Review of Vampire Dormitory

With every new season that passes by, dozens upon dozens of low-quality power fantasies for lonely, horny men are produced, and it’s gotten pretty exhausting. Vampire Dormitory is an absolute breath of fresh air, because it comes to deliver something I didn’t know how much we needed: a low-quality power fantasy for lonely, horny women! Vampire Dormitory is about a teenage girl named Mito Yamamoto who is poor and homeless ever since being orphaned, because despite how canonically beautiful she is, no one wanted to take her in! After getting fired from her job for being too pretty (no, really), she thinks about killing herself, fallsoff the bridge on accident, and is inexplicably saved by a hot vampire. I couldn’t make this up if I tried. I’m almost convinced it’s plagiarizing something from Wattpad.

But that’s not all—there’s something about Mito that makes her different from every other female protagonist of a trashy romance manga: for completely unexplained reasons, she’s a crossdresser! And, as it turns out, she’s wearing a wig—underneath it she has long flowing hair that looks exactly like the wig she’s wearing, and always looks perfect when she takes the wig off. How does she take care of long hair so well if she’s homeless? How did she afford such a realistic wig? Why doesn’t she just get a damn haircut because it would be 1000x easier? Why is she crossdressing in the first place when it would be way less complicated not to and she has no reason to? Who knows! Not the author!

This hot vampire happens to be a waiter at a local establishment, because men look sexy in waiter uniforms, and this is where the two of them actually first met; she wanted to apply for a job there and accidentally broke a vase on her way in. Huh, what does that remind you of…

Anyways! This vampire, a young man by the name of Ruka, goes to drink her blood after she cut herself on the vase, and he thinks her blood is absolutely disgusting! Just TERRIBLE. However, he wants to invite her to live and attend school with him as his personal…well, the word they use is “thrall,” but if there weren’t a word for it I’d say “drinking slave.” Why does he want to keep her around to regularly drink from if he thinks her blood is terrible? Well you see, blood tastes better if you’re loved, and the reason her blood sucks is because nobody loves her despite how jaw-droppingly beautiful she is, so he wants to make her blood taste better by loving her. Because…? Unclear. Why he doesn’t just find someone with good blood to drink from is beyond me.

Oh yeah, and don’t forget, he thinks she’s a guy! And he’s very explicitly doing this because he’s a degenerate otaku (specifically a magical girl fan) and real women scare him. Despite how buck wild that is, that’s actually unironically a good bit; I have to respect it.

Mito agrees to this, because she’s poor and homeless, so now she spends the series hiding her identity as a woman while wacky romantic hijinks ensue.

Yeah, romantic hijinks ensue while he thinks she’s a boy, meaning Ruka is just…explicitly bisexual. And he says explicitly that he’s in love with a man at the end of the show. Diversity win! The love interest from the stupidest show you’ve ever seen is bisexual!

Interestingly, at first he is deeply in denial about that fact, because he goes off on “how can I feel this way about a guy?!” rants MULTIPLE times, but the fact that he does is hilarious because nobody in this show is homophobic—not only that, but they’re the exact opposite, being shown supportive of the possibility of their relationship and wanting them to get together, so I have no idea why he starts off so deeply in denial over his feelings for a “man.”

Anyways, Ruka and Mito have romantic tension like, immediately after meeting each other, and make sure to get a dozen romance cliches out of the way in the first few episodes despite barely knowing each other, and after getting to know each other the tropes increase tenfold. It feels like the author was trying to win a competition to see if it was possible to fit every single stereotypical romance trope into twelve episodes of television.

Interestingly, Ruka says that he’s essentially using Mito as a placeholder for when he meets his “destined partner,” a woman who is supposed to be his one true love with the most delicious blood ever, and if you fall in love with someone else you’re cursed for life. Is this an actual provable thing that happens to vampires? Is it just a weird cultural value? I hope you’re seeing a pattern and can parse out that answer from there.

And this makes it get…weird. Because the whole “you have a woman destined for you so stop falling in love with a man” thing reads like an allegory for homophobia. Like, the only reason he reads as bisexual and not homosexual is because we know eventually her gender will be revealed and they’ll still be a couple. Granted, the guy pushing this idea says “don’t fall in love with anyone regardless of whether they’re male or female” so he isn’t actually homophobic, but regardless, his commands still have overtones of homophobia.

So…why not just commit to the bit and make it a yaoi, then? You literally wrote yaoi and then made one secretly a woman because…? (Actually, put a pin in the yaoi topic. I WILL be coming back to it) I know it’s meant for audience projection or whatever, but in that case…who is this for? Who is the target audience? How many teenage girls fantasize about falling in love with a man while crossdressing? Let me tell you, any teenage “girl” who fantasizes about that is going to make a huge revelation about themself in a few years, so what I’m saying is…this story would just make way more sense if the main character were transgender.

