So this... this is what the barbaric, heartless humans call... seafood!
The Mermaid Princess' Guilty Meal (Ningyohime no Gomen ne Gohan) is a manga written by Hiroshi Noda and illustrated by Takahiro Wakamatsu, which was serialized from 2017 to 2019 in Yawaraka Spirits.
Deep, deep under the sea, in the fish kingdom, there was a mermaid princess named Ela. The kindhearted princess had many fish friends whom she loved dearly. But one day, poor Benito the bonito was snared by a fisherman's hook and turned into a delectable meal. Heartbroken, Ela goes to land to mourn his death and aid his passing into the great beyond...
If only that was the end of the story. Remember how in The Little Mermaid (1989) fish were sentient and friends with merfolk, and humans were seen as evil because they ate fish? This manga takes place in a world quite like that... but as Ela finds out to her horror and dismay, the humans might just be on to something with the whole 'eating fish' thing...
Follow Ela as she discovers the wonders of seafood!
The Mermaid Princess's Guilty Meal contains examples of:
- Abdicate the Throne: In the final chapters, the Sea King crowns Ela as the new sovereign and retreats from public life to devote himself to mobile phone games.
- Accidental Truth:
- When Yellowtail tries to come up with scandalous tabloid headlines involving Princess Ela, she comes up with two that she promptly rejects as being too far-fetched to be believable but which are actually more-or-less 100% correct: that Ela is involved with organized crime like motorcycle gangs and the Yakuza, and that she's a kleptomaniac who's been stealing money from the government.
- In Chapter 28, Marin wonders if Ela might be a mermaid due to her having the name she suggested to the Sea King for their prospective children, but dismisses it as impossible since no mermaid would ever eat seafood — let alone enjoy it as much as Ela does.
- Achievements in Ignorance: When Ela smacks her head and loses her memory, she ends up being recruited by the Independent Party and runs for Japanese Prime Minister. If not for a porgy dinner jogging her memory, she would have won.
- A-Cup Angst: Sango is clearly jealous of Ela's figure, though she keeps it to herself.
- Ambiguous Ending: In the final chapter, after Ela has apparently reformed from eating fish and offered herself as a sacrifice to stop the Leviathan's rampage, she bursts out of the Leviathan's head holding a pair of chopsticks and repeating her catchphrase, showing she survived but indicating she may have relapsed.
- Animal Motifs: Cats for Ela, between her love of seafood and her Maid Cafe outfit. At one point when she's wearing the aforementioned outfit, she catches a falling fish out of the air in her mouth in a very feline manner, and her yukata for the festival is adorned with kitty designs.
- Art Shift: The fish are drawn in a cartoony style... while they're alive. Once they're dead, they shift to a realistic portrayal.
- Asshole Victim: The Yellow(journalism)tail. After spreading nasty rumors and causing no end of chaos in the kingdom, she's fished. A gruesome enough fate, but Ela goes up to eat her, and Yellowtail's last moments are her going Laughing Mad at realizing a real scandal that eclipsed anything she'd imagine was right under her nose the whole time and she'd never get to reveal it.
- Author Avatar: A cartoonish, toque-wearing fish with a gaping, three-toothed grin. He usually shows up to give the educational segments on the dish of the day, but can be seen in the background at times as well. Chapter 38 reveals that he used to be Madame Bonita's son, Nakajima, before being driven to despair by his failure to save Benito from being fished and begging the spirit of Troutadamus to end his suffering. Troutadamus acquiesced, reducing Nakajima to a soulless shell doomed to aimlessly wander until the end of the sea world.
- Bait-and-Switch:
- Played for Laughs in chapter 26, where after attending a mixer, Alisa is approahced by a rich, American oil-king, foisting her into a Love Triangle between herself, Ryo and this new suitor. It turns out that Aburoil is actually a fujoshi, and he's just requesting her to get him some BL manga from the upcoming comiket.
- In Chapter 28, it's strongly implied that Ela's birth mother is actually Marin, who dated the Sea-King twenty years prior and has a similar appearance and mannerisms to Ela. However, it's later revealed that this was a Red Herring and that Ela's birth mother was her stepmother's late twin sister.
