Blood+: Anime Review and Meta
Jul. 13th, 2011 08:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
labingiBlood+ Anime Review and Meta
with remarks on evolution and biology
Somehow in the midst of my current X-Men obsession, I managed to finish Blood+, a 50-episode anime, recced bysixish, and I am here to recommend it to others. It's been a long time since I've found an anime so satisfying and genuinely interesting.
Non-Spoilery Summary:
Blood+ is a vampire story, the basic premise of which is Saya the Vampire Slayer, a high school girl who discovers she has fighting skills and unique blood that can kill vampires ("chiropterans"). Along with her adoptive family, she is inducted into a band of vampire hunters. Sounds generic enough, but it's actually creative and dramatically subtle. (Disclosure: owing to Netflix weirdness and laziness, I skipped the first disc; I'm told it's the boring one.)
Spoilers Follow:
Spoilery Summary:
Chiropterans come in three main varieties: queens (humanoid beings with magic blood to create and kill chiropterans), chevaliers (humanoid beings who serve the queens and can also take on monstrous bat forms), and ordinary chiropterans, which are fairly mindless bat-wolfman-like beings ravenously bent on eating humans. Saya is one of two chiropteran queens, the other being her twin sister, Diva, who is responsible for creating the chiropterans who keep popping up to plague human society. The story revolves around Saya's moral dilemmas: being a chiropteran yet wishing to destroy them, having vowed to kill Diva yet being deeply attached to her too (and understanding that she is so destructive only because, unlike Saya, she was abused as a child and is, thus, somewhat demented). The characters' relationships and conundrums resist easy solutions and stereotyping, thus maintaining interest throughout the series.
The Good
Evolutionary and Anthropological Discourse:
Whoever conceived of the anime's scheme for vampire society had a genuine regard for evolutionary theory. Chiropterans are convincingly (and somewhat originally!) presented as a naturally evolved species. (Because they are so closely tied to humans, my guess--fanonical--is that they originated when some disease infected humans but, instead of killing them, launched them onto a different evolutionary path in symbiotic relationship with some sort of enormously flexible microorganism. Again, nothing about this in canon, but it fits.)
What we do know from canon is that this species typically has two queens (and usually only two?) at one time. These queens create chevaliers by giving their blood to dying/newly dead humans, typically male. (It's not clear if this process would work on a female.) These chevaliers serve two functions: 1) they protect the queen who created them and 2) they mate with the queen who did not. Their offspring are the new queens. Thus, for chiropteran reproduction to work, one must have two queens, one chevalier (typically more attached to the queen he can't mate with), and a human population from which to generate chevaliers. This sounds like an evolutionarily haphazard way to reproduce, until one considers how nigh indestructible chiropterans are and what heavy ecological footprint they have. They are extremely efficient predators, capable of laying waste to vast food resources. If their population were not extremely low, they would rapidly deplete their own food source and cause ecological havoc wherever they go. Their convoluted mating requirements, however, serve to limit their population.
Another couple of factors, too, seem to mitigate the potential habitat damage chiropterans could easily wreak. The queens--who generally set the agenda--have the physical form of teenage girls and seem to retain something of a young-girlish mentality. At the risk of gender essentialism, I might argue that they are hormonally predisposed to be less competitive and ambitious than one might expect from males, all other characteristics being equal. This might militate against expansionistic destruction of habitat. The males, meanwhile, are strongly instinctively driven to follow the queens, which may somewhat counteract their inherited human tendency toward more assertive action on the environment. (Yes, this is a very gender essentialist line of argumentation, and while I think it's plausible, it should be read as drenched in caveats about individual variation.)
How do the mindless chiropterans fit into this? Not well. They don't really help anyone (except in the very removed sense of modern civilization using them as political pawns, but this probably wouldn't explain their evolution). In the main, they compete with the queens and chevaliers for food--and they can consume a lot. My guess is that they are a biological mishap, like the capacity of humans to reproduce far beyond replacement level, the result of the misapplication of the process that creates chevaliers. In evolutionary terms, the creation of these creatures is probably rare and/or--like excess infants in many societies throughout history--they are killed by their parents/creators.
All this is skewed in the generation of Saya and Diva because (as orphans) they are separated from any traditions that would conserve and maintain chiropteran society and are brought up counterproductively by nineteenth-century French naturalists with a Cartesian worldview and little regard for ecological balance or their subjects' health. Raised in a place called the "Zoo," they are, indeed, out of whack, like animals in captivity who refuse to breed or breed too much. As an experiment, they raise Diva in isolation while giving Saya the benefits of a loving family. The results are predictable: Saya grows up healthy (if a little spoiled); Diva grows up emotionally stunted and likely incapable of ever functioning as a normal adult. This is a sad fate for anyone but devastatingly dangerous when practiced on one of the most powerful predators in the animal kingdom. Thus, the plague of chiropterans Diva launches on the world is not a normative part of chiropteran ecology but rather the result of mental illness in one of the generation's two chief representatives.
