
Links go to search results. Availability varies by region.
ă´ăĄăłăă¤ă˘çˇĺ寎
12
TV
Finished Airing
Apr 7, 2024 to Jun 23, 2024
Homeless and fresh out of employment, Mito Yamamoto faces familiar loneliness and despair. Luck is simply not on Mito's side; when he stumbles upon a cafe and cuts his hand, a strange server named Ruka Saotome licks the blood from his wound and even dramatically retches at its apparent disgusting taste. Offended and dispirited, Mito runs off to a bridge, hoping to put an end to his misery. But when Mito accidentally slips, he is miraculously saved by Ruka, who reveals he is a vampire. Unable to drink blood from just any woman for mysterious reasons, Ruka proposes that Mito become his thrallâa vampire's human servant and primary source of food. In this deal, Ruka will shower Mito with love to sweeten his blood, and Mito will gain a warm place to call home. However, there is an issue: Mito is a girl! Concealing her long, flowing hair and feminine body, Mito readily takes this chance and enrolls in the Hijirigaoka Boys' High School while working part-time at the cafe with Ruka. But the more Mito's bond with Ruka deepens, the more she struggles to hide her secret. [Written by MAL Rewrite]
5.2/10
Average Review Score
24%
Recommend It
17
Reviews Worldwide
Vampire Dormitory has cured me of my depression in a way that my therapist could only dream of. It has pulled me from a dark place that I thought I could never escape. Every week me and my best friend would tune in to watch this gift from God that has been blessed upon us. Mito is the most complex and fleshed out character I have ever had the pleasure of being introduced to. The way she keeps on going and fighting for her love despite her trauma is so beautiful and inspired. Speaking of her love interest, Ruka, our knight in shining armor, is such anamazing character that does NOT have a fuckass hairstyle that makes me feel better about my bob cut in 3rd grade. Every episode he blesses my screen and I get to watch as he treats Mito the way any sane would like for their S/O to treat them. I especially loved the episode where he said "It's Ruka time" and then Ruka'ed away. Everyone and their mom should watch Vampire Dormitory. It's a true cinematic masterpiece (even though it isn't a movie, it deserves an Oscar) ((It's that good guys, trust)) that will change your perspective on life and leave you a changed person. 10/10 3/10 if I hadn't watched it with a friend
Click an episode to read its synopsis.
With every new season that passes by, dozens upon dozens of low-quality power fantasies for lonely, horny men are produced, and itâs gotten pretty exhausting. Vampire Dormitory is an absolute breath of fresh air, because it comes to deliver something I didnât know how much we needed: a low-quality power fantasy for lonely, horny women! Vampire Dormitory is about a teenage girl named Mito Yamamoto who is poor and homeless ever since being orphaned, because despite how canonically beautiful she is, no one wanted to take her in! After getting fired from her job for being too pretty (no, really), she thinks about killing herself, fallsoff the bridge on accident, and is inexplicably saved by a hot vampire. I couldnât make this up if I tried. Iâm almost convinced itâs plagiarizing something from Wattpad. But thatâs not allâthereâs something about Mito that makes her different from every other female protagonist of a trashy romance manga: for completely unexplained reasons, sheâs a crossdresser! And, as it turns out, sheâs wearing a wigâunderneath it she has long flowing hair that looks exactly like the wig sheâs wearing, and always looks perfect when she takes the wig off. How does she take care of long hair so well if sheâs homeless? How did she afford such a realistic wig? Why doesnât she just get a damn haircut because it would be 1000x easier? Why is she crossdressing in the first place when it would be way less complicated not to and she has no reason to? Who knows! Not the author! This hot vampire happens to be a waiter at a local establishment, because men look sexy in waiter uniforms, and this is where the two of them actually first met; she wanted to apply for a job there and accidentally broke a vase on her way in. Huh, what does that remind you of⌠Anyways! This vampire, a young man by the name of Ruka, goes to drink her blood after she cut herself on the vase, and he thinks her blood is absolutely disgusting! Just TERRIBLE. However, he wants to invite her to live and attend school with him as his personalâŚwell, the word they use is âthrall,â but if there werenât a word for it Iâd say âdrinking slave.â Why does he want to keep her around to regularly drink from if he thinks her blood is terrible? Well you see, blood tastes better if youâre loved, and the reason her blood sucks is because nobody loves her despite how jaw-droppingly beautiful she is, so he wants to make her blood taste better by loving her. BecauseâŚ? Unclear. Why he doesnât just find someone with good blood to drink from is beyond me. Oh yeah, and donât forget, he thinks sheâs a guy! And heâs very explicitly doing this because heâs a degenerate otaku (specifically a magical girl fan) and real women scare him. Despite how buck wild that is, thatâs actually unironically a good bit; I have to respect it. Mito agrees to this, because sheâs poor and homeless, so now she spends the series hiding her identity as a woman while wacky romantic hijinks ensue. Yeah, romantic hijinks ensue while he thinks sheâs a boy, meaning Ruka is justâŚexplicitly bisexual. And he says explicitly that heâs in love with a man at the end of the show. Diversity win! The love interest from the stupidest show youâve ever seen is bisexual! Interestingly, at first he is deeply in denial about that fact, because he goes off on âhow can I feel this way about a guy?!