Blood-C - Episode 2

Having established its key concepts quite methodically over the course of its first instalment, episode two of Blood-C wastes no time in putting Saya into the midst of some more "Elder Bairn" monster slashing as we see her in the heat of battle once again.

With this latest scrap over however, episode two of Blood-C somehow happens to waste lots of time on irrelevant nonsense - plenty more random singing is just the start of it, as we watch the series indulge in long discussions about sweets and how Saya takes her coffee.  In a slightly more relevant fashion, Saya's blatant love interest (that everyone but Saya has spotted of course) is also brought more clearly to the fore while the mysterious and gruff Tokizane's future is entwined a little more closely with Saya's while huge neon lights flash in the background shouting "hey, doesn't this dude act like a bad guy?"  Okay, I made up the flashing neon lights part, but they might as well be there.

It's only come the end of the episode that we're treated to some more action, with Saya taking on another decidedly creepy Elder Bairn (who seemed rather like he'd lost out in an audition for a part in Half-Life) in a flash of blood and... well, more blood, mostly.  By this point however, I think I was just thankful that something was happening which didn't involve singing or eating.

While many seemed tepid towards Blood-C from the very start I rather enjoyed episode one and felt like it did everything required from it to set things up for the rest of the series; such positive thoughts seem to have been dashed upon the rocks of reality this week however, as it's become clear that episode two is suffering from what I'm going to call "Star Driver disease" - the key symptoms of which are a delusional insistence upon a formulaic episode structure, coupled with a rash of slice of life silliness that can be found spreading across the midriff of each instalment, in turn leaving only the extremities untouched and functioning normal as an action anime.

I'm not going to say that Blood-C sucks just yet ("hey, maybe it's just building up to something big really slowly?" the wellspring of positivity in my brain is suggesting cheerfully), but unless something drastic happens sooner rather than later the prognosis is not good - Star Driver disease currently has no known cure, and the initial test results are worrying.