The story concludes, we hope, with a return to a more normative pattern of chiropteran functioning: Diva's children are both raised in a loving household, by Saya's adoptive brother, Kai. Like Saya, they should not be gravely dangerous to humanity.
Instinct in Higher Animals: Chevaliers
Blood+ consistently shows a sophisticated understanding of how instinct interacts with cognition in higher animals. There is, thank God, no false opposition here between "reason and thought" (what "humans" have) and "blind instinct" (what "animals" have). The cognitively functioning chiropterans clearly filter biological instinct through thought, as both humans and many other animals do. The best example of this is the chevaliers.
Chevaliers all begin as human and retain fully human cognition, including their native personalities and cultural context. However, it is clear that they are instinctively driven to protect their queen, in much that same way that humans are instinctively driven to care for their children, that is, obviously and consistently but with a wide variety of personal variations, predispositions and (sometimes) maladjustments. Each chevalier is an individual, and each expresses his protective drive in an individualized way:
* Amshel (Diva's): One of the scientists who manipulated Saya and Diva, he describes himself as having a scientific obsession with Diva: he wants to possess her, study her, control the natural history of her species.
* James (Diva's): A former soldier and rather authoritarian personality, James treats devotion to Diva as, no doubt, he previously treated duty to God and country, as a moral absolute he will never relinquish and which justifies any kind of nasty behavior toward others.
* Solomon (Diva's): A former doctor, a man of reason disillusioned by World War I, Solomon's higher cognition cannot be happy with Diva: she is a destructive child he doubtless finds both boring and pernicious, yet he retains an adult's indulgent caring for her for some 70 years. In the end, he switches loyalties, falling in love with Saya, the more reasonable and mature of the queens. His protective instinct transfers to Saya, though he clearly retains some affection for Diva. This is a little like the parent of a very disappointing child bonding more strongly with a niece or nephew of whom they are more proud.
* Carl (Diva's): Carl was an abused child himself and is unstable and desperate to be loved. This desperation takes the initial form of desiring Diva's love and approval. When it is not forthcoming, he--like Solomon--somewhat transfers his focus to Saya, but it's a destructive focus, bent on killing Saya and, thus, still protecting Diva. He is like the abused child who grows up to demand love and validation from his own children.
* Hagi (Saya's): Hagi and Saya grew up together and were something like best friends/siblings/lovers before she ever made him a chevalier. Thus, on human terms, he already had a strong attachment to her, and this attachment intensified under a chevalier's instinctive drive. He became her inveterate protector and constant companion with an indefatigable loyalty that seems implausible in a human lover but may make a lot of sense in a chevalier.
* Riku (Saya's): Like Hagi, Riku already had a loving relationship with Saya as a human; he was her adoptive little brother. He is only a chevalier for a short time, and his attitude toward Saya doesn't seem to change. He was loyal to her as a human, and he still is as a chevalier. If he had lived, the patterns of his behavior might have shifted over time to express a more differentiated will to stay with Saya and protect her.
* Nathan (Saya and Diva's Mother's): Nathan's queen is dead, but Nathan persists. He shows a genuine, indulgent fondness for Diva, but largely transfers this parental doting to Diva's children while they are still in their cocoons. Nathan is a grandparent: overseeing generations of family and attaching to the grandchildren and great-grandchildren as they arise and need adult support.
Emotional and Moral Complexity
This story is much concerned with how to love people who are dysfunctional and how to cope with personal tragedy. It involves sisters trying to kill each other yet loving each other and mourning for lost family. It involves far-ranging commentary on the essence of family, biological and emotional. It culminates in a young man becoming the loving adoptive parent of children who resulted from his brother's rape.
These complexities are further filtered through chiropteran (as opposed to human) nature, the biological underpinnings of a different species. The intersections between two species and biological-adoptive connections make relationships hard to tease out. Hagi, for example, is Saya's blood relative and was raised as something like her brother but has also, it is strongly suggested, been her lover (or emotionally in the role of), yet he is incapable of having children with anyone but her sister. Kai, on the other hand, is not related to Saya in any biological way, but he is much more clearly her brother emotionally, and yet the primacy of his attachment to her as the series progresses also suggests a possible romantic overtone that reads as ever so slightly incestuous in a mundane, human way. Now, this sets up Hagi and Kai to have interesting relationship: they both love Saya and both recognize each other as partners in supporting her. Yet their respective attachments to her (and hers to them) predispose them toward jealousy. The untangling of their attitudes toward each other is fascinating (what are they finally? brothers-in-law?), and just one of many such complex interconnections among the large cast of characters.
