Blood Lad – 10 (Fin)

Staz meets Heads Hydra, Bell’s dad and Neyn’s wife. Neyn wants to adopt Fuyumi, but Heads wants to give Fuyumi the choice of whether to stay with them or be brought back to life. He makes Staz pledge to do what Fuyumi says and not drink her blood without permission. Staz agrees, and he and Fuyumi are transported to Hydra’s exit. Meanwhile, Deku and Mimic protect Staz’s territory from interlopers, while Liz helps Braz escape from Goyle. Braz and Stein complete their work resurrecting Braz’s dad.

All of Staz’s and Fuyumi’s adventures have risen out of the original plan to bring her back to life. At first, Staz wanted to do this so he could drink her delicious human blood (Ever tried drinking ghost blood? Nothin’!), a selfish reason that didn’t have anything to do with Fuyumi’s well-being. But now that both he and Fuyumi are given a choice: give Fuyumi up to Neyn, or continue with the resurrection plans – his motives have changed from selfish to selfless. In the end, this is partly because Heads intimates that he might die of a curse if he harms or defies her (though that “curse” was merely a trick played with herbs.)

Heads was never a guy Staz had to fight, just a guy he had to convince he had Fuyumi’s interests at heart. Fuyumi decides she wants to be brought back to life, so they leave the comfort and safety of Hydra and will have to deal with Braz – who clearly has other priorities, along with some mysterious team of red-eyed baddies. But that will have to wait until next season or the OVA(s) or film or whatever. It was a very tentative ending. So…will we keep watching whenever it starts back up? Mmm…probably not. We didn’t dislike this series, but ten episodes was about right for us.

Rating: 6 (Good)

Blood Lad – 09

Berros escorts Braz to the Demon King Wolf-Daddy’s palace, where the king gives him three days to return the remnants of his agent Pantomime (Akim) to him. Braz escapes from Berros, but is chased by her superior, Chief Goyle. In Hydra, Bell and Staz meet up with Nell and Fuyumi. Fuyumi meets Bell and Nell’s mother Neyn, who tells her she was Fuyumi’s mom’s demon doppelganger. When they met, the two women were fused into one, making Fuyumi and Bell sisters.

At first Yanagi Fuyumi’s presence in the demon world seemed like a random occurrence, but considering it was Hydra family “technology” that got her there, and all the revelations we learned this week, it’s starting to look more and more like her coming was no accident at all. The concept of demons having human counterparts – be it Fuyumi’s mom and Neyn Hydra or Fuyumi’s dad and the Hydras’ butler – suddenly makes Bell and Fuyumi family, and gets Staz thinking that there’s probably more to his intrinsic interest in Fuyumi than just her human blood.

Speaking of family, Braz reveals that he isn’t just into creating super-monsters for his own enjoyment. He literally watched the current king kill his father, the previous king, and he’s never been cool with that. Everything he’s done has been to dethrone Wolf-Daddy and replace him with a new, “worthy” king. Thing is, it sounds like next week is the last episode, so we can’t see any way of Braz completing this task, on top of the Hydra family and Staz/Fuyumi and Staz/Bell situations shaking out. We’re assuming there’ll be a second season of this at some point; something we don’t have a problem with.

Rating:7 (Very Good)

Blood Lad – 08

Liz returns home, but is confronted by Officer Beros of the Acropolis Police, who arrests Braz for illegally leaving Acropolis. Fuyumi’s kidnapper slips up while feeding her, and she rings the bell Bell gave her. Bell intercepts the kidnapper, who is her brother, Nell Hydra, who says he’s only running an errand for their mom. Staz arrives, but Bell lets Nell escape to Hydra with Fuyumi and then shoots Staz, throwing him in her grid room.

Jealous of Staz’s devotion to Fuyumi, Bell challenges him to a fight to decide if she’ll take him to her. When she’s overly cocky he nearly takes her bottom half off, and she must abandon all the clothing attached to it. Before he reads her diary, she surrenders, and takes him to Hydra. Staz apologizes for causing her to be uptight, but won’t apologize, because he sees himself not as the hero, but the “bad guy.”

If that synopsis was too long, here’s the tl;dr version: Staz goes looking for Fuyumi and runs into obstacles; the biggest among them Bell. She likes him, and it pisses her off that A.), he doesn’t notice, and B.), he’s so fixated on Fuyumi, and C.), he considers Fuyumi a rare and one-of-a-kind “collector’s item,” not an equal partner Bell could be to him. Their battle proves they’re on pretty equal footing power-wise, and FWIW, we’d choose Bell over Fuyumi every time.

