Blood-C

I was hesitant to review this anime when it was announced that CLAMP were putting out a new anime fans expected a lot from the new addition to the 'Blood franchise'. After it was aired, Blood-C became the most talked about anime of Summer 2011, for all the wrong reasons!
Saya Kisaragi, clumsy, oblivious, father-obsessed but kind. She's a shrine maiden in a little town and is taught Kenjutsu by her father. When the man-eating elder bairns attack Saya uses her swordsmanship to fulfill her promise to protect everyone. The plot is just piles up more and more unanswered questions with out really advancing the plot. The elder bairns speak of a covenant between them and the humans and Saya has parts of her memory missing. I can't tell whether this is supposed to be suspenseful because in reality it's just stupid, the plot has no direction to it, it just suddenly reached an end with out any kind of warning!

It's all about the action then. Saya's adult rated fight scenes with added blood. I'm all for hot chicks with swords getting covered in blood, who isn't? But only if the fight scenes are actually any good but Saya's fights follow the same structure, every episode!!

Recipe for a Blood-C style fight scene:

You will need: A stupid heroine, a katana and an ugly looking monster.

1. Get beaten up enough to be dead several times over.
2. Hit the monster repeatedly, but make sure you're not using you sword strong enough to actually cause any damage.
3. Wait for any near by civilians/friends to all be killed, the extra blood is completely necessary! 
4. Be upset about the fact that every one's dead and cut the monster to pieces with out breaking a sweat.

If you follow the recipe correctly you should end up of with a horribly monotonous fight scene which is stupid on so many levels that it's not even funny! How can she get beaten up so much and not die? Why does her katana actually cut after all her friends have dies? I'll tell you why, because this is a god awful anime! Sure it's gory, there's exponential amounts of blood, but she doesn't even have any flashy ninja-esque moves to make it remotely interesting! (Seriously though, I cannot overestimate the amount of blood in this series!!

So the plot has nothing to it and the action is more annoying than anything now to top it the characters are just stupid! Saya's stupidity and naivety is completely unrivaled! She's a total Mary Sue and can't even notice when some one is asking her on a date. Her 'moe points' are overplayed to make just plain annoying and don't even get me started on her "I must save every one" mentality! 

But the show is not with out positives! As with any CLAMP anime, we do have some very nice character designs -those uniforms are totally adorable! Also, the soundtrack is really nice despite being underplayed. One final confession: despite how terrible the anime as a whole is, I genuinely the final two episodes! Plot twist of the Century and it only took 10 episodes to get there! It almost makes it worth my time!

But then again, the first two episodes were a total chore to get through! So, how to judge an anime like this. After all, the only good episodes came after the plot twist, which totally shook up the foundations laid by the rest of the episode. It essentially rendered the first 10 episodes worthless, other than a few episodes for scene setting. But I would LOVE to see an anime that uses the same plot twist more effectively so I suppose the ending is not completely satisfying. However, I am aware that this series is in a sense a prequel for the movie, Blood-C: The Last Dark, but that's no excuse for the abomination of an anime it truly is. I will look passed how exciting the final two episodes were and judge it as a whole. I really can't see this as a CLAMP anime, CLAMP has always been so much better than this! So putting both my bias for CLAMP and brilliance of the plot twist aside, I agree with the masses: this anime is not worth your time!

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