eat, you may also like:

• The Wize Wize Beasts of the Wizarding Wizdoms
• Why Don’t You Eat Me, My Dear Wolf?
• Beastars

Thank you to Seven Seas for providing an advanced review copy of this manga. Receiving this advanced copy had no impact on this reviewer’s opinions.

Article edited by: Stephanie Liu