Yofukashi no Uta – 9 [No Fair]

Welcome everyone, to another week of Yofukashi no Uta! This is another decent week for our vampire waifu’s if you ask me. Remember when I said the new girls were just cardboard cutouts and I was hoping they got some development? Well this week sort of gives us that, though only for Seri, who was already the most fleshed out of them all. I’ll take what I can get though! Now lets jump in to the episode.

Production wise this week was just fine. There were some nice closeups, some interesting angles at times and one amusing slow mo shot. But most of the rest were rather dull wide shots of our characters in one of the like… 3 locations of the episode. And the only time Yofukashi really branched out and tried to do something different, it ended up flooding the screen in singular splotches of neon. It reduced all the nice shading and lighting I enjoyed into blobs of color and was just really off putting. To be honest, it’s kind of disappointing how uninspired Yofukashi has been with its color palette. Always playing things safe, with the few times it does anything else just being flooding the screen in color without any kind of nuance. This could have been one of the best looking shows of the season! Instead it’s just kind of… there.

Getting into the episode proper, as I said above, this week is all about Seri and the separation between humans and vampires. How their consistent push for blood and offspring, this predator/prey dynamic, prevents them from having meaningful relationships with each other. My overall thought is that I liked it. It’s an interesting angle, especially when you remove the romantic subtext that Nazuna and Ko are surrounded by. In a way, since all of the vampires until now have been female, it’s almost more like Yofukashi is exploring whether or not men and women can have platonic relationships through the lens of vampires. The main thing that will decide if it’s any good or not though, for me, is this: To become an offspring, you have to love the vampire who bites you. But does it have to be romantic love? That’s what I would love Yofukashi to explore.

And it’s not like Yofukashi didn’t lay the groundwork for that! Just this week it explored the idea that romance and friendship, while both affectionate, are still different. That they are overlapping, but separate. You can lust after someone without truly appreciating them as a person, like all of Nazuna’s previous flings, romance without friendship. And you can have friendship without romance, as we see with Seri just desiring human companionship without any of the sticky romantic details. More than that though, friendship can grow out of lust and romance can grow out of friendship. It’s like… Through these two separate human/vampire couples, Yofukashi is showing how people can fall in love through two different ways. With the ultimate point being that genuine love, long lasting true romance, requires a bit of both.

With Seri specifically, I liked this fear of romance she had. The very real fear that once a friend develops romantic feelings for you, will your friendship fall apart if you don’t reciprocate them? For Seri, she solved this by just pulling the eject cord. Killing Akkun before she would have to deal with that loss. But in reality she was just avoiding the problem, cutting off their friendship rather than struggle and lose it anyways. It wasn’t something I was expecting Yofukashi to every tackle to be honest, especially not through someone portrayed as promiscuously as Seri. It’s because of that promiscuity though that it does work. Seri, and most likely the other vampires, long for some kind of genuine relationship. Something established on who they are rather than lustful desires for what they look like. I doubt the others will get much, but I’m glad we got this.

So yeah, all in all I think it was a perfectly fine episode for Yofukashi. It went on longer than it needed to, and the “serious” moments where Seri was going to kill Akkun felt very out of place. On top of that the visuals flip flopped between good, the high detail closeups and some interesting angles, to making me want to tear my eyes out, the neon splotches. But even with those, I felt I got more out of this episode than I did the prior two. Maybe that’s because Yofukashi hasn’t been pacing or handling its second half very well, that’s entirely possible. I’ve certainly found myself with less motivation to watch it each week as it stumbles to whatever cliffhanger ending it will have. Still, good enough week for a bronze medal if you ask me.