As with the earlier installments AMV Hell 6.66 inspired me to try out a myriad of new shows. Some of them were really good like Arakawa Under the Bridge some of them were really bad like Another There were even some guilty pleasures like Future Diary. But the show I was the most intrigued by was Blood C. It had a few clips but all I was paying attention to was the one of a blackclad teenage action starlet battling it out with a samurai with a giant eyeball for a head. Because that That Was one of the most awesome things Id ever seen. Its not as cool as the beatboxing samurai from Shamploo but damn it its close. So upon watching this series did it hold up to its own example? As it turns out Blood C is a member of the Blood franchise which contains one awesome movie one crappy liveaction movie and a fifty episode series I still havent seen. The star of blood C is Saya Kisaragi another incarnation of that iconic character Dont ask Whos a super popular super pretty high school student by day and a coldblooded monster slayer by night. She lives with her father and has five very loyal very lively very godawful annoying friends. As the story goes on and the monster attacks begin to strike closer and closer to home Saya slowly begins to realize that there might be more to this situation than meets the eye. Blood C was animated by a company called Production IG which has been around since 1988. Taking a look back at their filmography a lot of their work may look dated by todays standards but theres no doubt that the majority of their shows were the best looking shows of their time. Blue Seed FLCL Ghost in the Shell SAC and most recently Attack on Titan. Theyre known for bringing their A game to most of their projects and Blood C is no exception. Characters move fluidly the fight scenes look awesome and the artwork from Clamp looks equally inspired But while Saya and the monsters she faces may look really good its her friends that make the art design look a bit awkward. At first the story is kind of a mixed bag. You have to deal with Sayas friends at school as they openly parody Clamps notorious character design tropes I wonder why they bothered since they already did such a good job making fun of them in xxxHolic without even trying But on the other side of the coin you have Sayas battles with the monsters which is a plot seed that starts off with a lot of promise. You see her fighting one on one with some kind of gargoyle which is a lot of fun to watch but then you get to see her fight the very monster that drew me into the series Eyeball Samurai. This is one of the best fights Ive ever seen in an anime. Its staged well its paced well it ends on a great note and Saya actually manages to save some poor girl from being killed. She saves somebodys life. Why am I drawing so much attention to this? Well Lets not dance around this. Saya Kisaragi is my least favorite character of any anime ever. That girl she saved from Eyeball Samurai? Thats the only character she manages to save in the entire series I love her character design but in a show that was already occasionally painful to watch she is so ridiculously incompetent that she made the show physically painful to watch. She can go through some kind of transformation into a vampiric badass and she proves at one point that she can do it right at the beginning of a fight Unless of course her class is being devoured in which case shell wait until only three of them are left to employ it. I really wish I were making that last part up because half way through the series a giant monster attacks her full classroom. So what does she evacuate the room tell everyone to spread out and hide jump out the window to fight it outside transform and save the day? No she just sits there and lets everyone get slaughtered God forbid a hero takes some initiative in saving innocent civilians And despite the fact that her teacher is practically telegraphing the fact that she knows something about the attacks Saya never asks. She never asks why her giant monster battles arent attracting more attention either. For the love of God Id rather have Captain Hero try to save me then ever rely on her. If I were drowning Id have a better chance of being rescued by a pack of piranhas. This girl couldnt save a sandwich with a Ziploc bag Ill admit that its kind of cathartic seeing monsters devour her irritating friends but it doesnt take very long to see the real reason why she cant save any of them. The real reason why her power is so conveniently inconsistent. As good as this show looks and as much promise as it shows its gore porn. Its not a horror title its not an action title oh no its gore porn. The main characters credibility isnt important The dialogue isnt important The story isnt important The villains motivation is certainly not important All that blood C cares about is delivering as much gore porn as possible and if every other aspect of the show has to dumb itself down to accommodate this then so be it. Thats not to say that it doesnt TRY to be more than the sum of its body parts Theres a metafictional scene near the end where the whole clamp making fun of itself idea comes full circle but its over so quickly that you cant really enjoy it. Theres also some social commentary on mankinds relationship to the food chain but the way its delivered is just heavyhanded tasteless and an excuse for more gore porn. I dont mind gore porn I will begrudgingly admit that Im a fan of Elfen Lied a show riddled with problems of its own. But at least there was more to Elfen Lied than its fetishy abuse of red paint. The only elements of Blood C that had any real care or effort put into it was the art and animation because they wanted better looking gore porn. All in all Blood C doesnt really have that much to offer. If youre looking for a gory anime thats centered around epic battles youd have a much better experience watching Berserk. If you wanted to see giant monsters gobble terrified people up you could just watch Attack on Titan. a show that does an exceptional job portraying the struggle against hopelessness. If you wanted to see an anime that pokes fun at man as a dominant predator you could get that and so much more out of Madoka Magica the most perfectly constructed tragedy anime in recent memory. But Blood C dumbed itself down so much to maximize the squicky blood fountains that it unintentionally created one of the least effective heroes in the history of fiction. Its hard to watch and not in a good way which is why I have no choice but to award Blood C with the dubious honor of a 3/10.
30 /100
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