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1. Basics

The very basic, most important things to think about here are adequate levels of protein and calories. Two of the cheapest, yet still nutritionally reliable, sources of protein are beans and eggs. For carbohydrates and quick calories, some form of simple grain covers that— most likely rice, since the combination of beans and rice fulfills all of the amino acids necessary for a complete protein. Eggs are complete on their own, so that's a beneficial addition.

What this looks like as a meal is going to be a mixture of plain, cooked beans and rice with whatever amount of whole eggs mixed in during the cooking process. Simple and incredibly dull to eat day after day, but surprisingly nutritious!

2. Nutrients

To cover things like vitamins and minerals, the quickest and easiest way amounts to what's done for cats and dogs with "homemade" food— as in, a scoop of nutrient powder containing the necessary amounts for function, dumped right into the above-mentioned meal. It likely makes the consistency at least a little gritty and gross, but it's a simple and cheap way to ensure bodily function, so it works.

3. Produce

While the necessary nutrients for functioning would be supplied by the first two points, produce is still a good idea. And in the case of not-people, what better way to offer that than by taking advantage of things humans don't want to consume? In this case, we're looking at the world's most awful salad, composed of leftover bits and pieces of whatever produce didn't make the cut for human meals. Nothing toxic or unsafe, of course, but things that are less than desirable.

Things that are a little too ripe, or not quite ripe enough, or perhaps slightly spoiled. Leftover bits from food processing that didn't make it into the soldiers' meals. For example, bananas that have gone brown, potato skins, carrot peels, fruit that's a little too squishy, over-ripe tomatoes, wilted lettuce— just all kinds of things that humans would pass up, this mixture is mockingly referred to as "Compost".

4. Liquids

In the military, the amount of water you drink is monitored for adequate consumption. And thanks to massive amounts of physical activity under harsh conditions, one needs a lot. Hydration is vital, so they're going to be downing plenty of plain old water.

In addition, though, an awful equivalent of a sports drink is given. Approximately the consistency of a thick, vaguely gritty broth, this drink is a mixture of water, more nutrient powder, and added electrolytes, and is meant to provide both additional nutrition and a quick, efficient means of hydration under extreme conditions. In terms of flavor, it's either going to be mostly tasteless, or vaguely resembling a faint, fruity, chemical-y sort of taste.

5. Animal Products

Foods like meat and dairy are rare occurrences. Between price, easy spoilage, and simply being considered too high-quality to waste on weapons, they don't make many appearances in the typical diet. When they do, it's cheap, simple proteins like chicken or white fish, cooked blandly, and even that's considered a special treat.

6. Others

Other foods, like many of the "favorites" we know in canon, are either going to be stolen or offered as special rewards. Belga's liking for cola, for example, would have started either from a hand-me-down from a soldier or something he managed to steal from whatever source. Cheap snacks can be offered as rewards of some form, but this varies for each gun. Some of them (the more important ones) may have been taken to events where they got to try more refined foods— and that's the kind of thing that leaves a lasting impression. Others may be given better meals as rewards for particularly good behavior, often tying into some form of abuse.

Pre-canon, Meijirou Kyouko was a fairly typical unhappy teenage girl. Her parents' relationship was strained, hanging on the precipice of divorce by a thread, while the childhood home that was once a safe place had become an emotional war zone where she went forgotten in the face of her parents' constant fighting. A "weird girl" type with no real friends, she'd taken to staying late at school and drowning her misery in the world of literature instead of going home in the evenings.

This is where she met Nazuna! A young vampire who was attending the same school as a way to acclimate to living amidst humanity. Nazuna crashed in the same mostly abandoned clubroom, and Anko, uhhh... made an especially striking first impression.

Side note— This is also one of a few scenes that establish Anko as an implied arospec lesbian. She all but says as much, outright.

Anko and Nazuna develop a friendship in these clubroom meetups, until eventually, Anko confides in Nazuna that her home life has been rough, lately. Her father is suspected of cheating, and her mother is an emotional wreck over it. The two of them decide to try to investigate Anko's father to search for evidence of his affair. (Which is also the part where we get the world's cutest little detective in training!) They don't find anything, but the process of hunting for clues both gives them something to bond over, and leads to Nazuna revealing herself as a vampire. When Anko breaks down over how miserable she feels in her current life, Nazuna offers to turn her, so that the two of them can share an immortal existence together, and Anko won't have to feel lonely.

