A few weeks late, but I figure I might as well start from the beginning. While Negs currently has his hands full covering Mai-ZHiME (don’t worry, you’ll hear my take on the series as well, but he’s the primary commentator on that one), I’ve decided to take on a similar role for one of the other big titles this season, Blood+. Production I.G.’s latest, the show’s actually come as a bit of a surprise to me. Wanting more development on what we were given in the short Blood movie that debuted a few years ago, the initial presentation of the series prior to its debut left me disappointed, and the advertised timeslot left me expecting some toned down, generic shounen remake of the story instead of any sort of legitimate continuation. Needless to say, when I actually got around to watching the first episode, I was pleasantly surprised. While it does retain some shounen adventure anime clichés, it still doesn’t pull very many punches, and leaves numerous openings for potential tie-ins to the previous Blood installments. So, with a newer, more positive outlook on the series, I’ve decided to take on the task of covering it here, episode by episode. And yes, I know I’m about three episodes behind, but by all accounts I have about 48 more weeks to catch up. No problem, right?
Oh, by the way, if you don’t want to be spoiled on the Blood short movie or Blood 2002 manga, I suggest you either watch and read them respectively right now, or avoid reading any further. Many of my theories heavily involve major plot points presented in both, and I won’t be making any attempt to hide them behind any sort of spoiler tags or anything. You’ve been fairly warned. Well now, let’s get to it, shall we?
Basically this time Nagi and I were discussing it over IRC. Given that our comments are kind of all over the place, I thought it was probably best if we post separately. Unfortunately, wordpress isn’t designed with multiple people writing one entry in mind. Anyway, I’m personally really enjoying this series so far. I think one of the great things about it is that its predecessor proved that, unlike most anime, the predictible event is not always what transpires. They have a history of not taking the soft option, and that lends itself to far more in the way of debate, discussion and speculation. Once again, I’m not going to summarise the episode (people have done that already) but instead discuss and speculate.