天下制覇

Come on in, they’ll give you a good time.

Impressions:

I probably found a bunch of school girls glomping pretty boy vampires far more amusing than I should have, but I’ve read Ann Rice… I know how pretty vampires can be. Who wouldn’t want to glomp a vampire? Yuki Cross (Horie Yui) took on the role of Ouran’s Haruhi at the start, running interference for the vampires and acting as the put upon member of the group. She even has a blonde guy ranting about being her father. So what if he actually is her father?

The show was a lot less serious than I had expected things to be, especially for the first half. It was just a big joke that all the vampires were pretty boys. I mean, hell, take away the initial "Sad Horie Yui in Snow Getting Attacked By Vampires" and it could have just been a knock-off Ouran. Hell, replace Ouran’s casts with vampires give Haruhi some sugar and the two really wouldn’t be that different. It did handle the shift pretty well. Yuki and Zero basically guard the border at night between the school girls trying to sneak in to peak on the vampires and prevent the vampires from just wandering out to eat people.

While I usually love Horie Yui, I’m not sure she was the best choice for this role. It’s clear they wanted to make Yuki pretty spunky, energetic and relatively hapless, but… she just feels off I guess. A little too girlish, especially given all the pretty boy vampires. When she was attacked by the pair of vampires, she just sounded completely wrong. I suppose she felt alright for the more comedic parts, but I’m not sure I was really expecting this to be mostly comedy though, so I sort of adjusted my expectations as things went along. The juxtaposition of the two sides of the show in general was what felt clumsy and a bit awkward. Even when the more serious lines were being delivered, there was usually some marshmallow faced person soon to follow or comic violence.

No complaints about the art and animation. Both were done well, though nothing to write home about. The boy band pop OP I could do without, but the ED was pretty nice. It was intriguing at the very least, and barring some strange divergence of fates, I’ll probably be sticking with this one for Tuesdays. You didn’t think I’d abandon Horie Yui so easily after toughing it out for all of Labyrinth, did you?

Vampire Knight OP