Manga Review: Karin

Title: Karin
Author: Kagesaki Yuna
Release: Monthly
Status: Finished
Genre: Supernatural, Shoujo, Romance, Comedy
Art: B
Originality: B
Story: A
Characters: S
Humor: B
Action: B

Impression: This manga is about a teenage vampire girl who has a unique biology where instead of sucking out blood from her prey injects her own excess blood into them instead. This perplexing condition allows her to live as a normal teenage girl unlike the rest of her family who have had to abandon the daytime world upon puberty. The main character herself is sweet and naïve, a stark contrast to the rest of her family, and also has trouble relieving her need to eject blood due to a trauma in the past that results in her periodically having severe nosebleeds to get rid of the extra life fluid. This story is about her developing relationship with a human boy who discovers her secret and their attempts to get past the species boundary the other baggage the two of them carry on their persons. There’s a lot focus on the development of the characters and their relationships and that’s the best part of this series. The author managed to come up with characters and situations that make it easy for readers to sympathize with and become compelled enough to want to read on. The quality of the story is consistently good up till the ending which was pretty damned rushed despite it actually managing to wrap up the story’s loose ends. It wasn’t the most satisfying way to end a series like this but in some ways the ending was actually realistic in some ways. I didn’t like how it happened but I guess that’s just proof of well made the characters were.