Let me paint the picture for you of where I’m at right now as a critic trying to deal with the uncontrolled disaster that was my experience with Diabolik Lovers; it’s 8 in the afternoon on my day off, I’m sitting here agonizing over what intro could possibly capture the core of how the 5-6 hours I spent watching this shit actually made me feel, and now I’m at the point where I realize the simple act of admitting defeat and acknowledging how pointless it is to try and break this down coherently seems like a better way of conveying my thoughts about it to you than the numerous alternatives. I try to give every show that I watch an honest chance, regardless of whether or not I assume it will be bad (which I rightly did assume in this case primarily because I was warned in advance by family that it would be); Mahou Shoujo Site, Happy Sugar Life, and even Yofukashi no Uta to a certain extent are all shows that subverted my own expectation that they would be trashy. This is not one of those times, however. I recognize, first of all, that I am not the target audience for this at all; an anime adaptation of an otome game about generic otome protagonist #87,000 being caught up in a reverse harem with a bunch of edgy vampire twink boys who want to suck her blood and don’t really give two shits one way or the other about her opinion on the matter. This is, at its very core, junk-food entertainment for a very specific niche, and I don’t necessarily think that it’s wrong to be a part of that niche, but there has to be a conscious effort made by the viewer to make a firm distinction between these ridiculous fantastical scenarios and reality. This is most relevant when using the female protagonist of Diabolik Lovers as a lens through which to examine the relationship dynamic we see here between her and literally every single one of her romantic interests; each and every single “romantic” scene that plays out in Diabolik Lovers is a carbon copy of the one that precedes it in all but the most artificial and superfluous of ways. In case I haven’t made my own feelings on the matter clear at this point, let me be the voice of reason: this is not okay. Setting aside the absolutely absurd plotline which becomes relevant towards the final third of the show’s runtime, most of Diabolik Lovers consists of grossly fetishized and extremely uncomfortable scenes of sexual violence and abuse in which the protagonist is treated like complete and utter shit by love interests who couldn’t give less of a shit about her as a person, and she lets them! That is the show; that is how it opens, that is the reason why you are expected to be there, and that is the initial impression that it wants to leave on the viewer. The plot is almost nonexistent until the show begins nearing its end and serves as little more than an excuse for the aforementioned fetish material, made somehow even more obvious by the POV segments following the show’s absolutely hysterical cliffhanger ending in which all of the assorted vampire boys insult the viewer directly. In fact, it is very strongly implied over the course of the show’s runtime that not only is the protagonist perfectly fine with her various love interests trampling over her and treating her like trash (against her will, mind you), but she also genuinely cares about them; why? The protagonist, and the audience by extension, is literally never given any legitimate reason as to why we should see the various vampiric love interests we’re shown as anything other than antagonists, because that is literally all they do and the only thing which defines them; they are an enemy shown to be wholly incapable of saying so much as a single thing that even partially humanizes or redeems them throughout the entirety of Diabolik Lovers’ 12 episode runtime. The protagonist’s infatuation with her various romantic interests is based on essentially nothing besides surface level attraction and her own complete lack of any pride in herself; it literally does not matter how much the vampires degrade her, call her a worthless piece of shit or tell her that she’s just there for them to snack on because she is essentially just written as a blank nothing without self-worth who will go along with whatever they say while making no real effort to resist it or to establish herself as being her own person, content with being an object of infatuation dominated against her will because she has no standard for the way in which she should be treated. This is the primary reason why this show bothers me as much as it does. It bothers me for much the same reason that Tokyo Ghoul bothered me, not because of the people who can watch it and enjoy it while recognizing how fucked up it is, but because of the people who watch it and enjoy it while letting it color their viewpoint of what is acceptable to them, or what they find attractive; this is targeted primarily towards a relatively young and impressionable demographic, and that makes it reckless, irresponsible and just flat-out disgusting. I legitimately felt nauseous at one point and nearly threw up; despite all that I’ve said up to this point in regards to giving those who enjoy this show the benefit of the doubt and not simply assuming that they’re immature, we have to acknowledge the fact that those statements are essentially an attempt I’m making to be diplomatic and that I absolutely loathe everything that this show is and represents down to its very core; it is beneath contempt. The dialogue is pure unfiltered drivel, a clown show in which the writer is desperately attempting to write the same scene over and over again and make it sound different each time, searching for myriad ways to continuously drive home the same point and reaching so absurdly far in doing so that it is comical. Every character has no depth and can be defined in seconds simply by listing their surface level personality traits; I can’t even remember any