#kaname/yuuki

[eternally-yume]

His expression is so tender here~💗🖤💗

Oh, Yuuki, you can do anything to him, anything at all, and he'd be happy with it.

After all, you're the one who gives his life meaning.

[eternally-yume]

That is definitely Kaname's hand, make no mistake. And the kiss! The kiss to the hand! So sweet. Ah, yume, my new eternal love~🖤

[eternal-rose-scans]

To commemorate the end of Vampire Knight Memories, a special project has been released.

Famous scenes from across the series will be published with new commentary from Matsuri Hino.

In the absence of a chapter this month, please enjoy translations of three of these scenes.

Many thanks to @judaluffy for translating, and @vk-crzy for providing scans and proofreading.

[yume4evere]

I always imagined what this scene would be like! it's so Magnificent 😍

[vk-crzy]

Wake up, my love. Please.

[noticemezero]

The only time Zero tried to speak some sense into Yuki, only for him to immediately drop it (which, to be honest, is something Hino loved doing: introducing potentially bombshell questions or conflicts that we as readers, wanted resolved, then never following through, usually by having something interrupt the scene. It’s her convenient way to keep plausible deniability.)

Anyway, I feel like that moment was Hino’s ridiculous attempt to show us ''see I'm pointing out the elephant in the room, namely, that Kaname had an innocent child’s family massacred, had the child endure a brutal, excruciating transformation into a vampire, and set him on a path that would inevitably end in his execution(level E), all to use him as a pawn.'' And yet, Hino lets that elephant sit there untouched, never properly addressing it again.

I think this is part of why I don’t like Yuki. She has the appearance of someone with strong convictions, someone who stands up for what’s right, but when it comes time to challenge her moral beliefs or make tough choices, she either bails or the author conveniently reshapes the situation so she never has to make a decision. There are numerous examples of this.

She’s more afraid of upsetting someone she cares about than she is of facing hard truths. Maybe that comes from her abandonment issues. Honestly, if the same night she slept with Kaname, Zero had shown up wanting to sleep with her too, I feel like she would’ve let him hit it just to avoid hurting him. It’s like she doesn’t have a will of her own anymore.

I don’t think she was portrayed that way at the beginning of the manga, but Hino definitely pushed her character in that direction as the story progressed.

This is why I don't really care for a Zeki or Yume ending because it feels cheap either way.

[suisaber25]

[azraanth]

Kaname shoud’ve been the main character of VKM or at least should have had more moments where he got to experience what it’s like to be human, outside of his feelings for Yuuki. I feel like Hino didn’t want to explore certains aspects of Kaname’s character. Such as ; why after his memories are erased, he still feels like he’s a bad person? Is it something that he believes so deeply about himself that even erasing his memories didn’t change his perception about himself? What did he feel, when he woke up and had no memories of his past? What was it like to be confronted by the fact that he has two daughters and he doesn’t remember them ? What is it like for him to know he never got to see Ai grow up? Did he grieve that? Worse, what is it like, to know that Yuuki loved him so much that she waited a thousand years to give him her heart? That she died for him? Especially as a human, his perception of time should have changed. There was many themes that could have been explored with his character while keeping his love for Yuuki and Ai as the main topic but while also exploring Kaname in a different setting than the original manga. I am aware that some of those questions have been partially answered, but Hino never dug deep into his mind or his thought patterns.

I love VK and partially love VKM as well, but Hino went from interesting concepts and vilains to very generic ones that don’t give any real challenges to the main characters. At least not emotionally. The vilains in VKM never made Yuuki question herself or her choices. Even raising a daughter should’ve been a challenge itself. I mean, imagine : immature Yuuki learning to mother a child while maintaining order in the vampire communities and slowly understanding where Kaname was coming from before he died and his mistakes and also creating parallels between Kaname’s love for Yuuki — like the length he went to keep her safe to Yuuki herself being in the position of the protector for her daughter. It could have been so good. I sometimes see glimpes of that in VKM.

