First Impression: Babanbabanban Vampire

Mori Ranmaru lives and works at a bathhouse, and has done so for ten years now, ever since he fell in love at first sight with the five-year-old son of the house. Uh huh. He’s waiting until the boy is 18 though, so it’s ok. Thirteen years isn’t that long to wait either, in the grand scheme of things, when you’re a 450-year-old vampire with gourmet tastes. So Mori enjoys the simple life and fantasizes about the child and his pure virgin blood until his pants tent, repeatedly. Rihito is 15 now, and heading off to high school. Unfortunately for Mori, the boy has a shoujo moment and falls in love on a street corner during an incident involving a piece of toast (sacrificed for love), a collision, and a cute girl. When Rihito later confesses to Mori that he’s fallen in love, the vampire is sent into a frenzy of panic over the dire need to maintain the virgin purity of Rihito’s blood for the next three years, and Operation Preserve Virginity is launched. This involves embarrassing the boy in front of his father and grandfather, to shame him out of love, and when that fails, paying the girl a visit—to do what, exactly, it’s not clear, but suffice it say his plans go awry when she tells him she decidedly did not fall in love that day.

Yikes, that was worse than I feared! I expected some heavy-handed romanticization and scenes of sexual tension from this BL set in a bathhouse and centering on vampires, but I did not see this unabashed “comedic” treatment of pedophilia coming. The lingering shots of Mori’s tented pants were also rather surprising, as well as the subtitles’ use of the f-word. Most disturbing of all though is Mori’s repeated clarification that he does not care in the least for the boy, he just wants to satisfy his (blood and other kinds of) lust on him; he only wants his body and blood. Maybe all this blunt sexual commodification of a minor is meant to be the starting point for a profound character arc for Mori, but somehow, I doubt it. Instead, it’s being played too much for “comedy” in both the animation style (solid animation, by the way! Very pretty to watch with clear shoujo touches) and the profusion of weak attempts at humorous one-liners in Mori’s internal voice. If Mori didn’t exist in this series, the rest of the setup could be mildly interesting: Rihito catches the baleful gaze of a gyaru that first day too, and generally seems to be a pretty sweet kid. I’d probably watch his love story unfold, actually, but not as long as Mori remains not only in the picture, but the main focus of the series. So there we have it! If you’re looking for a BL romance or comedy, keep looking; this one is neither. Gonna go sweep out my Netflix account now and get rid of the bad taste left in my queue. 

I don’t think Rihito is going to get his shoujo romance in this one…

Babanbabanban Vampire is streaming on Netflix.

claire
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