Blood-C Episode 6--Censors & Mami Flashbacks

After the cliffhanger ending from the last episode, it's finally safe to say that the plot is off and running, taking a page from Madoka Magica in the first five minutes (spoilers for Madoka in this post).




For everyone that complained that there was too much happy daily school life and not enough gore, this is your episode. The violence has finally gotten to a point that the legal stream has to use the "broadcast" version, which means that there are black and white bars pretty much everywhere in the two fight scenes this episode. It also looks like the types of school scenes that we've seen up until this point won't be happening anymore, as the teacher announces that the school is closed until further notice since the disappearances are becoming more common. So no more "well I watched some innocent people die last night, guess I'll go to school" from Saya. The fights in this episode also took things in a different direction than expected; I thought that Nene seeing the monster would result in the temple's activities being exposed to the public, not her death. Also, apparently elder bairns can possess people, which I hope the show makes more use of going forward.




But for all of the interesting stuff happening in this episode, none of it really packed an emotional punch for me. Since I've already brought up Madoka, let's use that as an example. Mami's death was shocking not only because it was unexpected but also because she was an extremely likable character. While the twins have been amusing, they never really distinguished themselves as characters beyond being the quirky ones in Saya's school group. What makes this frustrating as that this show had five episodes to make them likable enough to make their deaths shocking, but instead it went for blandness. There's also the sheer amount of blood in this episode; yes, blood is part of the title, but it's hard to take all of the shock value seriously when there's so little character development behind it. The show is still improving, bit by bit, but I wish that it had made better use of the large amount of exposition time it was given if this was what it was leading up to.


Famous last words

Images from NicoNico.com.