Summer 2022 First Impressions – Call of the Night

Streaming: HIDIVE

Episodes: 13

Source: Manga

Episode Summary: Ko Yamori can’t sleep, so rather than stay home and keep trying to catch some elusive Zs, he decides to leave his apartment and walk the streets at night. The city at night is a completely different world – quiet, glowing in the colors of the street lights – and traveling those roads is like discovering an entirely new world. As Ko tries to buy a beer from a vending machine, he’s suddenly approached by a mysterious woman dressed in black who teases him for being underage. She takes him along on her nightly stroll and shows him what her world is like after the sun goes down.

As the hours tick on, she invites Ko back to her apartment to “go to sleep,” which Ko interprets as some kind of overture. He’s not interested in dating but decides to pretend to sleep until he can find a way to leave. But it’s not sexual gratification the woman is after – it’s her next meal. Ko learns that she’s a vampire, and that despite serving as her blood drinking fountain he’s not destined for that same fate. For to become a vampire, he must fall in love with a vampire. Considering his disinterest in love (and the vampires disinterest in creating other vampires) this seems impossible. But with Ko’s “day” life becoming more and more distant and his night life becoming his reality, he decides to take on the challenge of falling in love, and getting his new vampire friend to love him back.

Impressions: Vampire stories have often served to convey a society’s feelings regarding what it considers deviant behavior. The protagonist of this series very obviously doesn’t fit into the mold he’s been given – as a teenage boy in an anime, the expectation would be that he’d be high on his own hormones and chasing after his female classmates, but it’s made very clear multiple times that he’s either not interested in girls whatsoever, not interested in dating anyone, or some other flavor of not feeling compelled to fulfill this particular role that society has laid out.

My personal interpretation is that Ko fits somewhere on the asexual spectrum (an interpretation that I expect to be proven wrong at some point, but which feels the most relatable to me at the moment) and that his disengagement with his middle school life and his shift to the life of a night owl is a way that his disengagement from “normal” society is manifested. When he meets Nazuna, his beautiful new vampire friend, he sees a way of belonging that never properly existed for him before, so his appeal to her to help him fall in love with her is not as much an attraction to the idea of romance, but a plea to help him fully embrace a world where he finally feels welcome.

It’s interesting – on its surface this show seems to simply be an atypical take on some kind of wish-fulfillment story for boys, and I think depending on who’s actually watching it and why, that might be all it’s meant to be. But I find that occasionally stories have the ability to stumble onto something more interesting than their basic parts may imply, and that’s the pull I think I’m feeling here. I fully expect this to become a tale of an ostensibly asexual person being proven to be simply a late-bloomer; if the story arc goes in some other direction I’ll be very surprised. But I’m more in the camp of people that considers representation in media to be a continuum that’s generally moving in the right direction, so maybe every little bit is helpful.

Pros: This episode is all about color. While the use of bright colors is a little ham-fisted throughout the episode, it also lends a slightly supernatural atmosphere to the cityscape at night. I like how different locations receive a little bit of extra character from the impossibly bright stars in the sky, and the color-coordinated street lamps and lit windows. It does a good job of showing how much the night is becoming a new, appealing world for Ko in lieu of his daytime school day slog (depicted appropriately in very muted, washed-out colors).

There’s also an interesting phenomenon regarding the ways in which Nazuna is framed versus the way her character feels. Nazuna receives all the typical camera angles one would expect of a series pretty clearly aimed at a male audience – low angle shots, a focus on her thighs and thigh-high boots, a goofy, impractical outfit that brings focus to her chest once she removes her cloak. And yet there’s something about those things that feels almost truncated, as if the lewdness never really lands. This might just be my own feelings, or and extension of how I interpret Ko to feel about it, but I thought it was interesting.

Cons: Nazuna feels kind of like someone’s particular fantasy, or like a “manic pixie dream girl” kind of character. This is (hopefully?) more an issue of just not knowing very much about her at this point in the story than an active attempt to keep her mysterious and in service of Ko’s growth, but there’s always that possibility.

Content Warnings: Alcohol use, nonconsensual vampire feeding, depiction of blood.

Would I Watch More? – I’m very curious about this one. I’m typically neutral on most vampire stories because they tend to feel derivative, but this one seems a little less so.