This is also the part where it's important to note that vampires in Call of the Night are transformed when a vampire drinks the blood of a human who's in love with them. Yes, that means Nazuna wants Anko to fall in love with her. And Anko very much wants that too!

Unfortunately, this almost-romance does not end well. Anko's father has indeed been having an affair, and with the highly dangerous main vampiric antagonist of the series. Just when Anko thinks that her relationship with her family is about to be repaired (and on the night of her eighteenth birthday, no less), her now-turned-into-a-vampire father snaps, accidentally kills her mother, and then moves on to try to kill her too. She barely manages to stop him, and in the process, discovers this setting's only way of killing a vampire.

Which is— items from their human past! The lighter she'd given her father as a treasured gift is what enables her to kill him. Anko sits in that empty apartment for the rest of the night, clicking her father's lighter open and shut until his corpse dissolves in the morning sun.

This incident is what traumatizes Anko badly enough to form her hatred of vampires. She disappears in the morning with her dad's lighter and glasses, presumably packs her things at some point after that, and becomes legally dead for the next 10 years. Meijirou Kyouko becomes Uguisu Anko, her old identity killed along with whatever semblance of meaning her life had left. Scared, furious, and now desperately alone, Anko projected onto vampires as the substitute cause for all of her misery. If vampires were the problem, she had something to hate. And having something to hate gave her a reason to keep living.

Nowadays, Anko is a private detective by day (mostly investigating cheating cases and the like, much to her displeasure) and a vampire hunter by night, tracking down and killing any that she can get a lead on. She researches their backgrounds to find clues to their human past, and then uses those findings against them to actually bring them down. She's not technically trained in combat, but she's lethal at mind games (queen of psychological warfare <3), and can hold her own surprisingly well against supernatural creatures with enhanced physical abilities. She's also reckless enough to pick fights with said supernatural creatures— something which is probably easier for a woman who doesn't give a fuck about her personal wellbeing.

Now that I've gone through what led her to her current self, it's time for a compilation of Anko moments that I absolutely adore!

Her introduction scene!!! My beautiful sepia wife!! Call of the Night's anime makes HEAVY use of color schemes to emphasise theme. Nazuna and Kou's nighttime hijinks are always backlit by a technicolor starry sky, swimming with purples and blues and greens. The setting is vibrant and colorful... until Anko appears. Anko makes stunning use of warm neutrals. Her scenes are sepia and gray, illuminated primarily by her ever-present lighter and the cherry of her cigarettes.

This intro scene really drives in how dull and miserable she is, cast in grayscale from the very start, in stark contrast to the multi-colored world that the protagonists exist in. She's washed-out, tired, dulled down to warm, muddy browns, and hunched by the wayside all on her own. From Anko's first moment on screen, she's exhausted.

Reckless self-endangerment!! Anko is ready and willing to put her body on the line if it means taking down a vampire. She stands up, covered in her own blood, like nothing happened. She let a vampire maul her (because she was bitten and never turned, her blood now tastes absolutely rancid to them; this proves to be an effective disabling tactic), and then just keeps talking. Unbothered. No sense of danger. Not reacting to the pain in the slightest.

Knowing way too much about other people!! This is one of her many tactics of psychological warfare. Anko is very, very good at finding things out about people; what her detective skills don't gather, her intuition can fill in the gaps. She has a fascinating method of swinging back and forth between two extremes— disarmingly ridiculous, strange to the point where the people she's talking to can't possibly take her seriously; and then swinging right back around to threatening, intelligent, and brutally effective. By going sharply back and forth between those manipulation tactics, she throws people off their guard. They don't know what to expect. By the time they've braced themselves to respond to one thing, she's snapped around to something totally different. A lot of her conversations follow this ebb and flow of threatening vs ridiculous behavior.

Run away!!!! Anko is a chronic chainsmoker, and it SHOWS. She makes it all of eight blocks before she's doubled over and wheezing. I love this moment. It's so brief and so silly, and she's so CUTE!!

