Blood C episode 1

While I generally try to watch the first episode of everything in a new season, I’m afraid that downloading Ro Kyu Bu would put me on some sort of international watch list. The token paedophile show of the season that people desperately try to claim “no really, it’s actually a heartwarming tale about friendship, teamwork, parenting and little girls asses”. So instead the new season begins with Noodle People Fighting Statues.

Surely this would be a good start to the season, right?

Nope. It was dreadful.

You would think with a synopsis that included a vampire girl fighting other vampires would be a bit action packed, right? Actually most of this episode consisted of absolutely nothing happening. There was an extended sequence of about 2 minutes of Saya skipping through the streets, singing a song to herself. The anime swung frequently towards shots of landscape that served no purpose except to drag time out even further. An awful lot of the anime was Saya walking from place to place, either running home or walking with her ditzy friends. It’s not that there’s very little happening in these scenes. There is flat out nothing happening whatsoever.

The scenes with something actually happening aren’t a whole lot better. Saya has been upgraded from her previous personalities in the past Blood anime (that is, no personality whatsoever) to this time being  insufferably nice. She’s a Tohru Honda. A Hanato Kobato. A whatever the name of that twat from Bungaku Shoujo is called. The admirable, cute, ditzy and utterly uninteresting to watch in their daily lives. But Blood C seems to think that yes, we do want to watch Saya think about petting a puppy before almost tripping up and then deciding she has to hurry home. Oh, and now here’s a picture of the background scenery for a bit.

Lalala singing a song while skipping to school lalala

The single fight scene that does occur in the episode comes totally out of nowhere too. Dad gives Saya a sword, she walks to a water front, spends ages ‘building up tension’ (read ‘look at this shot of some hills and clouds’) before Saya starts having a long duel with a statue. The fight scene was sort of cool, but we were given no reason to care about what was happening. Apparently Saya is incapable of having her head chopped off, even if clamped between a pair of pincers and swung about like a rag doll, so it’s hard to care about whether she wins the fight or not. Not that I particularly cared about Saya in the first place. I hadn’t gotten emotionally attached to her while watching her skipping to school. The fight scene had no explanation, hence the scene was a series of gothic colours that was impossible to care about.

I get what they’re trying to do. They’re trying to set the scene before the mystery horror shows up. It’s trying to do a Higurashi/Madoka/Steins;Gate/Shiki thing. Set the scene before sending the entire thing spiralling down into chaos and madness. But Blood C does nothing right. The main character is dull and impossible to care about what happens to her. The jokes have canned laughter (well, it’s a classroom laughing, but it serves the same purpose) that you feel awkward hearing because of how utterly unfunny they are. The episode drags with drawn out sequences of nothing happening in an attempt to set the scene. The horror element is poorly directed. Most of all, it’s just boring.