Record of a Fallen Vampire 8

Kyo Shirodaira / Yuri Kimura – Viz – 2010 – 9 volumes

Holy crap, yes!  YES!  This series is incredible!  I am so ridiculously pumped after reading this volume.  There is nothing quite like the story in this series, ridiculous as it seems at first.

After all the stuff revealed last time, I was a little shy about sitting down with this one and had to make time to re-read volume 7.  But man.  I thought that the last two volumes would be taking care of the alien problem.  They are, in a sense, but it’s not nearly as straightforward as it seems, and along with revealing more of just how awesome Strauss is, there is one more huge twist.  Not perspective-changing, as the last one was, but still a pretty major stumblng block for the end of the story to resolve.

I love the treatment of vampires here.  It gets pretty ridiculous when the series goes on and we keep learning about additional powers Strauss has.  He has one more major one here that shocks everybody, but it was kind of ruined for me because I was under the impression he could do this, along with all other vampires (maybe because I believed him when he said it at the beginning, and talked about the history of the vampires).  But Strauss is quite literally an immortal badass.  He’s polite about it, and doesn’t brag or show off.  On the contrary, he keeps as much to himself as possible.  The vampires also don’t suck blood, something that Bridget mentioned towards the beginning and is explained further here.  Shirodaira mentions his reasons behind this towards the back, but the logic behind why it was necessary for the vampires of the past and not the present is interesting.  He also promises more on that next volume, and I am truly, TRULY looking forward to it.

The other thing about the vampires in this volume is a spoiler.  But it’s pretty extreme.  Silly, but I loved it anyway.  It fits so well with the nature of the series.

One of the things I thought about here were the similarities in exposition between this series and Tsubasa.  Both are based almost entirely around past events.  Tsubasa has a bad habit of having characters sit down and explain things to you periodically, and as a result doesn’t make much sense if you don’t read big chunks of volumes together.  RoaFV does the same thing, and I’ll admit I was a little antsy when storytime with Strauss came up again, but I think the difference is that the flashbacks in this series are told through long story segments that take place in the past rather than just having the character tell you.  It shows you, which helps.  It also helps that there is more than one character available to tell the story most of the time, so they pass the stories between them and add perspective and help make sense of things.  But in a sense, it is a bit like Tsubasa since most of the story isn’t happening in the present, and you have to pay attention to follow things.  But Tsubasa is a bit farther out in left field than this one is, and I think the story here is told better and is also easier to understand.

I cannot recommend this series enough.  It’s got an amazingly well-told story, one of the more interesting I’ve seen.  It’s not long, and it’s also got all its seriousness balanced out in its inherent silly nature (vampires vs. aliens).  I love the constant change of perspectives and the twists, and I am dying to read the conclusion.  Pick it up if you think it sounds at all interesting, you will not be disappointed.