Thoughts on "Vampire Knight" and "Vampire Knight Guilty"

Better than when I last watched it but still prefer the manga with the far superior quality of art.

Most of the blood in the anime looked even more fake than the stuff in Bleach.

Vampire Knight is a "love or hate" series. It can be easily criticized for just about every  shoujo cliche which exists and other cliches/classic traits which vampires possess. But I shoved all of that aside and just enjoyed it.

Having just finished Kimi ni Todoke, it was a relief to see a much darker series. True to its genre definitions, there is barely any fighting. Zero was transformed into the most powerful Vampire Hunter of all time and therefore barely needs to do anything to kill the evil weevil, Rido Kuran. A complete lack of actual action (hand to hand combat as opposed to characters looking at each other with emotionally-charged anime eyes) makes the pace of the story move faster but rather unexciting which is then filled with unsurprisingly truths such as X will kill Y or K was in fact Z's long lost cousin or X was the person whom Z's mother had an affair with and T is the bastard child. And so on.

The first 26 episodes are an inconsistent blend of Van Helsing and Enid Blyton adventurers. The villain is flavoured in similar way to Harry Potter's arch-nemesis, Lord Voldemort though Rido Kuran is defeated a lot more easily and Harry Potter's role is distributed between two equally precocious t(w)eens who possess more interesting capabilities.

If you enjoy your anime/manga with a dash of incest, Pedobears, ALL OF THIS, as well as very good art and morally dubious bishounen, then Vampire Knight will be an exciting ride.

I could slag off the inconsistency of plot or the animation, the tiresome cliches etc etc. But that would make this review tiresome.

So I've decided to commend Vampire Knight. As a long-running shoujo work which achieves a ridonkulous amount of fanservice in every chapter and with a rather winded plot, the characters still hold it together. Not all of them. But they each evoke some feeling from me. Moreover, it seems that Hino Matsuri also made a few stabs at meta-narrative style humour and shared a few jokes about shoujo manga with the readers, much like Gintama. The antics of "Idol"-senpai and "Wild"-senpai had me in stitches quite often. And thank goodness Kaien Cross is there to defuse the heavy tension which Kaname represents. I came to truly dislike the young Kuran vamp.

All in all, an enjoyable (and ongoing) effort by Hino Matsuri. I can safely say this is a really fun read/watch if taken with a pinch of salt.