Reviews: More Vampires, but Flatter

Today's review is for Blood+, an anime recently airing on Cartoon Network. Like every anime on Cartoon Network lately, I didn't watch it live. I get tapes of the show as they got collected, so I can watch it in bulk. Yes, tapes; I mean VHS tapes. I am one billion years old.

But we're here to talk about the show. Blood+ is a pseudo-sequel to an animated movie called Blood: The Last Vampire, which I never watched, but it's not essential. The TV series summed up the movie's plot as it went, so I never had trouble understanding what happened back then. The series is basically a dark, M-rated action/horror series about vampire hunting. The main character is Saya, a seemingly normal teenaged girl. This changed as she learned she was destined to hunt a race of monsters called Chiropterans, which are basically vampire. Yeah, it's kinda like Buffy.

But that basic premise doesn't last long. Saya is in fact a Chiropteran/vampire/whatever herself, but she belongs to a different family, and the two are naturally opposed. In fact, her blood was the only normal weapon to kill them. There were downsides, though, including having amnesia for her past life and the fact she has to go into a dormant sleep every few years, and she has to sleep for thirty years every time.

As she learns the truth, she teams with a group of allies, including her adopted family, a vampire servant she created, and a secret society tasked at hunting down the bad vampires. But the bad vampires aren't exactly willing to stand around waiting to die. They have armies of the generic vampires (which look a bit like feral horse/bat things,) almost a half-dozen of the upper-tier vampires, government ties, genetically engineered vampire-based weapons, and plans to infect and transform countless humans into vampires en masse. Plus there's their queen, who has the same advantages and weaknesses as Saya and is evil, or at least sociopathic and crazy.

The show has both strengths and weaknesses. Strengths include the fact that at no point is this a Monster of the Week series. The initial arc starts with Saya hacking apart generic vampires, but from there on, the series bounds across the globe, from Vietnam to Russia to France to New York, with story arcs at each location. Each covers more of the plans and history of the villains, include revelations about Saya's past, and features some growth among the protagonists. This is definitely a tragic series, and many characters, good and evil, suffer and/or die, often in ways you wouldn't believe even Adult Swim would go. Most of the villains also aren't generic "mwa ha ha" villains; they often have their own motivations and fight amongst themselves.

The downsides are the occasional tendency for nothing to happen. One problem is that the generic vampires sort of disappear from the action after a few story arcs. This only leaves the evil chiropteran queen and her top-tier minions as antagonists. And all of them are much, much better than our protagonist is. As for Saya, she's sort of useless combat-wise as well. That's reasonable, given the amnesia and initial tendency to think of herself as a normal girl, but it means that the game's have a whole lot of our heroine relying on getting help from her friends and not doing anything herself. This often gets ridiculous near the end; any one of the main villains could kill her easily, but they always choose not to, episode after episode. Suspension of disbelief started to take a hit, which you never want to happen in a vampire series. Let's face, there are often easy if goofy ways to kill normal vampires, like water guns filled with holy water. You ignore these things in a good vampire series, like Buffy, because it doesn't fit the show's feel, but kill the feel and you turn skeptical. Blood+ vampires are immune to most vampire weaknesses, even light and stakes to the heart, but they're not completely invincible. Saya's blood is the only way to easily kill them, but pretty much anyone can be tied up, manacled, tossed in a safe, immersed in cement or molten iron, or tossed in a volcano. It would sure beat shooting at enemies who are bulletproof, wouldn't it?

So it's not Buffy, or Angel, or anything of that sort. It nonetheless was a dark, interesting series with many complex characters, and the problems only really start to develop in the second half. If you assume the series is not perfect, tends to degrade in the second half, and features less action than you might expect from vampire hunters, you can get a good time. And the series is only 50 pages total. After stuff like Bleach, that's refreshingly short. I'd give it a B. It hasn't inspired me much by itself, but it gave me some ideas about how to make a story of this sort, including how to and how to not do it right.