And— Zero, I feel like he made his peace with himself in VKM but we never for the thought process behind his actions. His main problem as a character was that he hated vampires, especially purebloods in VK and that got his arc completed in that regard in VK. I feel like his challenges would have been different too if I follow my own ideas. I don’t think he’s ever seemed deeply jealous of Kaname. His character was always the peaceful protector, the one who descalate situations and bring back Yuuki from extremes ideas to more neutral ones. But his challenges, so far? I have never seen him struggle with knowing that Yuuki loves Kaname as well. But what I would have liked to see with him is other themes : because in VKM, he’s the reverse of Kaname. He started his life as a human and became a vampire, and even from then, it was more or less implied that he would die quickly if he descended to a Level E. This man has never expected to live such a long life. How does he not struggle with the idea of eternal life? Of not knowing the end? How is he not having a crisis over this? Even after Kaname’s death, he still had problems with vampires and I truly do want him to see him become friends with some or even: what is it like to live longer than your hunter friends? What is like it kill a vampire with your gun and coming back to your pureblood wife? How does he deal with it? And, also, being 25 or so and having a baby daughter — because Ai is. How did it feel like, being so young and seeing the spitting image of his greatest love and greatest enemy/friend walking around? Did he learn to love parts of Kaname through Ai? Did it help him make peace with Kaname? Was Ai being born was the cataclyst to Zero forgiving Kaname?

[rm-dedeca]

I come here to defend Ai Kuran and the negligence her author displayed toward her.

The woman was born and raised having to watch her father dead in a freezer, her mother suffer from depression and constant thoughts of killing herself because she couldn't live without the man in the freezer.

She fell in love with the man who loved her mother, had to give up her feelings so her mother could finally have happiness in life. And she ended up projecting this onto her younger sister.

She met a human, married him for political reasons, but learned to love him, only to watch him grow old and die.

When she finally met her biological father, the one she longed for her entire life, she didn't even get the development she deserved with him because her father only thought about her mother.

In the end, she was left without her mother, without her father, without her husband, without her other father. She saw her entire family go down the drain, and only her sister was left.

Ai wasn't respected, she wasn't properly developed. Her entire story revolved around her mother and her fathers.

What promise did she make to her husband's family, and why does his descendant look like him?

Vampire Knight's biggest victim is Ai.

Zero and Ren had a happy life. Ren had her father for a long time, and Zero married the woman he loved all his life.

Ai and Kaname are too tragic. They didn't even get a single illustration together.

Disappointing.

[eternally-yume]

This panel gets me every time. "Please, only you"... He's just so tender here, but as it stands, he's so tender with her so very much. But I digress—Kaname has been waiting for Yuuki for so long. Hell, if memory serves correctly, he only turned her back into a vampire because Juuri's seal was destabilizing. It was causing her to slowly go mad as she tried and failed to force her memories to the surface. Had that not happened, who knows when Kaname would have chosen to turn her back into a vampire—or even if he would have chosen to do so.

After all, the man is incredibly accustomed to pain and longing, so it wouldn't be a stretch of the imagination at all for him to have never removed the seal to begin with. Yuuki was happy as a human, for all the worries and woes that plagued her about her past, and Kaname wouldn't want to ruin that for anything. Except he had to. The seal rupturing forced his hand.

He's sorry here for, as he puts it, bringing Yuuki back "into this hateful spell of blood". The fact that he so deeply, dearly wished to bring back the vampire Yuuki doesn't negate the fact that he still loathes how doing exactly that has brought back into Yuuki all the monstrosity of what being a vampire truly is.

And yet, he tells her that he wants her to drink only his blood. Inasmuch as he acknowledges and even accepts her love for Zero, he wants to be the only one she drinks from. Nobody else. It's a selfish thing, of course, but utterly understandable. Vampires can only satisfy their bloodlust with the blood of someone they hold so dear to themselves, and so Kaname wishes to be the one Yuuki holds dearest to her heart. Despite all his loathing for vampires and their destructive, deplorable ways, he can't let go of that desire to wholly satisfy Yuuki's bloodlust.

Because Yuuki's different. She's all smiles and sunshine and sweetness. She's his light in the dark. She's the beating of his heart. She's his everything, all he could ever desire, even if it ultimately wasn't enough to stay his hand on the path to self-destruction. And even then, even on that path, his true goal was Yuuki's safety, not simply his own annihilation.

[dremonoid007]

Magical Girls of Mitakihara

(None of the images are mine.)

All the known and possible(/named) magical girls and canditates of Mitakihara City.

