Holiday Review: BITE MAKER: THE KING'S OMEGA

As the American shojo market slowly but surely embraces its hornier side, it becomes more susceptible to trends from outside of the manga world, as this title unfortunately proves.

BITE MAKER: THE KING'S OMEGA (Bite Maker: Ou-sama no Omega), by Miwako Sugiyama.  First published in 2018 and first published in North America in 2021.

PLOT:

In this world, humanity can be divided into three separate groups: alphas, betas, and omegas.  Alphas are not just impossibly beautiful beings.  Their intense hormones can drive people into a horny fury and a single word from their mouth can command them.  Betas are ordinary people, who can be affected by the alphas but otherwise go about their days and enjoy normal relationships.  Omegas are the rarest, who also possess strong hormones that drive not only betas crazy but the only people able to bear the children of an alpha.

Noel is an omega who desperately tries to hide her status.  Her secret is revealed when she meets Nobunaga, a haughty young alpha boy.  From this moment on, the two find themselves helplessly drawn to one another as Noel is forcibly drawn into Nobunaga's elite world.

STORY:

I hate omegaverse.

For those of you blissfully unaware, 'omegaverse' is a fictional concept that was born from trying to imprint the social and reproductive roles from a (poorly done and later retracted) study on wolf packs onto human ones.  You can find elements of it in earlier stories like Love Pistols, but the modern concept was largely forged during the supernatural romance craze of the 2010s.  It continued to percolate through the world of fanfiction and romance novels, eventually crossing over from gay romances to hetero ones.  Now it's starting to creep its way into manga, which is why I find myself compelled to talk it about it now.

So why do I hate omegaverse?  It's because all too often it's used to justify archaic, abusive concepts about sex and romance, and this manga is a prime example of that.

Right from the start, it's loaded with a lot of the shojo manga tropes that I can't stand.  You've got the imperious asshole love interest who bullies the heroine into a relationship.  There's also the weak-willed, wibbly heroine who is supposedly plain but in truth is secretly beautiful.  You've got a ridiculously posh private high school, completely with ludicrously overpowered student council that serves less to represent the students and more to cater to the love interest and a handful of others like him.  There's multiple instances of attempted rape.  There's a Childhood Best Friend who heelturns almost immediately to make the love interest look better.  All this from just the first volume!  Sugiyama was not exactly straining herself here with original ideas.

Then you have to deal with the omegaverse content that has been slathered on top of it all.  I barely know where to begin with it all.  Do I complain about how its attempt to relabel the alpha/beta/omega roles as 'genders' does not work because that's not how gender works?  Especially since so much emphasis is put on these roles being defined by genetics and sex characteristics?  After all, the only definition we get for omegas are 'able to bear an alpha's child,' which would imply that all alphas are male and all omegas are female?  I'm a cis woman and as such not an expert on gender, but I know enough about the concept to know that this is a lot of heteronormative BULLSHIT.

Oh, speaking of babies, let's talk about all the focus on sex and pregnancy.  I've frequently talked about how I wished that more shojo manga was in touch with its sexuality, but reading this feels like getting that wish from the monkey's paw.  Horniness here is an involuntary state, something that happens violently and sometimes against one's will, regardless of what role they fall into.  Even then, it's all couched not in talk of desire or pleasure, but of pregnancy.  The first page is literally just an image of Nobunaga with the declaration "You're going to have my baby."  When girls lose their minds over him, they don't cry out some variation of "do me now," but instead "I want to have your children."  Based on some of the comments Nobunaga and his fellow alphas make, omegas are meant less to be romantic partners and more like a pet to be bred.  I knew that this emphasis on baby-making was a thing in the hetero takes on omegaverse, but it is awkward as hell to see this kind of talk coming from literal goddamn high schoolers.

Perhaps I could talk about how the omegaverse stuff makes the main relationship worse?  For example, when Noel and Nobunaga first meet he literally blackmails her into a kiss by threatening to sexually assault her hormone-addled best friend.  The only thing that Noel is assertive about is hiding her omega nature.  She literally starves herself in an attempt to stop herself from growing up and filling out.  She hides her appearance (even if it's in the most half-assed, She's All That-style fashion possible).  When Nobunaga discovers her secret, she literally tries to slit her throat and wrists with a boxcutter she pulls out of nowhere.  She absolutely does not want this!  And yet from the moment she meets him, she no longer as a choice.  She wakes up from a five-day horny coma with a sudden school transfer, an ear cuff that marks her as Nobunaga's servant, and a dawning realization that her life is no longer her own.  This isn't the start of a beautiful romance, it's the beginning of a horror story.

ART:

I wish I liked anything about the story because Sugiyama is a pretty good artist.  She's got a knack for good character design, particularly when it comes to the guys.  I think it's because she understands that less is more - these boys are all androgynous yet handsome, but she doesn't go overboard on hairstyles or overly stylized features, keeping the focus on their large, expressive eyes.  Even her ladies are OK, even if I'm pretty sure I've seen dozens of shojo heroines who look exactly like Noel.  She also puts the shojo convention of "screentones as visual stand-in for strong emotion" to good use here, using it not only to demarcate all the usual moments of high drama but also for moments of strong pheromonal drama.  It's a smart way to visualize an otherwise invisible thing.

RATING:

In her author's note, Sugiyama notes how she wanted original to make a series about an office lady hooking up with a hot guy who cooks for her, and how it was her editor who pushed her towards an omegaverse story.  I wish I could have read that story instead of Bite Maker not just because it would be less offensive and derivative, but also because I think it would be a better match for Sugiyama's art.

This series is published by Seven Seas.  This series is ongoing in Japan with 8 volumes available.  3 volumes have been released and are currently in print.

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