Bokura no Ketsumei

I haven't read an extremely large number of manga in my life, so this isn't exactly the most profound statement, but Our Blood Oath is easily the worst manga I've ever read.

Absolutely appalling. Even with bad manga there is always something about it that was redeemable - something about the authors work that you can see being a foundation to build upon with their next work.

I feel bad for this mangaka but my god, it is truly shocking that they were given a chance in Jump at all. Their art is awful - well below what should be acceptable in non-gag manga in Jump. Their storytelling is not just amateurish - its as if this author has never read or experienced a story from any medium.

I have nothing good to say about this manga. I can't even be kind enough to say that any portion of it was mediocre. It was abysmal from start to finish.

Before I start, I would like to go more in-depth into the series as a whole, but it's a bit late now to play catchup. Most of the chapters I missed are locked now. So, I'll have to work with the incomplete information I have.

At first, it seemed like it could be interesting. Two adopted brothers, a human and a vampire, who want to create a world where the two races can coexist in peace. And, it spent a lot of time both building the brothers' dynamic, and the world they inhabit. The first couple chapters seemed pretty wholesome, and I had high hopes for the series.

Things started to fall apart before too long, though. For starters, it was a few chapters before the series started introducing other "good" vampires besides the little brother, until then most of the other vampires in the series were human-hating villains. I thought, if the series doesn't start bringing in other vampires who want peace with humans, this just isn't going to work.

It did before too much longer, but... in hindsight, things might have been better if it didn't.

So, the main characters have this delivery route they do, where they deliver blood to vampires who can't get it themselves. (I'm pretty sure that was it, it's been a while.) It was here where my biggest issue with the series, and the reason I dropped it, appeared. You see, it turns out that if vampires don't get their blood on time, they run the risk of becoming feral and attacking people to satiate their thirst. It doesn't matter how nice of a person they are the rest of the time, they WILL attack people if they get hungry enough.

This one element gives humans a very good reason to fear vampires, and calls one of the core ideas of the series into question. If every vampire, regardless of personality, is just one missed meal away from killing people, then how can peace between humans and vampires possibly be attainable? A story like this just doesn't work when one group poses an inherent threat to the other.

Compare Tokyo Ghoul and Demon Slayer. Those series work because ghouls and demons are capable of controlling their hunger. If skipping lunch was all it took for Kaneki or Nezuko to start eating people, they wouldn't be nearly as sympathetic. By contrast, I feel nothing for that girl in Our Blood Oath who ate her friend, because with things set up the way they were, it was an accident waiting to happen.

Apparently, according to others who've read further, that plot point got dropped. As if pretending it doesn't exist makes it go away. I'm sorry, but it doesn't work like that. That one detail completely ruined what could have been a decent story, and there's no undoing that.