Okay! It’s been decided, and fairly easily, at
that. I’m watching the sub. Because there’s basically only one role in
the dub that does a really good job, and it’s the character that already has
Mamoru Miyano in the original Japanese.
The rest of them in the dub range from ‘okay, I guess’ to ‘really bad’. And, of course, everyone in the Japanese does
a fine job.
On the topic
of the episode itself, I’ll start with something simple: the animation. Which is okay. Considering that it’s Studio Deen, which
usually has pretty poor animation (and recently has seemed to get a tiny bit
better, but this anime is from 2008 so that doesn’t apply), it’s actually
better than I thought.
All of the
guys are bishies, so if you like bishies, by all means, drop everything and
watch this right away. I’m not as big a
fan, so I’m not really that fond of the character designs. My favorite’s possibly the headmaster, who is
goofy comic relief often drawn in a super-deformed manner, so he’s a bit
of a breath of fresh air compared to
everyone else.
Okay, so
this episode has set everything up. I’m
not going to explain it all to you, most people know about this mildly-notorious
anime’s premise already and those that don’t can just check out MAL.
So, we
clearly have a love triangle. Me, I’m
okay with them, as you could probably tell from my aforementioned fondness for Fruits Basket. I’d prefer to just have a two-person
relationship, but a third person added in there can add some tension,
especially if the story lacks tension otherwise. This will only start to annoy me if another
guy is added in and becomes a harem.
I’ll do a
quick rundown on our three corners, because why the hell not.
We have the
girl, um… *flips through notes* Shoujo
lead #376. Whoops, I meant Yuuki. She’s not terrible, perse. I mean, generic, but okay. She travels around the school by leaping off
of high ledges and swinging on tree branches, and I guess that’s pretty
cool. *raises hand* However! Don’t raise your expectations too high! Of course, she is a weak, fragile flower that
needs to be protected!
At one point
in this episode, she encounters some vampires misbehaving. She gets out a staff, and I got all excited,
thinking that some asskicking was going to begin. However, then she freezes and basically lets
him bite her. He really wasn’t holding
her down or anything, so I have no idea why she didn’t hit him or kick him in
the balls or something. Am I supposed to
believe that she’s suited for the job of preventing trouble between the
vampires and humans when she can get knocked over by a stiff breeze and needs
corner #2 Zero to come and save her?
On to that,
Corner #2, Zero. He’s the lucky fellow
who gets Mamoru Miyano in the Japanese and Vic Mignogna in dub, meaning that he’s
the best acted all around by far. Since
none of you people care, I’ll discuss his personality. Okay, he’s the character who broods sexily in
the moonlight. You know what archetype I’m
talking about. He goes on about how much
he hates vampires, but I’m about 90% sure he is a vampire (I mean, he needs to
drink blood and has fangs. How did
nobody notice that?), so that’s one of the weirdest cases of racism that I can
think of.
He was also
raised since he was a child with Yuuki, and occasionally teases her/argues with
her/is a complete and total tsundere for her in some scenes that probably were
my favorite parts of the episode because it made both of them feel more likeable
and human. It also could possibly be
interpreted as BST, and I’m fine with that.
Maybe I’m
weird, but I like characters that do that a lot more than characters that brood
boringly in the moonlight and talk about how much they hate themselves, which
is what Zero spends the other half of the episode doing. Yeah, I’m probably weird.
Awkward
segue to our corner #3, Kaname! I’m
pretty sure he was played by a robot in the dub. No offense to the guy who played him, but
there’s playing someone who is stoic and there’s being completely wooden. I didn’t have any reason to like him over the
course of this, because he lacked the occasionally entertaining interactions with
Yuuki that Zero had. He’s also a good
deal older than Yuuki is, because we saw him in a flashback in which Yuuki was
five and he appeared to be the same age he is in present day (so, how old is
he, then? If he’s around twenty-five,
what’s he doing in high school?). In
that flashback, he saved Yuuki from a vampire and brought her to her
present-day caretaker, the headmaster.
Thus, Yuuki
has a sort of crush on him, probably because he saved her life. At least, that’s the only reason I can think
of for it, because, otherwise, he didn’t really do much that made him
interesting to me. Showed some mild
interest in Yuuki, helped her and Zero out a bit, boom, episode end. He really didn’t show off any of that
all-important personality. Oh, and he’s
a vampire.
BITCH
SLAP!
Thus ends my
excursion into episode 1 of Vampire
Knight. The verdict? Lots of shoujo tropes and clichés at play
here. However, there hasn’t really been
anything horribly bad yet, it’s just been rather dumb at worst so far. I’ll watch episode 2 at some point in the
near future. What could possibly go
wrong?~
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