Unholy Blood (Korean: 화이트 블러드, White Blood) is a 2020 Korean webtoon written and drawn by Lina Kim and Keonghyeon Kim. It was serialized on Webtoon from January 1st, 2020 to October 20th, 2021, and official English translations were made available on the Webtoons app.
It's South Korea in the near future, and out of nowhere vampires started to infiltrate the world in past 10 years, with violent crimes committed by vampires in the country at an all-time high. Hayan would rather live a peaceful life and continue going to college, but if a vampire attacks someone in her community, she can't help but intervene. She's one of the few people who can fight toe to toe with a vampire, as she is a Pure Blood.
After tragedy strikes, she joins forces with a rising star on the police's anti-vampire task force in order to rein in the vampire threat and bring peace back to her home town.
This work contains examples of:
- Action Girl: Hayan is a badass vampiress who can mow down dozens of vampires at a time.
- Dark Action Girl: On the villain side, there is Ash and Levy.
- Asskicking Leads to Leadership: The generals of the powerful Vampire creator "God" are called the "Angels of Death" and gain their position by defeating all competing vampires in their region. There are seven Angels of Death in total, with each controlling a portion of South Korea and fending off any challengers to their spot.
- Author Appeal: The majority of the characters are athletically built. The women tend to have a slim, yet toned physique. The men are generally very muscular, often either getting a Shirtless Scene or ending up briefly wearing a Stripperific outfit.
- Badass Normal:
- Detective Hwang, a star member of the police's anti vampire taskforce may not have any powers but can still kick vampire ass. This is subverted later with a reveal. He's actually a vampire and has been taking drugs to help him digest human food.
- Father Michael is a Badass Preacher who despite being human is able to fend off multiple vampires on his own.
- Badass Preacher: Father Michael is revealed to be an ex-soldier who served in a war, and he's a preacher now in order to find redemption. That doesn't mean he's out of shape, as he single-handedly fends off the vampires that are searching for Hayan by tricking them into his traps and using weapons he's had hidden in his closet for who knows how long.
- Big Brother Instinct:
- Hwang has a little sister he'd put his life on the line to protect. He even became a vampire to protect her.
- Part of Hayan's motivation for her quest to eliminate the higher echelons of modern vampire society is to protect her two younger siblings; Lucian reveals to her that while he may have only killed Father Micheal to get to her, the rest of the Angels of Death will be willing to go after anyone and everyone she holds dear. She responds that she was planning to kill them first, anyway.
- Body Horror:
- When Euntae turns into a vampire, his antagonists attempt to subdue him with an electrified net. However, he's so determined to fight back that he manages to stand up again, while still being electricuted, giving us a nice shot of the right side of his mouth melting off.
- After Hayan convinces Ash to defect, a meeting of the executive members of God's underground is held, where one normal mixed blood asks if he could be made an Angel of Death to secure Hayan's heart. After three more vampires make a similar request, God decides to "test" them. We then see them swell and bleed out of every opening, as if he's boiling their blood, before exploding.
- Clark Kenting: Yohan wears rather modest and baggy clothes to obfuscate his muscles, in order to hide the fact that he is a vampire, to the point that even a Sexy Soaked Shirt fails to reveal how ripped he actually is. After his real identity as the Big Bad is revealed, he no longer bothers with the ruse, instead wearing very tight shirts that make his real physique all the more apparent.
- Deceased Parents Are the Best: Hayan's biological mother and father were both pleasant and responsible individuals who showered Hayan with love. Of course, they end up dying tragically.
- Averted with Euntae's vampirified parents and especially Yohan's father.
- Dirty Cop: Large portions of the Korean police are secretly minions of the Big Bad God and are helping him with his illegal activities.
- Fantastic Racism: Thinly veiled versions of far-right groups go out looking for vampires on campus at the university. Interestingly, the police treat people who were turned into vampires against their will and don't commit crimes differently than those who do.
- From Nobody to Nightmare:
- The Starter Villain Byeongsu starts off as a lazy and dickish bully but nothing worse then that, but upon becoming a vampire he's become one of their most psychotic, with even his sires finding him extreme.
- God, the vampire responsible for the mixed blood vampire epidemic, is an incredible example of this. He starts out as Yohan, Hayan's downtrodden best friend whose single mother ends up marrying a mobster. When he fails to mug Hayan's parents, he's beaten to a pulp, but his selfless concern for Hayan leads her parents to make him a vampire. He ends up not only Drunk with Power, having had incredible ambition before being turned, but also manages to rip out Hayan's father's heart, empowering him enough that he manages to force Hayan's mother into going Action Bomb to stop him, and even that only slows him down for a bit.
- Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: After finding out how much Yohan went through before he decided to become a mass murderer, Hayan says this to his face.
- Great Offscreen War: Father Michael was in a large-scale war that involved terrorists using kids as their tool, and the experience he had in it is what spurred him to took Hayan in. The details of said war are never specified (although its place is possibly in the Middle East, given its depiction in the episode 8), and because it's only related to his backstory, it never comes up again after it.
