I started reading this manga cause I had watched the anime and I absolutely loved it. The music was beautiful, I loved how the characters’ stories were told, the way they grew in such a short amount of time, but what really hooked me into the story was the emotions that the anime conveyed. Their grief, their sadness, their angriness, it was all layed out so perfectly that you almost felt their emotions with them. When it comes to the anime and the manga part that was adapted (until vol 3) I honestly prefered the anime. The music plays such a part in the story, with the way Mafuyu tells his emotions through his lyrics, that you just don’t get in the manga. Don’t get me wrong, this part of the manga was beautiful and damn did I cry at some parts, but the anime just goes that extra step. But anyways I digress!!! Enough about the anime and let’s talk about the manga.

Plot

Man I don’t even know where to start, the whole story of this manga is just beautiful. It has such a nice blend of music and them being in a band, romance, friendships and all their emotions that affect the story.

One thing I really appreciate about this manga is that, even though it is a BL and there’s a lot of drama between characters about their relationships, the story is focused a lot on music and the characters’ growth. We have 4 people who are in a band together and throughout the manga they’re trying to grow as a band, write and compose music, try to get more recognition and figure out what they want to do in the future as a band. While that’s happening, the characters are going through stuff in their own lives that then affects the main aspect of the plot aka music. It was also so interesting to see that, whenever someone had something going on in their lives, it reflected in the way they played their instruments and the other characters could also tell right away something was wrong or changed (I really liked how Mafuyu was always so aware of this).

While we are shown Mafuyu and Uenoyama and the development of their romance and obviously we’re rooting for them throughout the manga, it’s so interesting how big of an impact Yuki has on the story. I’m not even talking about what happened to Yuki, and obviously if that didn’t happen then this story wouldn’t exist, it’s more the way that they talk about Yuki and Yuki and Mafuyu’s relationship, that it kinda makes you root for them, even though it’s impossible. They talk about him in such a kind and emotional way, that it almost feels like he’s there with them and he’s changing the story with them. I literally couldn’t help myself but cry everytime they mentioned and showed Yuki.

Characters

The way characters are written and portrayed has a huge impact on how I feel about a story, so I decided to highlight each one.

Mafuyu Satou
In one word: adorable. He’s a lovable character who grows soooo much throughout the story. He’s the typical quiet kid who is always in his own world and doesn’t say much. But that’s the thing, he may not say much, but he has so much to say, which he says through his music, and I found that so beautiful. He does get more comfortable with this feelings throughout the story, and learns how to properly express himself, and I loved how much he relies on his friends and just gets more comfortable with them.

Ritsuka Uenoyama
It’s kinda interesting how, even though he’s basically the main character and one of the first characters we’re introduced to, he didn’t have a huge impact on me. Nonetheless, I did really enjoy seeing his personality and how much he cares about the people around him, specially Mafuyu. I also loved the transition between the first few chapters, where he and Mafuyu are the main focus of the story and we see them get closer, to latter chapters, where we see Uenoyama as an individual and we find out more about what he truly wants to do in his live and with his music.

Haruki Nakayama
My beloved Haruki. When watching the anime, he was the character that grabbed all my attention, and he always made me laugh, and reading the manga and learning more about his character just made me love him even more. At the beginning of the story, he feels a lot like a supportive character for the main characters. We don’t know much about him, we see him mostly help the other characters and encourage them to grow, and we see him suffer from how much he loves Akihiko while not being able to do anything about it. But throughout the manga we see him evolve as a character, and he goes from being there for others, to him being his own person and showing his own pain.

Akihiko Kaji
I had such high hopes for him, and he disappointed me a little, but I also understand his pain. He’s the cool guy who seems very intimidating at first but, when you get to know him, he’s just a chill guy who does whatever he wants and lives his life according to his own wants and needs, which sometimes can go wrong. For most of the story, he’s dealing with the pain of having his heart broken and that’s all he cares about. He tries to get his mind off of this pain by doing regretful things that, in the process, hurt him, the person that loves him and even the person who broke his heart.

With that said, I do think that the assault scene with Hikaru was very unnecessary, and it really changed the way I see him. I liked the consequences of this scene, we got to see Akihiko’s pain and kinda see his true self, while also seeing his regret and him changing because of it. I loveddd how Haruki didn’t forgive him right away and was really pissed at him, for obvious reasons, and while he still continued to love him, the way he viewed Akihiko changed completely. Then again, even though I did like what happened after that scene, it could have been done differently.

He does redeem himself and grows from his mistakes, but it still doesn’t forgive the pain he caused others and I feel like he just got things easy.

Hiiragi Kashima and Shizusumi Yagi
When I started reading the manga and we were introduced to Hiiragi and Shizusumi, I thought they were just going to be supporting characters to Mafuyu. We get to know their relationship to Mafuyu and Yuki, their backstories and how they became friends, and even how they help Mafuyu with his grief. But I’m so glad they dove deeper into their stories and we got to know each of their personalities and how they feel about each other. Shizusumi reminds me a lot of Akihiko, in the sense that he doesn’t really show a lot of emotions and he mainly shows his love through actions (he also does some weird things that remind me of Akihiko but anyways) and while he may not say it, everything that he does has a meaning behind it, he just doesn’t know how to properly express it. Hiiragi was a character that I got more fond of the more I read the manga. He has a very similar personality to Uenoyama, so it was always funny to see them together and their personalities just crash.

