Koishite Akuma : In Love with the Devil

So, the summer 2009 drama season begins with the premiere of Koishite Akuma ~Vampire Boy~, or roughly in English In Love with the Devil.

This drama stars the fresh Golden Boy of Johnny’s Junior, Yuma Nakayama and the prolific veteran Johnny, Masahiko Kondo (familiarity known as Matchy)  in a story about a young vampire and a forgotten love — with some other random generic high school drama cliches thrown in.

In episode one we are met with the scene of Matchy dramatically wooing his new young bride, sucking her blood and subsequently making her his bitch. In the next scene we are introduced to an emo Yuma Nakayama walking around town in a hoody, saying only one line and causing ruckus (while slitting his wrists along the way).

Turns out our young, emo, vampire is on a quest to find his destined woman because until then, he will never get his fangs.. and only this woman can make him grow his fangs. So the entire episode is spent with Yuma emo-ing about on his way to finding his destined woman.  Once he believes he finds her, he transfers into the school as an exchange student from Romania (okay…) and, we can’t have a high school drama without having the entire female student body completely head over heels over this character.

Eventually, our emo vampire unexpectedly finds his destined woman — Not by the students in the school, nor the girl he originally set on — but his own English teacher. This sets the stage for the next episode, because our emo boy is now a full fledged, wrist cutting, vampire boy.

If you didn’t find that drive by summary ridiculous, then imagine watching the hour long first episode special.  At first it was just ridiculous to watch because the drama just screamed twilight from the moment Yuma appeared on screen, without all the sparkle, but then it just gradually got even more ridiculous. He manages to use his magic powers to trick a family into letting them live with them, which by the way this family runs a gyoza restaurant so it has garlic everywhere — much to our young vampire’s dismay and the family is overally energetic and have a positive outlook on life.

Why couldn’t he find another, less cheerful, family? I have no clue.

Matchy’s purpose in the drama is to basically antagonize Yuma into finding his girl faster. The maniacal laughter and pimpmaster moves seem more headache than entertaining. I had a hard time taking him seriously, and I was half expecting him to snap his fingers and take Yuma 6 years into the past to fix his mistakes to marry the girl he has a crush on. *coughprodaicough*

The development of the future, certainly obvious, relationship between Kato Rosa (the English teacher) and Yuma Nakayama is probably the one element of this drama that disturbs me the most. Mainly because we have a fifteen year old boy and a 24 year old teacher pining after each other. Granted its later revealed that Yuma is her long lost love from High School, it just seems so Mrs. Robinson. Its definitely not appealing at all to me for a love story.

It is clearly obvious that this drama is clearly produced for that 14 – 18 year old demographic, and its probably the biggest reason why I am NOT watching this drama this season. I do not see the appeal in it. Its just ridiculous to watch, and the fact that its making a quick buck off of the Twilight boom makes it even more annoying to sit and watch through. Also, watching Yuma Nakayama act is like someone running their nails down a chalkboard.

The boy can not act even if his life depended on it.

The problem with dramas like this is that they lack substance. I had skipped over 20 minutes of this drama to the last ten and did not miss one bit of storyline that made or broke this first episode. I believe all good dramas should hold some substance, and this drama severely lacks it. With flat pacing, predictability, and actors who don’t sell their characters it can be a severe problem in terms of gaining and keeping an audience. While young viewers will find some enjoyment in it, may it be for the pretty boys or the fantasy of it all, an older audience will not connect with this drama at all… and if they’re going in expecting a lot, they’ll be highly disappointed at the ending result.

Also, for fans of vampire mythology, the broken rules of the conventional vampire will be a large turn off. The only thing this drama is missing, and again I’ll say it, is Yuma walking around sparkling all over the place.

Obviously the Yuma fans will enjoy this, as well as the Junior fans and just those generally looking for something stupid to watch with good looking boys but this drama is definitely not for me.

Clearly no one is interested with premiere rating of 8% but who knows what this drama will bring in by the final ep. I doubt much.

Edit: Some images removed due to image shack getting hacked.