Eve dreams to give travel a whirl,
While Lucce wants to unite the world.
Emille’s dream, less global,
She claims is quite noble;
Emille wants to spoil younger girls.

If you’ve ever gotten into collectible trading card games and built your own Magic: the Gathering decks before, then you know that synergy helps to make stronger builds. It’s not enough to just put a +1/+1 counter on something, you want other cards on your board to also provide value when that happens.

I attended a prerelease event on the weekend for the latest set of cards, which happens to be horror-themed. When I went home and started working on a deck using my new pieces of cardboard, I remembered that I can’t always take the coolest-looking cards and mash them all together into one deck, because there may be conflicting effects that keep things from working harmoniously together. Sometimes throwing in random different things that I like means the deck ends up being less than the sum of its parts, or at least inconsistent. 

Kiss the Scars of the Girls, Volume 3 from Aya Haruhana and Yen Press is also horror-themed, and full of many different plot ideas and tones: for example, the book is set in the future with vampires, but in a Catholic school (even the students question what a church is doing on campus) with antiquated uniforms and Class S sensibilities. Can Emille Florence’s bright, cheerful optimism overcome Eve Winter’s unapproachable manner to find sisterhood, in a world where they have to rely on their combat training to avoid vampire hunters when they go into town to feed on humans? Do all of these different elements hang together, or does it feel like the author sticking together a variety of cool ideas as they come to her?

Our final volume begins with tertiary character Violetta Emme (sounds like: Violent Femme) upset with Lucce Ruth (secretly half-vampire / half-human…just like Blade, the Vampire Hunter!) because Lucce got the top score on a test. Naturally, swordplay ensues. 

This leads us to the nurse’s office, where Emille, recovering from their bloodless battle, makes Violetta apologize to her opponent for calling her Lucce the Loser (which, if we’re being honest, isn’t as derogatory as her birth name, Lucce Ruth…parents can be so cruel). 

In a comedown from the action that starts the book, Emille lets herself get talked by the school nurse into helping clean up the nurse’s office, having been promised stories of what Eve was like when she was younger (from, you know, all of two years ago). Eve, sensing complete horseshit, comes by to collect Emille and scream at the nurse for exploiting students for free labour and trading in gossip. On their way back to their room, Eve confides that she has a dream: to go future-vampire-version of backpacking across Europe in her dead older sister’s place, which Emille thinks is very sad…mostly because it doesn’t include her. 

Later that night, Emille accidentally spies two students drinking each other’s blood and getting all makey-outey on the stairs, claiming that what they’re doing is a “sister vow.” Hard smash cut to Emille waking up Eve, all breathless smiles and sparkle-eyed, demanding “SISTER VOWS!” As Eve tells her to get out of here with her unlicensed porn-parody version of the oath, Emille acts entitled to this intimate exchange, whines that everyone else is doing it, and even attempts to drink Eve’s blood without her consent while she’s unconscious later. To say that Emille is being a vampire brat at this point would be a huge understatement.  

Some childhood flashback chapters help explain why Emille has been acting so clingy and desperate with Eve. A maid explains that Emille rolled a natural d20 in Charisma, which makes friends and family alike get into awkward cringe fights over her. Exposition Maid continues to explain that she’ll only find happiness once she can get someone immune to her overpowered vampiric Mesmerize abilities to fall in love with her. Eve, who, when they met, had as much use for Emille as a bicycle has for an ashtray, was therefore the perfect tsundere for Emille. 

Eve admits to Emille that she’s not opposed to the idea of fluid bonding after all, but she just needs to go at her own pace. I won’t spoil whether or not Eve and Emille consummate their sister vows by book’s end, but I will say that Eve brilliantly tells her that doing the deed does not magically guarantee they’ll be together forever, a refreshing bit of honesty and realism for the genre.

We also get a nice bonus chapter at the end, where Lucce pays Violetta a compliment which she may or may not realize was also a bit of a dig, and so a lovely friendship begins to bloom. 

Ratings:

Characters – 5
Story – 6.5
Service – 1 I think there’s an attempt at service in the opening splash pages, where the cast are wearing flower crowns on their heads vertically instead of horizontally, looking out at the viewer like they’re very confused as to how these things are supposed to be worn.
Yuri – 8

Overall – 7.4

For a three volume series, Kiss the Scars tries out many different types of tones, plot beats, metaphors and types of conflicts. Aya Haruhana says in the Afterword that this was her first attempt at serialization, and I feel that once she has more time to create a setting where these different tones and characters find a harmonious, synergistic balance, she will be a force to be reckoned with. Haruhana does bring up very cool ideas and subversions of tropes in these books, and the art between volumes one and three has vastly improved. I actually enjoy the series the more that I think about it. As a Magic deck, this may not consistently win at your local gaming night, but it has enough cool things going on that people should at least remember it fondly.