The integration of gore can create a certain tension by making you fear for your favourite characters not to end up being shred to bloody pieces. It can also underline a dark atmosphere, telling you that the environment the story takes place in is harsh, brutal and knows no mercy for people making mistakes. That is something we all know (or should know) from series like Berserk, BLAME! or (to mention animated material) Umineko. Of course, this terror-spreading bloodstained medal of gore has another side to it. Let's talk about Blood-C.
- The Story:
To be honest, (although not being completely satisfying) Blood-C actually follows an interesting base frame considering the storyline. The story of innocent shrine maiden Kisaragi Saya, who is fighting against demons for the sake of her village, starts out as your typical monster of the week action show. This section is, looking back after seeing the whole picture, well made and pretty enjoyable. The action is exciting and Saya and her schoolmates are sympathetic and easy to get used to. While watching her slaying demons and handling her school life, there are always little hints, weird moments and mysterious lines that keep you on your guard for some bigger mystery behind the scenes to emerge sooner or later. The problem is, when that happens, rushed explanations and plot holes keep you from being satisfied. By then, it's already too late to save the show, anyway... More of that in the next paragraph.
- The Atmosphere:
The big problem of Blood-C is NOT the excessive depiction of gore and violence, but its purposelessness. Saya's battles with the demons often take their toll on casual bystanders. In the first episodes it is still shocking, to see what the demons are capable of, when Saya is too late to rescue someone from being devoured alive.
After a while, though, the attentive audience starts to wonder:
"Well, she COULD have saved this poor bloke BEFORE he was turned into a bloody pulp, couldn't she?"
And once you realized this, you'll start to ask yourself, if there maybe is a hidden purpose to this depiction of innocent people being gorged on (while the main heroine humbly waits for the monster to finish dinner), or... if this show is just about gore and brutality... for the sake of gore and brutality.
By the end of the show, after seeing countless people being tormented to death without identifiable reason, you are so fed up with random violence that you don't care about explanations anymore.
- The Design:
As for the character design, there's not much to be said: It's CLAMP. Long, thin bodies with typically formed eyes and messed up proportions. You either hate it or like it. Looking at the design of the demons Saya has to face, most of them are designed rather well and have a unique feel to them. Regarding the quality of animation, although you get the feeling that some episodes use smaller budgets than others, most of the animation is done well and most of the fighting sequences feel dynamique.
- Final Conclusion:
Before realizing that most parts of the show emphasize violence for the sake of violence, Blood-C serves well as a typical dark monster-of-the-week action show with a mysterious subplot beneath it. The purposelessness of the extreme level of depicted gore and the (for me) unsatisfying and rushed conclusion in the final episodes of the show corrupt what could have been an exciting and interesting dark action mystery experience.