- Beast of the Apocalypse:
- Invoked in Chapter 38, where it's revealed that the great sage Troutadamus had prophesied that a monster with an insatiable appetite for sea-life would arise and devour everything in the ocean. While Madame Bonita was a believer in the prophecy, her son Nakajima scoffed at it due to his psychic powers letting him foresee that he would die to prevent Troutadamus' prophecy from coming to pass. Unfortunately, Nakajima befriending Benito — thus giving him hope — derailed his destiny and led to Benito being hooked in his place, thus bringing about the fulfillment of Troutadamus' prophecy when Princess Ela ate Benito and became addicted to seafood, making her the prophesied monster that would devour the oceans.
- Resurfaces in the final pages of chapter 40, and turns into the focus of chapter 41, the finale. While Nakajima has managed a miracle to get Ela to reform, Leviathan — the monster originally prophesied by Troutadamus — instead awakens. It's a mighty unstoppable beast with an insatiable appetite that had to be sealed away by the combined might of two kingdoms... and Era eats it from the inside-out, seemingly reawakening her seafood addiction in the process.
- Black Comedy Cannibalism: Basically the whole premise. Ela's addiction to seafood is dark, tragic and hilarious at the same time.
- Black Eyes of Crazy: Mister Ripper the shark has almost completely black eyes with light-colored rings indicating where his irises and pupils are. He's also a notorious serial killer who ate ten fish. Ela, who by that point had eaten more than twenty, is mortified, but he assumes she's mocking him when she mutters "Only ten?" in disbelief.
- Carnivore Confusion: Played with: Ela and the fish she ends up eating are different species, but they're still friends.
- Catchphrase: Whenever Ela consumes seafood made from one of her friends, she says "Forgive me [insert name here]... but you taste so good!"
- Collector of the Strange: Sango is in charge of studying humanity, and has collected all manner of memorabilia dumped from the surface world. She's kind of like Ariel, except it's a job instead of a hobby and she actually knows what everything is. Her stockpile of human money comes in handy when Ela wants a bite to eat, the princess helping herself in secret much to Sango's chagrin.
- Cool Old Lady: Ryo's grandma is a tough-as-nails, sake-swilling hunter who takes on bears at her ripe old age.
- Contrived Coincidence:
- Out of all the thousands of fish being served around Japan, Ela invariably manages to be served the remains of the Victim of the Week, who she personally knew, every single time in the same restaurant no less. Although chapter 12 shows she explicitly follows her fished friend to see where they go, she still ends up at the same restaurant.
- And even this has absolutely nothing on The Reveal regarding Ela's parentage. To make it short, the Mer-king dated Marin — who happened to look similar to Ela — but they broke up and found love somewhere else. The king met Ela's stepmother who introduced him to her twin sister whom he married, but she died after giving birth to Ela. This in turn caused her grieving sister and husband to get closer and eventually marry each other.
- Corrupt the Cutie: Ela is very slowly becoming more casual with eating fish. In Chapter 34, it almost seems like she was trying to get her Victim of the Week caught. After she becomes Queen, she tries to go cold turkey and makes going near the surface illegal... but her closet is stuffed full of fish snacks and when she learns someone was fished she is grimly delighted.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: The general fish populace see what humans do to fish after being caught as this trope, tempura in particular: Sango describing it to Ela's friends is framed like a horror story... one that's interrupted by Ela's Growling Gut as she zooms off to try it.
- Death Glare: Despite giving her signature eulogy to the remains of the Yellowtail spreading vicious rumors about her family and friends, Ela is shooting a thunderous glare at the dish the whole time. Later, as Mullet is threatening her with blackmail, even with her back to the reader, Ela is clearly getting angrier with every word out of Mullet's mouth. We don't get to see her expression when she finally turns to face him, but it's so terrifying that Mullet immediately swims out of there as fast as his fins can carry him... and slams right into a fishhook in his blind panic.
- Doppelgänger Replacement Love Interest: Era's father eventually reveal that her stepmother is the twin sister of Era's biological mother.