â rants MULTIPLE times, but the fact that he does is hilarious because nobody in this show is homophobicânot only that, but theyâre the exact opposite, being shown supportive of the possibility of their relationship and wanting them to get together, so I have no idea why he starts off so deeply in denial over his feelings for a âman.â Anyways, Ruka and Mito have romantic tension like, immediately after meeting each other, and make sure to get a dozen romance cliches out of the way in the first few episodes despite barely knowing each other, and after getting to know each other the tropes increase tenfold. It feels like the author was trying to win a competition to see if it was possible to fit every single stereotypical romance trope into twelve episodes of television. Interestingly, Ruka says that heâs essentially using Mito as a placeholder for when he meets his âdestined partner,â a woman who is supposed to be his one true love with the most delicious blood ever, and if you fall in love with someone else youâre cursed for life. Is this an actual provable thing that happens to vampires? Is it just a weird cultural value? I hope youâre seeing a pattern and can parse out that answer from there. And this makes it getâŚweird. Because the whole âyou have a woman destined for you so stop falling in love with a manâ thing reads like an allegory for homophobia. Like, the only reason he reads as bisexual and not homosexual is because we know eventually her gender will be revealed and theyâll still be a couple. Granted, the guy pushing this idea says âdonât fall in love with anyone regardless of whether theyâre male or femaleâ so he isnât actually homophobic, but regardless, his commands still have overtones of homophobia. SoâŚwhy not just commit to the bit and make it a yaoi, then? You literally wrote yaoi and then made one secretly a woman becauseâŚ? (Actually, put a pin in the yaoi topic. I WILL be coming back to it) I know itâs meant for audience projection or whatever, but in that caseâŚwho is this for? Who is the target audience? How many teenage girls fantasize about falling in love with a man while crossdressing? Let me tell you, any teenage âgirlâ who fantasizes about that is going to make a huge revelation about themself in a few years, so what Iâm saying isâŚthis story would just make way more sense if the main character were transgender. Iâm not saying that just for the sake of diversity or anything. Genuinely her crossdressing is so nonsensical and weird, transgenderism feels like the occamâs razor here. Either that or just making the main character a cisgender male and making it a yaoi. And I donât just mean transmasculinity. Quite a few scenes of Mito expressing a desire to be seen as a girl and wear womenâs clothes read as similar to the transfeminine experience. It doesnât matter. All that matters is her crossdressing is so contrived and weird it would somehow be simpler if she were just transgender in either direction. Seriously, the plot of this show is the very definition of contrived. Not only is all of the drama stereotypical and overdone for the romance genre, but none of it has any reason to be happening at all. The drama is so manufactured you can tell the author really wanted to force in cliches where it didnât make sense for there to be any. Genuinely all of this conflict could have been solved if the characters just thought about things like real people, but theyâre not real people, theyâre Vampire Dormitory characters, so their brains turned to mush the moment it started airing. Thereâs also a pointless love triangle, because when I say this has every stereotypical romantic trope, I mean it. Her other love interest (you know, the one who stands no chance at winning so whatâs the point of him even being here?), Ren, is dark and edgy to contrast Rukaâs sheer dorkiness. He has a tragic backstory and mysterious scars all over his backâthe kind youâve seen in a million romance novels before. He is also infinitely less interesting than the main love interest, as he doesnât have the gimmick of loser otaku dweeb going for him so heâs just a bunch of overcooked tropes with nothing unique or special to care about. Oh, and he sucks! Taking after Kaname Kuran before him, he starts off seeming fine enough, if mysterious and edgy, before devolving into a manipulative, controlling asshole who acts like heâs doing it all out of love. And I am absolutely not going to spoil it, but the things that Ren does near the end of the show are their own degree of 1) heinous 2) batshit fucking insane; I could not make them up if I tried. Yet heâs so easily forgiven and Mito still trusts him. But whatever, Ren was so clearly the loser of the love triangle from day one that I donât care all that much. All I can really say about it is that it involves underage marriage, and Ren is also by far not the only character to get wrapped up in it. There is so much child marriage in this