There are a couple of recent anime which have surprised me.

When Madan no Ou to Vanadis was running, I caught every episode as soon as it showed up. But now that it's over, the surprising thing is that I have no urge whatever to rewatch it. The last time I looked at any of it was when I plundered it for the top rotation.

Strike the Blood is exactly the opposite. I didn't watch it when it originally ran. When a BD rip of it showed up I downloaded that solely for plunder purposes. But I've gotten hooked on it and rewatched various parts of it a lot of times.

I'm no big fan of vampire stories; on the contrary, most of them reek to high heaven. (Most of them are woman wish-fulfilment, and I ain't a babe.) Which is why I ignored it on first broadcast.

But in this case, the vampire (Kojou) doesn't consume blood for nourishment. It's a magical powerup, and in the course of the entire series I think he only drinks blood about six times. More to the point, every time the maiden in question volunteers for it, and not because he's using some sort of Vampire hypnosis on her.

Another thing that works well about the series is that it's divided into discrete story arcs, and none of those is long enough to be pretentious. There are seven of them in a 24-episode series, none longer than four episodes. Yet none of them feel rushed. They also don't feel padded.

Over the course of the series Kojou becomes more and more powerful, but itdoesn't skyrocketlike DBZ power inflation; that too is nice.

The kind of series that I find myself rewatching make me wish I was there, at least a little bit. And Strike the Blood does that.

There are a bunch of interesting supporting characters in it, and none of them are really annoying. Dimitry Vatler is probably the most annoying, in his intro arc, but they crank way back on that later even though he gets involved in a bunch of the remaining stories.

Yet another thing that's nice: one guy and several desirable girls, but it is NOT a harem show. The chosen one is the first we meet and it's obvious she's the one. (That's confirmed at the end, by the way, though it's subtle.)

Natsuki is probably the most interesting supporting character, and I was glad that one of the best story arcs was about her.

She's a teacher and she claims to be 26, even though she looks like a loli, and wears Goth-Loli fashions. Is she really 26? Having seen the truth about her origin I'm still not sure, but she could be. Depends on the chronology, I guess. Anyway, because she looks like she's 12 years old, the other main characters all call her "Natsuki-chan", which invariably makes her mad.

She tends to be a bit disrespectful, which she can get away with because she's very powerful. She refers to vampires as "bats" and she calls Dimitry "hebi-tsukai" which FFF translated nicely as "snake charmer". (She's not the only the only person who calls him that, I should mention.)

She's always fun, and her arc was particularly nice.

There are also some rather interesting support characters who only show up once or twice. This one is my favorite:

She's a computer hacker that goes by the sobriquet "Tank Driver". She's only on screen for a couple of minutes, but they are wonderful minutes indeed.

No, I'm not attracted to the show because of the lolis. Those two are the only ones, and there are other characters I like, too.

The show never feels as if it's bogged down, like it's run out of momentum. Things are going on constantly, and there's plenty of action. I really enjoy it.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 04:55 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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