The Fall 2024 Manga Guide

Otaku Vampire's Love Bite

What's It About? 

Some vampires live to feast on the blood of their victims. Others just want to score super limited edition anime merch!

Hina Arukado is a modern vampire who drinks blood from bags instead of from humans. But she's also a complete shut-in who hasn't left the house in 30 years. In an effort to reach her, Hina's dad does something that changes her life—he gives her a DVD of the Vampire Cross anime! Hina is instantly obsessed, especially with the character Mao. But it's difficult to fangirl as hard as she wants from her bedroom in Romania, so now Hina is out of the house and off to Japan to live her otaku dream!

Hina's so busy collecting Mao merch that she almost doesn't feel bad about missing out on the Vampire Cross cafes. If only she had a human friend who could eat all the themed food for her! But connecting with humans isn't easy until Hina literally bumps into her neighbor Kyuta, a prickly boy who looks just like Mao. Having her best friend live next door will be so convenient! Now if she can just convince him to actually be her friend…

Otaku Vampire's Love Bite has a story and art by Julietta Suzuki, with English translation by Tomo Kimura. This volume was lettered by Jeannie Lee. Published by Viz Media (October 1, 2024).

Is It Worth Reading?

Hina's dad is starting to worry: his daughter hasn't left her room in thirty years. In desperation, he gives her a random DVD of a vampire anime, and lo! His plan works! Except now Hina is a raging otaku and moves from the family castle in Romania to Tokyo to better stan her precious Mao and get her hands on Vampire Cross goodies, all while refusing to drink from humans. Because direct bloodsucking is just so unhygienic, you know?

Otaku Vampire's Love Bite comes to us from the same creator who gave us Kamisama Kiss and Karakuri Odette, and if you didn't recognize her art style, you almost wouldn't know. Hina, unlike Nanami and Odette, is all-in on the things she loves, with a laser focus on her favorite character from the in-world vampire anime she adores. It's not that she doesn't care about anything else or doesn't understand other things (although she's not awesome with the human world, that's understandable, given her thirty-year shut-in phase), it's just that she's more interested in finding friends to discuss her beloved show and character with. She's also sticking to her guns on the whole drinking-from-humans-is-gross issue, much to her father's dismay, and the discourse between them may sound very familiar to anyone on the asexual spectrum who's suffered through similar conversations about sexual attraction with well-meaning people. That's not necessarily an angle I've seen in a lot of vampire stories, and while I don't expect Hina to turn out to be an ace-spec vampire, I love that the possibility is there.

If she isn't – or isn't also aromantic – the person most likely to be her romantic interest is Kyuta. Kyuta is a college student who lives in the apartment next door, and he's a dead ringer for Hina's favorite character, Mao. He's aghast at how bad she is at day-to-day life, doesn't understand why she'd need multiples of the same merch, and…might be starting to crush on her despite all the warning signs he's seeing. The biggest one to him is the whole vampire thing because his blood has a nigh-irresistible aroma and he's already been preyed upon by one bloodsucker. But Hina's so well-meaning and basically emotionally untrammeled that he can't help watching out for her, even if he's not thinking about why right now.

The book opens with episode zero, which feels like it might have been a one-shot before the story was serialized. We ought to hope that's the case, anyway, because it directly contradicts a bit of lore that seems integral to the story starting with chapter one, that once a vampire bites a person, no other vampire can. The chapter also establishes that the vampire hierarchy is pretty rigid, but it doesn't say if there are allowances for a higher-ranking vampire to re-bite someone once bitten by another, which I admit is something that kept bothering me as I was reading. But Julietta Suzuki is a creator whose work I have consistently enjoyed, and I am more than willing to give this another volume to get its feet on the ground. It's cute, and Suzuki's note that she thinks that vampires and otaku have similar lifestyles is enough to make me stick around.

I love it when my nerdy self-inserts are badasses. That was one of my biggest takeaways after reading Love Bite which did actually catch me off guard as I thought the story would be more predictable than it ended up being. The overall structure itself is something more akin to those typical shoujo romances where a sweet girl ends up falling for an asshole that treats her like trash. But as time goes on, they fall in love. Here, we actually get the inverse of that where the more grounded and cynical male protagonist ends up playing the straight man in a supernatural comedy. I thought the vampire aspect was there for some cute flavor text in the background for some comedic high jinx and while that does happen, it also ends up being an actual narrative thrust for the story.

We get the introduction of other vampires targeting our cynical Kyuta because of his special blood. The story quickly puts to bed any potential for the story to go down any moments of dark or serious self-indulgence. The whole thing is almost played up as one big joke. Our protagonist Hina is one of the most powerful vampires in the world and can shut down others with just a word yet she is chronically online and is obsessed with a character from a show where they aren't even the main character. I was pleasantly surprised by this title and how it blended fantasy, comedy, and a lot of typical shoujo tropes that feel fresh. Its execution is simple, but it also feels like the story is self-aware enough to go beyond what it needs to. Throw in some cute yet simple artwork and I wouldn't mind continuing the series past this volume if only to see how the story continues to scale itself.

This is not a series that will convert most people into shoujo fans. If you have not yet learned to love things that are unabashedly from the perspective of an adolescent girl or embrace the peculiarities of that demographic, I encourage you to move on and try something different. Like maybe Last Quarter.

If that is a point of view you can empathize with, or even interests you without empathizing, Otaku Vampire's Love Bite is a lovely little confection from Julietta Suzuki, best known in English as the creator of Kamisama Kiss. Rina is a vampire and an otaku, so her indulgent father lets her move to Japan to live her dreams of buying every single bit of merchandise featuring her beloved favorite character Mao. As someone who has yet to fully grow out of falling for anime characters (and is very appreciative of her husband, who tolerates this tendency) Rina is adorable. Her enthusiasm and naivete about the ways of the world cut both ways, allowing her to connect to others while also getting her dangerously close to alienating her next-door neighbor who looks just like Mao. It creates a sense of push-and-pull tension that propels the story and characters forward.

Her apartment is a complete mess, and who would find that relatable? Not me, hahaha…

Suzuki's art is simple, adorable, and simply adorable. The volume is full of rounded shapes drawn with simple, clean linework and simplified detail. This has two effects: one is that it's cute and pleasant to look at! But on top of that, it makes the moments that the art shifts away from that all the more effective, drawing attention to themselves with their level of detail.