I don’t think I’ve ever read a single vampire yaoi I liked and this one makes me even less hopeful that I’ll be finding one anytime soon. It’s…bad. Remember that weird fanfiction you wrote in high school that you and your friends thought was hilarious but you find it as an adult and cringe so hard your skin crawls and think “oh my God this needs to be burned, it should never see the light of day?” (Er, not that I’m speaking from personal experience or anything…) Well, that’s this manga….Except your high school fanfiction could have been better than this.
Sakuya is a vampire S&M dom who lives in a European castle turned love hotel with his butler Balaur. He’s despondent because he no longer enjoys the taste of blood after his last encounter with a “dhampir” (a half human and half vampire who hunts vampires) named Atsumi, who had sex with Sakuya and then fed him his own blood which made it so that only Atsumi’s blood tastes good to Sakuya. Atsumi then reappears after a while to the despairing Sakuya, but now he’s a…salaryman who sells insurance. They try to kill each other on and off seemingly for fun, but are also secretly in love…or something.
Plot-wise it was very, very messy and disorganized and relies on explanatory text to tell you what was going on. The comedy mostly fell flat for me, though I suppose if you were like 15 or something it might be funny. Also, Sakuya was a fucking S&M vampire who gets paid to whip people and we didn’t see him in a single sex scene doing this. Why fucking bother?
She talks about how she wanted to draw gothic lolita fashion really badly in this manga and even got community feedback on it so maybe that was the sole purpose behind some of her choices but like – sister, when you make a BL with an S&M vampire in it who works in a love hotel, the damn sex scene is already written for you, all you have to do is freaking draw it. Her art isn’t like, terrible either…it’s inconsistent but passable. The idea of the sex scenes are hotter than they actually end up being, since they’re very short and never really concluded. They have a sort of seke control dynamic, both seeking to overpower each other, which is fun.
The mangaka said she was “allowed to do whatever she wanted” and boy, does it ever show. Plot-wise it’s completely self-indulgent and reads more like a doujin that she made up as she went along, and is wildly inconsistent in just about every way it could be. It’s like ideas that are thrown into a pot and randomly spooned out onto the pages with a sieve. She wanted to do something with a vampire wearing gothic lolita…but with S&M!…but also with…a vampire-slaying salaryman?…so a comedy…at a love hotel!…oh and feet, don’t forget the feet.
Like…obviously no one said no to this, and artists are free to art, but the editor could have stepped in and help the whole thing be more readable and clearly laid out. I’d ask why DMP even licensed this in the first place too but then I’d remember they truly had no standards back around this time.
I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again, The Incredible Kintaro is how you do a manga like this, or in other words – take the outrageousness to the nth degree. I mean, organizational issues aside, the concept wasn’t that funny or that smutty because it isn’t taken far enough in those directions, and just ends up being bad. Even for people who are very into the vampire thing, there’s better out there, unless I guess you’re very into this specific sort of carefree salaryman vampire hunter x tsundere vampire control sex seke dynamic and plot be damned, in which case I could understand how your options would be very limited. It’s curious that this is one of June’s rarer titles – I’ll chalk that up to people whose sexual awakening was Twilight reading it back in the day and now have disposable income.
TL;DR: This is like someone’s cringey highschool vampire fanfiction turned into a manga. It’s some kind of nonsensical, unfunny vampire BL S&M comedy attempt that is basically just a completely self-indulgent doujin on the part of the mangaka. The glimpses of good smutty parts or fun ideas have no followthrough and are drowned by illogicality, overly wordy panels, and absolutely dogshit plot organization.