show. You are all in high school. Ren is explicitly seventeen. Do vampires regularly groom underage brides? Anyways, as for the rest of the supporting cast⌠Okay, take out that pin from earlier; itâs time to address it. Thereâs actual yaoi in this show. Like, 100% explicit on-screen romance between two men. Itâs between two of the supporting characters, who act as our beta couple. Now, making these two a thing was a good decision because it made two previously boring characters way more interesting, but it also just begs the question even further: why isnât the main couple also yaoi? Why is this not a BL? What? The only other supporting character worth mentioning is Rukaâs butler/the vampire king (it makes just as much sense in context), and heâs really only worth mentioning because his dub VA was so clearly doing his best J Michael Tatum impression. Itâs not subtle. Also, this show looks like shit. I donât usually knock animation because I know itâs expensive and difficult, but itâs worth mentioning. Everything is just slightly off. Instead of animating anything that requires a lot of movement, theyâll just put voiced lines over stills. Episode three features a river with some of the strangest looking water Iâve ever seen in anime. CGI horses in the sky. This show was running on a budget of 1000 yen and a dream. However, after all is said and doneâŚI love Vampire Dormitory so much. It is the dumbest, most ridiculous show I have ever seen in my life. Nothing that happens makes any sense. The dialogue is weird and unnatural. It looks a little strange at all times. But at the same time, itâs so genuinely charming. Despite its poor quality, I canât help but get invested in the weird main couple. The love interest is a bisexual otaku loser vampire waiter (five words I never thought Iâd say in succession) and the main character is crossdressing for no reason. Thatâs so unbelievably dumb it loops right back around to being highly shippable. The romantic moments are trashy and overdone, but at the same time are genuinely sweet (although it probably helps that I watched it in dub, and the dub voice actors did very well with the script they were givenâwhich was absolutely not doing them any favors). Those two love each other so much, in a way that genuinely warms the heart underneath the stupidity, and I canât deny it. In the end, I just canât help but root for the main couple despite how poorly written the entire thing is. In fact, the poor writing makes it all the more charming. Itâs poor in a way that is not frustrating and boring, but so wild and insane you have to know more. Itâs so unashamed of what it is, nothing but indulgent in sexy, stupid fun without a thought behind those eyes, and I have to respect that! While it may be low quality, I am genuinely charmed by how much Vampire Dormitory loves being Vampire Dormitory. Itâs here for a fun time and a fun time alone, and it was never trying to be more than that, so why not have fun with it? Is it good? Not technically. Do I recommend it? Absolutely. Vampire Dormitory is the stupidest show I have ever watched, and I couldnât stop smiling the whole time.
Vampire Dormitory - Please don't make this work as the definitive version of a legendary anniversary...let this be a learning lesson for all. Vampire stories are the bane and boon of any industry medium, both in the West and everywhere, and as a guy myself, I do love to take a gander at stories that can actually execute the vampire theme well, with recent examples ranging from the comedy series of Kyuuketsuki Sugu Shinu a.k.a The Vampire Dies in No Time, to growing modern classics like Yofukashi no Uta a.k.a Call of the Night and Vanitas no Karte a.k.a The Case Study of Vanitas. However, Ireally sympathise for the Shoujo audience, which has been really looking forward to some good Shoujo content for the past few years, to not only be baited by garbage/trash Isekai-esque standards of delivering nothing but the worst, but to feel like anime producers just don't want to gamble on actually good Shoujo works floating all around. And in this season, Vampire Dormitory is that show, from a female author that I ACTUALLY respect for her past works: Ema Toyama, with 2009-2015's Watashi ni xx Shinasai! a.k.a Missions of Love, being her most prized work, winning Best Children's Manga at Kodansha's 36th annual Manga Awards, and a source work that I'm very closely knitted to being one of my favourite manga of all time. In fact, Ema Toyama got her start publishing stories for one of Japan's oldest Shoujo manga magazines: Kodansha's Nakayoshi, which features the classics of the likes of Sailor Moon and Cardcaptor Sakura, celebrating its 70th anniversary this year. But to see Ema Toyama go from said manga to Vampire Dormitory, being the best that Nakayoshi has to offer currently, the Shoujo AniManga scene is truly in deep shit and trouble being so out of touch. I'm not going to sugarcoat things: in the words of fellow reviewer @gingerholic, Vampire Dormitory is truly the "best of both worlds," combining Twilight with Ouran High School Host Club, because having a career of being a mangaka for 20 years be damned to write lots of stories, and yet, have a severe case of writer's block enough to produce this bullshit of a Shoujo work. This is the story of Mito Yamamoto, a beautiful Ikemen whose life is not so blessed by Lady Luck, and after having