- Early Instalment Weirdness: Tuna is introduced trying to eat Squid, and Ela berates him for eating those he should consider friends while Tuna scoffs that he's just obeying the natural order of predators and prey. Later chapters zig-zag this, with the rockfish sumo wrestler being implied to have eaten his dieticians, but for the most part it's established that fish eating each other is such a horrifying taboo that a shark who'd eaten only ten other fish was treated as a serial killer and locked up in solitary confinement.
- Easily Elected: When Ela smacks her head and loses her memory, she ends up being recruited by the Independent Party and runs for Japanese Prime Minister. If not for a porgy dinner jogging her memory, she would have won.
- Empty Eyes: As Princess Ela's addiction to seafood worsens, she's sometimes drawn with solid black irises both when despairing over her growing desire to eat her friends and when she lets her Killing Intent come to the surface. As the Queen of the Sea, her irises are drawn as solid black until Nakajima restores her memory of her friends — causing her eye-shines to reappear.
- Everyone Has Standards: Despite eating seafood, a near
Moral Event Horizon among her kind, Ela draws the line at learning to fish for herself. - Evil Costume Switch: After she becomes the dictator of the undersea kingdom, the former princess Ela starts wearing a black dress and keeps her hair up.
- Expy: The magician fish David Hokkerfield is a blatant parody of real life magician David Copperfield.
- Face of a Thug: Himada looks like an intimidating Yakuza, but he's a friendly, lovable goofball who strikes up a friendship with Sango.
- Face of an Angel, Mind of a Demon: Just look at the cover for chapter 2 (the page picture). The denizens of the ocean see Ela as a kind, beautiful Princess Classic, oblivious to the fact she's been eating their friends and loved ones. While the Princess isn't necessarily a bad person, later chapters imply she's eating fish more for the taste rather than to honour their memory. That said, Ela's angelic face can occasionally slip. The Killing Intent Ela unleashed when Queen Death Needles reveals that some humans consider her to be a delicacy was apparently so terrifying it freaked out a professional assassin. On a different note, Cody mentions that the Princess has a darker side, presumably something unrelated to her eating her fellow sealife.
- Failed a Spot Check: Sango is distracted watching Himada leave after they first meet, oblivious to the huge array of TV sets behind her displaying Ela eating seafood as part of a cuisine show. She later gets enraptured watching fireworks for the first time at a festival: Ela's sitting right next to her munching on a grilled squid.
- Fatal Family Photo: Parodied. Once during the Great Sea War, the King showed a picture of Era to Sergeant Herring and gushed over her before getting shot in the chest immediately after. For extra hilarity, he was shot in the same panel where the sergeant warned him from raising so many Death Flags.
- Fanservice Pack: Ela's breasts become larger over the course of the manga, to the point where in later chapters the bra she wears in mermaid form doesn't cover them as well as it did at the beginning.
- Flat Character: Zigzagged. While no character actually falls under this trope, Ela has made many of her victims into this in her memory, as she's only able to remember them as meals she's had and not people.
- Food Porn: The various seafood dishes are drawn with loving attention to detail: it's clear at a glance how Ela fell into temptation.
- Formerly Fit: Marumi Honnōji was stoic and slender as a 17-year-old, but in her twenties has packed on a lot of weight. She's also quite happy the way she is, and rejects her friends' attempts to fat-shame her.
- Freudian Slip: By Chapter 35, Ela has become so addicted to seafood that she frequently slips up — even when talking to a police officer, leading him to suspect her of being involved in a recent fishing-related murder. This leads to him figuring out that she's been "paying respects" to deceased fish by eating them, only to meet that fate himself.
- Gyaru Girl: Alisa Alisaka is a ganguro, and thus has tanned skin and dyed blonde hair. While she's currently a nice girl, she was a bit of a bully in high-school.
- God Save Us from the Queen!: Ela gets crowned Queen in chapter 39, and enacts a very strict policy that keeps the fish from getting fished up. Her tyrannical rule is also her means of keeping herself from succumbing to the temptations of seafood, though her janitorial staff note that even after her coronation she would sneak up to the surface and she still has a room full of seafood snacks. She sports a Psychotic Smirk upon finding out someone was fished and sets out to devour the poor unfortunate soul on the surface. At first the unlucky fish is implied to be Mackerel, but when Ela arrives at the restaurant she's surprised and disappointed to be served seared bonito instead. This turns out to be Nakajima, who is able to remind Ela of the friendships she once had, thus fulfilling his destiny in the process.
