Sunday 1 September 2013

Blood Lad - Episode 9

Braz has been summoned to meet the demon king - a terrifying prospect in itself; but for what reason has Braz been granted an audience with the top man in the demon world?

It seems that the king's interest is in Braz's dealing during the whole incident with Akim, and more specifically the fact that this nasty piece of work looks exactly like somebody in the king's charge.  Braz is quite open in his response to this, suggesting that the two individuals are one and the same while openly admitting that acknowledging this is his declaration of war upon the king.  Although the plan from here is to lock him up, Braz has no intentions of being taken into the king's custody, and thus makes good his escape, even if his getaway isn't entirely a clean one as he finds himself being pursued by a potentially hard to shake opponent.


Meanwhile, we get to the crux of why Bell's brother has been tasked with capturing Fuyumi and taking her to the family home - put simply, Bell's mother Neyn is in fact also Fuyumi's mother, although in a sense she also isn't Fuyumi's mother too.  To cut a long story short, Fuyumi's mother in the human world was the doppelganger of Bell's mother in the demon world, causing the two to fuse and merge when they inadvertently met one day.  What does this mean?  I really have no idea.

Even when it has two major concurrently running story threads to play with, it seems that Blood Lad simply can't help being boring - there's no real verve to anything that it does, and at times it feels as if it's more interested in playing dress-up with its characters than really building any interest in its story.  If you've enjoyed the series from the start, then I guess you still will at this point as it's effectively still doing the same thing, but personally I continue to find almost nothing of value in the animation, humour or story-telling of the series - a shame, as its premise holds at least a reasonable amount of promise.

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