You would think by the title that this would be your average vampire yaoi, but you’d be wrong. It’s your…below-average 10-volume isekai trap yaoi featuring vampiric half-dragons (how many of those have you read?) that I originally dropped around volume 3 because it was so bad that I couldnt see myself getting through the whole thing. But after exiting the mudpit I decided to take a deep breath, rinse myself off, and promptly and regretfully get back in. Why in the name of red hot scaly dragon dick did I pick it back up? I’m still asking myself that question and I’m not sure actually…maybe I’m just a masochist, or I thought it would get better (spoiler: it does not get better). But really, it’s probably because it’s one of the things I’ve had in my collection for ages; it was one of my first manhwa. Those bright red spines have stared out at me for years…I had to do it justice by at least finishing it. A totally unnecessary sacrifice? Absolutely. Was it worth it? Not at all.
Sooho is a broke and struggling high school boy who gets isekai’d into a fantasy world by some kind of vampiric creature named Kiahn, who thinks Sooho is a girl. Kiahn is a homophobe so good thing Sooho doesn’t turn out to be a man, huehuehue. Kiahn never describes himself as a vampire, but they don’t really have a name for whatever he is – he lives on an exotic tropical island, is apparently part-dragon, and is a king of some sort, but for some reason that is never explained he needs to bite humans to drink their blood. Some blood tastes better than others and Sooho has ‘sweet blood,’ but the taste of his blood will change for better or worse if he falls in love with Kiahn. But no one in this world wants that to happen because Kiahn is some kind of royalty and they need him to breed to carry on his lineage and not be gay with a trap kid, but that is some wishful thinking on their part.
There are other characters in here, of course, but I did not care one bit about any of them. Their backstories and plots were all incredibly confusing and they mostly looked really similar so I could not tell them apart very well. The one who has the most bearing on the main story is a disgraced prince named Isaac, who has a love affair with Sooho and tries to steal him away. There was also a royal named Sharka and his servant Nick, two names which do not seem like they really go together at all. There is one earth character named Kyungmin, who is sort of paired with Sooho at the beginning and then gets paired with…Kiahn’s dragon servant pretending to be Sooho who comes to earth?…but his function is mainly as an extra hot guy to make more pairings with.
Some obvious effort was made in weaving Kiahn’s nameless world together but honestly it was all way too self-indulgent on the part of the author and added a whole lot of needless complexity in the form of too many characters who looked too much alike, a crapton of explanatory text everywhere, and plot points like territorial wars and convoluted political squabbles. It’s ambitious and tries to fit in a lot of stuff in 10 volumes – action! Romance! Drama! Isekai! Comedy! War! Gay crotch grinding! Blood-sucking shapeshifting dragons! – all while trying to do high-fantasy world-building. Perhaps because it tries to cram so much in, it lacks focus and does not present any of these things particularly well (except the gay crotch grinding, it really nailed that). I guess if anything, a sunny tropical world is a unique place for a vampire manga, but the blood drinking aspect starts to feel out of place in the grand scheme of things and more just like a convenient excuse to have the MCs together.
As a couple, Kiahn and Sooho were incredibly annoying together. They both treated each other like shit for the entire story and their relationship was largely nonconsensual. I’ve mentioned before how much I hate the “powerful rich seme and commoner uke” trope – and not only was Sooho way out of Kiahn’s league, Sooho shamelessly cheated on him and spent most of the story trying to escape from him. Sooho was so shitty that in the end I actually felt bad for Kiahn for having this little fuckwad tied around his finger so much. Their actions rarely matched their thoughts or emotions and it was frustrating and tiresome to watch the soap opera of them separating, reuniting, fucking, fighting, separating again, reuniting again, fucking again, fighting again. They essentially had a master/slave relationship and had nothing in common, and it was nearly impossible to feel good about them as a couple.