- Good Angel, Bad Angel: Ela's show up when she's trying to resist a cod hotpot. The devil tells her to forget everything and eat, while the angel takes her gently by the hand... and pulls her toward the chopsticks, telling her to eat.
- Good Stepmother: It's mentioned that the sea queen isn't Ela's biological mother. Regardless, she deeply loves her stepdaughter, having taken multiple trips to the ocean floor to search for Ela when the princess went missing.
- Guilty Pleasure: It's right there in the title, folks: the mermaid princess Ela is addicted to seafood. Later chapters imply that she's slowly but surely getting used to it, to the point she asks for seconds at one point and even expresses malicious glee at the thought of eating Mackerel.
- Hate Sink: Yellowtail and Mullet were both thoroughly unpleasant individuals: Yellowtail used malicious slander to throw the royal family into chaos for laughs and popularity, while Mullet was a Spoiled Brat leader of the Secret Police who used his position to threaten and intimidate everyone around him into doing what he wanted. Of all the fish that ended up on Ela's plate, she showed almost zero remorse for having eaten them.
- Heroic Sacrifice:
- Benito takes the line for Nakajima to save him from getting fished, kicking the whole plot into motion. Nakajima, after months of wandering as a blank slate, gets inspired by memories of this friendship to take the line for Mackerel and lead Ela to reform.
- Ela, having known an insatiable hunger like that of the Leviathan, offers herself to be eaten in order to finally pacify it. This doesn't stick, as she not only survives but ultimately eats her way out of its stomach.
- Hijacked Destiny:
- Chapter 38 reveals that Madame Bonita's son, Nakajima, actually possessed psychic powers and had forseen he was destined to sacrifice himself to save the ocean world from a terrible monster's insatiable hunger for sealife. However, when Nakajima befriended Benito this derailed his destiny and led to Benito being hooked instead. Nakajima tried to use his psychic powers to jump back countless times in order to save Benito, only to be told by the spirit of the sage Troutadamus — who had prophesied the destruction of the ocean world — that it was too late and that Benito's death had guaranteed the rise of the monster destined to destroy the oceans (that being either the Leviathan or Princess Ela).
- The finale reveals that the Leviathan was the monster prophesied by Troutadamus to devour all life in the seas... but Ela usurped its place by becoming addicted to seafood. The moment Nakajima fulfills his destiny, the Leviathan breaks free to fulfill its destiny... only for Ela to ultimately eat it from the inside out.
- Horrifying the Horror: Shark the Ripper boasts of eating ten fish, a crime that landed him in a Hannibal Lecter-style straitjacket and mask. Ela, who by this point has eaten more than twice that amount, is naturally mortified by what that means for her. When her mutterings catch Shark's attention, he assumes she's mocking him and demands that she look him in the eye, only to be struck by a terrifying vision of her surrounded by the skeletons of the fish she's eaten. He ends up equally scared and impressed.
- Hot Guy, Ugly Wife: The mer-king is a Pretty Boy. His wife the queen is a ningyo, or Japanese mermaid: a koi with a Gonk-y human face. Going by Yellowtail's tabloid, however, she's considered a supermodel-level beauty by merfolk standards.
- Humanshifting: Merfolk can transform to and from human form whenever they please: handy for going up on land for a bite of seafood.
- I Am a Monster: Early on, Ela believes that she's become a monster; by merfolk standards, she probably would be considered this.
- Interspecies Friendship: Ela befriends Ryo, a young human fisherman whose family owns a modest seafood bar. It's this friendship that causes her to slowly warm up to humans despite their fish-eating ways (on top of her realizing for herself how delicious seafood is). Sango also makes a friend on the surface, Himada, and she quickly falls in love with and even gets engaged to him.
- Japanese Delinquents: The cod school is styled this way, with an aggressive leader who decides to attack a fishing boat that caught their prior leader in a manly display of revenge. Cue a newspaper clipping from the surface: 'BIG NEW YEARS CATCH OF CODS AND POLLOCKS!'
