(I first wrote this on MAL)

Vlad Love, a show full of simps, made for simps and brought into life by a genius team full of simps. This is, Mamoru Oshii shitposting on modern anime culture.

With constant spreading of otaku culture, we are now at a stage where consuming anime is not leered by surrounding, something which we can not imagine in late 90's or early 2000's. With the increment in audience demand, anime has delved into more and more varieties. There’s a demand of everything seeing animated by a Japanese studio. We are ready to evaluate ANYTHING drawn by them.
Despite however, how has this affected the creative talents? With keeping in mind the type of audience you are making anime for, what should be the proper attitude?
How many shows truly feels like an inspired product, where you can find love and caress poured into every episodes? I'm talking about the rewarding factor. A show made with your 100% and a show made with 50% of your intellect somehow ended up having same level of evaluation. Because you know, "this is just an anime", "anime is trash so am I",
This is how present day otaku looks like. A medium full of simp consumers who are ready to take anything that is, hand-drawn and animated by a Japanese studio.

"Vlad Love" is a show full of simp characters, just like viewers. They simp for a vampire beauty called Mai Vlad Transylvania (400 years old, worry not) who does nothing but sucks your blood. Sounds familiar right? She truly gives you nothing but the sense of watching her physical beauty unfolded before you. In return she'll suck your blood, and she does need a lot of blood. Not even just that, the types of blood she imbibes makes differences in her personality ; if she drinks a violent person's blood she gets violent, she'll get stinky if she drinks a stinky degenerate's blood (looking at you, weebs).
She is loved by everybody but you are not. She stays pure because you won't like another person tickling her. She takes everything from you (takes 500k yen to dance with her) but gives nothing (you are not allowed to touch her!)
She won't be yours because she is for everybody. You can’t stay still without seeing her because you are a simp.

In simple word, Mai Vlad Transylvania (coolass long anime name) checks every waifu standard. She'll give you the best smile you can imagine, will depend on you since she can't live without drinking your blood, will listen your blabbering but somehow she won't be yours, since she's for everybody. Oshii created a perfect metaphor of waifu culture, using Mai as the centrepiece, presenting how it lets you become more and more obsessive with something which has no returns. The main heroine Bamba presents her blood as favour, gets sucked up everyday and feels grossed when Mai drinks an ugly person's blood. Bamba has only one thing to do, pleasing Mai. Same as weebs who want nothing but her waifu's smile.

Characters in Vlad Love are more or less cantered around this theme. Most interesting of them is the Cinema Club president, Watabe Maki, who makes movie/documentary/PV featuring Mai. And she does a horrible job at making, being the knowledgeable on movies but naive on making movies. She knows "Failure is the pillar of success" so she isn’t afraid if her movie gets booed by audience. She's so confident on making the perfect movie that she ends up making nothing but garbage.
Sounds familiar? Currently the least-rated anime on MAL is airing, we all are familiar with the type of confident directors like Maki.

Another character which takes my interest, is the disciplinary committee girl named Jinko. She's so obedient to rules, craves for perfection and doesn’t like it when it goes into unholy hands. She ends up taking the director position for a stage drama in school festival since everyone else was slacking off. With a cast full of inexperienced actors her project didn’t have a chance of succeeding. As it turns out, the serious stage play becomes a chaotic comedy show. Her perfect image was in stake, but plot twist, she received huge applaud because guess who was in the stage? Yeah, Mai, her charm swells over every negatives of an otherwise shit product. This leaves an impact on Jinko as her view of being obedient to rules gets challenged and she accepted the new meaning of success, leads to the hot sensei commenting "Finally she's on our team now!" (Team full of characters who don't take their job seriously)

With Mai as the waifu, Bamba as the simp viewer, Maki who's all for naught making a good movie and Jinko who understands efforts do not get acknowledged here, we got the image of how present day anime works.

Your project will be praised if it has a waifu like Mai
You shouldn’t care about quality because there are simps like Bamba who are all ready to buy your shit if it has Mai
You don't need to bother on making good product because you believe that your failure of this time will lead you to your future success
And you don't even need to put 100% of your efforts because they won't be rewarded with proper recognition.

This is the sad reality of anime, a veteran like Oshii understands it better. I call him a simp earlier, mainly because only a simp for animation can afford to make a bizarre shitposting on the medium. Unlike Bamba though, he's self-conscious of his love for this medium. Seems like producers at IG port gave him a budget to do whatever his mind wants to play with and that's how he created the gorgeous looking shitposting namely this, breaking his long hiatus from anime industry.

Talking about it's production side, this looks gorgeous. Character design is stunning (Mai and Maki have the most complimentary design to their character) , there are tons of comedic faces drawn which is a sign of creator's goodwill, background art and colour design managed to create the perfect atmosphere, from horror to comedy to casual life. Impressive and strong drawings, with countless reference to many old movies, in dialogues as well. There are two Opening, both of them are eye-catching and I liked "Winds of Transylvania".
One of the most impressive aspect of Vlad Love is the voice acting. Veteran seiyuu like Romi Park and a bunch of other popular seiyuu including Hayami Saori, Ayane Sakura, Hikasa Yoko and Miyake Kenta putting an unbelievably strong performance. Specially Sakura Ayane recently has been torturing her vocal cord with Gabi's screaming in ep65 of Attack on Titan and here Bamba takes a lot of vocal power. Everyone did a good job at showing their skills, this really is a blessing for any seiyuu fans in general.

However, this isn’t a show which can be enjoyed regardless of your mood. Not every episodes are as endearing as the others. There’s a lot of dialogues which hardly makes sense to any casual viewers like me. Not much to say about music, this is certainly not the most Impressive work of Kenji Kawai.

Vlad Love is meant for everybody, but certainly not to be enjoyed by all. Maybe after years of burning out with anime, you'll return to this show and laughed at how much it tried to tell. This is truly "Mamoru Oshii shitposting" which is better than most unfortunately uninspired anime and I'm all in for it. If not anything, you should watch this because it has beautiful sexy girls. Who doesn’t like them?