Like a lot of media, anime has ideology. They tend to come up the most in the themes for shows - I have talked before about the Cult of Fun, characters struggling to do X or losing a relationship with person Y and those experiences are justified, made good, by the line “we had fun, right?”. Nothing wrong with that idea, but anime ideologies tend to play their greatest hits over and over - I can name hundreds of shows with that theme! (Dress-up Darling was last season’s obligatory Cult of Fun show). From The Power of Friendship to Shinzo Abe Says Make Babies a lot of anime can be slotted into a select few groups. Which doesn’t stop them from being great, but over time you really start to value less overplayed ideas.
Which is why I think Call of the Night is my favourite anime airing this season so far - its theme is “being an aimless nocturnal streetwalker fucking rocks” which is a very refreshing take on the vampire romance genre. Ever since the “urban fantasy” David Bowie-style vampire turn of the 80′s emerged, the vampire media ecology gained this “the Call of the Night, a life of back-alley raves and fancy parties and endless indulgence” sheen that, despite its obvious sex appeal, is almost always portrayed as fundamentally bad and also ridiculously excessive. Unending baroque orgy raves sounds fun in the abstract, but for most it would be unobtainable and also exhausting - you aren’t cool enough to pull it off, sorry!
Call of the Night is referencing this concept right in its title, but to make the genre work for its 14 year old loner protagonist it needs to scale back the ambitions: this is an anime about our high school drop main guy Kou Yamori befriending/being seduced by/being fed upon female street-hobo vampire Nazuna Nanakusa. And they spend their time literally fucking around on the streets of Tokyo together, drinking from vending machines, hanging out in parks, and just doing nothing. Every night they go back to Nazuna’s apartment for feeding and it literally looks like this:
Straight up “single men can live like this and be happy” meme level of zero fucks given.
The Call of the Night in Call of the Night has zero glitz and its entirely positive and fun, because what makes the call appealing isn’t the raves or the orgies, but the night itself, the ideology of the night:
Why do you think people stay up at night?
Because there is a show they want to watch, something they want to do?
[Nah,] It all boils down to one reason:
They aren’t satisfied with how they spent the day
The night means freedom…
Which sounds all dramatic except the inhibition released is high fiving a passing drunk guy who then throws up on your shoe:
Which is actually totally freeing! You never would high-five a drunk guy a 4:00 PM, 4:00 PM is the time of responsibilities, social pressures, the obligations of existing. But no one expects you achieve goals at 3:00 AM, everyone who could judge you is asleep! I absolutely feel this theme in real life and also don’t think I have seen it captured in anime before, or at least not very often - I didn’t know I wanted a show to reflect this part of me until I saw it.
And it leans into this aesthetically too. In CotN the night itself is gorgeous all the time in different color swatches of purples and yellows; who wouldn’t want to live here even if its all spent sitting on park swings:
But meanwhile, our main characters are not ideal seductresses. Oh sure, our vampire is a hot anime girl who wears like a leather crop top and mini skirt, its still anime, but like:
Nazuna has those tired lines under her eyes, her head is kindof flat, she spends most her time being either confused or a snickering gremlin - you aren’t shocked she is a little desperate for a blood buddy. Here is her “hey can I suck your blood” face before it goes evil:
Hell, indulge me here or skip if its cringe for you, but even her breasts are realism-first - here is her at her most seductive, moments she absolutely has, don’t get me wrong:
But notice how those aren’t the round perky bouncy anime tits of the average 2D hottie? I have had conversations with people with breasts like these about how their shape makes them insecure, which regardless of if they should be is certainly something *anime* normally agrees with.
The point is Nazuna’s grunge-flecked hotness, just like the beautiful-night-but-at-a-vending-machine aesthetic, is all calibrated to make the ordinary and stupid liberating via the socially-emancipatory potential of the night as an escape from having to worry about being stupid and ordinary. And it works, hands-down.
The actual plot mechanic, since I haven’t mentioned it, is that Kou wants to became a vampire to join the nightlife permanently, and you do that by being bitten by vampire while in love with them, while Nazuna is happy to indulge his attempt if she gets to feed on him in the meantime (which isn’t deadly). The sex metaphor is hilariously on-the-nose:
Which is a sign of the show understanding what level the audience is at when it comes to cultural awareness: it doesn’t need to play coy, you seen vampire shit before why not laugh at it? The plot is all normal them-getting-closer stuff, this isn’t a visionary show, instead its just a good version of a typical show. It does however have a grand time playing with the gender roles of this relationship: Kou is absolutely the girl of the two during bite time:
But it isn’t just jokes, like this scene of some now-consensual biteplay after Kou, delightfully, was insecure that Nazuna was just using him for sex blood and he isn’t special and Nazuna assured him no baby, it’s more than that:
I mean its still A: hilarious, and B: hot, and its great how Nazuna carries him around the city because she can fly and always climbs on top of him and initiates everything and all of that. If its your kink this show is absolutely here for you, Kou just needs some thigh highs, cat ears, and an Intro to Haskell and she will be Tumblr-ready in no time.
But the strength of this show is in how tight it is, how all the elements stack up. What are those themes again? The night frees you, not to be a brazen orgy-raving vampire lord, but to not have to deal the day-to-day stresses? Responsibilities, obligations, social expectations, you don’t have to put on a face and live up to all those under the forgiving light of the stars?
Including the onerous, demanding, constricting ones that come with Being a Man, maybe?