- Kill It Through Its Stomach: In the final chapter, Ela offers herself to be eaten by Leviathan to pacify its hunger for good. Cut to the manga's final pages, and Ela bursts out of its head, ending the series with her long-running catchphrase.
- Let's Meet the Meat: Each and every dish was living sealife at some point, and we get to meet them either before their untimely demise or through flashback.
- Local Hangout: Uotomo, an izakaya owned by Ryo's family: it's got great seafood, as a certain mermaid princess can attest.
- The Lost Lenore: Ela is significantly more haunted by the death and consumption of Tuna than she is by almost any other character.
- Mad Libs Catchphrase: "I'm sorry [x], but you taste so good!", uttered by Ela whenever she eats one of her friends, where [x] is the name of the Victim of the Week.
- Maid Cafe: Himada runs one as part of his Yakuza-lookalike Face of a Thug gag: he never takes advantage of his staff, treats them well and is in turn beloved by them.
- Mama Bear: The Queen apparently swam from near the surface of the ocean to the deep sea floor on multiple occasions to try and find Ela. It's implied she did this for months on end.
- Meat-O-Vision: When Ela returns from her first seafood meal, still reeling from how delicious it was, she's approached by some of her other fishy friends... who she envisions as all sorts of tasty dishes before snapping herself back to reality. By Chapter 36, it's gotten worse. She's no longer able to see her friends at all, and apparently hasn't been able to for some time.
- Ms. Fanservice: As a mermaid, Princess Ela wears nothing but a bra that becomes increasingly too-small as the manga progresses, and as her fish-tail only goes up to her thighs her butt is often on full display.
- My God, What Have I Done?:
- Ela is properly mortified after her first seafood dinner, not simply because she ate one of her friends, but because she found him so delicious...
- In Chapter 40, Nakajima triggers a very strong one in Ela that reminds her that everyone she's eaten, and all the fish she rules over, are her friends. Still, she's so mortified over what she's done that she keeps herself cooped in the central tower to figure out how to atone.
- Nice Guy: Himada's intimidating and eccentric, but he's one of the nicest guys you'll ever meet. Ela has this reputation among the fish, and to be fair she is an All-Loving Hero. But she has her darker side...
- No Celebrities Were Harmed: The fish news anchor seen in the final chapters is clearly based on the infamous North Korean news anchor Ri Chun-hee
. - Obliviously Evil: Humans seem to be unaware that most marine life in this world are sapient.
- Odd Friendship: Chapter 33 reveals that Alisa Alisaka and Marumi Honnōji have been best friends since high-school, where the former was a brash delinquent with a soft side and the latter was a stoic socialite.
- Oh, Crap!: In later chapters, typically anybody's reaction to discovering Ela's love of eating fish. They rarely live past this trope.
- Once an Episode: Ela inevitably laments "I'm so sorry (x), but you taste so good!" as she tucks into her latest meal, with (x) being the poor soul who wound up on her plate.
- One-Person Birthday Party: Himada throws one for himself when it seems that everyone's too busy to celebrate with him. Fortunately, Sango shows up... followed by his staff, who had been setting up a surprise party for him.
- Orgasmically Delicious: The inevitable result of Ela taking a bite of seafood is her having a foodgasm worthy of Food Wars!.
- Paper Tiger:
- Himada certainly looks terrifying, but he outwardly admits he sucks at fighting. Sure enough, he gets pummeled by the thugs he tries to defend Sango from. Even the nasty scar on his forehead is from he when he tripped and fell down the stairs when he was younger.
- His subordinate Takozaki is also this, but even worse than Himada.
- Phony Psychic: Madame Bonita once had actual psychic powers, but after she lost them she turned towards scamming people.
- Poke the Poodle: The merfolk have a very low standard for crimes. One of the inmates of a prison got in there for yelling at his mom for buying the wrong manga, which even the others found hardcore. A Gillman who participated in a war was traumatized for 15 years, because he drew something on his superior's head and hasn't apologized.
- Pokémon Speak: Ela's mom is only capable of saying "Gub gub."
