Review: VAMPIRE DORMITORY

 Don't think that I'm going to leave the ladies out of this month, though.  There's a long tradition of girls posing as boys in shojo manga and this...is not the best example of that.

VAMPIRE DORMITORY (Vanpaia Domitori), by Ema Toyama.  First published in 2018 and first published in North America in 2021.

PLOT:

Mito Yamamoto just can't catch a break.  Her parents are dead, she's been kicked out of school, and now just lost her job.  She's been posing as a man to protect herself, but if anything that just brings her nothing but unwanted attention from girls and women.  It's enough to drive her to attempt suicide...until Ruka came along.  

It's been a decade since Ruka felt the urge to feed on a human, but he can't seem to keep himself away from this mysterious boy.  He makes Mito an offer they cannot refuse: to become his thrall.  Mito will be enrolled in his fancy vampire high school, stay in his lavish dorm, and work alongside him at a butler cafe.  In return, Mito will allow Ruka to drink his blood and accept whatever care and affection he can offer (since it will make Mito's blood even sweeter).  Mito's fine with all of that, but how is she going to keep her true gender under wraps in a school full of handsome bloodsuckers?

STORY:

Vampire Dormitory is far from the first shojo manga to play with the idea of a girl posing as a boy at a school, but it might be one of the dumbest example of such a thing.  This is a manga that relies entirely upon plot conveniences and contrivances and employs them without so much as a single thought in its metaphorical head.  I can see a lot of people bouncing off of this series because it is so dumb, but I could also see others devouring it like candy precisely because it is so ridiculously, unpretentiously dumb.

In many ways, Mito feels like a stock shojo heroine.  You've got the tragic backstory, the complete naiveté about her own attractiveness, and a tendency for dramatically convenient klutziness.  She doesn't make much effort at passing as a boy beyond binding her boobs with bandages and inexplicably stuffing her long hair under a wig instead of just cutting it short, but somehow that's enough.  Thus, much of the drama in this volume comes from fleeting moments of cheap drama about others discovering her gender or denying her growing feelings for Ruka.  Most of the time she's just passively swept along through the plot as more and more ridiculous things happen around her.

Of course, the only reason she keeps this charade going is Ruka.  His fear of human women turns out to stem from him being an otaku who regards real-world girls as gross, and he views Mito as the beautiful boy who is the solution for his need to feed.  It's easy to buy that Ruka would do this as he is not just constantly surrounded by other pretty boys but is also dumb as a box of rocks.  Toyama makes about as much of a pretense at pretending that what Mito and Ruka have isn't a romance as Mito does at being a boy.  This becomes extremely obvious when Ren shows up.  He's both Ruka's childhood friend and virulently anti-vampire, but he's also your standard troubled dark-haired shojo romance love interest and he swiftly takes his place as the final angle in the inevitable love triangle.  

Maybe I could roll with all this silly drama if Toyama made even the slightest effort to give these kids some proper personalities or emotions that last longer than a few pages, but they are just as shallow as the drama.  The most you can say for it is that she isn't playing it for total seriousness, which might otherwise turn the whole thing into a farce.  That said, that shallowness and predictability makes it hard for me to get invested in anyone or anything going on in its pages.

ART:

Much like her storytelling, Toyama's art is ostensibly pretty but lacking in substance.  It's certainly true for the characters, whose wide eyes and fancy hair can't make up for their lack of expressions and somewhat stiff poses.  She can cover her panels in sparkles and splash pages in fancy outfits, but she can't quite manage to capture any sense of sensuality between Ruka and Mito, even when he's in the middle of drinking blood from her neck.  It's possible she was asked to tone things down for the sake of her audience (since this did run in Nakayoshi), but you do actively have to work hard to make vampire bits not even a little bit sexy.

RATING:

Forgive me for making the obvious joke, but Vampire Dormitory sucks.  When it isn't being dumb, it's being generic.  It's not quite dumb enough to be amusing, not sincere enough to make me care about anything, and not pretty enough to dazzle me into forgetting about the other two points.

This manga is published by Kodansha Comics.  This series is complete in Japan with 14 volumes available.  All 14 volumes have been released and are currently in print.