Review of The Vexations of a Shut-In Vampire Princess
A vampire girl of noble lineage is all but destined for a life of greatness, except that she does not want to get out of bed to achieve anything, much less greatness, and is instead dragged and coerced out of bed to fulfill her newly acquired and important role in society as a Crimson Lord acting as a general-figure, presiding over a number of vampiric forces. The story is simply haphazard. It is not an exaggerated claim to suggest everything was made up as it was going along. There is one clearly defined narrative promise made and kept to the viewer: the protagonist is the stuffthat will change the world. Every narrative plot development and advancement simply comes out of left field, not a lot of groundwork being laid to introduce new developments as they occur, and this only worsens towards the end of the anime. It is immediately apparent in the last 3 episodes specifically. The pacing is poor.
The tonality of the show has a very broad range and, as the scope of the full narrative becomes apparent, a lot of that range and the alleged stakes introduced to the cast of characters along the way seems marginalized by the way the story was written. This was a point that was hard to get a bead on, as the anime is surprisingly adept at building up drama and tension at certain points. It is the underwhelming resolutions that follow that put a nail in the proverbial coffin of why a particular moment of adversity was important in the first place.
The characters are inoffensive, some of them even being likable and reasonably written. There is enough nuance that every character feels important until they suddenly stop being so and are relegated to being a background character that makes some kind of episodic appearance. Music scoring of the show is good. The animation plays to a wide range--most of the time it is fine, sometimes it is good, a handful of times it is great, and then there are some certainly questionable frames that occur towards the end of the show that invite the question of when exactly budget was running out during production. Thematically, it leans very heavily into being yuri-oriented and dabbles in lite suggestive tones.
The show is, in a word, vexing. It did a lot right, but the lacking narrative framework and the poor pacing upend its finer qualities. It is an instance of biting your nose to spite your face. The concept would have been better off picking a lane and sticking to it as far as genre placement is concerned; it is not carefree enough to be an enjoyable slice-of-life, there is not enough in the way of stimuli for it to be a serviceable ecchi anime, it is not particularly funny, sometimes it is more ugly than cute, and narratively it falls completely flat at being anything remarkable as far as a action-drama entry is concerned. It is not bad, but it is not good either.
Overall, this is an anime that no-one expected anything from and it delivers just a little bit more than what was expected of it. I cannot recommend it, but I do not believe it is unworthy of being seen by anyone either. If you have the time, watch an episode or 2 and determine for yourself if there is anything it is offering you that may be worth your while.