dreamer_easy | You silly Vampire Knnnnn-ight!

My knowledge of manga and anime is not extensive, but I don't think I've ever seen one of the plethora of high school student characters actually study, with the exception of Light Yagami from Death Note. (Who was only using it as a cover for mass murder, anyway.) Rather, high school is a venue for ninjas, samurai, sorcerers, demons, and the undead, which must worry Japanese parents already fretting over their children's educations.

Vampire Knight is set in yet another elite school, this time with the twist that lessons come in two shifts: the Day Class for the human students, the Night Class for vampires. Our heroine, Yuki, is torn (not literally) between two potential vampire boyfriends – the regal Kaname and the tormented Zero, who can't keep his fangs zipped.

As far as I can tell, this is all fairly standard manga stuff, with orphans, amnesia, etc. (I'm only two volumes in and there's already a mysterious stranger with an eyepatch.) What has caught my attention is the character of Yuki and Zero's adoptive father, Headmaster Cross – the school is his attempt to forge a peace between humans and vampires. He is not an androgynous boy, like the slashy vampires of the Night Class, but a homosexual man.

This is used both for comic effect at the Headmaster's expense, and to highlight, with phenomenal lack of necessity, the sexual metaphor of the vampirism. So for example, after Zero loses control and attacks Yuki, the headmaster offers to let Zero suck his blood. An explanatory caption saying "GAY" pops up. Zero rages: "This is like sexual harassment!" In a bonus strip which parodies the scene in which Yuki willingly lets Zero imbibe ("the most forbidden act of all"), she instead fetches the headmaster for him. "You can drink more than blood from the headmaster. You can suck him dry if you want to."

Trying to figure out the gender signals is a strong reminder that, as familiar as manga might seem, I'm reading outside my culture. Are the headmaster's clothes supposed to hint to me that he's gay? His enjoyment of cooking? Certainly not his prettiness or his long hair. And what about Yuki? She doesn't look like a girl or a young woman; she looks like a rescue owl. And yet, IIUC, her doll-like, child-like appearance is what's considered feminine and sexy in Japan.

This is a world in which vampirism is the only sexuality; Zero doesn't even have nipples, for heaven's sake. That allows adolescent readers to explore "the most forbidden act of all" at a safe remove. But equating vampirism with sex inevitably results in disturbing implications. Zero is an unwilling rapist – an oxymoron – driven to attack Yuki by his instincts. After two assaults, Yuki decides to voluntarily slake his lust as often as necessary – for his sake. (As the Isla Vista mass murderer reminded us, this is women's duty.) Disturbing, too, is Headmaster Cross' offer of his own blood to his adopted son, which objectively ought to be kind and brave, not pervy.

I was a gender non-conforming teenager, so I suppose that my current interest in shōjo (and Kpop) is my enjoying now some of the adolescent fun I missed out on then. But it's one thing to read this stuff with an adult's perspective, and another for a younger reader to learn some questionable ideas about boys and sex. Hmm.

(I'm concurrently reading The Great Mirror of Male Love, an eighteenth-century collection of gay samurai tales – at least as funny, and even more overwrought, than Vampire Knight. I wish the manga came with as detailed an explanatory introduction!)

ETA: Now an evil twin has shown up, and far more shockingly, Yuki studied algebra for an exam. There was maths right there on the screen!