At the beginning of the manga, we're introduced to two concepts that I personally found very interesting:
- A 14 years old who looses joy in school and life and decides to walk around at night, making him discover a whole new world, experience new emotions, hobbies and meet new people that will change his life. I really liked this concept, especially with the person being so young, with him realizing that there’s still so much to learn and experience, and making him have a new perspective in life. When Kou meets Nazuna, he has this sudden realization of what he really wants to do with is life. But will this feeling change? How will him growing and changing as a person change his view in life and on what he wants to do in the future?
- The existence of vampires, underlings and how they work in a human society. I found it really interesting how, for them, sucking blood is not only a way to eat, but also a way to get pleasure. Sucking blood is both food and sex.
However, these two concepts should not coexist. A 14 year old shouldn't be involved in this act of sucking blood, knowning that it's not just food. Obviously this is fiction and it's just a story, but 14 is just too young. I feel like the plot relies a lot on Kou (and Mahiru) being very innocent, talking about him being a virgin and the fact that he's never been in love, but they still could’ve done all that with a young adult, there was no need for him to be in middle school. The school scenes could've been in college. But anyways, obviously this isn't the whole plot and there's soooo much more to the story, this isn't something that should stop you from reading this manga.
Artsyle
I'm starting with the artsyle of this manga, because it was the main reason why I started reading it, and omg it is just beautiful. Not only the artstyle itself, but the dynamic poses that we get from the characters. Nazuna, who is a very expressive character and is a lot of the times in the air, has such beautiful drawing and poses that just make you take a second and enjoy the art.
Characters
The characters and their different personalities is definitely something major in this manga. They are all very well written and each have a unique personality that makes it stand them out in their own moments. The character development was also insane. Basically all the characters grew with the story, which made even more interested in each one, always wondering how they would change with what was happening at the moment and how they would react/resolve what was going on. I really liked how kind Kou was and how much he cared about the people around him, always trying to make sure that everyone was safe and that there wouldn't need to be any killing involved.
Plot
Now the plot of this manga started of....weak. At the beginning we see Kou and Nazuna getting to know each other while they enjoy the night, but nothing major happens until around chapter 18, when we're introduced to more characters and then they start to shake the story. Something that was very well done and I really appreciated was how smooth the story was. The whole manga felt like one giant strip with now breaks in between. Like the story would change and would focus on different characters each time, but that change made sense, it didn't feel forced.
The plot twists were crazy and really made you view the whole story with a different prespective and look at the characters in a deeper way. They mostly happened when we were learning about Nazuna's background, which made everything more interesting. Her background isn't something that happened in the past and stayed in the past. All her story and how she came to be is still relevant to the present, and well as the people in her life, that she met in the past, still have an impact with the now. It just made everything so much more interesting.
The manga focuses a lot on love (aside from the fact that, for a human to become a vampire, they have to fall in love with one) and what it means to love someone, compared to just liking or compared to the love of a friend. I loved that they touched on this topic, considering that vampires only “job” is to make people fall in love with them to make underlings, so it was never important for them to know or experience what love is, only humans had to do that. But when some characters start to question what love is, their whole perspective on vampires and humans change. There are consequences to humans falling in love with vampires, but then we find out that there are also consequences to vampires falling in love with humans. But if they’ve never been in love, how do they know if they’ve fallen in love with a human? Has that ever even happened? When you’ve never experienced a certain emotion, and you don’t know how someone is supposed to feel, you try to figure it out yourself and you make your own definition of the emotion which, in some cases and also shown in this manga, can go to extremes. There’s a lot of little backstories that we are told that only later we find out the real meaning of them, with some of them having to do with love.
Kou and Nazuna's relationship
Last but not least, the main characters' relationship. This is a big part of the story, since everything starts with Kou wanting to be a vampire but, to do that, he has to fall in love with Nazuna, and I love how much it evolved and changed. Nazuna is someone very sassy that likes to tell dirty jokes and is always teasing Kou, while Kou is someone more chill, that just wants to enjoy the night and try to be happier. This contrast in their personalities goes so well, with them getting closer every day and starting to worry about one another. Their little moments of romance is something that I really enjoyed, cause we got to see them go from a "business" relationship to almost an actuall relationship with feelings.
Anyways, even though this manga has its negative side, it's also such a beautiful story about finding yourself, learning to love and learning what to do with that love. Truly an amazing story to read.