Known Magical Girls

Madoka Kaname

Homura Akemi

Sayaka Miki

Mami Tomoe

Kyoko Sakura

Nagisa Momoe

Mabayu Aki

Oriko Mikuni

Kirika Kure

Yuma Chitose

Komaki Asako

Koito Asako

Sasa Yuuki

Inui Itsumi (witch: Urhmann)

Mami's previous teammates from Different Story

Walpurgisnacht Rising

Unknown Magical Girl #1 (Theorised to be eaither Walpugisnacht herself, the Spindle Witch, ect.)

Unknown Magical Girl #2 (Theorised to be Gertrud)

Unknown Magical Girl #3 (Theorised to be either H.N. Elly [Kristen] or Albertine)

Other Girls

Fan Speculated Magical Girl: Momo Sakura (witch: Elsa Maria)

Non Magical Girls

Hitomi Shizuki

Akira Namekata

Miyuki Nagatsuki

Erika Mamiya

[kaname-v-kuran]

"Bound forever, in life and beyond."

[yume4evere]

yuki, kaname, zero illustration

[vk-crzy]

VKM Final Illustration!

[eternalpassions]

No one talks about how Kaname used to be Yuuki’s confidant. They used to be really close. He asks her what happened because she used to tell him everything.

But that came to an end because of one life changing moment.

When Yuuki caught Kaname cheating on her lol jk. When she caught him drinking blood from Ruka. Which triggered her early memories of almost being killed by a vampire. Kaname did this to protect her from herself. Because before this event she would’ve done anything for him, followed her anywhere. So he needed her to be more aware of her safety and so he had to instill some fear and distance for him into her.

My theory is Kaname also did this to put emotional distance between them because he has trauma from the hooded woman. He is afraid to get close to another woman and truly fall in love again because of what happened with the hooded woman. So in order to avoid the same fate of losing Yuuki to dangers of vampires and avoid the terrror of falling in love and losing someone again, he pushes Yuuki away.

This physical and emotional distance is the tragedy of the story because it led to Yuuki seeking that closeness with zero and that’s how we ended up with the rest of the story and vkm. Makes you wonder what would’ve happened if Kaname never pushed Yuuki away that day. They’d still be close and she wouldn’t feel the need to seek out zero to find that closeness with someone else. That attachment to zero wouldn’t have existed if Kaname never pushed her away that day.

However, I’m not saying she stopped loving Kaname that day. Her love was as strong as ever but it also put distance between them and left and opening for someone else to join their relationship 💀

[nobodypunk]

Vampire Knight Analysis: Classism

Long Post !

10,000 years ago, climate change caused the apocalypse. Because of lack of food and resources, vampires are at the top of the food chain, preying on humans. Kaname is a pureblood and the progenitor, we first see him as the Lord of a village, in which he gives the villagers his blood to sustain them and keep them healthy, but in secret he takes their blood to sustain himself. Eventually, he run-out the village when they suspect he is a vampire. 

He is in a position of power over his people and while it is framed as benevolent that he is healing them and helping them live, he is also stealing from them in secret. I think it is a fair comparison to equate this to money or goods. Serfs work the land for their lord and in return he offers them protection. While the lord may be a good one, he is still partaking in a power structure that ultimately benefits him. A lord still takes their livelihood as payment and in the way of secrets, may be oppressing them in ways they are not aware of, taking things they did not agree to give away. 

Kaname along with The Hooded Woman observe how their kind, pureblood vampires, have taken to turning many humans into vampires. But the hooded woman says this is not for equality, the purebloods are turning humans to make slaves of them. So purebloods are explicitly abusing the power structure as the upper class and abusing the lower class (humans) turning them into slaves (Level D). 

As the story continues The Hooded Woman and Kaname oppose the purebloods, rebel against them, and also search for a cure to vampirism. They recognize that the system that they are both a part of, needs to be dismantled. 

Through their research, Kaname becomes disheartened but wishes to make the necessary sacrifice to liberate humans from vampire tyranny. The Hooded Woman however is the one who has been working with a group of humans, having them ingest her blood to gain her power. In doing this she creates Hunters. Hunters who are human yet possess the strength of vampires given to them by a pureblood. She then casts her heart into a fire that will produce the Parent Metal which they can then make weapons to defend themselves against the vampires. 

