The Spring 2021 Manga Guide

The Honey-Blood Beauty & Her Vampire

What's It About? 

Kagari Tojyo is smart and beautiful...but what really draws a crowd is her rare "honey blood"—a crowd of vampires, that is! Enter Ryotaro, her bodyguard and a vampire himself...with quite the perverted, sadistic streak! What's Kagari got to do to have a "normal" life?

The Honey-Blood Beauty & Her Vampire is drawn and scripted by Toma Fuyuori and Kodansha Comics released its first volume digitally

---

Is It Worth Reading?

Rebecca Silverman

Rating:

Let's start with the good. The Honey-Blood Beauty & Her Vampire has some interesting tweaks on basic vampire mythology. Nothing hugely innovative, mind, but certainly enough to set it apart from other similar vampire shoujo romances. The series' twist is that humans and vampires are both living species (as opposed to vampires being undead) attempting to coexist, but things are very definitely slanted towards the vampires, giving the world undertones of dystopia. It isn't precisely subtle – humans are referred to as “pabulum” – but the way it makes an effort, not just as world-building but in how the characters all interact, is praiseworthy. It's as if the vampire population has done such a good job at hiding how the world essentially functions for their benefit over the humans' that the humans don't even notice or question it.

Also, the art is, or rather can be, quite pretty. That's nice.

Unfortunately, neither of these things are enough to make this an actual good book. Largely this problem rests with the main couple. Kagari, the heroine, is a spoiled brat who is one “oh-ho-ho-ho” away from being an obnoxious ojou-sama character. She's apparently been pampered into awfulness because she's a “honey-blood,” which if you've ever read a vampire romance you know means that her blood is somehow irresistible to vampires. In order to protect her, she's been assigned an “SP” (we never learn what that stands for), who also just so happens to be her childhood friend and is, naturally, a hot guy. Ryotaro and Kagari are plainly in love with each other, but for Reasons they don't seem to be able to get together, possibly because Ryotaro is afraid of what he'll do to Kagari. (That's what the cliffhanger ending implies, anyway.) So Kagari keeps begging Ryotaro to drink her blood, preferably from her neck since he's apparently into toes and only drinks from there for his payment, and Ryotaro kisses her while she's asleep and unaware of it, and the whole thing reads like a Greatest Hits of Terrible Romance Tropes.

What's really too bad is that this might have had potential if it were written differently. Just tone down both of the characters a bit, focus on the odd society that they exist in, and maybe leave out the love rival and this could have been a smoother, more engaging book. And there's some indication that things might move in better directions in the next volume. The love rival looks to have an issue with the vampire-centric society, Ryotaro's self-control (such as it is) is wearing thin, and Kagari is seriously due for a wake-up call, or at least a flashback about how she and Ryotaro met, which is implied in the volume's opening pages to not have been great. I may give this a second volume out of curiosity if I found it on sale. But otherwise, unless vampire romance is your favorite genre, I think this may be a series worth passing on.