Rosario + Vampire is a show with a fun pitch: an ordinary boy ends up accepted to a boarding school for all manner of monstrous supernatural entities. With no easy way home, he has to do his best to blend in, at least until he can make his way back to the human world. To his advantage, the monsters are expected to stay in human guises as part of their training to live in a world normally dominated by humans. Against his interest, if he’s found out he’s both powerless and subject to a death sentence.
Now, putting it that way, this sounds like a sort of horror/drama affair, but with the cases of mistaken identity and the like, it shouldn’t be too surprising when I say it’s a comedy instead. Even saying it’s a harem comedy still makes sense and promises at least an okay sort of time, since there is a basic conflict to build off of. It probably still sounds good, possibly even better, when we introduce the first and most critical girl of the Harem: Moka, a ditzy pink-haired vampire who agrees to keep main character Tsukune’s secret and who also possesses a super-powered true vampire alter-ego that comes out when the cross she wears all the time is removed, usually once an episode to kick the ass of some bully or troublemaker.
After all, to put more succinctly a topic I kind of addressed last week, vampires are sexy… or at least have a sexual and/or attractive element to their myth and imagery that can usually be brought to a level that’s appealing on a fundamental level. So cute vampire girl with a dark side (I don’t call the inner Moka evil, she’s more just gruff) is a perfectly reasonable romantic lead. Ghosts, after all, have far less baked-in romanticism and one of them worked extremely well as a romantic lead.
The basic outline of the slow is a little more prosaic – not strictly a mark of failure mind you – as we go through the expected beats of adding girls to the harem, episode by episode. We meet and recruit (though they remain somehow ignorant of Tsukune’s humanity for some time) Succubus Kurumu, loli Witch Yukari, and yandere stalker Yuki-Onna Mizore. Honestly, they even get at least a little decent character to start out, with Mizore being, at least to me, the stand-out, with an arc that delves into her depressed and lonely existence, so that it means something when Tsukune accepts her at least as a friend.
Most of their adventures are fairly episodic and, over time, get somewhat repetitive: somebody makes trouble, and eventually Moka beats them up. If the troublemaker is a girl, welcome to the harem. If not, background character at best forever after.
There are a couple of exceptions. One trouble-making male, the werewolf Gin, is the leader of the club all the main characters join and becomes a less than completely terrible senpai to Tsukune, meaning he gets more of a role. And, of course, the show does try to give us some actual drama now and then.
In one set of episodes that go bigger, Tsukune and pals visit the human world and end up running afoul of a witch named Ruby. She’s both a harder fight and a more tortured character than random students, and facing her is especially hard on Yukari. That said, she mostly vanishes after being defeated, showing up as a recurring gag sort of exposition in season 2.
For the end of season 1, the student council finds out (unconfirmed though it is) Tsukune’s secret. They arrest him and his friends and torture out a confession, but the girls all decide, even when knowing the truth, to try to save Tsukune. Moka shares some power with him so that he’s able to beat the antagonist (proving he has monster powers and this whole human thing is “just a misunderstanding”) and status quo is well and truly restored.
The second season introduces a new girl who, to an extent, is the bane of the series. The little redhead firecracker kouhai is Kokoa. Like Moka, she’s a vampire, and in fact she’s Moka’s little sister. However, Kokoa doesn’t accept every-day Moka as her sister or a worthwhile existence, and only wants to see the badass inner Moka, which is what she was like all the time before her powers were sealed.
Kokoa’s senseless spite and schemes to mess with the group largely replace the monster-of-the-week format, though now and then we’ll still get non-Kokoa antagonism. Aside from that, there are some episodes in season 2 that are markedly stronger because they take a second swing at a girl to actually develop her. Mizore benefits most from this, with a fun episode where she tries to learn how to cook and has to be the one to solve a curry-obsessed Aspara teacher from turning the student body into curry-addicted zombies (it happens) and a second sequence where everybody visits her home village for the obligatory school mountain trip. Yukari gets at least one good episode too, where she temporarily ends up with a grown-up body. Alas that the character growth seen in-episode doesn’t stick or shake status quo.
The second season finale starts from what else, Kokoa making trouble. Her pranking involves a dangerous magical artifact this time, and in order to protect the school, Moka uses her rosary to seal away the problem. Of course, that means she doesn’t have it any more, which means inner Moka all the time and regular Moka gone for ever unless her father can be convinced to make a new one.
A much bigger deal is made of this than I think really needed to be, but at least everyone banding together to see cheerful Moka again by escorting Tsukune to dad’s place hit its beats with competence. The two-sides routine is restored, with heavy hints that both Moka versions are in love with Tsukune, and the show decides it’s finally had enough.
That doesn’t sound too bad, does it? Maybe not good, but it shouldn’t be awful either. That’s because I largely left out the fanservice.
