Yofukashi no Uta – 7 [Reproduce]

Welcome everyone, to another episode of Yofulashi no Uta! I’m a bit late on this one, Path of Exile just released a new league and I wasted a day on that. Don’t worry though, the novelty will wear off soon and I’ll be right back on schedule. So without further ado, lets dive into the episode!

Starting off, Yofukashi actually moved this week! And it looked good doing it! I know that comes off as a joke, but seriously. Yofukashi isn’t what I would call “animated”. It exists primarily as a set of stills with pretty backgrounds, snappy dialogue and bright color palettes. So to see it move like this was a treat. It had to sacrifice some detail in places to do it obviously, forgoing some of it’s signature style. But I think that’s totally fine for a one-off treat like this. And I do assume it will be one off unless Yofukashi uses this as an excuse to start bringing more action into the series. I wouldn’t be against that necessarily, but it would have to be well considered before being thrown in. What do I mean by that? Well lets talk spoilers after the break.

Action! Animation! Antagonists? That’s right, this week Yofukashi introduces the first characters that could conceivably be called “villains”. Though I think even that is a bit of a stretch. All they really do is show up and put a timer on Nazuna and Ko’s little game of true love. And even then they only threatened bodily harm if Ko refuses to become a vampire via one of them. They are more like… the bitchy girls at school trying to steal Nazuna’s love interest just because they can. And that’s about as much personality as they each get to! All of them are just different flavors of the man-eating woman stereotype, only their visual appeal and approach to picking up men changing. None of them really have much character just yet. Maybe time will change that, they did just get introduced after all. But for now they are all rather basic.

How does all of that tie into the animation? Well it’s simple. If they are going to be reoccurring challenges for leads, all of them vampires, we will need a way to deal with them. Yofukashi has already established that a bit of physical harm really doesn’t mean anything between them. A severed arm is more like a slap on the wrist than any real harm. So if Yofukashi wanted to go down the action route, it easily good. Vampires make for some great gorey action with low stakes precisely because of this. The only problem is that none of it fits Yofukashi’s style. We are halfway into the season and this is the first combat we have seen. And before this it was 6 episodes of simmering romance. To suddenly try and shift that into a shounen battle series? It could work… It would just be really hard.

Getting back to the new girls, there is at least one interesting thing to come out of them, and that’s the conversation about love. If we take away the supernatural vampire aspect of it all, because how much does it really add here, they seem to be sowing doubt in Ko. Implying that Nazuna is leading him on and they they would be more than happy to do it themselves. But there’s also the implication that they wouldn’t actually feel anything on their end. To them, getting men to fall in love with them is just another game. It’s like they are the easy but ultimately failing route to what Ko wants, a meaningful relationship symbolized by the bond of vampirism, while Nazuna is the more difficult but true route. I won’t say this is a solid interpretation by any means, but I have to really struggle to get substance out of the episode.

All I can really say is that I hope Yofukashi doesn’t go down the harem route. I don’t mind these characters being introduced, but if we take a step back for a moment… Ko is the only male character in the show. The classmate, the officer worker, all of these vampires, Nazuna. All of them are women! Where are my male vampires, my male characters with names?! What about side plots of competition for Yo! You could even introduce one as a male role model for Ko, a mentor of some kind, if you didn’t want to go the competition route. Just give me some sign that Yofukashi won’t descend in to harem bullshit. I really don’t want this to just become “Everyone wants to fuck Ko” using vampirism as a metaphor for sex.

So yeah, all in all I think the episode was fine. The new characters don’t really add anything yet, all of them being cardboard cutouts, and like was said in the discord it felt almost like a lore/world dump. I understand wanting to expand your world and really explore what vampirism means in your setting. There’s a lot of potential for that! But you can’t lose focus of Nazuna and Ko, nor can you just have all your vampires be new waifu’s for people to thurst over. Such does not a complex story make, or however that saying goes. Hopefully Yofukashi figures this out with its remaining 5 episodes. We will have to wait and see.