Call of the Night

Yofukashi no Uta is one of the most hyped anime of this season. It’s not weird to have this kind of show where a guy with no personality finds a girl literally falling from the sky and then taking him into making his life more interesting, you know, the standard premise of romance anime, but this time the MC will fall in love with the girl to turn him into a vampire.

Nazuna is also one of the most obnoxious girls I have seen in recent times, don’t be fooled by how she appears as being the mature one at the beginning trying to teach the night life to Kou, she actually is childish and doesn’t take anything seriously, Kou is more mature than her. Her sex jokes aren’t funny and it is even less funny when she blushes for talking about love, how come a person that can make sex jokes blushes with the most minimal mention of love? That is beyond me, but you will find that in this girl. There is also her clearly manipulative side, no I don’t care about how old they are and what kind of relationship they will have, I’m talking about actual manipulative behaviors like offering a kiss for Kou if he goes and messages someone because she is too lazy to do it when that is literally her work and Kou has never done that in his life.

Then we of course have to add another girl, this time is Akira, she is actually decent because she is a decent human being aside from the part that she goes to sleep at like 6 PM. When she appears, she wants Kou to go back to school, you know, since that is what normal people do, but Nazuna even goes out of the room as if she starts to get jealous when Akira asked Kou to go back to school, after Kou goes and find her she kisses him, or rather, she was taking the blood in his mouth but it's basically the same thing since a kiss is when people connect their lips and Kou literally took it as one. Now, don’t think I’m saying something bad of Akira, I actually like her, she seems nice, but she barely appears, really.

The other vampires just appeared to add more characters and to make it seem like the stakes were raised, but actually, there’s no raising of stakes, I don’t even think I saw Kou worried at all that he only has 1 year more to turn into a vampire after the episode they said that, he had to be reminded of such thing, that part is just making you think that something important happened when in reality it didn’t, because after all they keep doing the very same thing as they were doing before which is nothing in general.

At the end of the season, you have something actually happening when the detective Anko appears and it actually shows the bad side of turning into a vampire, showing the reality to Kou that not everything related to vampires is fun and cool, it actually tries to act like a conflict which it failed to do when it tried to do it previously.

And you surely are thinking by now “this guy has barely talked about Kou” or something similar, well, that’s because Kou is really a lifeless character, he was excruciating to watch and even worse talking about because he basically amounts to nothing, he seems like those self-insert characters that have a nonexistent personality so you can put yourself in him. He stopped going to school because he wanted to stop being a good student and because people liked him, since he doesn’t understand emotions like love, he preferred to not go to school anymore. After meeting Nazuna and getting his blood sucked, he didn’t get scared as any normal human being would do, he instead just assumed she was a vampire, he was concerned that he turned into a vampire, but after being told that he wasn’t he returns to normal. Then he decides that he wants to turn into a vampire because… uh… who knows? Even when questioned in the series about that, he didn’t know how to answer.

Basically, when you have someone with no personality and an obnoxious character and put them to do random things at night you have something uninteresting because the characters are boring and they lack chemistry between each other. Look, when I’m watching a slice of life I know that I want characters which I can see and feel as people that would actually be together, after all the appeal of those series is the characters, as the story would be nonexistent or taking the backseat most of the time, however, watching these two is almost like watching Ishida and Orihime in the Soul Society arc, there was no chemistry between them because they were so opposite in personality that it hurt to see them even try to talk to each, not arguing the “opposites attract” makes it less painful to watch the most minimal of their interactions, and the same happens in this series between Kou and Nazuna.

The good thing is that the backgrounds are amazing, they aren’t the unsightly blurry backgrounds that you see a lot of the time in anime, you get to watch the city and sky in a variety of spectacular colors. The direction style really plays a nice role in it, specially because Itamura is not a lazy bum and he at least tries to do something more unique even if he is at best just a discount Shinbou, and the OSTs are honestly really good, but that won’t save the whole series, people mention that the atmosphere or the vibe of the show to be relaxing, but it isn’t, a series with an actual relaxing atmosphere is something like Yuru Camp, not this.

All in all, I really don’t get what is the appeal of Yofukashi no Uta or what it tried to do, it probably is just too early in the adaptation since the manga has like 100 chapters more to adapt than what was seen in the anime.

“Come on, people, get some proper sleep.” – Akira Asai. This goes for me too. Thank you for reading.