Sacrificial Princess and the King of Beasts is a unique reversal on the Beauty and the Beast myth–rather than a man cursed to be a beast, the King of Beasts is a Beast whose kryptonite is becoming human. In his kingdom of furries anthropomorphic animals, this tusked lion, who has a magnificent taste in stiff-collared cloaks worthy of The Count or The Sorcerer Supreme, desires his dinner. Not that The King craves his meal for its food value; no, he has fallen in love with the titular sacrificial princess Sariphi, who, in turn, is mesmerized by a king of beasts that proves to be less maneater than ladykiller, and with a vulnerability peculiar to these talking animals–periodically, the king becomes a scrawny human.

The background to the king’s indeterminacy of being (is he a sabretooth wounded by a toxic humanity, or a human embedded in a nightmarish animality?) is his enlightened oligarchical rule over a kingdom comprised of an animal majority resentful and contemptuous of a human minority, while neighboring human kingdoms mirror this prejudice, but with an inverted power dynamic. In that the King’s loathing of his doubled being holds the mirror to his prejudiced kingdom, Mangaka Yu Tomofuji is possibly quoting the renaissance idea of the body politic. Just as lion and human are at war in him, so the animals and the humans are at each other’s throats in the kingdom, and in the greater world.

While the burden of rule is great, and the King is conscientious of his responsibility to his subjects, the King’s loyalties are equally divided between animal and human, for the princesses sent to him as entrees are secretly released. When Sariphi is released, she clings to the King of Beasts, gives him a pet name—Leonhard—and, in other ways, cuddles up to her carnivorous liege, so that their wedding is soon announced, outraging the bigoted forefront of the animal kingdom.

In addition to Beauty and the Beast, I also thought of Howl’s Moving Castle more than once while reading Sactificial Princess, especially due to the shapeshifting at its core. Again, the rules and the roles of the shape changing are altered in Sacrificial Princess, with the Prince being the center of the unwilled alteration.

While I’m sure Sacrificial Princess and the King of Beasts isn’t the first furry shojo romance, it’s not only an agreeable manga but a deceptively light tale that finds immense replay value in the fairy tale original not only by hewing close to the original in tone, but by altering the rules of the game, and then having the courage to stick to those rules.

Sacrificial Princess

Yen Press sent the review copy.