Yuri Manga: Blood, the Last Vampire 2000

December 19th, 2005

Blood, the Last Vampire 2000, not Blood+. This ain’t no sweet kid with a mysterious violence-filled past we’re talking here. This is brutal, ugly abuse and monstrous violence and there are no good guys, only victims.

Which makes me wonder how on *earth* I ended up with this volume in my house….

But be that as it may, it is in my house and so I will share the misery with you all. ^_^

Meet Aikiko, a typical loser teenager. No one loves her, her parents don’t understand her, yadda yadda. Only her “friend” Maya (who looks, gosh, just *like* Saya) loves her. Of course this love is shown by setting her up for a gang rape, and bloody vampire sex – oh, and brainwashing her into killing her family…but at least she’s loved.

Saya appears in the first chapter as a sword-wielding champion of gothic misery, slaughtering what appears to us to be an innocent guy – but is in reality an evil something-or-other. She appears in time to save Akiko from a group of school thugs who are busy adding insult to injury, but is not in time to save Akiko’s brain from being washed quite thoroughly by her evil lesbian brainwashing vampire pal Maya.

A final confrontation leaves both Saya and Maya bloody and beaten. Saya is returned to her cell were she lives when the American Army doesn’t need her and Maya wanders the streets committing random acts of unbelivable, yet cathartic, violence.

And they live *happily* ever after.

Obviously, they don’t. There’s no happily here, although there seems to be plenty of ever after.

Let’s balance out the pros and cons. Twin lesbian vampires. For that alone most fanboys will like it. Con for me, Pro for others. Ugly art. I like that. Pro. Misery, ennui and unhappiness. Eh, that’ll draw in the goths, until they are skeeved by the unbeautiful bodies and not sexy violence, so totally Pro.

I remember now why I liked this manga – it shows blood in a really yucky realistic way. Not beautiful boys and girls with red delicately staining their fangs – gouting blood from open abdomen wounds. Yay harsh reality.

Ratings:

Art – 8 Intentionally ugly and brutal, but easy to follow
Story – 7 Teen ennui spawns bad choices
Characters – 7 No one here to really like
Yuri – 8 Actual lesbian sex, but no love
Service – 8 Sexual harrassment, lesbian sex, panties and naked tits for the well-adjusted among us.

Overall – 7

It’s ugly, it’s violent, it’s pandering, it’s grim. It’s well-named.

3 Responses

  1. punistation says:

    Oh good, a lesbian tragedy with no happy ending. There just isn’t enough of that around these days.

  2. James says:

    Just a quibble – there _is_ a happy ending, for Saya. The reason the American army doesn’t find Maya’s body is that Saya ate it, repair the flaws in her own genetics and becoming the first true vampire/chiropteran for over a century. So it’s Saya who kills off her captors and escapes.

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