Vlad Love Archives | 100 Word Anime

Watch or Drop? Rules

Rules modified for the Autumn 2021 season.

The anime must be new (not a sequel or spin-off).
I’ll watch as much as it takes to make a decisionas to whether the anime will be added to the watch/review list or dropped and forgotten. For good.

Just so we’re clear – I didn’t actually watch episodes 1-3. Episode 1 was enough.

Vlad Ep1 1 — *^{So this woman apparently works in a school. While they try and turn their own censorship into a joke it doesn’t actually make the thought of this person working in a school any better.}*

First Impressions:

Look, unlike Sleepy Princess, I did get to the end of episode one of Vlad Love and realistically I could watch more. It isn’t as though it was totally painful or overly offensive, although the nude nurse definitely makes you wonder what exactly the writer’s sense of humour is based on. If I had to sum up my thoughts while watching episode one I could do it with one word: dull. And for a school comedy featuring a starving vampire and a girl obsessed with blood donation (which is one weird obsession but I guess we’ve seen weirder in anime) to manage to be dull is perhaps the best merit I’ll give it.

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Series Positives:

None.

Um…

That probably isn’t fair.

Actually, Banba, the lead character, could actually be a pretty interesting character if they were a side character in a different anime with better writers. Conceptually I like Banba. Watching her here however she just doesn’t have anything to work with.

Vlad Ep1 4 — *^{And what is with the constant use of panels throughout the episode. You aren’t distracting me from the poor writing here.}*

Also, Mai, the vampire newly arrived from Transylvania after her shipping container got lost is also on paper a pretty interesting character. her desire for blood is at war with her desire not to actually bit or enslave people and all things considered exploration of that could be quite fun. Again, this wasn’t enough to make me stick around through any more of this anime but there’s certainly some potential there.

Series Negatives:

I covered the biggest one in the first impressions and that was that I was bored. They blow up a blood donation van, have a nurse strip, and we meet a Transylvanian vampire and I still wasn’t in any way interested in what I was watching. Part of this was because it is visually one of the least impressive anime I’ve picked up so far this year. However I think a lot of it is just down to delivery of the material. In more adept hands there isn’t anything overly wrong with the concept but it failed to get me even mildly curious about where it intended to go – and honestly given the people behind this one have some real credibility in making anime, you have to wonder just what has gone wrong.

Vlad Ep1 7 — *^{Trust me, this one is a snooze fest.}*

This anime seems to want to be bizarre and off-the-wall and not care but it just hasn’t got the zany energy to pull it off. Also, episode one introduces characters that with a bit more effort could have been interesting but instead has them become one-note memes even before the episode ends. You kind of hope that maybe in the following episodes they expand their repertoire but the damage is already done and any desire I may have had to see more of these characters was already thoroughly killed before the episode came to a halt.

Verdict?

Well at least Vlad Love has the privilege of being my first official declared drop in this new series of posts. For me to be this disengaged by a vampire story is a bit weird and I would claim it was the comedy angle except that I loved Karin and quite enjoyed Rosario and Vampire. So I have a clear history of actually kind of enjoying school based vampire comedies.

Honestly, I really found this one to be dull and just not worth even the small amount of time it would take to watch the next two episodes. Still, I’d love to know your first impressions if you gave Vlad Love a go.