I’m not saying that just for the sake of diversity or anything. Genuinely her crossdressing is so nonsensical and weird, transgenderism feels like the occam’s razor here. Either that or just making the main character a cisgender male and making it a yaoi.

And I don’t just mean transmasculinity. Quite a few scenes of Mito expressing a desire to be seen as a girl and wear women’s clothes read as similar to the transfeminine experience.

It doesn’t matter. All that matters is her crossdressing is so contrived and weird it would somehow be simpler if she were just transgender in either direction.

Seriously, the plot of this show is the very definition of contrived. Not only is all of the drama stereotypical and overdone for the romance genre, but none of it has any reason to be happening at all. The drama is so manufactured you can tell the author really wanted to force in cliches where it didn’t make sense for there to be any. Genuinely all of this conflict could have been solved if the characters just thought about things like real people, but they’re not real people, they’re Vampire Dormitory characters, so their brains turned to mush the moment it started airing.

There’s also a pointless love triangle, because when I say this has every stereotypical romantic trope, I mean it. Her other love interest (you know, the one who stands no chance at winning so what’s the point of him even being here?), Ren, is dark and edgy to contrast Ruka’s sheer dorkiness. He has a tragic backstory and mysterious scars all over his back—the kind you’ve seen in a million romance novels before. He is also infinitely less interesting than the main love interest, as he doesn’t have the gimmick of loser otaku dweeb going for him so he’s just a bunch of overcooked tropes with nothing unique or special to care about.

Oh, and he sucks! Taking after Kaname Kuran before him, he starts off seeming fine enough, if mysterious and edgy, before devolving into a manipulative, controlling asshole who acts like he’s doing it all out of love. And I am absolutely not going to spoil it, but the things that Ren does near the end of the show are their own degree of 1) heinous 2) batshit fucking insane; I could not make them up if I tried. Yet he’s so easily forgiven and Mito still trusts him. But whatever, Ren was so clearly the loser of the love triangle from day one that I don’t care all that much.

All I can really say about it is that it involves underage marriage, and Ren is also by far not the only character to get wrapped up in it. There is so much child marriage in this show. You are all in high school. Ren is explicitly seventeen. Do vampires regularly groom underage brides?

Anyways, as for the rest of the supporting cast…

Okay, take out that pin from earlier; it’s time to address it. There’s actual yaoi in this show. Like, 100% explicit on-screen romance between two men. It’s between two of the supporting characters, who act as our beta couple. Now, making these two a thing was a good decision because it made two previously boring characters way more interesting, but it also just begs the question even further: why isn’t the main couple also yaoi? Why is this not a BL? What?

The only other supporting character worth mentioning is Ruka’s butler/the vampire king (it makes just as much sense in context), and he’s really only worth mentioning because his dub VA was so clearly doing his best J Michael Tatum impression. It’s not subtle.

Also, this show looks like shit. I don’t usually knock animation because I know it’s expensive and difficult, but it’s worth mentioning. Everything is just slightly off. Instead of animating anything that requires a lot of movement, they’ll just put voiced lines over stills. Episode three features a river with some of the strangest looking water I’ve ever seen in anime. CGI horses in the sky. This show was running on a budget of 1000 yen and a dream.

However, after all is said and done…I love Vampire Dormitory so much.

It is the dumbest, most ridiculous show I have ever seen in my life. Nothing that happens makes any sense. The dialogue is weird and unnatural. It looks a little strange at all times. But at the same time, it’s so genuinely charming. Despite its poor quality, I can’t help but get invested in the weird main couple. The love interest is a bisexual otaku loser vampire waiter (five words I never thought I’d say in succession) and the main character is crossdressing for no reason. That’s so unbelievably dumb it loops right back around to being highly shippable. The romantic moments are trashy and overdone, but at the same time are genuinely sweet (although it probably helps that I watched it in dub, and the dub voice actors did very well with the script they were given—which was absolutely not doing them any favors). Those two love each other so much, in a way that genuinely warms the heart underneath the stupidity, and I can’t deny it. In the end, I just can’t help but root for the main couple despite how poorly written the entire thing is.

In fact, the poor writing makes it all the more charming. It’s poor in a way that is not frustrating and boring, but so wild and insane you have to know more. It’s so unashamed of what it is, nothing but indulgent in sexy, stupid fun without a thought behind those eyes, and I have to respect that! While it may be low quality, I am genuinely charmed by how much Vampire Dormitory loves being Vampire Dormitory. It’s here for a fun time and a fun time alone, and it was never trying to be more than that, so why not have fun with it?

Is it good? Not technically. Do I recommend it? Absolutely.

Vampire Dormitory is the stupidest show I have ever watched, and I couldn’t stop smiling the whole time.