Well I’ll be damned, this week actually furthered something in Blood-C that wasn’t exceedingly banal or repetitious. Right from the start, Saya’s monster a day quota is thrown off schedule by an Elder Bairn appearance in something that wasn’t just nighttime in the town somewhere. Not only that, but we finally get a bit of a back story related to the whole matter with Saya slaying monsters that her father notices. However, for a number of reasons, it’s too little much too late. That’s not saying that it’s as monotonous as previous episodes, far from it.
The first difference that you’ll notice from the previous Blood-C routine, and it was a routine that was as different between episodes as Earth’s gravity is from 9.8 m/s2, was the difference in the sequence of events. Yeah, there were very slight variations before, but in the end it all boiled down to the same thing, with Saya getting progressively more injured each time. This time, it flipped things so Saya had the scuffle with the Elder Bairn, and the appropriate injuries, before returning to the classroom. It helped to shatter her perspective on things, and allow for the mundane to become exciting again for both her and the viewers.
Second, there’s actually character and plot development. Before, both remained static with only the occasional negligible hint dropped implying that they’re going to happen. There was never any follow through, and each episode ended up feeling as shallow as the previous one. A covenant was vaguely mentioned in the dying breath of a few demons, but Saya showed as much interest in that as she would if they just spouted old war propaganda.
In this, right off, the covenant is displayed by a Bairn all knowing, and apparently all seeing.
Of course the fight that Saya has with it is as drawn out and phoned in as physically possible without it not being interesting, but that comes at the price of a decent enough watch and finally some exposition. Even if that exposition was on something entirely predictable before being poked in the eye (face?), it was a welcome change of pace from nothing of worth happening whatsoever.
The biggest change though is Saya’s perception of the events. Before, it felt like she was just doing her job, not really paying attention once the Bairns were slaughtered. Yet, after saving somebody who then ran away from her, she started thinking about things a bit more. She started to wonder about the state of affairs, and maybe question whether it’s normal to slaughter monsters every night.
So in the end, this episode of Blood-C was good. Not great, but it was nice for it to change things up a bit to break up the humdrumness of the first four episodes. I guess you could say that they really stress how routine it was for Saya, but that could’ve been expressed in one episode with Saya saying “This is routine” or something like that. It didn’t need to be dragged out another four into what was essentially the same episode with a different baddie at the end. I’m pleased with how this turned out, but it would’ve been far better if it aired earlier. As it stands, it’s simply too little too late to make Blood-C anything but decent.
Sounds like a job for a… ooh, I dunno, a montage? Seriously, they could’ve simply condensed the previous four episodes into one and saved the viewers so much time. But hey, maybe they just didn’t have enough material to even hit 12 episodes if they did that.
I was going to say a montage would’ve worked, but I wasn’t, and still am not, thinking normally and with any sort of acuity.
Who knows, maybe there could’ve been a story about the Guimauve pink cubes being made of people, and the cafe owner being a demon. They could probably stretch that into an episode or two, and would confirm my baseless suspicions.