- Pose of Silence: Ela reveals herself as having having a palate for fishpeople in a conspiratorial whisper to Gill-chan. Subverted because everyone else hears her asking how one of his sergeants tastes.
- Red Herring: Following the revelation that the Sea King's wife isn't Ela's birth mother, it's strongly implied that Marin, Ryo's high-school teacher, is her mom. The first half of Chapter 28 sets it up to confirm this... only for the Sea King to pull a Bait-and-Switch and reveal that Ela's real mom is his current wife's twin sister.
- Real-Person Cameo: Kiyoshi Kimura, the 'Tuna King' and owner of the famous Sushi Zanmai, makes a cameo in chapter 2, personally making and serving Ela's tuna roll.
- Reformed Bully: In Chapter 8, the mostly stoic and laidback Ryo is revealed by Himada to have been a notoriously violent delinquent in high school, earning himself the nickname "Man-Eating Shark". Alisa was also a bit of a bully in high-school, forcing Marumi to give her money — albeit only to feed a stray kitten she found.
- The Reveal: Chapter 28 reveals that Era's mother is the twin sister of her stepmother who died shortly after childbirth.
- Rescue Romance: Likely a strong component of Sango's crush on Himada: despite outwardly admitting he sucks at fighting, Himada doesn't hesitate for a second to protect her from a pair of thugs.
- Room Full of Crazy: Ela's pictures of her devoured friends have officially become this as of chapter 34, where we get to see them taking up the entire wall they're hung on.
- Rule of Funny: The underwater society pretty much runs on this. Cod biker gangs? Clam and oyster yakuza? It's absurd and funny, so why not?
- Saying Too Much:
- When she assumes that Gill-chan ate his CO during the war, Ela believes she's found a kindred spirit and conspiratorially asks how Gunnery Sergeant Hamoman tasted. Fortunately for her, Gill-chan and everyone else present assume she's joking.
- Ela's frequent freudian slips in Chapter 35 lead to Detective Hatahata figuring out she's been eating the sealife she's supposedly gone to the surface to mourn.
- Serial Killer:
- Later chapters paint Era as a serial killer, with multiple investigations trying to find out the dark secret, or hardened criminals feeling unnerved at her presence, sensing something wrong. Granted, she only eats the fish, doesn't actually kill them herself, and the whole thing is Played for Laughs.
- In contrast to Tuna eating other fish with little-to-no consequences beyond Ela scolding him, Shark the Ripper is locked up in solitary confinement with a straitjacket and Hannibal Lector-style mask, the other characters treating him as a monstrous serial killer due to having eaten just ten fish.
- Ship Tease:
- Alisa has a blatant crush on Ryo, who is completely Oblivious to Love, and sees Ela as a romantic rival for his affections. Ultimately nothing comes of this, as Ela's only interest on the surface is eating fish.
- Sango and Himada: Sango is shown spacing out after her first encounter with Himada, and when Mooray ribs her about having a crush on the surface she gets incredibly flustered. The Sea King seems furious when he hears rumors of it, but is disappointed when she nervously stammers that Himada means nothing to her, and offers her his support and advice due to having been in a relationship with a human himself. In chapter 36, it stops being 'tease': the two become engaged!
- Shout-Out: Holy carp, where to begin?
- The Chapter 3 cover references Nirvana's 'Nevermind' album.
- Several characters based on the Gill-man show up, starting in Chapter 3.
- The Cod bosozoku gang's old boss is a fishy Immortan Joe.
- The fast-food seafood chain that threatens Ryo's restaurant is Los Pollos Hermanos: Seafood Edition, complete with an owner that's a dead-ringer for Gus (his name is Sug, for Pete's sake). When 'Sug' shoots Ela a Death Glare after she exposes his dirty dealings, the horrified princess envisions him with half of his face burned to the skull in another obvious shout-out to the character.
- The Salmon Troop flag in chapter 7 is obviously based on the Survey Corps', with fins in the place of wings.
- Sango has a Hannibal poster hung up in her office. How... disturbingly fitting.
- One of the assassins who attempted to kill Era portrays herself as an Assassin class Servant.
