I came to Blood+ with few preconceptions. I'd seen it mentioned in a number of people's lists of shows worth watching if you're someone like me who likes extended dramas. (My two favorite animes are probably Monster and Junni Kokki.) I'd also seen a few recent animes by Production I.G. (e.g, Windy Tales) and wanted to see more of their work.
Somewhere around episode 20 I remember telling my daughter that Blood+ was probably the best fantasy anime I'd seen since Junni Kokki. I found myself remarkably captivated by what was, at base, a vampire epic. Many of the characters were quite appealing as well; not only Saya and Haji, but people like George and Riku. Even the stock characters like David, Julia and Lewis were worth watching. And, of course, Diva displays a disturbing mixture of childlike innocence combined with a powerful malevolence fueled by her mistreatment at the hands of Joel and Anshel. On the other hand, other than Solomon and Nathan, Diva's Chevaliers left me unmoved. They all seemed fairly unidimensional "bad guys" with little in the way of internal conflict that might have made them more complex and intriguing characters.
On top of that Blood+ has a great score. Even when it's sometimes heavy-handed, like the martial scene with Saya and David on the ship, it's still one of the most impressive scores I've heard in an anime.
One other thing that caught my attention in the early going was the portrayal of the conflicts between the American military and the Japanese citizens on Okinawa. I had hopes we might see some political drama played out that corresponded to the
actual tensions between the Americans and Japanese on Okinawa. But like many promising story lines in Blood+, this thread is dropped fairly quickly as Saya and friends set sail for Russia. The anti-American flavor of Blood+ reappears at the end of the program, where we have stand-ins for Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Rice colluding with Saya's (and mankind's) enemies in order to establish an American military hegemony over the entire globe. Indeed the discussion of the events in Vietnam suggested that the American military had been deeply involved in the development of the Chiroptera since at least the mid-1960's. (I've actually been surprised that the fairly blatant anti-American flavor of Blood+ has never been discussed in this forum.)
So what went wrong? Why was I so disappointed after such a promising start?
Spoiler:
Well, I guess for me it began at the infamous episode 32. Over the preceding half-dozen episodes we watched the intriguing development of Riku into a Chevalier, only to see him raped and killed. What looked like an appealing story line (the collaboration between Haji and Riku) that could have continued throughout the rest of the anime was cut short for what seems to me to have been a needless attempt to shock the audience. I actually stopped watching Blood+ at this point for a couple of weeks because I was so angry with the writers.
Not only was the rape scene needlessly shocking, it's also highly implausible. First, Riku is supposed to be about twelve. That's the lower bound on sexual maturation in boys, so it's unlikely Riku could father children at that age. Then there's the fact that for a woman to rape a boy, the boy would need to become erect. Yet Riku's face shows nothing but fear and horror at Diva's approach. Fear usually doesn't promote sexual excitement or erection; quite the opposite, in fact. So, to me, this pivotal scene which motivates much of the later story relies on events which I believe would be nearly impossible in real life. You might say that shouldn't matter in what is, after all, a vampire fantasy, but I don't agree. What made this story so compelling up to this point was that it placed the vampire fantasy into a credible modern context. To me, that sense of credibility was destroyed in this episode.
After episode 32, the series just falls flat. The Saya in this part of the show has none of the dynamism of the Saya we'd grown to admire in the first two-thirds. Kai, whom most everyone dislikes at the outset, actually grows the most over the course of the program. Sadly he's practically the only character who shows much development. The rest of the characters endlessly repeat the roles they've played since the beginning. Haji, in particular, becomes reduced to Saya's lapdog, and the viewer grows tired of watching him mysteriously appear at just the right moment to save whomever is endangered in a particular scene.
So many potentially interesting story lines are never developed, and many of the supporting characters, like the Sif, Mao, the reporter Okamura, et. al., seem to be mostly useless filler. David recovers from his near-death encounter but plays very little role in the remaining events. Julia is welcomed back into the fold with little fuss despite spending a year working with the opposition. There's a hint in one episode of a possible sexual liasion between Mao and Okamura (despite the latter being twice her age), but then it's dropped. Nor is there any development of the potential conflict over Kai among Mao, Saya, and Monique. In particular, Mao's willingness to back off after supposedly following Kai across three continents doesn't fit her character at all. Near the end of the story the writers make a big point of recruiting Okamura to help destroy the satellite uplinks, yet all he does is converse with David on the boat, then stand around while Lewis plants bombs. Instead of following any of these story lines concerning characters we might actually care about, we're treated to a bunch of episodes focusing on the Sif, who just aren't all that interesting.
Eventually I returned to watching the latter third of Blood+ simply to find out how it ended. With better writing this show would have been a contender as one of the finest long-form anime dramas of the past few years. I think part of the problem was that the writers were floundering around to fill 50 episodes. A show half that length with tighter writing and plot might have been an anime masterpiece. As it stands, though, it's a great disappointment.