Blood C is an installment of the Blood franchise, which contains one awesome movie, one crappy live-action movie, and a fifty episode series I still haven’t seen. The star of Blood C is Saya Kisaragi, another incarnation of that iconic character... Don’t ask... Who’s a super popular, super pretty high school student by day, and a cold-blooded monster slayer by night. She lives with her father, and has five very loyal, very lively, very god-awful 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 today’s standards, but there’s 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. They’re 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, it’s 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 Saya’s friends at school, as they openly parody Clamp’s notorious character design tropes... I wonder why they bothered, since they already did such a good job of that in xxxHolic without even trying... But on the other side of the coin, you have Saya’s 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 fight didn't disappoint, either. It’s staged well, it’s paced well, it ends on a great note, and Saya actually manages to save some poor girl from being killed. She saves somebody’s life. Why am I drawing so much attention to this? Well... To speak in the broadest possible strokes, it's her job to save people from being gruesomely murdered, and she is blisteringly incompetent at it. Hell, this girl couldn’t save a sandwich with a Ziploc bag!
I’ll admit that it’s kind of cathartic seeing monsters devour her irritating friends, but it doesn’t take very long to see the real reason why she can’t 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, it’s gore porn. It’s not a horror title, it’s not an action title, oh no, it’s gore porn. The main character’s credibility isn’t important,... The dialogue isn’t important... The story isn’t important... The villain’s 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.
That’s not to say that it doesn’t TRY to be more than the sum of it’s body parts... There’s some social commentary on mankind’s relationship to the food chain, but the way it’s delivered is just heavy-handed, tasteless, and a transparent excuse for more gore porn. I don’t mind gore porn... I will begrudgingly admit that I’m a fan of Elfen Lied, a show riddled with problems of it’s own. But at least there was more to Elfen Lied than it’s 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 doesn’t really have that much to offer. If you’re looking for a gory anime that‘s centered around epic battles, you’d 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. 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.
It’s 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 4/10. And I don't care what MAL says, that score is not decent.