- The guys who attack Sango during her first trip to the surface are almost traced from screenshots of Sherlock and John Watson from Sherlock.
- Himada ends up in the memetic Yamcha death pose after the aforementioned thugs beat him up.
- The bear that attacks the salmon migration is holding a pot of hunny.
- Ryo's grandma and the poofy-haired fisherman strike Jojo poses when they square off over whether oysters or clams are better (Josuke's◊ and Giorno's respectively).
- Shellza the scallop is almost a dead ringer for Shellder from Pokémon, minus the cartoony tongue.
- When Alisa laments that she's gained weight and that she wishes she had a perk that prevented that, a video game icon resembling Vault Boy from the Fallout series is shown.
- After Madame Bonita is fished, Ela recites "Fish are friends, not food!" to herself.
- The cover of Chapter 21 shows Ela lounging on the Iron Throne from Game of Thrones, a la Cersi Lannister.
- One of the assassins — a former member of the Gillman squad — planning to take out Ela is a near-dead-ringer for Cagnazzo.
- Shark the Ripper is a combination of Hannibal Lecter and Dio Brando, wearing the former's iconic mask and straitjacket and quoting Dio's 'Do you remember how many loaves of bread you've eaten?' line (the line is parodied when it turns out he does remember the exact number of fish he's eaten).
- In Chapter 28, the Sea King reveals that if his child was a boy he would've named his son Guts, which Marin actually named her son.
- The cover of Chapter 30 is a parody of The Shape of Water, showing Ela embracing Gill-chan in the same pose as on movie's cover. The chapter itself has a parody of Full Metal Jacket, with a drill sergeant eel named Gunnery Sergeant Hamoman in reference to Gunnery Sergeant Hartman.
- Ela turns down her final meal with a "No, I don't think I will."
- The fish doctor in chapter 40 is pretty much an aquatic Black Jack.
- Shoo Out the Clowns: Sango and the human characters are largely absent for the final chapters, which while not entirely without humor are far more serious
- Shrine to the Fallen: Crosses over with Stalker Shrine. Ela keeps a portrait of everybody she's eaten. By Chapter 34, there are enough to cover an entire third of the page.
- Slasher Smile: It may just be the angle, but Ela's got a demented little smile as she's eating Fluke at the end of Chapter 21. Even if it is just the angle, it's the first time she's outright smiled when eating seafood.
- Slowly Slipping Into Evil: It becomes apparent how low Ela has fallen when she sports a chilling smile while eating Fluke in Chapter 21, and in Chapter 34 it's revealed that she owns a collection of seafood cookbooks to read and a large box of fish sausages to snack on. Even as early as Chapter 18, she happily nods in agreement when recalling Cody's last words assessing her as being the worst among them.
- Small Role, Big Impact: The unnamed, poofy-haired fisherman dining alongside Ela when she goes to mourn Benito. She would have left after paying her respects and that would have been the end of it, but then the fisherman half-jokingly remarks that Benito wouldn't be able to get to heaven if he was just thrown out. Through a combination of fear that he's right and morbid curiosity, Ela takes a bite and the rest is history.
- The Social Darwinist: When Ela scolds Tuna for trying to eat a squid, he scoffs that it's a "fish-eat-fish world" where the weak become prey for the strong. Immediately after telling her this, he is caught and his words stick with Ela when she eats him.
- Spell My Name With An S: Is it 'Ela' or 'Era'? This is a bit of a funny one, considering Japanese pronunciation.
- Spirit Advisor: In Chapter 23, the ghost of Madame Bonita attempts to act as one for Era, helping her kick her addiction to seafood... only to fail miserably and give up.
- Star-Crossed Lovers:
- Ela is revealed to have been in love with Tuna, but never told him how she felt before he was hooked. While eating him she consoles herself that at least they can now be together forever, and she mourns him the most of all her fallen friends.
- Fukko and Seigo, the former being a seabass heiress and the latter her servant and childhood friend. When Fukko is pressured into an arranged marriage by her father, Seigo ends up being hooked before he can confess his feelings for her and Fukko is Driven to Suicide as a result.