The Schiff
The Schiff are artificially created chiropterans who all suffer from a fatal disease. They form a very close-knit family among themselves, though gradually they learn to bond with Saya's team as, for the first time, they are shown kindness by any outsiders. Within the series, they all die but one and their grappling with each other's illness and death and, of course, their own is consistently moving.
The Not as Good
David and Julia
A couple of Saya's human companions, both are good characters (David especially and especially at the beginning), but the narrative insists on aiming them at each other as a couple for no discernable reason. Lewis (another human companion) is a fountain of off-hand remarks about their "attraction" that feel about as motivated as Kramer's declaration to Jerry Seinfeld and Elaine, "Don't you see that you're in love!?" Apparently, however, we are supposed to believe they fall in love...
Being a Little Too Coy
In an interview in a Blood+ manga, one of the creators notes that the anime specifically avoided discussing how Hagi feeds. I guess they didn't want to muddy the waters of his heroism by showing him to be a bloodsucking vampire? This drawing of curtains extends to other areas, especially surrounding chiropteran sex. Do they do it the same way humans do? If not, how? How exactly did Diva rape Riku? What reproductive mechanism is involved here? Yes, these questions can be grizzly, but when you're inventing a new species, you can't leave your audience to guess. We don't know the answers as we would in a human rape story, for example. The avoidance of these areas creates uncomfortable gaps where the narrative cannot be fully understood.
On a more mundane level, I wanted more information on the sexual dynamics among queens and chevaliers. Amshel notes that he attempted mating Diva with her own chevaliers, but again, how? Did this include himself? Saya and Hagi, meanwhile, are presented as having had something like a romance, but were they a sexual couple? I can think of no reason they wouldn't be (unless, again, chiropterans just don't do it that way), yet the story is so emphatically reserved with their physical contact--in both present and past plotlines--that one begins to wonder. These issues do matter because they affect the way we read the relationships among the major characters. Withholding some information can give the audience room in which to play, but some information is necessary to producing a fully expressed narrative.
Still in all, an excellent series! It's a shame the fandom is such a quiet one. There are so many interesting directions to explore.
with remarks on evolution and biology
Somehow in the midst of my current X-Men obsession, I managed to finish Blood+, a 50-episode anime, recced by
sixish, and I am here to recommend it to others. It's been a long time since I've found an anime so satisfying and genuinely interesting.Non-Spoilery Summary:
Blood+ is a vampire story, the basic premise of which is Saya the Vampire Slayer, a high school girl who discovers she has fighting skills and unique blood that can kill vampires ("chiropterans"). Along with her adoptive family, she is inducted into a band of vampire hunters. Sounds generic enough, but it's actually creative and dramatically subtle. (Disclosure: owing to Netflix weirdness and laziness, I skipped the first disc; I'm told it's the boring one.)
Spoilers Follow:
Spoilery Summary:
Chiropterans come in three main varieties: queens (humanoid beings with magic blood to create and kill chiropterans), chevaliers (humanoid beings who serve the queens and can also take on monstrous bat forms), and ordinary chiropterans, which are fairly mindless bat-wolfman-like beings ravenously bent on eating humans. Saya is one of two chiropteran queens, the other being her twin sister, Diva, who is responsible for creating the chiropterans who keep popping up to plague human society. The story revolves around Saya's moral dilemmas: being a chiropteran yet wishing to destroy them, having vowed to kill Diva yet being deeply attached to her too (and understanding that she is so destructive only because, unlike Saya, she was abused as a child and is, thus, somewhat demented). The characters' relationships and conundrums resist easy solutions and stereotyping, thus maintaining interest throughout the series.
The Good
Evolutionary and Anthropological Discourse:
Whoever conceived of the anime's scheme for vampire society had a genuine regard for evolutionary theory. Chiropterans are convincingly (and somewhat originally!) presented as a naturally evolved species. (Because they are so closely tied to humans, my guess--fanonical--is that they originated when some disease infected humans but, instead of killing them, launched them onto a different evolutionary path in symbiotic relationship with some sort of enormously flexible microorganism. Again, nothing about this in canon, but it fits.)