of their names off the top of my head, all I remember is that there’s a fedora-tipping redditor guy who literally calls the protagonist “Bitch-chan” (quite possibly one of the show’s only redeeming qualities because it was hilarious), there’s a purple-haired guy with a teddy bear, there’s some motherfucker wearing an MP3 player around his neck like a choker, etc—you don’t need to know anything else about any of these guys because when it comes down to it, they are all carbon copies of one another in all of the ways that matter. Each and every one is aggressively unlikeable for the same reasons; all of them are complete and utter unrelenting pieces of shit that the viewer ends up actively rooting against, so much so that it is to the point where the intended antagonists of the show, Cordelia and Richter, actually end up being the good guys simply because what they’ve done wrong is so minor and insignificant compared to everything we see the so-called “protagonists” do that you can’t help but root for their enemies instead. In fact, let’s talk about the plot and the setting here in a little bit more depth… is what I would say, except that the story of Diabolik Lovers makes absolutely no sense. I came to the realization while watching this show with my best buddy that it is actually strikingly similar to Pupa in numerous ways; the shorter than normal episode length, the episodes jumping schizophrenically all over the place between disconnected, unexplained events, the lack of context for the setting, the way in which the subject matter has been so aggressively and grossly fetishized with entire episodes dedicated towards only that subject matter and nothing else, the high-school backdrop against which the story is supposed to take place being entirely irrelevant with no characters outside of the protagonist and her love interests having any importance to the story as it unfolds within its own insulated bubble; it is genuinely startling how similar the two are to one another when you get right down to it. The story itself, meaningless as it is in the grand scheme of things given that it simply exists as an elaborate excuse, is an absurd soap-operatic family drama in which this dude named Richter is trying to resurrect Cordelia, his brother’s wife and love interest with whom he has an affair, and the dead mother of the male protagonists who they intentionally murdered (maybe because the writers didn’t think they’d be edgy enough without killing their parents or something), and Richter plans to transplant her heart into the body of Yui, the female protagonist, and use it as a vessel except that this basic premise is mercilessly mutilated into an utterly incomprehensible mess. Yui is referenced over the course of the show as one of many “sacrificial brides” given to this family of vampires with the implication that this is somehow related to or a significant factor in her being the vessel which Cordelia uses in order to successfully resurrect after numerous other sacrificial brides didn’t do the trick except that nothing in Diabolik Lovers is ever explained; she’s supposed to be just some random unfortunate motherfucker whisked away to the spooky vampire mansion explicitly told that she was not specifically chosen to fulfill any greater purpose, but for whatever reason has the latent supernatural ability to fulfill the role of Cordelia’s vessel with the so-called “power of the sacrificial bride”, so what the fuck even is the sacrificial bride supposed to be? This is most obvious insofar as there being literally no explanation as to what defines a vampire within the world in which this story is taking place. There is a limit to the educated guesses a viewer can make about what vampires can do and what significance they have based on their portrayals in mythology and in other media; loose commonalities like blood sucking, having fangs and being immortal are on such an unimportant surface level in the grand scheme of things that it feels more like the characters in Diabolik Lovers are role-playing as vampires than anything else. The family of characters we see here and the drama unfolding around them are supposed to be important for no other reason than the fact that they’re vampires except we have no fucking idea what that means; the entire story just happens in what feels like its own little pocket dimension in which the vampires simply exist without fitting into the wider world in which they’re presumably supposed to have significance somehow. You could argue that the writers wanted to create the feeling or illusion that the viewer has stepped into another world, but the end result for the narrative is that what is happening onscreen feels wholly disconnected from whatever reality it is supposed to be grounded within, like the story is just a collection of scenes without a foundation there in order to make it a cohesive whole. The running theme here of absolutely nothing being explained is ever-present and results in the whole story playing out so confusingly and so laughably because the plot just unashamedly flies by the seat of its oversized clown pants. Part of the issue here is that you are clearly assumed to have played the visual novel that this anime adaptation is based on in order to fully grasp what is happening in the story, which in-and-of-itself is always an incredibly stupid way to adapt anything into a show which needs to exist independently from the material which inspired it, but if the story actually made sense or had a gripping narrative before being adapted in the first place, that would be a different matter entirely from what we’re presented with here. Even when entirely ignoring the fact that nothing is ever explained to you, the plot beats themselves are absolutely braindead and obviously fabricated for the sake of artificially driving the story forward; Cordelia, who is controlling Yui’s body when this happens, getting pushed into