- Chapters 24, 27, and 28 reveal that the Sea King, Ela's father, was in love with Marin, Ryo's former art teacher, but they ultimately broke up due to his laziness and her violent temper. They'd even discussed having children together, and despite breaking up named their respective kids after each others' suggestions.
- Old Man Veteran Herring had a sweetheart who was displaced when the Great Sea War broke out and he joined the army. He spent years searching for her, but when they were finally reunited she sacrificed herself to take a bullet meant for him. The Herring dedicated the rest of his life futilely trying to restore the kelp forest her family had owned, which had been razed by Gill-chan's military unit. After he's fished, Ela requests Ryo wrap his flesh in seaweed as a sendoff, and he's reunited with his sweetheart in the afterlife.
- Strong Family Resemblance: Invoked and subverted as part of the Bait-and-Switch regarding Ela's birth mother. In Chapter 28, it's made blatantly obvious that Ela strongly resembles Marin, Ryo's ex-high school teacher and the Sea King's ex-girlfriend from twenty years prior; with them both being beautiful black-haired women with similar features, even having the same ecstatic expression when eating sea-food. It's ultimately subverted, as Ela's birth mother is revealed to be her stepmother's twin sister.
- Supporting Protagonist: Ela has gotten less and less exposure as more side characters are introduced: there are numerous chapters that focus on the various fish that will inevitably end up on her plate, with Ela only showing up at the end to eat the poor pelagic. Nonetheless, it's her actions that drive a lot of said characters interactions, directly or indirectly. Sango, for example, would never have met Himada if she hadn't followed Ela onto land, and Uotomo would have gone out of business if Ela hadn't exposed Sug's misdeeds.
- Time Skip: The final chapters take place one year after Era is crowned the new sovereign of the mermaid kingdom, and some unspecified time after Sango's wedding.
- Together in Death:
- Chapter 16 involves a Star-Crossed Lovers plot involving a noble heiress seabass named Fukko and her servant Seigo. Fukko is placed into an arranged marriage by her impoverished father, but Princess Ela advises Seigo to pursue his feelings for her... which results in Seigo getting fished. Fukko subsequently allows herself to be caught, and Ela eats them both, with them being reunited and getting married in the afterlife (or rather, Ela's stomach).
- In the finale, when Ela allows the Leviathan to eat her she has a vision of all the friends she herself has eaten welcoming her into the afterlife... which is later subverted as Ela not only survives but eats her way out of the Leviathan.
- Trademark Favorite Food: Ela's is, to her mortification, seafood. She knows what she's eating, but it's just so good she can't stop...
- Trivial Tragedy: One chapter features a sea monster who had crossed the Despair Event Horizon after participating in a war. When Ela counsels him, he seems to be wracked with guilt over apparently eating his Drill Sergeant Nasty when the battle situation was going south, while the other fishes react with horror. When Ela asks him how the sergeant tastes, it is enough to snap him out of his depressive state and laughs at her, because he didn't actually eat the sergeant, but merely scribbled on his face using marker.
- Tyrant Takes the Helm: Towards the end of the manga, the former princess Ela is crowned the queen of the undersea kingdom and turns it into a police state with a certain resemblance to North Korea. Even her own father isn't safe from her iron fist, as she has him arrested for stealing from the royal treasury to fuel his gatcha game addiction.
- Wham Episode:
- Chapter 24: When Ryo brings up Ela's name, his former teacher Marin — who had nicknamed Ela "Kitty Cat" due to her love of fish — is shocked, realizing she recognizes the name. Having just been showing Ryo a photograph of herself and the man she'd fallen in love with when she was younger, she apprehensively looks down at the photo — revealing the man is none other than Ela's father the sea king in human form!
- Chapter 36 out-whams them all with Himada finding out that Sango is a mermaid, proposing to her, and her accepting!
- Chapter 38 delivers a heavy hitter by giving a backstory and name to the dopey-looking fish that has more or less been serving as the author's avatar along with revealing the circumstances behind Benito's death.
- Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Merfolk have a species-wide fear of cats: Ela jumped away from one so frantically she smacked her head and gave herself amnesia, and later Sango runs in terror from one after it licks her on the ankle.
