Out of curiousity, I flipped through Rosario Tu Vampire.
I've changed my mind. It's not total crap. Just mediocre.
The series does get better by becoming more serious and having darker and more complex stories. The characters still aren't great, but they develop beyond being one note. The one note of "get in Tsunke's pants" is still really loud though. And the stories, while predicatable, do have a certain charm to them. Or maybe that's just the fanservice.
One thing that really bugs me about this series is it's adherence to the Monster of the Week format. No wait, not that, but the problems that come from it. Such a format works fine in Buffy or Smallville storywise, as the incidents are isolated and can be written off as commonplace by the Muggles. But in the setting of Rosario, all the students and teachers that go crazy and go to a school specifically designed to curb that sort of behavior and let monsters live in human society. Everyone knows about the crap the antagonists of the week get up to, and none of them ever think "hey, if people keep monstering out at a school teaching against that, maybe we should do something or file a complaint to the board." It's not a hard question to answer, like say "the school is a really new idea, and only a few monsters that go there have really gotten behind what it's saying." And it could make for a good story of the edgy kind that the comic seems so fond of now. But it's never adressed. It's a odd thing, but it stretches my suspension of disbelief too much.
Being a fan of Negima, I can't say that a harem-minded action adventure manga is trash by default. So I'll just say it's too subpar for me to continue reading and move on.
