Review of Strike the Blood

They managed to make a show about vampires completely bloodless. About the kindest thing you can say for Strike the Blood is that it's not screamingly bad in any particular way. Rather it's uniformly, monotonously bad; bad in every single way that an anime of its general description might turn out to be bad. Now bad shows are a fact of life and nothing to get excited about, but the fandom's toleration and acceptance for bad shows like this is a real shame and only encourages the studios to keep turning them out instead of something actually worthwhile. SutoBura actually begins reasonably well. True, the first episodebegins with an unnecessary and confusing narrative prologue, in which anonymous voices portentously explain the main character's back story, but after that the actual content is solid if unimaginative. We're introduced to the setting of an artificial island city built to safely contain magic-users and demons away from the main Japanese population – an effective concept that should have starred as practically a character in itself, but ends up in later episodes feeling completely neglected and undistinguished from any random ward of Tokyo. We meet the two main characters and set up some promising tensions between them. Himeragi, apparently, has been assigned by some kind of powerful supernatural organization to investigate Akatsuki, who simply wants to be left alone in peace despite his recent unwanted conversion to one of the world's most powerful vampires, and therefore a focus of intrigue and suspicion. Of course, they're a young boy and an even younger girl, and the usual tsundere harem love-hate dynamic is clearly seen to be developing. And there's an action scene involving some random street punks that, if a bit of a cliched throwaway in concept, at least does introduce both main characters' fighting styles and supernatural powers. Okay, none of this is earth-shattering but it does at least seem to set up a serviceable, not-too-serious high school harem action comedy-drama, which is all I was ever looking for here.

And then, over the interminable 23 following episodes, it falls apart faster and more comprehensively than one would have thought possible. The series develops into a series of 2-4 episode arcs that are effectively "Monster of the Week" affairs. But the plot-development scenes that string the fights together are interminable, wooden gab-fests. We're lectured about complex conspiracies and clashes among a host of supernatural factions that never have any clear motivation and never actually appear on screen. And none of it really matters anyway because the resolution inevitably comes in an unimaginative fight sequence decided by the protagonists' inherently superior magical powers, while the villains stand around shouting something along the lines of "Masaka! Is this the power of yada yada, that can defeat even my blah blah??" But maybe we should be grateful for the sheer incomprehensibility of the supernatural bullshit, since when the plot turns on ordinary human powers it's often laughably illogical.

After the first arc we're introduced to a recurring semi-villain character who adds a delicious extra layer of inanity by showing up every so often, after something (apparently?) important has occurred, to stroke his chin and muse aloud evil-ly about how whatever the fuck just happened was actually just a brilliant manipulation he engineered in accordance with his own, still deeper plan. Pay attention, aspiring writers, this is how you make it in the light novel business.

As for the lighter, high school harem aspect of the show? The food is terrible and the portions are too small. The Himeragi relationship starts out okay but settles into an unimaginative tsundere thing; she's constantly "accusing" Akatsuki of horrible crimes such as wanting to kiss girls, but of course, these accusations are baseless and crazy since he's actually a passive, clueless dork. The other girls mostly just lust after Akatsuki for no real reason, some adding their own halfhearted "actually I hate you" tsundere routine and some not, according to taste. There's very little in the way of humor or entertaining byplay, mostly just Akatsuki walking in on girls, over and over. The attendant fanservice shots aren't even very good on a purely pornographic level; they're both artless and, largely, tame.

Even the chud who wrote this couldn't quite miss that vampires are supposed to be awesome inhuman monsters and that vampirism is all about power and sex. Akatsuki is introduced as someone fairly revolted by blood-sucking, having always suppressed his urges. Of course, he ends up forced into it by circumstances, and of course it's with a cute girl who he's already in some kind of ambiguous relationship with. But the resultant story beats are rushed and emotionless. The perpetrator doesn't fret much over the monstrous nature of the act, and doesn't afterwards struggle with an increased thirst for blood and compulsion to feed on innocent victims. The "blood donor" doesn't seem to really risk anything in the process; she's neither traumatized nor transfixed. She just makes a little bit of a sex moan and then falls asleep for a while and then afterwards everything's cool. You'd say it had all the human consequences of a botched grope session between two teenagers in the gym equipment room, except that actually, that's overstating it, if you consider how emotionally fraught that kind of thing is when conducted among actual human teenagers rather than poorly written anime protagonists.

On a purely visual level Strike the Blood is mostly serviceable though not pretty. The budget seems to have gone mostly into fight scenes (not that these are lavish) and a lot of the slower, talky scenes are virtually static, with characters' facial expressions sometimes mismatched to their VAs' performances. There are a few moments of outright "QUALITY" and a number of what seemed like contrived excuses to cut down on animation expenses, such as a scene staged on a cargo ship among featureless shipping containers and a fight involving stiff, clumsy looking robot soldier enemies. As I said up front, none of this stuff is really outrageously bad, it just provides no relief from the all-around badness. Nor do the unmemorable soundtrack and voice performances.

On the whole this is just not worth anyone's time, and a prime example of the plague of god-awful light novel adaptations that is ruining anime.