Comedy in Karin

Karin is a comedy which makes use of many devices, the central one being embarrassment: indeed the chapters of the manga are enumerated as her many embarrassments or shames (haji). For the demure and somewhat shy Karin, the world is full of embarrassments, not least of which is being not just a vampire but a defective one.

The traditional sexual overtones of vampirism are also a source of comedy. One example of this is when the sight of Karin seemingly "necking" people is initially misinterpreted by Kenta as Enjo kousai (in other words, he thinks she's a teenage prostitute). Karin is naturally mortified by the misunderstanding, but is unable to correct it because to reveal the truth would be even worse. Another example is Karin's attraction to Kenta which provides an opportunity for comedic confusion between love and blood lust, symptoms such as a pounding heart being common to both. Meanwhile her brother Ren clearly enjoys sexual relations with his victims, and his overt displays of lust are another source of embarrassment for the much more demure Karin.

Blood meanwhile is consistently used for comic effect rather than horror. Karin's profuse nosebleeds (hanaji) serve both as a pun on the common manga symbolism of nosebleeds as indicating sexual arousal, and as a source of menstruation jokes: indeed the author originally envisaged Karin "bleeding from every orifice" until it was vetoed by her editor. In the anime, a standing joke is that the vampire hunter Winner Sinclair, far from being a hardened killer, actually faints at the sight of blood, such as every time Karin has a nosebleed.

Karin's buxom physique (she officially possesses an E-cup) is a source of ecchi (lewd) humour, especially when it inspires jealousy in other females, such as Maki and her grandmother (the latter being an A-cup). In the anime, a ritual supposedly to cure her of her blood-producing condition turns out to actually be for increasing bust size, and the sight of her exposed breasts afterwards proves enough to cause a vampire hunter to faint, thus defeating him.

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