Kiss the Scars of the Girls Volume 1 Review

In the far-distant future, there’s an all-girls school hidden in the forest and all its students are vampires. There’s a rule within the school: at fourteen, the girls will be assigned a sister, who teaches the growing vampire girl how to hunt humans and feed without killing. We follow Emille, who just turned fourteen but is assigned Eve, a cold, withdrawn girl who wants nothing to do with her. Emille is a perky, positive girl who is adamant on being the best little sister, but is there a deeper reason for Eve’s hesitancy?

Vampires are such a well-known monster type in media, that they can be marketable all by themselves, due to their long history, their simple yet adaptable design (humans + fangs = vampire) and the fact that they’ve appeared in multiple genres outside of horror. They can also be a metaphor for whatever story you want to create, from the oppressive upper class to disease and so on. Then there’s the simple nature of them needing to bite and suck on the blood of humans to survive; that act can be represented as either horrifying (dying in the arms of a monster) or intimate (sacrificing one’s life to save a monster) or even romantic (the bite being a substitute for a kiss). Vampires are a great tool, but you can’t just plunk them into a story and expect to do no additional homework to make it work. Vampires, over the years, have had multiple ‘rules’ around them but can be easily adapted, depending on the creators’ needs. For example: it’s common for vampires to not walk out in the daylight (such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer or What We Do in the Shadows) but with the right protections, they can also be changed to walk abroad in the sun (2007’s TV show Moonlight had their vampires able to walk in daylight but it weakens them over time for example). You also need to lay the groundwork on how their presence affects the world they’re in; if your story is set in the modern day, are they common knowledge to humans? Or do they exist in secret? And do the vampires stay together in groups, grow up in families? Or are they mostly lone wolves that cause destruction wherever they go? I love vampires, but if you don’t establish what a vampire is within your story or have a specific place for them in the world you create, then the questions arises: why are they even in the story at all?

This is the question I raise to the Class-S, yuri manga Kiss the Scars of the Girls, and the answer it provides is not a good one. For starters, the school the story is set in? It doesn’t even have a name; there’s no establishing shot at the start of the book that explains the name, layout, or purpose of the school, it’s just a generic all-girls school where they just happen to be vampires, and their one rule is that fourteen-year-olds get ‘big sisters’ to help them flourish into full-fledge vampires (hence the Class-S tropes; which is a term for ‘romantic relationships between girls’, one older and the other younger – with the ‘S’ meaning sister in this case). This raises questions as to what happens if you don’t live in the school; do other fourteen-year-olds get taught in other schools? Or by their parents? Never elaborated on. Next we see shots of Emille eating human food just as she turns fourteen, and it’s a plot point (before the first hunt) that ‘human’ food starts to taste ‘off’ at that age, and you need blood to survive. However later in the book, the girls organise a tea party…with humans’ sweets, drinks and more, yet none of them comment on the food being tasteless, or say that it’s been adapted to vampire needs, it’s just there because tea parties are common in girls’ stories and drama tends to build up at such occasions. It’s like the author forgot that plot point; even a side story at the end of the book AGAIN references food that Emille is trying to make for Eve, and yet there’s no mention of how it differs now that her vampire senses have kicked in.

When the mangaka isn’t forgetting her own lore, she has a bad habit of introducing it JUST as it becomes relevant. In one instance in this book, it works; one big sister is attacked by a vampire hunter on her hunt and is bleeding out, and it’s just as she takes her last breath that the other characters whisper that vampires are, sadly, not immortal. It hits you as it plays on the audience’s expectations, and the new knowledge adds tension to all future hunts from now on. However at other times, this lore-dumping doesn’t work; the first hunt of the book is between Eve and Emille, and Eve does not make of any mention of dangerous humans…until she is shot by one of the hunters. Surely the threat of hunters would have come up before the girls left the school? No, it’s dropped in here for tension but it doesn’t work, due to the panel layout not only making it unclear what’s going on, but that the hunters prove to be easily avoidable after that one shot. The girls get away easily and we never see said hunters on the page; the shot comes from off-page. The story doesn’t even make it clear on whether it’s just the hunters who know of the vampires’ existence, or the scope of the organisation, or knowledge of where they live. If they’re picking off teenage girls left, right and centre, wouldn’t the school put up better security and have human blood available within the safety of their walls?

I know I’m getting very nitpicky here, but the manga really feels like a first draft of a story that got published straight away. This is Aya Haruhana’s first series (with only contributions to anthologies to her name so far) so it’s understandable that she didn’t think this through, but sadly it’s very noticeable. Not even the characters take attention away from the lacklustre world-building; Emille is the typical happy girl who never gives up, Eve’s the cold one with a dark past that slowly warms to Emille, and there’s a lot of side characters that all blur together after a while. Except for Emille’s friend Yucca, who sadly only stands out because she embodies the ‘predatory lesbian’ trope and assaults Emille at the book’s climax, leaving the first volume with a bad taste in my mouth.

I have fewer negative things to say about the art, although design-wise, the characters start to look similar after a while. However, I can’t deny that it’s a very pretty cover and the one page where Eve first bites Emille is also very nice, with great use of shading and angles. Translation from Erin Husson is all good, easy to read and tries its best to create atmosphere with the given material, but there are no translation notes.

The frustrating lack of care and attention to detail in this yuri series is so noticeable that not even my love for vampires can save it. It’s a collection of tropes the mangaka loves (she says so in the author afterword) but she’s given no thought as to how to weave them together to create an engaging series. If you really love  soaking up anything related to Class-S yuri stories, or vampires, then it might be worth a read if you can be more forgiving than me. The series recently ended in Japan, with the third volume coming out next year, so if you did want to invest in this series, you wouldn’t have to fork out too much money.

Our review copy from Yen Press was supplied by Diamond Book Distributors UK.