Nov 8, 2023
I've seen and read my fair share of good yuri anime and manga...but I've also seen some really bad yuri anime and manga. Kiss The Scars of The Girls, the debut work of one Aya Haruhana, kind of falls in the middle. It just got licensed by Yen Press for an English release here, and it's pretty short, clocking in at three volumes long. Deep within a dark forest, there's an all-girls' school that has a secret: All of the students are vampires. Said vampire girls are mandated to form bonds of sisterhood in order to hunt without attracting attention. Emielle Florence is one such
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girl, as upon her 14th birthday, she is delighted to finally have an older sister to bond with. But the sister turns out to be Eve Winter, an icy girl who really doesn't want anything to do with Emielle or the whole sisterhood rule. But whether they like it or not, Emielle and Eve are stuck together, and Emielle in particular really wants to be friends with Eve, whose troubled past continues to haunt her.
Not gonna lie, I wasn't a fan of this one. Kiss The Scars is just so generic, and the whole vampire angle doesn't really do anything to spice it up, especially since the authoress doesn't really do anything with it beyond "What if I made a Class S yuri story but with vampires?" There's so many unanswered questions in regards to the series' overall lore. Who funds the school and keeps it open? Why do the girls have to be in pairs when they hunt? The vampires are instructed not to kill people when they suck blood, but who mandated that rule? What's the deal with the Vampire Hunter group? Hell, the school that these girls go to doesn't even have a name, for God's sake! If you're going to establish this kind of premise and setting, at least put in the effort to establish some basic rules and lore and give it some history! Or even do something with it. Manga such as The Case Study of Vanitas and Hellsing do just that and are far better series for it. The whole thing just feels like Haruhana just slapped vampires onto a typical yuri story and called it a day, and if you take the vampire premise out, the story itself isn't different from other yuri stories that rehash the same premise, so Kiss The Scars still feels really generic and flavorless.
That flavorlessness also extends to the characters and their writing. All of them are one-note archetypes with one dominant personality trait, and while some of them do receive some development and backstory, they still remain rote stereotypes, and nothing the series did made me want to care about them in any way whatsoever. Emielle is your typical perky girl, Eve's whole personality is just "I'm angsty and emo," Yucca is unhealthily obsessed with Emielle, and Luce is the quiet library girl. The character I hated the most was Violetta, who spends all her time being unnecessarily bitchy for no reason, especially towards Luce, and seriously, her reasons for hating Luce are so petty and stupid that they border on ridiculous. None of the characters had any natural chemistry amongst one another whatsoever, making whatever romance they have come off as sloppy and half-baked. There's one character, Colette, who appears in volume 2 and might have presented an interesting conflict, but she just gets shunted out of the story, so she leaves absolutely no impact whatsoever, making me wonder just why she was even here in the first place. With the series only being three volumes long, it doesn't use its short time to really flesh out its characters or make them even remotely interesting whatsoever.
Honestly, the only good thing Kiss The Scars has going for it is its art. The backgrounds and paneling are fine, the girls have nice, down-to-earth designs, and the colored splash pages are very striking to look at, but that's really all the praise I can give this. Then again, the problems with the story's writing and characterization might just be chalked up to the author's inexperience, as this is her first original work, and for all we know, she might get better as she puts out more work and gains more experience. Who knows? Plus, I have seen far worse than Kiss The Scars, so I'm not gonna knock it too badly. If you're into your typical yuri stories about girls loving each other passionately, you do you. You'll probably get more enjoyment out of this than I did. But Kiss The Scars of The Girl is just a generic Class S yuri manga but with vampires, and doesn't really know what to do with itself. It's a short read, but there are better vampire stories out there.
Reviewer’s Rating: 5
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