someone drink her blood but only being told that it tastes bad, he already declares himself defeated by life. The kicker: the same guy who drank his blood, saved him from a near-suicide, and soon reveals that he's a vampire in disguise, trying to seek out his destined partner to become the Lord of the Vampires. As if this plot isn't twisted enough, Mito is actually a girl, being feminine in nature, but with looks akin to those of an Ikemen, which also puts the girls to delight. It's a game of hide-and-seek about hiding secrets, but this game is infested with too many no-shit-Sherlock moments, which is the definition of tropes stacked one onto another with no end in sight. I already knew that this cast of characters isn't going to stack up to the likes of Ouran High School Host Club, but even with them being a much more BL version of it, just doesn't make things anymore tropey and instead, just fuels for more braindead interactions between a girl who chooses to crossdress just because, and guys who are hot Ikemen by themselves, yet are dense in the larger scale of the picture, especially towards Ruka Saotome and Ren Nikaido, a vampire and a dhampir, respectively, for showering love to Mito in their own ways that only the likes of Twilight can manifest. To that end, I would say that this is indeed Japan's version of Twilight, only more cringeworthy and a clear frustration at the behest of Ema Toyama's crude half-hearted ass of a plot and, presumably, her version of a fiery drama of relationships gone horribly wrong. Again, even along with the co-conspirators of Komori being the cafe owner of a sweets shop that house both vampires and normal humans of Juri and Takara Kagurazaka, I just find myself being so baffled at what a Shoujo of a near-BL-esque this can be, to the point of puke. Studio Blanc's production is serviceable, I'll give it that, and the same can be said about the OST itself, which is also decent, if not mediocre at best. Also, FANTASTICS's "Sugar Blood Kiss" for the OP song is such a perfect fit for the series, it almost seems like this is the ONLY true standout of the entire show. Seriously, I was hoping better for the Shoujo market when it comes to anime, but aside from producers having cold feet to just go with the current trend of the Shoujo genre, having works like these just tells you that Shoujo anime is born to die once works get greenlit, and there's just no getting out of this seemingly never-ending winding trope of "bad boys being good for relationships." For the love of God, AVOID this show at ALL costs. You're not missing much...unless you're a Twilight fanatic and want some more of these cringeworthy BS stories like this.
When I watch this anime, I feel like I'm a 14-year-old watching Twilight. It feels like a well-made parody. The plot isn't too interesting but not too lame either. I've never tought that a girl can turn peoples gay by made fell in love with her. Just bravo Mito ! I've realy like Ren too because this guy is litteraly the perfect theorycraft "chad" : handsome, black hair, great fighter, has a bike, asocial, brave, a great sense of justice, a sad past, and more... This anime is just fun to watch if you don't take it seriously. I didn't expect to enjoy this anime asmuch as I did. It was very fun, and I recommend it if you like wasting time.
My higher rating is a bit biased as I've been a fan of Ema Toyamas' works since 2011, when I read Koko Ni Iru Yo. She has written amazing works, but Vampire Dormitory is definitely not her best though. Relieved at least one of her works has gotten an anime though. I did enjoy the character interactions and chemistry with one another (Mito & Ruka) vs (Mito & Ren). It felt very Twilight-esque for my mid-20s heart that thinks about my younger days when I raved for the love triangle trope. Though the slight-BL bait kept deterring me from wanting to keep watching and readingat times. I get why it's there, but honestly felt like the story could've done well without it (and prevented a number of issues the main leads faced in the series) Voice acting is amazing! I recognize mito's va as Fern from Frieren, Ruka as Akane from TBHK, and Ren from [insert the countless hot MCs Umehara Yuichiro plays]. Lotis VA also plays another vampire from the Diabolik Lovers (2013), and the Founder's VA is ALSO another vampire in the anime Dance with Devils (2015). They're like little cameos and both are animes I'd recommend if you want something similar to this show (and that isn't Vampire Knight.) Animation is a bit wonky and inconsistent at times. Ema Toyama's art style is actually hard to replicate into animation now that I've actually seen a work of hers animated. While the main & supporting cast remains (for the most part) are drawn consistently in keeping the Toyama's art style, the background characters look completely different at times which feels a little jarring. I hope that improvements are made for the blu-ray release. But overall, I can understand why people can have mixed feelings over this. This is a silly and cute little vampire shoujo romance with a variety of twists and crazy turns. When watching or reading, I would recommend not thinking about the situations too deeply to continue enjoying the work. Though as a Nakayoshi anniversary anime, really think her other popular work Watashi Ni XX Shinasai should've gotten animated instead of this work.