Basic Trope: A (usually female) monster uses its sexual attractiveness to lure in victims to eat.
- Straight:
- Alice is a very attractive succubus. She uses her sexual beauty to get Bob alone and eats him alive.
- Alice is a member of a shapeshifting species who assume the form of attractive members of other species in order to lure in members of the opposite sex as prey. Same thing happens to Bob.
- Alice is in fact a Human Alien whose females eat their mates after sex, analogous to some spider species. She seduces Bob, has sex with him first, then eats him.
- Exaggerated: Alice does this with entire groups of men, all the time.
- Downplayed:
- Alice drains away Bob's life energy instead of physically eating him in the most literal sense.
- Alice isn't a non-human monster, but rather a human girl who just happens to be a cannibalistic serial killer of her male lovers.
- Justified:
- Alice is a demon. It's what she does.
- If she's a shapeshifter, it's an evolutionary adaption. Shapeshifting for them is easier than bringing down prey with speed, strength etc. (Maybe human males just happen to be Alice's favourite prey).
- In the sexual cannibalism sense, perhaps another evolutionary throwback — Alice's species eats their males to ensure the offspring develop when food is scarce or similar. Alice is the only fertile woman left on her planet, and since Earth is the only known world where the Precursors visited, she needs a human male to mate with to carry on her species. Either the unfortunate consequences are necessary, or she simply doesn't see anything wrong with eating her partners, not realizing Earthlings don't do that.
- Inverted:
- Alice decides to target Caroline instead.
- Alice is a normal human woman who seduces, then kills and eats Bob, a male demon.
- Gender Inverted:
- Bob is a Hot as Hell devil who uses his good looks and charisma to seduce and eat Alice.
- Bob is an incubus who is irresistible to other men, who he eats after seducing them.
- Alice is a succubus who eats other women.
- Subverted: Alice starts to eat Bob, but then notices the chocolates he brought and goes for those instead.
- Double Subverted: ...Well, she goes for those first, at any rate. She still eats him.
- Parodied:
- Alice is an obviously inhuman predator who can't keep her desire to feast on Bob's flesh a secret. He doesn't seem to notice or care.
- Alice is actually very unattractive to the average person, but is able to seduce Bob anyway, because Bob's ideas of beauty do not overlap with the average person's. If Alice has shapeshifting, it can be that she wants to eat Bob, but his conceptions of beauty/sexiness are so disgusting to her, that she refuses to shapeshift and thus doesn't get her meal.
- Alice beauties herself up, taking the form of a promiscuous human woman to seduce and lure in Bob... for a completely platonic reason, such as wanting a companion to play her favorite board game.
- Zig Zagged:
- Only when Alice is feeling particularly ruthless or hungry does she search for victims to eat, other times she takes mercy on them and lets them go after having "some fun" with them.
- Alice primarily targets corrupt and evil men and leaves good men alone.
- Averted: Alice tries to seduce Bob and eat him, but Alice isn't Bob's type so she fails.
- Enforced: "We need a horrific twist for the beautiful and sweer Alice that would shock readers. Oh! I got it! Why don't we have her eat Bob after they have sex?"
- Lampshaded: "You'd better watch out for that chick Alice! She's a real maneater!"
- Invoked: Alice is a man-eating monster, and also very attractive. She decides it's much less risky than other hunting methods, and so goes with this trope.
- Exploited: Though getting her services is a risky venture, Evulz hires Alice to take out specific people he wants dead, via a one-person Honey Trap.
- Defied: Sure they Can't Have Sex, Ever, but Alice would sooner pull a High-Heel–Face Turn and be a Celibate Hero than eat Bob.
- Discussed: If this was a Horror movie, a pretty but uncanny girl like Alice would turn out to be some sort of a literal maneater and eat the guy she just seduced for shock value.
- Conversed: ???
- Played For Drama:
- Alice genuinely falls in love with Bob for real, but has great difficulty with resisting her predatory instincts to eat him.
- Bob isn't a lustful womanizer looking for quick sex; he's just some lonely and unfortunate chump looking for true love. He meets and falls for Alice... who isn't just a hungry monster in disguise, but also a sadistically sociopathic demoness who plays with her food by toying with Bob's emotions for a prolonged period of time, eventually planning to gleefully devour him just for fun.
- Played For Laughs:
- Alice keeps trying to murder and devour Bob during their "date", however various comical interruptions keep delaying her until she gets too frustrated, breaks up with him, and then leaves him alive.
- Alice has some Bizarre Alien Biology (or Bob has some secret superpower) such that, while eating Bob during sex is necessary, killing him is not. The story could focus on the off-screen resolution of how come there's a Bob outside in the morning with no clothes on, or Alice awkwardly trying to explain to his understandably-panicked friends that she really didn't hurt him.
- Implied: Alice seduces Bob even though he's not very attractive. What actually happens is left ambiguous, but Bob's body is not found, and Alice called Bob "delicious" when flirting with him..
Back to Literal Maneater