Their battle is also a wonderful exercise in absurdity, as Bell gets caught with her pants down (literally!) and Staz is riddled with bullets to the point of needing to be pixelated (unlike Bell’s ass). Staz freely admits he’s not sure why Bell is so erratic around him, but he also tells her she’s welcome to take it all out on him, because he can take it, unknowingly endearing him to her even more. Even as she leads him to her home where he’s sure to meet her brother and mother on the way to retrieving her rival in love, she’s determined to keep her feelings hidden.

Rating: 8 (Great)

Stray Observations:

• Blood Lad’s character designs are relatively simple, but fun and expressive, and the characters’ outfits change often (Bell’s in particular), keeping their looks fresh.
• Now we know that crazy land with the planetoids/laputas in the ED is Bell’s home, Hydra.
• Braz’s arrest by Berros shows us that, indeed, most people don’t really like him, which isn’t surprising.
• Fuyumi seems to be a cooperative hostage as usual, but when the opportunity presents itself, she wisely rings the bell Bell gave her, setting everything into motion.

 

 

Blood Lad – 07

Braz and Liz meet Fuyumi and Staz’s crew. Staz drinks Fuyumi’s last bottle of magical essence, so she has to drink his blood, which overwhelms her. After Staz takes a magical sample from her, he returns to the Acropolis to work his lab, but Liz stays behind. Staz learns she stayed to keep an eye on him, but after sampling Staz’s earth collection and hanging out with Fuyumi, Liz starts to warm to the place. The next morning Fuyumi has disappeared. Staz orders a search, suspecting she was abducted.

Liz is an emotionally damaged little girl. With both parents out of the picture and Staz quick to leave home, she ended up stuck with her big brother, who never paid any attention to her, but is constantly trying to attract it by being a good girl, which means serving as his henchman. She never experienced a normal childhood or love, for that matter. Fuyumi steps in to act as a big sis, feeding, bathing and generally doting upon her like the cute little kid she actually is (she also enjoys watching Castle in the Sky. Who doesn’t? Nobody, that’s who.)

Meanwhile, Staz oozes “up to something” from every pore in his body, stripping Fuyumi to take her magic sample, planting Liz as his spy, and planning to extract Staz’s magic from Fuyumi’s for lord-knows-what experiment, but it can’t be good. On top of that, some random blonde guy (who looks a little like Bell) abducts Fuyumi, which is bad because she needs Staz’s blood a regular intervals to stop from fading away. Perhaps in future Staz will consider implementing security measures, like, say, something…anything.

Rating: 6 (Good)

Blood Lad – 03

Staz wants Bell to help him get to West Demon World. She refuses, but he goes anyway with Fuyumi and Mamejirou, hiring a carriage that is stopped when Wolf himself slices it in half. Both their underlings are surprsied when they greet each other as friends. Wolf agrees to help him find the Book of Human Resurrection if he loses a bowling match, which is changed to a boxing match at the last minute. Staz embeds a tooth in Wolf that drains his magic, but a tearful Fuyumi puts an end to the match. Bell declares them both losers, then transports everyone to an isolated area. She gives Staz the book she had on her all along. No one is able to decipher it, and Staz is perturbed to learn it was written by his older brother, Braz T. Blood.

Yanagi Fuyumi may have changed Charlie Staz Blood more than even he’s aware. Both his underlings and his childhood friend/rival Wolf are surprised to the point of being caught off guard by his sudden devotion to a random human girl. Despite her actual death being relatively quick and silly, Staz is dead serious about bringing her back to life. That resolve is tested when he has to enter a powerful rival boss’s territory and fight him, but even moreso going forward when he’ll have to interact with his older brother, something he’s most certainly not looking forward to.

Fuyumi, meanwhile, ends her passive streak by stopping Staz from killing Wolf in her name. She won’t have friends fighting over her, and likely wouldn’t want to be resurrected if it meant hurting others. As for Bell Hydra, she takes on the role of puppet master, pitting the water of Staz against the fire of Wolf, apparently in an effort to test his strength and resolve. We’re still not sure about her motivations, but while she still doesn’t quite trust him, it seems logical she’d want his plan to save Fuyumi (whom she seems to like) to succeed. The Oni-Qlo clerk could also have a point about her liking him, and testing his worthiness to be her mate.

Rating:7 (Very Good)