Art style

The artstyle of this manga was beautiful. The characters are such drawn in a way that each one of them is so unique and my favorite panels were always the ones where they were playing music cause, even though you obviously can’t listen to what they’re playing, you can feel how much passion there is in what they’re doing. And those panels were just very visually appealing lmao.

After reading the manga I finally understood why it's so loved and, while it focuses a lot on the bl and music aspect of it, it also talks about so much more and even deeper feelings like grief (not only about death, but also losing things in your life to focus on others), finding yourself and thinking about your future. Even with it's flaws, overall it really is a beautiful manga.

At the beginning of the manga, we're introduced to two concepts that I personally found very interesting:

1. A 14 years old who looses joy in school and life and decides to walk around at night, making him discover a whole new world, experience new emotions, hobbies and meet new people that will change his life. I really liked this concept, especially with the person being so young, with him realizing that there’s still so much to learn and experience, and making him have a new perspective in life. When Kou meets Nazuna, he has this sudden realization of what he really wants to do with is life. But will this feeling change? How will him growing and changing as a person change his view in life and on what he wants to do in the future?

2. The existence of vampires, underlings and how they work in a human society. I found it really interesting how, for them, sucking blood is not only a way to eat, but also a way to get pleasure. Sucking blood is both food and sex.

However, these two concepts should not coexist. A 14 year old shouldn't be involved in this act of sucking blood, knowning that it's not just food. Obviously this is fiction and it's just a story, but 14 is just too young. I feel like the plot relies a lot on Kou (and Mahiru) being very innocent, talking about him being a virgin and the fact that he's never been in love, but they still could’ve done all that with a young adult, there was no need for him to be in middle school. The school scenes could've been in college. But anyways, obviously this isn't the whole plot and there's soooo much more to the story, this isn't something that should stop you from reading this manga.

Artsyle

I'm starting with the artsyle of this manga, because it was the main reason why I started reading it, and omg it is just beautiful. Not only the artstyle itself, but the dynamic poses that we get from the characters. Nazuna, who is a very expressive character and is a lot of the times in the air, has such beautiful drawing and poses that just make you take a second and enjoy the art.

Aside from the characters' poses, the expressions of each character is also something to really take in when it comes to their drawing. The manga has quite a few comedy moments, and the expressions really help convey that.

Characters

The characters and their different personalities is definitely something major in this manga. They are all very well written and each have a unique personality that makes it stand them out in their own moments. The character development was also insane. Basically all the characters grew with the story, which made even more interested in each one, always wondering how they would change with what was happening at the moment and how they would react/resolve what was going on. I really liked how kind Kou was and how much he cared about the people around him, always trying to make sure that everyone was safe and that there wouldn't need to be any killing involved.

Plot

Now the plot of this manga started of....weak. At the beginning we see Kou and Nazuna getting to know each other while they enjoy the night, but nothing major happens until around chapter 18, when we're introduced to more characters and then they start to shake the story. Something that was very well done and I really appreciated was how smooth the story was. The whole manga felt like one giant strip with now breaks in between. Like the story would change and would focus on different characters each time, but that change made sense, it didn't feel forced.

The plot twists were crazy and really made you view the whole story with a different prespective and look at the characters in a deeper way. They mostly happened when we were learning about Nazuna's background, which made everything more interesting. Her background isn't something that happened in the past and stayed in the past. All her story and how she came to be is still relevant to the present, and well as the people in her life, that she met in the past, still have an impact with the now. It just made everything so much more interesting.

The manga focuses a lot on love (aside from the fact that, for a human to become a vampire, they have to fall in love with one) and what it means to love someone, compared to just liking or compared to the love of a friend. I loved that they touched on this topic, considering that vampires only “job” is to make people fall in love with them to make underlings, so it was never important for them to know or experience what love is, only humans had to do that. But when some characters start to question what love is, their whole perspective on vampires and humans change. There are consequences to humans falling in love with vampires, but then we find out that there are also consequences to vampires falling in love with humans. But if they’ve never been in love, how do they know if they’ve fallen in love with a human? Has that ever even happened? When you’ve never experienced a certain emotion, and you don’t know how someone is supposed to feel, you try to figure it out yourself and you make your own definition of the emotion which, in some cases and also shown in this manga, can go to extremes. There’s a lot of little backstories that we are told that only later we find out the real meaning of them, with some of them having to do with love.

Kou and Nazuna's relationship

Last but not least, the main characters' relationship. This is a big part of the story, since everything starts with Kou wanting to be a vampire but, to do that, he has to fall in love with Nazuna, and I love how much it evolved and changed. Nazuna is someone very sassy that likes to tell dirty jokes and is always teasing Kou, while Kou is someone more chill, that just wants to enjoy the night and try to be happier. This contrast in their personalities goes so well, with them getting closer every day and starting to worry about one another. Their little moments of romance is something that I really enjoyed, cause we got to see them go from a "business" relationship to almost an actuall relationship with feelings.

Now, I don't want to repeat myself, but I will. The fact that he's 14 made me enjoy this part of the story way less that I wanted to. There were moments where I completely forgot about his age and the fact that Nazuna also looks so young kinda helped with me enjoying seeing them together, but then I was either reminded of his age by the characters, or Nazuna would say one of her lewd jokes and I would be brought back to reality. I'm not gonna talk much more about it, but if he was older, I would've enjoyed the manga wayyy more.

Anyways, even though this manga has its negative side, it's also such a beautiful story about finding yourself, learning to love and learning what to do with that love. Truly an amazing story to read.