A popular young girl in a prestigious school is in love with a powerful and mysterious vampire schoolmate. However, she is also in love with her best friend, who hates vampires and is trained to kill them, restrained only by an uneasy truce. The girl for some reason seems to be special, though, with blood the vampires find irresistible and some strange, latent powers of her own. When she is threatened, will the men she loves be able to put aside differences and work together to protect her?
If this all sounds like Twilight to you, you won’t be the first to make that observation. But while Vampire Knight is indeed also highly derivative, about as lazily misogynistic despite being written by and for girls, and very nearly as downright poorly-conceived, it grows in a very different direction from Twilight (which itself supposedly grows in a challenging direction in the final book) and is a little cleverer. On the other hand, it contains elements to make the audience squirm every bit as much as glittering skin and yet shares a compulsive quality, where despite the overall plots being terrible and the characters being very hard to sympathise with, its screen adaptation is stylish and pretty enough to make it watchable and even compelling - though that's not to say it does not have irritating elements large and small.
I thought that this might just be the worst bit of vampire fiction I had ever come across when I first started to watch it. The academy the action takes place in has a ‘Day Class’ of ordinary students and a ‘Night Class’ of vampires – with the cover story that they are all models and celebrities, and work during the day, so have to study during the evenings. Thus, we’re shown a world where a group of elite students go to school each day with girls screaming at them for attention and getting overexcited about how beautiful they are. If there has ever been an awkward and contrived way to present a group of characters as attractive and superior, it is this. Vampires as teenaged heartthrobs. Vaguely acceptable as a background detail, but not centre-stage.
Later in the series, made up of two thirteen-episode seasons, the plot develops in more interesting directions. Yuki discovers her past is not what she thought it was, her vampire love interest Kaname is revealed to have been quite the puppetmaster, and her childhood friend Zero not only has to wrestle with his changing nature after himself being bitten, but meets his identical twin, presumed dead, for considerably more drama. There’s easily enough to keep the drama going, as well as some rather poor action, some spoilt by over-powered vampires just making lower life forms pop, the rest underwhelming because of the ‘level E’ concept in the world of this story.
True vampires, you see, are born and not made. Only children of vampires are really stable, and purebloods are the most powerful. Those who are bitten and lose their humanity are first puppets, and later feral ‘level E’ monsters, like the zombies of 28 Days Later. While at least offering an explanation why not everybody desperately wants to join the elite bloodsucking club, in practice the mindless zombie-vamps are extremely stupid and drag down the tone.
And Vampire Knight also has many of the worst shoujo tropes. The ‘Ouran High School Host Club with vampires’ opening episodes notwithstanding, most of those initial vampire characters ending up being unimportant, undeveloped peripheral figures, the main drama is replete with the things that mystify me: the strong-willed girl actually ends up constantly powerless in the hands of men, pulling sex faces as she is bitten and restrained. Rape – or symbolic rape, with neck-biting instead of violation – ends up being something titillating, helplessness being erotic. Identical twins are portrayed in annoyingly patronising manner, talking about being incomplete, stealing life from one another in the womb, wanting to be combined as one and suchlike. And the best kind of power is not earned through hard work or devotion, but what is given by birthright: nobility and influence trump earning or proving anything.
Vampire Knight was wildly popular for its run. It is now almost never mentioned. A shallow flash in the pan, I feel.
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