Which I find to be such an interesting dynamic as we can view this as a royal who despises the royal class, donating all of her funds to lower class people for a rebellion. The upper class woman willingly sacrificed herself “Viva La Revolution!” style for the lower class. However for me, this feels a little weird subtextually. The Hunters having their genetics changed by her pureblood makes them have similarities to vampires, like Kaien living an unusually long life, or the Hunter Twins curse. I will return to this thought later. 

Kaname fights the revolution with Artemis for a period of time, but eventually loses hope that vampires will ever be stopped or cured. He abandons the cause, abandons the humans, abandons the Level D/E vampires to their doom. 

Let’s now focus on the time period that Vampire Knight takes place:

In VK we now have a very literal class system of vampires as illustrated by the pyramid in the manga: 

Level A: pure bloods that are the reigning class (born vampires, beautiful, precious, powerful, manipulative)

Level B: the noble/aristocrat class (not as powerful as purebloods but still beautiful and have specialized powers) 

Level C: common vampires (that we see very little of … I can’t think of a single named character that is one) 

Level D: vampires that used to be human (can only be turned by the pure bloods, seen as lesser and generally not accepted as part of vampire society)

Level E: vampires that used to be human who have lost their humanity and sanity (ugly, bestial, outcast, thought of as murderers, violent, often dressed like they are poverty level). 

And finally humans (viewed as a food source, but strangely are treated socially above Level D and Level E vampires, almost a Level C/F combo???). 

Let’s break down this pyramid: 

Purebloods are reflective of royalty. At one point Kaname was formally titled The Vampire King, and even though they are not per se a legally recognized monarchy, the role of the Kuran family is the same. They are a hierarchy based on ancestry and bloodlines exactly like a monarchy. “Pureblood” is very obviously a classist ideal. Blood unmixed, blood not dirtied by “lower classes” or also in this case, human blood. Royals were thought to have “blue blood”; that they were called by divine right as sovereign, and that they were special and above everyone else. It is very much the reason why incest in royal families was practiced to “keep the bloodline pure”.

 Incest is a reoccurring theme in Vampire Knight that is controversial and something I have always been confused by and wildly uncomfortable with. We have themes of incest with Kaname and Yuuki, Haruka and Juri, as well as Rido, and later with Ai and Ren.

Incest between Rido and Juri is framed as assault and not right, but the incest between Juri and Haruka is framed as loving and pure. When Yuuki finds out Kaname is her brother she remarks that it’s strange that she was in love with her brother this whole time, to which Kaname says: ‘Vampires are just beasts in human form. We are already betrothed. Our parents before us were siblings.’ He justifies the incest as bestial and a system that she was born into as a pureblood. (Which is an interesting contradiction as animals do not often practice incest as it is not good for genetic diversity. However, selective breeding can be something that humans force animals to do which does have parallels with royalty practicing incest. There is a different theme in VK that is “Humanity VS Beasts (in human form)“ that I will hopefully write about separately but right now we are going to focus on Classism)

I think having this correlation between royalty and incest makes the presence of it in this particular series make more sense and as a part of the horror genre (and generally) incest is supposed to be uncomfortable and grotesque. Vampires often manifest our social anxieties with class and sexuality.

I also want to touch on the term “pureblood” and how it is a clear link to eugenics. 

Japanese vampires have distinct differences in interpretations from western vampires, there is a wonderful video about Vampire Hunter D that explored some of those differences (UNFORTUNATELY, It was by @thegamingmuse on YouTube and IT HAS BEEN TAKEN DOWN but have this one ‘History of Vampires in Japan’ instead). Like how Japan’s view of classism is very affected by the country’s long history with feudalism and subsequently their past with fascism. I want to stress that these may not have been the author’s clear intentions but rather things that affected her writing subconsciously. 

Eugenics began to gain popularity in Japan around the 1880s when scientists introduced a theory that through selective breeding they could make the people of Japan (the Yamato race) stronger and smarter to dominate over other cultures including the west. They valued “junketsu”--pureblood and looked down on “konketsu”-- mixed blood. Social Darwinism, forcible sterilizations and abortions began occurring more and more in the early 19th century and specifically in the 1930s at the height of imperialism. They deemed certain traits to be undesirable such as disability, genetic disease, criminal inclinations, and even race (look up the indigenous people of Japan like the Ainu), etc. Ableism and xenophobia are still very much ingrained in Japan’s culture today because of this. 

