#ynu

The inciting incident of the story is not Nazuna finding Ko while he's wandering the streets at night and luring him back to her lair. Rather, it goes back a bit further: a girl in his class confesses she has a crush on him, and his response is "so?" (I don't feel like digging up quotes, so any in this post are just paraphrased from memory.) Ko admits he doesn't get what it means to have a crush, the girl's friends harass him for that, and he flees into the night to avoid facing them.

Right from the very beginning, Ko has been pretty upfront that he doesn't understand love. Sure, he's 14, and a lot of nuance comes from experience. But it certainly seems like he's at the age where all his peers are trying out dating for the first time, and he feels left behind.

Ko and Nazuna become close friends pretty quickly. They try going on dates (and not just the stereotypical one Seri forced them to try) and even get physical (kissing). But throughout all of this, Ko doesn't get how it's different from what they normally do as friends: hanging out, having meals together, platonic physical contact. There's some je nais se quois he doesn't feel, and the vampire curse must agree, because he never transforms when Nazuna feeds on him.

He's not the only one. In the second arc, we meet Kyoko, Nazuna's first friend from when she tried going to high school ~10 years ago. She was upfront from the start about being a lesbian. As we learn about her terrible home life, she expresses her hatred for her parents' failing relationship and all the systems in place that mean they can't do anything about it. Once she learns Nazuna's secret and decides to give up on mortality, the two even joke that she might not have the right feelings for it to take, and we see that they're right. It wouldn't be accurate to say her parents' problems caused her to reject romance, but it likely didn't help.

In both cases, these are characters that like Nazuna and actively want to become vampires, but even when they let Nazuna feed on them, they can't turn. In contrast, we see a lot of explicitly romantic relationships, both human/human and human/vampire, but none of them end with a happy couple. The human/human ones, like Kyoko's parents, tend to tear themselves apart. The human/vampire ones are even worse, usually leading to one or both parties killing the other. Even the "best" outcome, the vampire turning the human, still leads to the end of the romance.

In the end, neither Ko nor Kyoko achieve the freedom in immortality they initially wanted, but instead they find happiness. Ko realizes he had friends all along, and makes a bunch more, and he's even grateful for his long-distance situationship with Nazuna in the end. Kyoko's journey was a lot harder, but she manages to move on from her past, reconnect with Nazuna, and even get a support system with the other vampires.