Blood Blockade Battlefront

Episode 7

Uh oh. It seems Blood Blockade Battlefront has been too immaculately animated for too long, and Studio Bones needs a breather. What better way to save on the budget, while maintaining entertainment value, than with a low-stakes filler-iffic episode about boxing? Everybody loves fisticuffs, and freeze-framed punches can tell the story as well as fully animated blows when the balance is right. It's a win-win situation!

That's not to say that The Kase of Klaus' Kurious Kage Match is poorly animated. BBB continues to excel in its production, even when the show is forced to hold back. Still, the hectic enthusiasm of previous episodes is even more absent than in last week's relatively gentle episode. There are no pop culture cameos or blink-and-you-miss-it gags exploding in the corners of exceptionally composed frames. Episode 7 is lackadaisically paced, conventionally shot, conservatively animated, and more than anything else, a deceitful build-up to a ridiculous punchline courtesy of incorrigible dick-suck Zapp Renfro. What I'm saying is, this is a clear "step down" for Blood Blockade Battlefront, but it's still more entertaining than many other entire anime series. They can't all be gold standard. Animators need to rest their wrists sometimes, and Yasuhiro Nightow needs to let his silly out more than usual. It's not a bad thing to finally have an episode where you can catch everything that matters in one viewing without ever having to rewind.

Our story begins with Zapp Renfro getting kidnapped by a mysterious underground organization known only as the "e-den." Like its moniker suggests, this is a "beast's paradise," where otherwise law-abiding Beyondians gather to exert their violent frustrations by either betting on cage fighters or participating themselves. So why would the alien MMA want to hold Zapp hostage? Well, they don't. This is all just an elaborate Zapp-trapp to get Klaus away from his computer and into the ring. Let loose a little! Have fun! (And wear yourself out so Zapp might have some prayer of fulfilling his futile life's aspiration to land a blow on you.) So Zapp crows to himself from the manager's box seat as Klaus takes down monster after monster in congenial combat, and the audience perhaps wonders to themselves what the point of all this is when there are only five episodes left in the season.

"Lighten up!" the episode seems to be saying, but there's just a little more to it than that, to be fair. Nightow's love of the old ultra-violence has always been self-aware and in curious conflict with his strong pacifistic beliefs. As a writer, he hates cruelty and pain and lauds self-sacrifice, but he's also incredibly amused by wanton violence and destruction, and this episode (and chapter of the manga) serves as an opportunity for him to explain himself. One trounced cage fighter explains to Leo that the desire for violence seems intrinsic to human (and alien) nature, and e-den proves that it's not some evil thing that can't be overcome in a healthy way. "Step one foot outside and with one pull of a trigger, you can inflict fatal injury. With one push of a button, you can blow up a lot of people all at once. The world has become a cavalcade of efficiency in violence. But there's a deeper craving that grips us, that we can't evolve away." He argues that the desire to hurt people, sometimes with very little effort, can be crushed by exerting the true instincts behind it: people just want to hit each other, sometimes without even shedding a single drop of blood. You don't have to hurt anybody, you just have to let your spirit out so it can collide with someone else's and make you both feel alive. Even violence can be mutually beneficial in a safe space, and that's what e-den means to him. Nightow has complicated feelings about violence, why we love it, and how we should love it while remaining good to one another, and despite this episode's goofiness, it serves as an outlet to express those tangled feelings. The slowly growing smile on Klaus' face says it all, along with the weepy faces of the spectators who have lost all their bets at the cost of something fantastic to behold. Being a peace-lover doesn't mean you can't kick some ass for the love of the game. (At least not in Nightow's world and the worlds of the many superhero comics he draws inspiration from.)

Of course, it's not all fun and games. This otherwise transient episode is bookended by great weights of plot, as e-den's safe space becomes violated by its own manager. The portly and purple-suited don in charge of the fight turns out to be a Blood Breed living inside the gangster's dead body, which screeches the fun-loving tone of the proceedings to a deadly halt. After being stunned and knocked unconscious, Klaus, Leo, and Zapp get out of dodge and sober up a little. There's still a whole world of evil outside e-den's doors, and the gathering Blood Breeds won't stay silent for much longer. (Oh, and of course Zapp's plan to wear Klaus out so he can finally land a punch on his boss faceplants as hard as Zapp does.) Next week should be business as usual!

This brings us back to Black, Leo's girlfriend's sinister sibling. He and Leo have a heart-to-heart chat at their favorite diner about White's hospitalization, where Black reveals that his sister has a very weak heart, but she isn't the weak sibling in the family. He always felt as if his sister was protecting him, and even though he has some mild telekinetic powers to help him survive in Hellsalem's Lot, he's only a fragile shade of the brother he should be. Poor Black doesn't seem so bad on the surface, but his gentle smile is only half of his true face. The "third sibling" we've seen so many times in the show's credit sequence is actually just Black with his glasses removed, his hair swiffed back, and murderous Blood Breed eyes. There's sympathy and sadness in the human half of his true self, but he's still a dangerous vampire working in cahoots with Femt and Aligura, and he still plans to use Leo's eyes for nefarious purposes. "I'm finally going to end my own 'Great Collapse,'" he chuckles, right before the episode cuts to a family photo of Black, White, and their loving parents. It looks like the show will be drawing some extremely direct parallels between Leo, Michela, Black, White, and maybe even Femt and Aligura.

What do all these twisted siblings have to do with one another? Well, I'm eager to get back into the meat of the story and find out. Episode 7 was a chill diversion, but I'm already itching for the show to return to its true manic nature.

Rating: B

Blood Blockade Battlefront is currently streaming on Funimation.

Hope has been an anime fan since childhood, and likes to chat about cartoons, pop culture, and visual novel dev on Twitter.