- High-Heel–Face Turn: Ash, also known as Ayeong Song or Jinha, is the only Angel of Death to make a Heel–Face Turn, thanks to Hayan inspiring her to assume her true actual identity and attempt to pursue her dreams of becoming an actor as herself again.
- By the end of the story, Levy has become something of a vigilante Anti-Hero, helping out in fixing the mess she helped cause.
- Kill It with Fire: One of the only effective ways of killing a vampire is burning it, but vampires who've had enough blood can resist fire unless you literally throw them into a blast furnace. This is how the police execute vampire criminals.
- Made from Real Girl Scouts: The nightclub that the vampire Lucien runs stocks blood for its customers rather than alcohol. Each bottle is given a quick description of the victim whose blood was used to fill it (for example a 21 year old female) and is treated as if it were vintage wine.
- Mid-Season Twist: Detective Hwang is secretly a vampire, but this revelation happens midway in the story.
- Mind Rape: The ability to violate the mind is the special ability of the vampire Sahan. Sahan torments his victims using visions of figures personal to them to mess with them psychologically.
- Mr. Fanservice: Detective Hwang, a Walking Shirtless Scene. The majority of Vampires alternate between this and Fan Disservice, but the charismatic Stage Magician Vael plays it straight.
- Monster Progenitor: The scourage of vampires that has infested Korea is shown to have been caused by a vampire called "God" who spread his vampiric infection throughout the population.
- One-Man Army:
- Hayan is a pure blood vampire and hence one of the strongest of her kind. It allows her to effortlessly take down hundreds of mixed blood vampires in her fights.
- The generals of the Big Bad, the "Angels of Death", are each able to take down hundred of other vampires themselves. In fact, to become an "Angel of Death" requires a vampire to be the strongest of his region.
- Orphanage of Love: Hayan's small family came together in one of these; Father Michael first took Hayan in, and then took in her younger siblings. As of the time of the series itself, only Hayan and her siblings are still with him, and he more or less acts as a caring foster father to all three of them.
- Our Vampires Are Different: These vampires are still alive, don't burn up in sunlight, have massive strength, and a tremendous Healing Factor. They can only consume blood from either humans or animals, most liquids, and apparently grape slushies; if they attempt to eat normal human food, their blood stops circulating and they experience immense pain and nausea that only goes away when they throw it up. Apart from this, vampires can be split into 3 categories:
- Mixed bloods are those who drink blood from another vampire. The physical strength they have upon completing their transformation depends on their human strength, determination, and level of ambition. If a vampire receives a supernatural power, it will have qualities related to their personalities or frustrations. All mixed blood vampires have a limited lifespan of 5 years without outside intervention, and upon dying will collapse into dust, leaving only their clothes behind. They tend to have Red, slit pupiled eyes, and are often violent due to both getting Drunk with Power as well as the general culture that God introduced to vampire society.
- Angels of Death are mixed blood vampires whose strength or tactical skill was so impressive that God, the leader of all vampires in South Korea, gave them some of his blood to keep them alive indefinitely, and give them even greater power.
- Pureblood vampires are more of a Mage Species; they're born vampires, and if two pureblood vampires have a child, their child will be a pureblood vampire as well. Pureblood vampires are the strongest of all the vampires in the series, and can live indefinitely. While they have human forms, their true forms have white hair and blue eyes. They have the capacity to use any of the supernatural abilities a mixed blood vampire might develop, as well as some manner of energy powers. Any mixed blood vampire they create with their blood is incredibly powerful, and can keep other mixed blood vampires alive indefinitely with their blood, much like their sires. Additionally, their hearts lend an incredible amount of power to whatever vampire assimilates them, especially once said heart has completely matured. When a pureblood vampire dies, they do leave a body behind.
- Psychic-Assisted Suicide: When cornered, the vampire Sahan threatens to force a crowd of hundreds of people to rip their own hearts out if the heroine Hayan does not surrender to him.
- Psycho Psychologist: Sahan works as a school therapist. He uses this position to take in abused and neglected teenagers and then warp them into bloodthirsty vampires by preying on their insecurities.
- Real Men Love Jesus: Hayan's adoptive father, Father Michael, is a war veteran who became a priest in the hopes of atoning for the lives he took. He's still completely shredded and keeps a stockpile of weapons in case of a vampire attack.
- Shapeshifter Mode Lock: Hayan starts the story with both a human looking form, but her rage at Lucian for killing Father Michael is so great that she becomes permanently stuck in her pureblood form for the rest of the story, using disguises to hide herself.
- Vampires Own Night Clubs: The Vampire Lucien owns a night club whose inhabitants consist of vampires under his control. They party and drink blood which is inside alcohol bottles rather than real alcohol.
- With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: Hayan receives this talk from her biological father at a young age. In fact, her childish lack of understanding this, as well as the ramifications of her actions, leads her to subconsciously blame herself for the mixed blood vampire outbreak, as well as the deaths of her own parents.
- World of Muscle Men: The majority of named male characters - especially the vampires - tend to have very muscular bodies. Lampshaded in the case of vampires, as higher ranked vampires usually become more muscular upon their transformation; Lucien in particular went from a Lean and Mean Spoiled Brat to having the physique of a fitness model simply because his willpower and ambition were so strong at the moment of his transformation.
