#edward or whatever. idk. but before they get to that he feels rapey to me dawg im sorry

[snekdood]

individuals will be like "guys who say they're just too horny not to rape people are horrible" and then fetishize vampires 😒

[nightcoremoon]

in high school I bought the complete box sets of both death note and vampire knight manga because I was a certified C-tier weeb, and, uh, yeah, i fuckin loved both of them. so sue me. I actually had a system with a girl I had algebra with where she would borrow my mangaka and when she was finished I would give her the next one and she'd give back the last one. we had maybe one full conversations' worth of words exchanged over the course of several months (granted, her native tongue was cantonese or mandarin, I don't remember which, since she was an exchange student from china, and she didn't use as much english that year as she did as she continued to go to school where I did). she introduced me to lucky star & angel beats & stuff. in hindsight I liked her mostly because she was one of the few people who was nice or at least civil to me, but I had it in my head at the time that I had a crush on her which looking back I feel like I might have been fetishizing her due to her ethnicity but that certainly faded in a few years time when she was friends with my best friends? idk man vampire knight was really important to my high school early development probably more than I gave it credit before even thinking of it again today. guess that's score more for my status as "giant fucking weeb".

admittedly death note is legitimately great. the only people who ever talked shit about it were misogynist reddit scuzzlords who didn't like the fact that the non-shoujo anime had a lot of fans who were teenage girls, and weebs in denial who went back and said they loved it once they passed their hipster phase. i offered to have my mom and sister read it, and they did- eventually (they forced me to read twilight and I used that as a bargaining chip :P ). they liked it so much that they stopped outright hating anime. in fact mom started dating a weeb eventually and now she likes cowboy bebop. lmao, you're welcome! anyway. the anime was great. one of the best ever created. it's a shame they never released any american movies :)

so now is the less pretty part

...

the vampire knight anime is really, really, like... HOLY SHIT THIS IS REALLY GODDAMN RAPEY.

like yeah I get that when you involve vampires in your fiction there's a very strong potential for drawing comparisons between forcibly drinking blood and sexual assault, that isn't necessarily intended or warranted. just because a vampire protagonist drinks someone's blood doesn't mean that the series is justifying sexual assault. edward drank bella's blood and it was fine (if we ignore the weird mormon bullshit justifying the rest of his creepy behavior). in fact, even villains can forcibly drink blood without being an allegory for rape- the people who like dio brando as a character are not rape fetishists. I'm not trying to write a whole virtue-signaling manifesto decrying vampirism in fictional media because that's fucking dumb as hell. vampire fiction is valid.

however:

Aido is a slimeball to end all slimeballs. So like. The dude straight up restrains Yuki and- in the wake of her crying out for him to stop, he licks and bites her and whispers into her ear that she tastes good and he wants to drink her blood, and is only stopped when Kaname steps in and what happens? he gets suspended. a slap on the wrist. and he continually flirts with her and touches her and restrains her and threatens her and talks about drinking her blood, and there are Z E R O CONSEQUENCES. no pun intended. and he's easily the most likable character. he's the secondary comic relief (headmaster being the primary). he's the prettiest. he's smart and funny and popular and basically tamaki suoh (which is ironic because tamaki and zero share a voice actor but whatever). why. why the fuck did the writers make the creepiest slimeball in anime super likable? he's dangerous and yet he's endearing??? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU GUYS oh wait yeah that's right I forgot, japanese animation is just like that sometimes :/

if aido wasn't a vampire he'd be considered a rapist. why is it not as bad if he's trying to drink someone's blood? I'm pretty sure that having your bodily fluids drank straight from your body without your permission, being licked & bitten & forcibly restrained, that's on par with being sexually assaulted. because uh. last time that i checked, licking and biting can 100% be a form of sexual assault. ok I lied I haven't checked but I'm pretty sure it counts. I'm fairly certain that a person attacked by a vampire and a person raped would both be traumatic in many similar ways. not to disparage rape victims in this hypothetical situation where vampires were real. god why does tumblr spawn the weirdest sentences. anyway I feel I've adequately made my point.

not even gonna touch on all the Level Es, Zero, Kaname, and anything else cropping up over the course of the rest of the series. Aido alone and the way the show handles him is... chilling, to say the least.