What we do know from canon is that this species typically has two queens (and usually only two?) at one time. These queens create chevaliers by giving their blood to dying/newly dead humans, typically male. (It's not clear if this process would work on a female.) These chevaliers serve two functions: 1) they protect the queen who created them and 2) they mate with the queen who did not. Their offspring are the new queens. Thus, for chiropteran reproduction to work, one must have two queens, one chevalier (typically more attached to the queen he can't mate with), and a human population from which to generate chevaliers. This sounds like an evolutionarily haphazard way to reproduce, until one considers how nigh indestructible chiropterans are and what heavy ecological footprint they have. They are extremely efficient predators, capable of laying waste to vast food resources. If their population were not extremely low, they would rapidly deplete their own food source and cause ecological havoc wherever they go. Their convoluted mating requirements, however, serve to limit their population.
Another couple of factors, too, seem to mitigate the potential habitat damage chiropterans could easily wreak. The queens--who generally set the agenda--have the physical form of teenage girls and seem to retain something of a young-girlish mentality. At the risk of gender essentialism, I might argue that they are hormonally predisposed to be less competitive and ambitious than one might expect from males, all other characteristics being equal. This might militate against expansionistic destruction of habitat. The males, meanwhile, are strongly instinctively driven to follow the queens, which may somewhat counteract their inherited human tendency toward more assertive action on the environment. (Yes, this is a very gender essentialist line of argumentation, and while I think it's plausible, it should be read as drenched in caveats about individual variation.)
How do the mindless chiropterans fit into this? Not well. They don't really help anyone (except in the very removed sense of modern civilization using them as political pawns, but this probably wouldn't explain their evolution). In the main, they compete with the queens and chevaliers for food--and they can consume a lot. My guess is that they are a biological mishap, like the capacity of humans to reproduce far beyond replacement level, the result of the misapplication of the process that creates chevaliers. In evolutionary terms, the creation of these creatures is probably rare and/or--like excess infants in many societies throughout history--they are killed by their parents/creators.
All this is skewed in the generation of Saya and Diva because (as orphans) they are separated from any traditions that would conserve and maintain chiropteran society and are brought up counterproductively by nineteenth-century French naturalists with a Cartesian worldview and little regard for ecological balance or their subjects' health. Raised in a place called the "Zoo," they are, indeed, out of whack, like animals in captivity who refuse to breed or breed too much. As an experiment, they raise Diva in isolation while giving Saya the benefits of a loving family. The results are predictable: Saya grows up healthy (if a little spoiled); Diva grows up emotionally stunted and likely incapable of ever functioning as a normal adult. This is a sad fate for anyone but devastatingly dangerous when practiced on one of the most powerful predators in the animal kingdom. Thus, the plague of chiropterans Diva launches on the world is not a normative part of chiropteran ecology but rather the result of mental illness in one of the generation's two chief representatives.
The story concludes, we hope, with a return to a more normative pattern of chiropteran functioning: Diva's children are both raised in a loving household, by Saya's adoptive brother, Kai. Like Saya, they should not be gravely dangerous to humanity.
Instinct in Higher Animals: Chevaliers
Blood+ consistently shows a sophisticated understanding of how instinct interacts with cognition in higher animals. There is, thank God, no false opposition here between "reason and thought" (what "humans" have) and "blind instinct" (what "animals" have). The cognitively functioning chiropterans clearly filter biological instinct through thought, as both humans and many other animals do. The best example of this is the chevaliers.
Chevaliers all begin as human and retain fully human cognition, including their native personalities and cultural context. However, it is clear that they are instinctively driven to protect their queen, in much that same way that humans are instinctively driven to care for their children, that is, obviously and consistently but with a wide variety of personal variations, predispositions and (sometimes) maladjustments. Each chevalier is an individual, and each expresses his protective drive in an individualized way:
* Amshel (Diva's): One of the scientists who manipulated Saya and Diva, he describes himself as having a scientific obsession with Diva: he wants to possess her, study her, control the natural history of her species.
* James (Diva's): A former soldier and rather authoritarian personality, James treats devotion to Diva as, no doubt, he previously treated duty to God and country, as a moral absolute he will never relinquish and which justifies any kind of nasty behavior toward others.
* Solomon (Diva's): A former doctor, a man of reason disillusioned by World War I, Solomon's higher cognition cannot be happy with Diva: she is a destructive child he doubtless finds both boring and pernicious, yet he retains an adult's indulgent caring for her for some 70 years. In the end, he switches loyalties, falling in love with Saya, the more reasonable and mature of the queens. His protective instinct transfers to Saya, though he clearly retains some affection for Diva. This is a little like the parent of a very disappointing child bonding more strongly with a niece or nephew of whom they are more proud.