a lake by one of the male protagonists, not being able to swim simply because she’s in the body of Yui who didn’t know how to swim, and then Yui randomly regaining control over her own body for literally no reason AND THEN SWIMMING BACK UP is probably one of the single most schizophrenic, awful scenes I have ever witnessed in anything, and that’s just one example of how poorly thought out this shit is. The act itself of trying to explain what is happening and why here is self-defeating, because the more you try to explain it, the less sense it makes; the writers have successfully written themselves into a fucking corner. I mean for god’s sake, the ending is literally that in order to prevent Cordelia from taking over Yui’s body, one of the male protagonists just makes some magic purple juice that’ll expel Cordelia and kill her, and in order to complete the potion he needs a “piece of Cordelia” so the motherfucker with the teddy bear just fucking rips the teddy bear’s head off and reveals that for absolutely no reason whatsoever he just has a whole ass vial of Cordelia’s blood hidden inside the teddy bear, the glasses guy uses the blood in order to transform the purple juice into blue juice, they give Yui the blue juice and she’s just magically back to normal except that they imply she’s now a vampire(?) at the end by having her just go “I’m so thirsty” and then hard-cutting to the credits immediately, fucking fantastic, amazing writing. It’s just so unrelentingly absurd, Richter tries to pull a double-cross where he turns to Cordelia and starts talking shit like “I’ve actually been the one using you this whole time!” except it makes no fucking sense at all, he says some incomprehensible shit about only needing to awaken “the girl who has your heart” in order to become head of the family which I’m not even going to attempt to unpack given the fact there is literally no precedent set at any point as to how this works and then we get an “epic final battle” where these supposedly supernatural vampires just have a regular ass sword fight that’s really poorly animated and choreographed and Richter is just taken out of commission and killed with spooky green fire because he gets stabbed one time; which, by the way, makes no sense when considering we see the teddy bear guy literally throw himself off a building on purpose and survive without even a single scratch earlier on in the show which is also contradicted by Cordelia being pushed off a balcony by the fedora-tipping redditor guy and falling to her death, which is then again retconned later when the writers decided the fall didn’t actually kill her and she was killed by Richter before her body was burned after her fall with the implication that we simply didn’t see the scene of Richter cutting out her heart happen before despite the fact that the fedora guy literally looks down during that flashback sequence and personally witnesses her fucking death, it’s so fucking comically stupid. The worst part is that despite some of these things being funny enough to be reasonably considered as “so-bad-they’re-good”, the rest of the really disturbing and gross romantic material ruins them because suffering through that material is not worth the payoff of this particular nonsensical drama; it is simply not worth your time, I would go so far as to say even if you are among those within the niche this show is meant to appeal to that it does an extremely poor job not only because the writing itself is brainless but also because the love interests you are supposed to fantasize about are completely one-dimensional and entirely uninteresting characters and not simply evil people. The concept itself of a girl being suddenly trapped in a spooky mansion with a family of really fucked up vampires is not necessarily a bad one; take, for example, a version of this story in which the horror of Yui’s situation is highlighted and the vampires are treated as villain characters rather than romantic interests, in which Yui actually does shit and has agency while telling the vampire twink boys to go fuck themselves while uncovering the dark secrets of their family’s internal power struggle. That could potentially be pretty cool! Nope, instead we get vampires that are essentially omnipresent and omnipotent whenever Yui tries to resist them because it would ruin the story otherwise, but when they’re fighting eachother they might as well just be regular ass dudes; they don’t even have the decency to at least show us some cool vampire-vs-vampire action or to highlight any of what makes these vampires supernaturally powerful in the first place except when it suits the notion that Yui is powerless to do anything about her situation whatsoever. In fact, even when she actually is given the power to do something about it in the form of a weapon with the ability to kill a vampire, such as, you know, the motherfuckers kidnapping her, she instead chooses to stab herself with it for no obvious reason, which ends up doing nothing because of the aforementioned blue juice she’s force fed in the aftermath; the notion that even in death this motherfucker still can’t escape these guys is just fucked up. But I’ve said enough; Diabolik Lovers is an absolute dumpster fire and I strongly recommend that you avoid it like the plague at any and all costs. The only justification for watching this is out of sheer morbid curiousity, and even then you will more than likely be disappointed and deeply disturbed like I was, I was gonna make a joke about how I’d rather watch the entirety of the last Twilight movie over this and am now genuinely thinking about how much Twilight does right when compared to this which is an impressively low bar, I mean come on at least there’s a cool fight scene at the end of that movie. I need to properly get back on the anime grind now given that my break has gone on for far too long, take care of yourselves my fellow gamers.