dunno whatta u implied in however as if she isnt went to evening school 10 years ago when she was 20-30, bc she 30-40, and like, MAN, all her lifetime is asocial gaming, she's same kid as Kou..
You're not wrong, at all...
I've been considering a contrast between Kou and Nazuna, and Mahiru and Kiku, but specifically along the lines of the fact that these are couplings of middle school kids with significantly older women (vampires, but still), and the one of the things that came up was that in fictional age gap relationships where one of the parties is a minor, people seem to respond very positively to the younger party being
at least as mature as the older party-- that normally means that either the younger party matures into that parity, or the older party is at least as immature as the younger party.
At any rate, among those who enjoy age gap romance plots, it appears they want to be assured that the older party isn't going to leverage any of their normal advantages (e.g. as a physical adult, as an adult with societal authority, and/or as a worker that's granted some qualified authority) over the younger party.
Suffice to say: Nazuna doesn't do any of that with Kou-- in fact, the only adult thing about her is that she drinks. She's not worldly (she tried to front as such, but that fell apart early in the story), and she probably doesn't even have the ability to charm or hypnotize.
In contrast, Kiku deliberately hypnotized Mahiru on multiple occasions (most particularly, to get him over his reservations about confronting his mother for the final time), and got him to cut out everything in his life except for her, thus isolating him. Granted, these were the actions of a remarkably menhera womanchild who was so inept at love as a general concept that she seriously imitated what she saw in movies, but I can't help but feel like Kotoyama very incidentally produced a meta-commentary on writing age-gap romances by writing out these two foiling relationships.
Joy becomes a vampire, they stay together forever playing old video games.
That’s what we wanted. Not a bittersweet “coming of age” goodbye, now grow and be better.
I'm not going to front and say I didn't want
something like that, but becoming and being a vampire is progressively established to be a really raw deal. You're fatally vulnerable to items that you were attached to when you were a human (meaning you have to destroy every valuable vestige of your human life), you HAVE to drink blood or be driven to painful madness from the abstinence (if you don't just have a complete break from reality like Kyouko's father),
you don't grow if you were vampirized as an adolescent, and you're liable to lose all human memories-- even the ones that inform you about why you fell in love with the one who vampirized you. Many kin don't even stick around with their vampirizer because their relationships somewhat resemble parent and child such that the kin is inclined to "leave the nest", as it were.
Nazuna herself was flat out bored with her life until Kou. Like, her introducing Kou to the night and night games at the start of the manga was her trying to play the vaguely seductive onee-san and failing in so much style we never noticed(she was so confident most of the time that a given reader probably didn't take her first kiss with Kou and calling it a gesture of friendship for the goofiness it was), but she even explained that vampire life was no more than figuring out ways to kill time.
That aside, this expectation became progressively incongruous with the narrative's themes. Kou started out the story wanting to become a vampire in order to grasp at a freedom he saw in the night after being fed up with his normal life and not being able to understand and truly connect with other people. Throughout the pursuit of his goal, he grew past those character defects
and discovered that there wasn't any freedom in becoming a vampire, meaning all that remained of his goals was "to be with Nazuna", which was made to be something independent of him becoming a vampire. What's more, the way he grew past those character defects was partly by rekindling relationships with his
human friends and family.
Becoming a vampire, strangely, is to comprehensively give up on your life. Most vampires we see aren't
unilaterally miserable as vampires, but any peering into a vampire's human past depicts them as having nothing by the time they're turned (Kyouko's father possibly had a terminal illness by the time he turned). Thinking about all of that, it'd be odd for Kou to-- after learning the lessons he did, and after making the gains and reconnections he did-- still give them all up for the sake of a shade of a life where he'll eventually involuntarily forget why he came to love the woman who vampirized her.
With the bondage of hindsight, I can't help but feel like the only way we'd get such a straightforward ending is if Kou never grew as a person, or if all the lessons he did learn were misanthropic.
https://twitter.com/Sunday_hara if you too are in disbelief over kotoyama getting away with this shit twice, this is call of the night's assigned editor in case anyone wants to leave polite feedback on the chapter. Note: This is not a call to harass the guy
A thought occurs.
Were the
Japanese at least okay with the ending to Dagashi Kashi?
I mean, the mangaka responsible for that one ero-doujin some people tout as the canonical ending to the manga, from the very little I know, didn't seem to make that out of anything that wasn't just wanting to make a fan work.
