Plot: Ranze Eto is the daughter of a vampire and a werewolf but believes herself to be a normal human girl. She’s so normal that her parents move to the human world to allow her to live a normal human life, barring her odd home life. However, when she becomes very angry at a classmate, she unwittingly bites her, revealing a somewhat vampiric nature. Not only that, but she discovers that, when she bites a person, she instantly transforms into them and can only be transformed back with a sneeze. These newfound powers and additional restrictions on her future only make her life more complicated.
Breakdown: This show seems really…..meh so far.
It doesn’t really take a lot to set up the plot. Vampire dad, werewolf mom, normal kid. The first episode also does a pretty decent job of introducing us to our main characters.
Ranze is a pretty normal girl, though a bit scatterbrained and bratty. Her love interest, Makabe, is a troublemaker, but ultimately a nice and goofy guy. Her parents are quirky and easily the best part of the show, but even they can have their meh moments.
They really overdid the antagonist for this show, Yoko Kamiya. She is a complete and utter irredeemable bitch. Her first three lines in the show are thinking insults to Ranze. She calls her a dimwit, an idiot and a bitch in succession.
I should mention that, before the bitch remark, she did absolutely nothing but introduce herself to the class and seem a little infatuated with Makabe. The bitch remark was after she was starting to get a little closer to Makabe, not romantically mind you, and since Yoko takes Makabe to be her unwilling/witting(?) fiance, she calls her that.
She then bends her umbrella (who was Ranze’s father…..he can do that) in half in anger at her doing nothing and then later runs back into the school in a rage, tells her to back off of Makabe and slaps her when she says she doesn’t want to. Geez.
The final character to address is Ranze’s younger sister, Rinze, and she’s not really explored much outside of the fact that she’s a kind and loving little girl.
Ranze’s story after she discovers her powers is also a bit farfetched. Her parents are ecstatic because they were worried she’d never develop powers and then they explain to her what her powers entail. The important part is that her fiance has already been chosen for her in the demon world, though he’s never revealed to them. Since she is betrothed, she can not fall in love with any human. This devastates Ranze because she’s so in love with Makabe.
She’s known Makabe all of a day, he has not shown the slightest bit of romantic interest in her, in fact he turned down the offer to even be friends so he could make a show of how cool he is, and they’ve had no moments that even hint of romantic connection. She has a crush. The end.
Yet she really is so distraught at this that she runs away from her parents when they tell her and she declares to herself that Makabe is the only guy for her. And reading up on this, this plot point runs throughout the entire show. I get that she’s a teenager and to her a crush might seem like the love of her life, but to the audience it really seems like a stupid reason to fly off the handle.
Art and Animation wise, this show is fairly old debuting in 1982, and it hasn’t aged well. The character designs are okay at best and bad at worst, especially when comedic moments are happening. The backgrounds are terrible, though.
In the music department, it’s really forgettable.
I am at a crossroads here, because I don’t feel this show is really bad enough to drop outright, yet I don’t feel much incentive at all to watch this all the way through. Not only that, but the Wiki page admits that this series was basically forced to end in a cliffhanger because it finished airing over a decade before the manga completed its run.
Verdict:
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