Sweet Blood is rated rated 13+, but there technically is on-screen sex as you can see – just no peen. More common though is characters draped around each other in bed or just rubbing their bodies together, and especially with the plentiful bed scenes it’s sort of hard to tell if they’re cuddling, sleeping, having sex, or doing the blood-drinking thing – maybe all four at once, idk. A lot of stuff in here is nonconsensual including a few instances of sexual contact where a character is restrained with chains or rope, and there is a huge power dynamic discrepancy in nearly every relationship. It has a sort of sleazy feel, and I felt icky reading it – it wasn’t wholesome, it wasn’t fun, and and it wasn’t really sexy to me. It was also hard to skim because there was a lot of dialogue and complex fantasy plot, so once I committed to strapping myself in there was no getting off this ride.
There is SO much text in this series – like, way too much. It ‘tells’ with explanatory text rather than ‘shows’ with the art, and I felt like I was reading illustrated novel instead of a manhwa half the time. It doesn’t help that the characters hardly have any facial expressions or life to them, they’re more like pretty wooden puppets or dolls being posed in a play. I’m not sure if this way of storytelling with ‘pretty but static characters’ is more of a manhwa thing because I felt the exact same way about Bride of the Water God, but I haven’t read enough manhwa to really know yet.
Save for the hot saucy covers, I disliked the art in this series. The characters were definitely pretty, but they were a little too pretty for men and too feminine for my tastes. They were all skinny and lanky as well there was a lot of yaoi hands – it was sort of surprising this series was done in the 2010s. Stylistically this type of art is probably someone’s thing, but it wasn’t mine.
Another thing I disliked about the art was the use of what looked like processed digital photos or collages for a lot of the backgrounds. This might have been done for practical reasons, like maybe because Kim didn’t have any assistants, but it was still cheap and ugly and overused. Towards the end she used them for things even like simple doors or windows which felt pretty lazy.
Sweet Blood is from Netcomics, who was traditionally the main licensor of manhwa in English. They have a range of mostly shojo and BL but other random stuff too, with quality that varies enormously…like the biggest quality gap I have ever seen in a publisher ever, it’s really a lottery what you’re going to get with them. Let Dai and Totally Captivated are probably their most well-known BL series but I’ve heard good things about Prince Bari and His House, and I really loved Dining Bar Akira even though that’s not a manhwa. On the other hand they have some series that spent about a decade in the $1 clearance section in Rightstuf (RIP) such as this awful ecchi series I read by them called Let’s Be Perverts. I wonder if maybe they don’t have the budget to take advantage of the current webtoon craze because Lezhin, Seven Seas, and Tokyopop seem to have stolen the whole pie in what seemed like should have been an easy slice for them.
Anyway, here is probably the most useful comment I can give regarding this manhwa – read something else. Unless you really, really really love this art style or sleazy fantasy trash stories, or can’t get your rocks off without blood-sucking, there are just so many better series out there that aren’t a long convoluted mess like this one. If it does look like your thing though, you’ll be thrilled to know that she apparently wrote some side stories that follow the main story that perhaps contain something more explicit than crotch-grinding.
TL;DR: This is like a…high-fantasy BL isekai manhwa about vampiric half-dragons. I originally dropped it because almost every male character looks like a woman which isn’t my thing, but I decided to finish it because it had been in my collection for so long. The art has a few highlights but it’s overall surprisingly bad for being done in the 2010s unless you really like feminine men – it’s also too long, has too many characters, ugly processed photos for backgrounds, and SO much text that it feels like it should have been an illustrated light novel instead of a manhwa. There isn’t a single relationship in here either that you want to root for either, all of them have a master-slave dynamic and are rife with shameless lies and cheating, non-con, or some other drama. All of this was compounded by a needlessly confusing web of complex fantasy world-building involving territory wars and political squabbles that took itself way too seriously for what sells itself as a vampire BL, a label I guess it really wanted to transcend. I want to applaud the effort because it’s no small thing to draw a 10-volume comic and some clear thought and effort was put into details in both the art and story, but in doing so it loses the big picture and becomes a muddled, sleazy mess very quickly.