Vampire Knight: Review

I don't really review manga, so instead of making this the same kind of slightly more formal review I use for regular books, I'm just going to talk about how I feel and such. I made a personal challenge to read 15 manga volumes by the end of the year since I watch a lot of anime, and the first series I decided to start was Vampire Knight.

I've heard a lot of mixed things about it, especially with one of my friends loving it and another hating it with such loathing that she ranted about it  for about, oh, I'd say six years. So with some trepidation, I started the first volume. And yeah, it's about vampires, but it's quite different from Twilight or any other vampire book I've ever read.

Basically, there's a school with two parts - the Day Class and Night Class. Yuki and Zero are guardians, which means they protect the Night Class (a class secretly composed of vampires) from the Day Class (normal people). Like Twilight, all vampires are beautiful, so every time the Night Class emerges, all the girls in the Day Class go nuts. Yuki thinks that vampires and humans can get along okay, but Zero feels differently, and she starts to find out disturbing things that make it seem like Zero's more right.

Yuki's different from some of the girls that get featured in animes *cough* Nagisa in Clannad *cough* because she can totally kick butt. I was looking forward to this since I love strong female protagonists, but for such a strong girl, she sure needed rescuing a lot. However, I still liked her even if her love triangle with Zero and Kaname ticked me off at times.

And I know what you're thinking: girl on the weak side? Love triangles? Vampires? It sounds like it's shaping up to be the stereotypical paranormal romance. While, yeah, the plot isn't the most original, the way Vampire Knight is executed makes it different.

Because this manga? Majorly disturbing, although I still can't tell if that's in a good way or a bad way. Some scenes definitely made me cringe while others had me at the edge of my seat. I don't know a lot about illustrations, but the drawings were generally quite dark, which added to the atmosphere.

By the end of Volume 1, I wasn't sure if I wanted to keep reading or not, but I decided to give Volume 2 a try. However, I found myself getting a little bored and more than a little disturbed (and not so much in a good way), and I wasn't connecting to the characters anymore. Hence, I dropped this.

Still, other, less squeamish people might enjoy this if they're fans of creepy thrillers!