It is hard to talk about purebloods and not talk about Level E’s at the same time. Only Purebloods have the power to turn humans into vampires so they are therefore responsible for all Level D and Level E vampires that come into existence.

 Level D vampires in Vampire Knight are treated with disdain, they are usually servants or scandalous lovers to their higher class pureblood masters. As we see with Shizuka, she took a human lover that ended up being a target because society did not approve of her relationship to him. As well as Shizuka’s master bond over Zero. He physically has to fight to harm her because the power of the bond, Master vs Servant, Creator vs Creation, is so strong. They are meant to be slaves with no will of their own. 

Vampires that used to be human need the blood of a pureblood to remain stable and sane and when that blood isn’t given they lose their humanity. They roam the streets with insatiable thirst, killing to barely survive a cursed life. Food that did not die, only to be used and discarded. Level E vampires are those that are discarded, plaguing the humans with violence and fear. 

So purebloods, like royalty, are framed as desirable, beautiful, fashionable, the peak of society versus Level E’s that are portrayed as starving, ugly, bestial vermin that need to be slayed. They both prey on humans but one is deemed more villainous because of their lowly state. The Level E’s are the lower class created by the upper class. The upper class took their resources and left them in the streets to die. They are othered and thought of as a plague to both human and vampire society. Does that remind you of the eugenics that I was just talking about?

 The Level E’s are also portrayed as mentally unstable, mirroring Japanese disdain for mental illness. Hikikomori is a phenomenon in Japan of severe social withdrawal. One of the reasons this could be happening is because it is not socially acceptable to have a disability, visible or not. It is more acceptable to remain inside your home. Much like ‘The Ugly Laws’ in the United States: “These laws targeted poor people and disabled people. For instance, in San Francisco a law of 1867 deemed it illegal for "any person, who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or deformed in any way, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object, to expose himself or herself to public view.”

I’ve always thought it was interesting and really sad that in VK they search for a cure for vampirism, but they never specifically say that it’s to help Level E’s restore their humanity or their sanity. It’s almost as if the cure is more geared toward curing purebloods and the acceptable parts of vampire society. But that view was most certainly influenced by a group.

Aristocrats are exactly like they sound, they are privileged in high society. In VK they hold a lot of power though they are not as powerful as the Purebloods they are subservient to. Still they pull the strings and abuse their station. In many ways they control what is socially acceptable and what is not. Vampiric Aristocrats are as their nature is, greedy and hungry for blood. Pureblood is coveted by them and held as a rare and precious commodity. They are the ones encouraging incest to keep their blood stores full. In Shizuka’s case it was her family and the aristocrats that kept her caged after deeming she was unstable (there’s that disdain for mental illness and disability again, even though inbreeding can cause such things even in royalty) The Aristocracy is also responsible for supplying humans for Purebloods to feed on, such is the case with Kaname meeting Seiren. 

The Aristocracy benefits most from how society has been set up, even with their dealings with humans. The secret of vampire society is best kept, and that is why they sneer at vampire/human coexistence. Humans are just food and tools. Like the Hunter Society. 

The Hunter Society as it is in VK’s time is corrupt, we find out the President has been in league with the leader of the Aristocracy, Ichio. In exchange for protection they get pure blood for their drinking pleasure. Though it is not explicitly said, the Hunter Society is basically an extermination system for the victims of purebloods. Hunters only kill targets on the list curated by the corrupt President who with their ties to the Aristocracy would know what humans were turned into Level Ds and Es. The real world equivalent for hunters is the police. The police are funded by the government, are easily corrupted, and often unfairly discriminate against the lower class, arresting them for stealing food when the upper class hoards it all to themselves. 

So like I said before we have this really interesting view of the Hunters as being like vampires: being a part of the leech, upper class, and feeding into a system of oppression.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I might do more parts to this as a series, such as analyzing the class system and how it pertains to certain characters, but those were all the thoughts that have been bouncing around in my head for the last two months. Let me know what ya'll think or feel free to request a take!