Thank you very much for picking up the scanlation to the end, as unflinchingly consistent as it was.
The ending was a lot less bitter than I was fearing, and flowed a lot better than I feared it would for a final chapter of the same length as any other chapter in this work.
I'm surprised that Nazuna's vampiric instincts compelled her to try to drink Kou's blood even though it's been three years and she must have been drinking blood just fine during that time. Even if I account for Nazuna's appraisal of Kou's blood, I was initially inclined to write off her instinctive attempt to drink his blood-- even after three years-- as a reaction from overwhelming affection rather than vampiric instinct (I mean, come on-- she's completely fine until he points out that he's became way taller than her...)
On an aside: I'm convinced the hatred of the ending to
Dagashi Kashi is a meme that people forgot was a meme, and it's infected their viewing of this even less offensive ending. I do not get the problem in someone
temporarily going away, and then coming back.
But maybe that's me remembering how
Vonnegut allegedly described what he called "boy meets girl" stories, as well as my exposure to the opinion-- by two different nonfiction writers discussing masculinity at whichever length-- that men tend to have relationships of separation and reunion rather than the persistent staying together that women tend to have.
i hate seeing this go. i do have complaints though. we never got confirmation that turning while the vampire is in love kills. to my knowledge, what we saw was that they died when the sun came up and it felt kinda ambiguous as to what killed them. i could just be misremembering but im fairly sure thats what happened.
You're right, we didn't. Even in this chapter, not even Nazuna knows if it's the vampire or the subject who dies.
But it's also the kind of thing that
can't be readily investigated, with how the concept was set up. The vampire has to fall in love with the subject, and naturally, they'll be disinclined to try to vampirize the subject and risk death (whether they interpret it as the subject's or their own) unless they have a death wish like Kiku and are convinced it'll be them that dies.
mans was reading Naruto during that time skip
It just leaves everything open with nothing resolved. Why is Kou still able to go half vampire state? Is Nazuna being born a vampire as opposed to the others who were humans turned into vampires different at all when it comes to the whole "dying from drinking the blood of the one they love" thing?
Does it matter at this point? Why Kou is still a vampire shifter is as much of a mystery as why he's a vampire shifter in the first place, and the latter issue you brought up is too risky to explore-- but even then, they've made their workaround (Kou learning MMA).
Vampires have always been poorly explained, for all their prominence in the narrative. It's a point of worldbuilding that vampires are so concerned with "living normally" that they barely understand themselves, and they're stuck being overly cautious or amateur philosophers of the vampiric condition. I'm starting to think that point was made as early as it was in order to shush the reader-- to tell them to not think too much about vampire lore and simultaneously sealing the door shut.
We may as well ask about the precise mechanism of the vampire weakness objects, why memories can be stored in the blood, why vampires have strength that contradicts their builds, or why they can float. It's fairly secondary to the kind of narrative this is.
It
does matter whether sucking the blood of a beloved subject kills either of them, but it mattered even more that they were concerned enough about the idea that they chose not to risk it.