On the grounds that it’s silly to drop a series you’ve blogged for eight episodes with only four left, I’m going to finish covering Blood-C.  But I’ll be honest – it isn’t exactly going to be a labor of love.

On the other hand, I don’t just want to lay out a string of negative comments because while that might be fun for some writers, it’s not for me.  As a result, unless something changes I’d expect these posts to be pretty short.  It’s not too easy to find stuff I liked in an episode like this one, which seemed to highlight all of the problems that plague this series and have from the outset.

What really strikes me is just how little character development there’s been in this series.  I’m hard pressed to recall any series, much less one that takes itself seriously as a drama, where there’s been less.  On occasional bit of background is not the same as character development, and that’s just about all we’ve had.  There’s really no connection between events and behavior here – in fact, there’s barely connection between events and other events.  The series seems at this stage like a random string of ideas loosely combined together, with no real attempt to make them fit.  It just sort of lumbers from one scene to the next, with overripe background music occasionally flaring up to let us know either, A. We’re supposed to feel something or, B: Great fountains of blood are about to appear.

There’s no delicacy, no cleverness, no style to all this.  Decapitations and massive amounts of plasma aren’t scary or horrific – they take no effort at all.  It’s a lazy attempt to be jarring, but it’s become almost comical at this point for me.  Speaking of which, who could resist laughing when Saya said “I will protect everyone!” mere seconds after watching half her surviving classmates be eviscerated, beheaded and/or eaten alive?  It’s going to take more than yet another CLAMP crossover in a dog suit and random, pointless fanservice to salvage this bloody mess.

I’m afraid I don’t have much else to offer, except that I hope next week is better.  I feel more strongly than ever that this is about at the level of a “Blood” fanfic, and that’s how it plays on-screen.  There was the usual dribble of exposition this week – indeed, it looks as if this whole experiment was part of a bet in which Saya was involved, and her memories of that have been suppressed.  It was mildly interesting to hear her tell Tokizane that the Elder Bairns weren’t monsters, even though she wasn’t sure why.  But to be honest, there’s so little dexterity to all this and so little context to what happens that it’s hard for me to really care about all that conspiracy stuff.  And the characters are so flat and lifeless that it’s hard to care about them, either.  In the end, that doesn’t leave a whole lot left at the bottom of the barrel.