Blood Alone is an obscure manga about a loli vampire living with a young male novelist, with an air of mystery and intrigue woven into the densely implicit romance. That’s it, in a nutshell: a random purchase made on my last Amazon shopping spree because the cover art looked nice. Was I disappointed? Not in the least. Read on to hear more about this little gem of a series that I hadn’t so much as heard of until a month ago.
To be frank, the first sentence of this post says it all, and if that synopsis didn’t intrigue you, then you probably won’t care much for the series. Very little happens in the first volume: like with many stories, the beginning simply serves to introduce the characters and set the tone for the future developments. The mystery and fantasy elements are quite prevalent at times, especially since there appears to be a mystery hiding in the characters’ pasts (as always), and about half of the book was dedicated to a Gyakuten Saiban-style murder mystery story.
However, while the plot might sound very unoriginal – moe-moe vampire lives with cool senpai, stuff happens, other stuff happens, confession of love under the moonlit sky – the fact remains that it’s a fun read. It was reminiscent of May Sky in the sense that it wasn’t so much the story that attracted me as it was the atmosphere. Subtly healing, both fantasy fulfilling and painfully real, with just enough implications to get your heart pounding yet not so much to make it feel like an episode of Shuffle; it’s a tricky balance, but it does it well.
And that’s the one point I really want to hit with this post: the atmosphere. I’m not sure how one would go about creating an atmosphere this alluring, but we’ve all seen it before in countless forms of anime and manga. Somewhat like the chaste MariMite setting where everything is implied yet nothing is directly stated, or the beginning of a Key story where everything is surreal and mysterious – it’s tough to explain, but it’s something you should feel the moment you start reading. Maybe that’s just the otaku side of me talking, but the moe and romance and fantasy is all woven together in such a sublime way that even though I feel as if the plot is as cookie-cutter as it can get, I still want to read more.
And at the moment, I still want to read more. I finished the first volume about twenty minutes ago, yet I already want to see more of Misaki’s adorable antics, more of Kuroe’s fatherly protection, more of the love that will surely bloom between them. It’s about as fake as a story can get, the very antithesis to shows like KimiKiss, but maybe that’s just what I like about it: it’s a masterful juxtaposition of fantasy and reality, and it’s alluring enough to warrant a purchase of the rest of the volumes.
~ ETERNAL
つづく
