If you like a good old-fashioned horny as all get-out vampire story, Vanitas no Carte should be right up your street.  For all its anime trappings this show is a pretty traditional vampire story in a lot of ways – certainly more so than Mars Red, though the opposite may have appeared true on a superficial level.  If you believe certain ideas about the deeply-held psychological underpinnings of vampire mythology (I do) Vanitas no Carte is pretty much Old Testament gospel (albeit in fancy dress).

One other theory I have is that the less human characters are involved in a vampire story, the more human the vampires have to be in terms of their motivation and personalities.  So far it seems as if Vanitas is pretty much the only human character playing a major role, and he’s more vampiric than most of the cast.  The vampires have their species-specific hangups and turn-ons, but basically they’re people – driven by the same insecurities and desires human characters would be.  It’s a good formula when executed well, and so far this series is executed pretty well.

I do have some issues on the execution front.  The casting is inconsistent (I’m not crazy about Hanae or Shimoji Shino in their roles).  The over-reliance on comic face-pulls and chibi intercuts is annoying, and the direction takes on too much of that twitchy St. Vitus Dance quality at times.  Also, while the series is undeniably good at reaction shots and epic pull-backs, there’s simply too many of them – they’re stylish but they lose a lot of their impact from overuse.  With a couple of tweaks in casting and a first-rate director I think Vanitas could have been really special, and it’s hard to get that nagging thought out of my mind while watching it.

That said, there’s still an awful lot to like here.  Vanitas no Carte is a beautiful series to look at, and it’s stylish as hell – it just needs less of it.  Mochizuki Jun is a serious, grown-up writer who knows how to construct a compelling premise that’s easy to grasp.  And the way the series unabashedly embraces the sensuality of the mythology is refreshingly old-school.  The horniness in this episode is hilariously over-the-top – from food porn on down, literally everything that happens is tinged with sexual tension.  It’s a bunch of young people almost totally clueless about love and sex being driven mad by their desires for each other and everything else.

Lucius has an excuse for being clueless – he’s a child, though he’s no less mad with spiritual lust than any of them.  As for the rest, they’re just dense – though how true that is of Vanitas is hard to say.  Luca loves Jeanne, and is painfully aware he’s too young to act on it.  Jeanne may in fact love Luca the same way he does her, though it’s hard to say for sure.  She also may have fallen for Vanitas in spite of her revulsion at the idea, as witness her leaving her mark on him (apparently the vampire version of having him wear her pin).  And I don’t think there’s any question Vanitas has fallen for Jeanne – if any of this group has some self-awareness, it’s him.

Vanitas, in fact, does try and show a little tact when it’s clear his crowing over Jeanne’s lust for him has gone too far.  Is he doing it for Luca’s benefit, or Jeanne’s?  He agrees to her plea to keep the depths of their dalliance under wraps. but on two conditions – she must suck no one else, and she must call him by his name.  What a cad.  The impact this has on Noe and Dominique is intense and rather comic – these two are definitely the classic human teenage couple of the group.  Domi is in love with Noe, that’s as straightforward as it gets.  It’s slightly less so when it comes to his feelings for her – love, to be sure, but in addition to his cliche denseness there’s quite a tangle with fraternal love as well.

So just who is Noe jealous of when it comes to Vanitas and Jeanne?  This is the question Domi is desperate to have answered, and I’m not sure she should be as relieved as she appears to be.  There’s something there between Noe and Vanitas, don’t kid yourself – vampires (and vampire stories) aren’t hung up that way.  But there’s still work to do after all this hormonal posturing – Lord Ruthven remains to be dealt with, and is clearly a prime mover in the plot side of this story.  And Dominique implies there’s a major reveal about Luca still to come.  Plot returns to center stage next week, it seems, but I’m confident horniness will never be far away from the spotlight in this series.