The Spring 2021 Manga Guide

Bite Maker: The King's Omega

What's It About? 

Nobunaga won the genetic lottery and was born an alpha: his beauty, intelligence, and talent drive everyone wild with lust. Despite his seemingly perfect life, Nobunaga is unsatisfied--until he meets the woman of his dreams, who can sate his every desire. Enjoy a taste of the supernatural in this alpha/beta/omega tale about love, lust, and the power of attraction.

Bite Maker: The King's Omega is drawn and scripted by by Miwako Sugiyama and Seven Seas Entertainment has released the physical and digital versions of its first volume for $12.99 and $9.66 respectively

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Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

Previous to this manga, the only use of the word “omega” in a romance novel context I was familiar with was the Mercy Thompson spin-off series Alpha & Omega by Patricia Briggs. Apparently I have been missing out.

Bite Maker is an omegaverse story (a genre more typically associated with BL in manga terms) where there are basically three genders – Alpha, Beta, and Omega – and everyone is just really horny all of the time. Alphas trigger sexual reactions in Betas, but Omegas trigger them in Alphas, and only Omegas can bear Alphas' children. And my, isn't that super important in Bite Maker's world, where it's all about the baby-making, both in plain old sex terms and as the end goal of that sex. I've read TL manga that was less horny than this.

But the amount of sexual content here really isn't the issue. Where this book treads on uncomfortable territory is in the way that it's used: it takes as a given that readers will find the idea of people losing all control over their sexual urges as hot. If that works for you in your romance fiction, that's perfectly fine, but if that's not how you like your romances, this stands to be a very unsettling read, and it's certainly territory most often covered by what are sometimes called “old school” romances in the bodice-ripper reading community. That means that there are virtually no actions in the volume that involve mutual consent. There's always one character who is under some kind of influence or is actively against what's happening; in fact, heroine Noel is actively hiding her Omega status because she finds the whole thing so upsetting. When she's outed as an Omega by ostensible male protagonist Nobunaga, her first reaction is to whip out a knife and try to kill herself – twice. This is not a heroine who longs to lose herself in the hero's tender caresses, his promises of her having “so many of my babies” notwithstanding.

That she gets them anyway, and that he forces her to receive them by threatening to make her hormone-addled friend give him a blow job if she doesn't, just doesn't work for me. Noel has the right to refuse anything she doesn't want, and while the prevailing theory behind this subgenre of romance is that the characters (more typically the heroine) doesn't have to fight and can use his “need” as an excuse to just go with it, I've never quite bought it. Noel's fear is clearly real, and that Nobunaga ignores it under the guise of “protecting” her just doesn't sit well with me as a reader. It doesn't strike me as something that needs romanticizing.

I've been saying for years that we need more mature manga for the ladies in English. I still stand by that. This one just isn't working for me, even if the school Nobunaga attends being named for the time period he ushered in is my kind of humor.

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Lynzee Loveridge

Rating:

This is maybe the dumbest thing I've read in a while, but only in the sense that it goes full circle into being hilarious. My familiarity with the "omegaverse" is reading about it wide-eyed after my friends explained it to me in a Discord channel. It's mostly window dressing for a lot of screwing and that doesn't change in Bite Maker, a manga I took several screencaps of because I found the entire thing so friggin' funny. There's something about a heterochromia dude slinking around the shopping district and arrogantly proclaiming he "wouldn't even put in the tip" of his dick that made me cackle, followed by him bemoaning his inability to impregnate his soulmate a few pages later. Just normal horny teen things.

I guess this can be a good read if you too find that premise overtly silly and can overlook the desperate melodrama on every page. Some of it is crueler than I can stomach; I thought it was exceptionally mean to have her actual crush become pheramone-driven near the book's end, not to mention how Nobunaga comes from the school of Hana Yori Dango men – in other words, he sucks. Some of the other Alphas look like they'll be more interesting, typewise, but these stories always set the sexy jerk as the primary love interest, so don't hold your breath.

Consent is also nonexistent. I mean, it's baked into the premise that everyone is just going to be pheromone horny constantly. And obsessed with babies. Honestly, I'll probably keep reading this because it satisfies a certain kind of rubbernecking.