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Vampirism and Queerness:
My perspective on how the current arc where Sayo is currently struggling with the idea of fully turning into a vampire is a metaphor for internal homophobia and his struggle with fully accepting his sexuality and how Yamadera's quick assimilation with his powers means that he has accepted his feelings for Sayo and now, has to help him accept it too.
(A perspective that I've had since the beginning but couldn't put into words till it dawned on me when I saw Mouse's comment on how they wished Sayo could accept his new body and find happiness with it.)
Vampires have always been tied to queerness, or more specifically sexuality. Writers have used vampires as a literary device to hide themes of queerness without actually having to state them upfront and risk social backlash from their time.
It's in the secrecy, the forbidden desires, the social outcasting (treated like monsters), deviance from the norm, and last but not the least, the hunger that can't be satied through "normal" means.
In this manga, this hunger is present in it's literal sense, hunger for life, hunger for love, hunger for intimacy (lust), and hunger for companionship. I'll get to how each of these manifest in the story but for this comment, I want to focus on Sayo and Yamadera only.
Sayo's hunger for blood in the early chapters is seen as a simple physiological need. He needs to drink blood to survive, simple as that. And Yamadera has a hunger for a sense of life. You could argue that at that point, he was still human but remember that since childhood he's been convinced that he is a vampire and will grow up to be one. He just hasn't "awakened" yet. They rely on each other to fulfill these desires and in turn subconsciously full each other's hunger for love and companionship as the story progresses.
They both treat themselves as "monsters", something inhumane. Sayo, again in a literal sense, since he died and became a vampire and Yamadera because he thinks of himself as something below human. They both see these traits as something they need to hide and they only began to step in the direction of acceptance when they met each other and began to satiate the hunger they couldn't fulfill through normal, socially acceptable, "human" means.
In the early volumes, we navigate through Sayo's vampirism in the surface level. Old man suddenly gets turned into a vampire by his first love and now has to navigate the changes within his body as well as deal with the world that being a vampire has brought to him with a sassy junior colleague that orders him around, this is the premise that brought us to read this story.
But as the chapters go on and we get to see more of the vampires and their stories, we see how the concept of vampirism in the story deepen. We saw how it intertwined with ideas of isolation, rebirth (a "second chance" for those that society left behind), repression, self-sacrifice, and loneliness.
This is just part 1 of what I have to say. In part 2 I'll delve deeper into the thesis that I presented in the introduction CAUSE THIS IS GETTING TOO LONG FOR A COMMENT AGSJDHJD I LOVE THIS MANGA