* Carl (Diva's): Carl was an abused child himself and is unstable and desperate to be loved. This desperation takes the initial form of desiring Diva's love and approval. When it is not forthcoming, he--like Solomon--somewhat transfers his focus to Saya, but it's a destructive focus, bent on killing Saya and, thus, still protecting Diva. He is like the abused child who grows up to demand love and validation from his own children.
* Hagi (Saya's): Hagi and Saya grew up together and were something like best friends/siblings/lovers before she ever made him a chevalier. Thus, on human terms, he already had a strong attachment to her, and this attachment intensified under a chevalier's instinctive drive. He became her inveterate protector and constant companion with an indefatigable loyalty that seems implausible in a human lover but may make a lot of sense in a chevalier.
* Riku (Saya's): Like Hagi, Riku already had a loving relationship with Saya as a human; he was her adoptive little brother. He is only a chevalier for a short time, and his attitude toward Saya doesn't seem to change. He was loyal to her as a human, and he still is as a chevalier. If he had lived, the patterns of his behavior might have shifted over time to express a more differentiated will to stay with Saya and protect her.
* Nathan (Saya and Diva's Mother's): Nathan's queen is dead, but Nathan persists. He shows a genuine, indulgent fondness for Diva, but largely transfers this parental doting to Diva's children while they are still in their cocoons. Nathan is a grandparent: overseeing generations of family and attaching to the grandchildren and great-grandchildren as they arise and need adult support.
Emotional and Moral Complexity
This story is much concerned with how to love people who are dysfunctional and how to cope with personal tragedy. It involves sisters trying to kill each other yet loving each other and mourning for lost family. It involves far-ranging commentary on the essence of family, biological and emotional. It culminates in a young man becoming the loving adoptive parent of children who resulted from his brother's rape.
These complexities are further filtered through chiropteran (as opposed to human) nature, the biological underpinnings of a different species. The intersections between two species and biological-adoptive connections make relationships hard to tease out. Hagi, for example, is Saya's blood relative and was raised as something like her brother but has also, it is strongly suggested, been her lover (or emotionally in the role of), yet he is incapable of having children with anyone but her sister. Kai, on the other hand, is not related to Saya in any biological way, but he is much more clearly her brother emotionally, and yet the primacy of his attachment to her as the series progresses also suggests a possible romantic overtone that reads as ever so slightly incestuous in a mundane, human way. Now, this sets up Hagi and Kai to have interesting relationship: they both love Saya and both recognize each other as partners in supporting her. Yet their respective attachments to her (and hers to them) predispose them toward jealousy. The untangling of their attitudes toward each other is fascinating (what are they finally? brothers-in-law?), and just one of many such complex interconnections among the large cast of characters.
The Schiff
The Schiff are artificially created chiropterans who all suffer from a fatal disease. They form a very close-knit family among themselves, though gradually they learn to bond with Saya's team as, for the first time, they are shown kindness by any outsiders. Within the series, they all die but one and their grappling with each other's illness and death and, of course, their own is consistently moving.
The Not as Good
David and Julia
A couple of Saya's human companions, both are good characters (David especially and especially at the beginning), but the narrative insists on aiming them at each other as a couple for no discernable reason. Lewis (another human companion) is a fountain of off-hand remarks about their "attraction" that feel about as motivated as Kramer's declaration to Jerry Seinfeld and Elaine, "Don't you see that you're in love!?" Apparently, however, we are supposed to believe they fall in love...
Being a Little Too Coy
In an interview in a Blood+ manga, one of the creators notes that the anime specifically avoided discussing how Hagi feeds. I guess they didn't want to muddy the waters of his heroism by showing him to be a bloodsucking vampire? This drawing of curtains extends to other areas, especially surrounding chiropteran sex. Do they do it the same way humans do? If not, how? How exactly did Diva rape Riku? What reproductive mechanism is involved here? Yes, these questions can be grizzly, but when you're inventing a new species, you can't leave your audience to guess. We don't know the answers as we would in a human rape story, for example. The avoidance of these areas creates uncomfortable gaps where the narrative cannot be fully understood.
On a more mundane level, I wanted more information on the sexual dynamics among queens and chevaliers. Amshel notes that he attempted mating Diva with her own chevaliers, but again, how? Did this include himself? Saya and Hagi, meanwhile, are presented as having had something like a romance, but were they a sexual couple? I can think of no reason they wouldn't be (unless, again, chiropterans just don't do it that way), yet the story is so emphatically reserved with their physical contact--in both present and past plotlines--that one begins to wonder. These issues do matter because they affect the way we read the relationships among the major characters. Withholding some information can give the audience room in which to play, but some information is necessary to producing a fully expressed narrative.
Still in all, an excellent series! It's a shame the fandom is such a quiet one. There are so many interesting directions to explore.