Some shows that fall flat are dead on the outline level. There’s no way you could take something like In Another World With My Smartphone and make it work; the core outline of what happens in the show has enough problems that the rest flow naturally from it. Other shows die in the writing. That is, the events aren’t really an issue, but the characters are stupid or annoying or the specific details of the plot don’t really hold up. Maybe it’s poorly paced or full of shoddy exposition. There’s a skeleton there that might work, but something went wrong producing the script. Rosario + Vampire takes its lumps when you get to the directing. The script isn’t great; the girls are pretty personality-deprived and a lot of the conflicts are fairly samey filler, but it was survivable.
What it can’t survive is awkward, unnatural, and downright shameful fanservice pandering. I’ve reviewed shows with very heavy fanservice before, and with some of them, like Isuca or Cat Planet Cuties I may have mentioned how the fanservice there managed to not be artificial and distracting. The majority of Rosario + Vampire’s run time is that artificial and distracting fanservice I was talking about.
Almost every scene in this show is manipulated to be looking up some girl’s skirt. The show doesn’t even try to hide how bald-faced this is, it’s not sometimes like Cat Planet Cuties, it doesn’t try to work things in like Trinity Seven, there’s no real creativity to the visuals like Isuca… the show just assumes you want upskirts and therefore delivers them. Constantly. I think that as incompetent as the fanservice was in Omamori Himari (and trust me, that was a bloody mess that dragged the show down) it was not as forced and awkward as the fanservice in Rosario + Vampire.
I like a panty shot scene as much as the next guy; a well executed one like Asuka getting her skirt flipped in Neon Genesis Evangelion can be a good moment, even aside from being a fanservice beat. Ending up being at the right angle behind a flying girl for a second, if the show has some ecchi elements to it, can use the trope well. Even the occasional harem comedy mishap, if its used in a decent way, can be fun. Just filming low angle shots with magical super-short skirts that probably shouldn’t cover the goods when viewed straight on is not fun or charming, and when you saturate it everywhere it just starts to feel creepy rather than spicy as intended.
In terms of the writing, the transition from season 1 to season 2 was a mixed bag, but overall one that I think was a little stronger. I felt worse watching Season 2, but that’s mostly because the show had overstayed its welcome by then; more of the S2 episodes did something unique or memorable. However, the fanservice stepped up its awkward creep factor by deciding that naked breasts were now on the table, including in Moka’s every-episode transformation scene. I didn’t complain about this overmuch in Isuca or Cat Planet Cuties, which also decided boobs were OK, because those shows knew what they were doing, at least to a greater degree than Rosario + Vampire.
Fanservice, even ecchi fanservice, should make a show more fun and appealing to watch. The constant saturation bombardment of it in Rosario + Vampire doesn’t do that; it makes the show awkward and uncomfortable to watch, and it so utterly permeates the show that it makes it difficult, downright impossible, to forgive the show’s other flaws, because it hurts to watch.
Because, if the show didn’t hurt to watch, there are degrees to which I could forgive the repetitive monster-of-the-week business. The show is set up for it and while it would be nicer if they were more unique, I do understand the familiar at least has an appeal. If the show wasn’t painful to watch, I could be more forgiving with the fact that the monster-on-monster action rarely lasts more than a few seconds; after all, this isn’t an action show, and they do lampshade the short confrontations by having a little comedy bat narrator tell you exactly how long the fight lasted. If the show didn’t hurt me, I could just sort of let it slide on having mostly lame characters and little meaningful dialogue. It wouldn’t get a great grade because those are all still flaws, but it might at least claw its way to something like a C- for the few episodes it did legitimately well.
But that’s not the case with Rosario + Vampire. The show hurts to watch. Because of that, I can’t go easy on its flaws. Why would I want to? It hurts. The other material couldn’t just coast by with a standard substandard execution, it has to actively try to redeem itself from its fanservice and direction, and it cannot even begin to do that.
Folks, I wish there was more I could really say about Rosario + Vampire. It’s a decent concept with a largely botched execution. You can enjoy it for some of its run, until you wake up and realize that it’s aging like spoiled milk, and that most of the “Fun” was really just a generous honeymoon period where you told yourself that it could get better.
For all of that, I will give Rosario + Vampire a very sincere D, and that in recognition of some very basic facts. First, the fact that it goes with heavy ecchi is going to please some viewers well enough. I find that kind of regrettable but I know this has an audience. That alone wouldn’t be enough to not fail the show, but… the direction is awful, but the writing is merely lame, and the outline is actually pretty good. There’s only so much you can look past the final product to see it, but now and again there will be a good scene or a worthwhile setup that means I don’t regret everything about watching this show. I still regret plenty, though, enough to recommend passing it up given the chance, but the show’s few high points do need to be acknowledged if this is to be a fair review.