Waking Dead

The second show of the new anime season to hit my desktop was Vampire Knight. When I was putting together the list of shows I was going to check out in April, this was probably at the bottom of the list. I normally don’t like shoujo anime – not being a girl and all – but certain shows over the years have won me over (EscaFlowne and Chobits spring to mind). Vampire Knight might just be another one of them.

One minor warning: as you can probably tell from the screencap, there’s plenty of hot bishi action in this show. It’s about on par with most shoujo stuff out there, but is thankfully a million miles away from something like Wallflower. Still, if the prospect of the boys being prettier than the girls puts you off, you’re unlikely to enjoy this.

Anyway, onto the show itself. First off, the story is actually quite interesting. The idea revolves around an academy somewhere in some unknown country that has a Day Class and a Night Class. Predictably, the Day Class are all human and the Night Class are all vampires, and two Day Class students have been chosen as prefects or “Guardians” in order to maintain the secret and keep the two apart.

One of these students is a girl called Yuki. She believes that vampires are generally good-natured, and longs for peace between the two races. The other is her adopted brother, Zero. Zero’s parents were killed by vampires, and he’s understandably bitter about it. The only reason he took the job of Guardian is so that he can observe the vampires and find the best way to wipe them out.

The last major character is the vampire Kaname, head of the Night Class dorm. He saved Yuki from another vampire when she was a child and brought her to the academy. Obviously there’s a closeness between these two, but there are subtle hints that despite Kaname’s pacifist outlook, he can’t quite control the beast inside, particularly when it comes to Yuki.

The first episode splits about 70/30 between drama and comedy, which is a good number for me (Firefly is my benchmark). As with most anime comedy, there’s lots of stretched faces, chibi interludes, and plenty of random text flying around. But for some reason it works, even though the drama is actually pretty dark. And I should really mention the ED song, which is awesome. The music in general is actually all pretty good, with plenty of church bells and pipe organs to add to the mood.

I’ll be keeping up with this for at least another few episodes.