What do you think about Vampire Knight?

Kurokolist said:
Another Shit Tier vampire series. I give it a 1. Yuki is a terrible slut of a heroine. Kaname was a pathetic villain wannabe hero. And Zero was awesome until he became a doormat in the last few chapters.

Fuck this shit.

sarroush said:
Started out very interesting. Went down to decent. Went down to god awful.

volatile said:
Don't waste your time.

Barion-Zara said:


+1

SayNOtoIncest said:
I give it 1 point for introducing Zero to me.

CrescentYozora25 said:


+1

tsubasalover said:

May I ask you why?

SayNOtoIncest said:
1 out of 5.

I give it 1 point for introducing Zero to me.

SayNOtoIncest said:

Because Zero is the only interesting thing to appear in this manga. He's strong, endures so much anguish, risks his life for others and avoids ever saying mushy, sappy things. He should have just wrapped his bloodsucking vines around every character, except Kaito, Yori and Yagari, and killed them off.

Ana93 said:
This manga is a victim of its own success, unfortunately. On the grand scale of bad mangas I've read, this one isn't nearly as stupid as a smut shoujo, for example. However, what works against Vampire Knight is that it started off good, and then got SO BAD. If it had been shit to begin with and then maintained that quality, no one would be complaining because you knew what you were getting into going in. The problem with this manga was that we didn't know. We thought it was something better than what the author was actually capable of.

As a manga, Vampire Knight had so much (utterly wasted) potential.

There were so many interesting themes the manga could have developed. But rather than doing anything with them, the manga pandered to the lowest common denominator and spammed the love triangle. And did the love triangle poorly! Which was the biggest joke of all.

VK wasted everything but the romance, but delivered a romance that going by the comments, none of the shippers were very happy with. Whether your ship sailed (Zero x Yuuki), or sank (Kaname x Yuuki), you didn't get an ending you could be completely happy with. Kaname didn't get the girl, but people who liked his pairing could be sort of OK with Yuuki using her dying breath to do something nice for him. Zero didn't get many doki doki moments in the last few chapters with Yuuki, but people who liked his pairing could be sort of OK that he did get endgame.

But did any of us stick with this manga for years just for "sort of OK"? Even if you were like me and didn't ship, this kind of wishy-washy ending was a disappointment because it wasn't a good conclusion to this story. Personally, I wanted to feel like the ending made sense, like everything in the manga was leading to a certain point. Even if I didn't like the way things had ended up, I still could have respected the author for having a plan and sticking to it. What VK proved in the end was that the plan was ditched long ago and all we were left with was fanservice, which was all the ending was. A sad attempt to make everyone happy.

But who can be happy with this mess of a manga?

The major co-existence subplot was a joke. Of all the failures in the manga, this was my biggest disappointment. Co-existence was Kaname's major part of the storyline (since that was supposedly part why he did what he did), but Hino's development and explanation for it was a failure. Part of Kaname's problem in the manga SHOULD have been the fact that he was a relic of the past (pre-vampire council) and thought like a relic of the past, which is why it was OK with him to start a war and make himself king of vampire society. That was what people did back then. But the manga never made it explicit that the world had moved on from Kaname's way of thinking. Challenging him on this and showing why he was wrong, that there was a better way of making the world safe (other than killing Purebloods) would have helped A LOT for co-existence. Instead we got a half-assed "cure" for being a vampire. According to Hino's own canon, vampires were caused by a GENETIC MUTATION. There's no "cure" for that! They were an entirely other being.

Besides co-existence, there was so much other interesting stuff the manga brought up but never did anything with. There was some incredibly shitty parenting that went on in this manga that Hino never addressed. (Zero & Ichiru being trained as vampire hunters when they were barely school age, Cross pretty much ignoring Yuuki and Zero for most of the manga, Yuuki being allowed to become Kaname's fiance and go LIVE with him when she was just 16--when Cross knew the dude was 10,00 years old, Yuuki killing herself in front of her kids--I'm sure Zero would have had a lot to say about why that was a messed up thing to do. I could say so much more about this topic.)

And what about the class system in vampire society that was so rigid that Purebloods had to marry their own siblings and it was a crime for Shizuka to love an ex-human?

And that's just scratching the surface. So many characters I liked that never became more than plot fodder. So many mysteries that never got solved. (What happened to Rido? Did he spend that 1,000 years Kaname was frozen hanging around his body? And what about "the cure"? How many vampires took it, and what happened to the ones who refused?) If we were to start talking about it, we'd get pages of comments about all the themes, characters, and story developments that Hino never did anything with.

In summary, I'm glad the manga is over and it's time to move on to something I like better. And no, I won't be reading anything by Hino Matsuri ever again. VK was a big enough of a fuck up that she doesn't deserve a second chance. Even a semi-competent mangaka wouldn't have ruined her characters (especially her main character) and her plot the way Hino did. Looking at VK, I would say it's going to be a long, long time before she ever reaches the level of a "semi-competent mangaka."

SayNOtoIncest said:

Because Zero is the only interesting thing to appear in this manga. He's strong, endures so much anguish, risks his life for others and avoids ever saying mushy, sappy things. He should have just wrapped his bloodsucking vines around every character, except Kaito, Yori and Yagari, and killed them off.

Ana93 said:
This manga is a victim of its own success, unfortunately. On the grand scale of bad mangas I've read, this one isn't nearly as stupid as a smut shoujo, for example. However, what works against Vampire Knight is that it started off good, and then got SO BAD. If it had been shit to begin with and then maintained that quality, no one would be complaining because you knew what you were getting into going in. The problem with this manga was that we didn't know. We thought it was something better than what the author was actually capable of.

As a manga, Vampire Knight had so much (utterly wasted) potential.