Just rip my heart out, why don't you? Doomed yuri girls, my beloved. This whole scene HURTS me. Anko's "I wish I could have fallen in love with you" line. The cut back to their younger selves. Anko wishes that her life could have been different, that she wasn't such a mess, but it will never be that way and she mourns the person she could have been. She's past the point of having that kind of relationship with Nazuna ever again, no matter how much it hurts her that she has to leave that part of her past behind. Even once they're on good terms again, their relationship will never be what it was before her life broke her.

Girl, wHAT?!? Anko casually admitting that she held a vampire captive as a torture subject at one point. As far as I know, this line is never referenced again. I think about this constantly. How old was she? How did she catch it? What exactly did she DO to the poor thing? How did no one find out that she was keeping Basically A Person in a cell somewhere and seeing what would kill it?? Anko, GIRL.

JUMPING OUT A THIRD-FLOOR WINDOW!!! My girl is SO suicidal. I'm sure she'd planned in advance and knew that bush was there, but if the fall killed her, I don't think she'd mind.

Just rip my heart out, why don't you— part 2! Anko has been living as something not quite human for the last decade. She admits at one point that she hasn't gotten a proper haircut in the last 10 years, for example. She's legally dead, and emotionally, she might as well be ACTUALLY dead too. She's been so obsessed with her quest to kill all vampires that she's abandoned any semblance of a normal, fulfilling life. She's depressed, traumatized, suicidal, and has spent the last decade emotionally circling the drain because she doesn't know what else to do with herself other than keep throwing herself at the same problem because at least it gives her existence meaning. I adore how this scene describes her mental health issues. She's so, so very sad, and her mourning the parts of her life that she's lost to trauma and misery hits hard. I want to hug her so bad. ;w;

She's a lightweight with alcohol, and REALLY pathetic about it. My cute cute cuteeeee girl. <333 I want to squeeze her, she's PRECIOUS. Her being all whiny and miserable in this scene is just too adorable for words. She's perfect. I love that despite her constant chain-smoking, the other common substance vice is just NOT her thing. Absolute loser behavior, and I mean that in the most affectionate way.

F — A: “It tastes lovely on its own, but the experience is highly entertaining. He’s quite loud, you know?”

Belga — D: “I have no words. It’s just terrible.”

Mikhael — A: “Mellow flavor and pleasant consistency. The overall product is every bit as refined as Mikhael himself.”

Ninety — D: “Underfed as he is, hardly anything comes out. What’s there is thin and fairly tasteless.”

Ghost — B: “Forgettable. Sweet enough, but it’s really nothing special.”

89 — D: “His diet is terrible, and it shows. The flavor is awful and the consistency is much too thin.”

Eins — A: “That impressive chest gives equally impressive results. Not particularly sweet, but rich, full-flavored, and creamy.”

Fal — B: “You can taste the stress, however that’s possible. The consistency is quite enjoyable, though.”

Kirsch — B: “Sweet to the point of simply too much. Good in small amounts, nauseating in large quantities.”

Hokusai — C: “I’m honestly surprised it’s not blue. Points deducted because of the worrying chemical aftertaste.”

Love1 — C: “Every part of him is a disaster, and this is no different. It’s edible, but oddly bitter.”

Like2 — A: “Fussy princess that he is, it’s no surprise the results are superb. All of that spoiling brings results.”

Mauser — B: “Overall sweet and pleasant, but easy to get tired of over time and somewhat plain.”

Parume — B: “Acceptable, yet the consistency is oddly thick. It’s a unique experience as a whole.”

Muku — C: “Bland and unremarkable. Slightly unpleasant aftertaste.”

Marks — C: “Mediocre. I wouldn’t want our dear Master to even taste it— not while there are so many better options around...”

Like Two — B: “Sweeter than his sour exterior would imply, but still lacking. All that exercise keeps him too trim to produce the proper texture.”

Herme — A: “As expected of our perfectionist, every aspect is exquisite. Herme takes such good care of his body, after all.”

Arisaka — ?: “Unable to gather concrete data due to the threat of dismantling via Murata.”

Springfield — A: “The flavor is delicate and nuanced, but the quantity is disappointing. Perhaps if he was in better health...”

Siegblut — S: “By far, the most excellent of the samples. The perfect consistency with an addictive flavor— absolutely sublime.”

Murata — C: “Better than you’d expect, but debatably not worth the scuffle that follows— only if I feel up for a fight.”