#blood-c

Saya Kisaragi from Blood-C

I tried to articulate this in my Jurassic Park response, but I think I personally have a lot more willingness to get invested in some random minor character than the average person. The back end of this is that minor characters typically aren't emotionally load bearing, which means whether they live or die is often a byproduct of narrative function.

There's also an underdog element to it. One of my favorite aspects of Blood-C is that, despite it being an utterly merciless show that will gleefully execute nearly its entire cast, there's this one random minor character who makes it out unscathed. I'm always ecstatic when something like that happens, when someone that has no real narrative necessity lives even when up against unforgiving odds. Danganronpa 1 is another example, where one of the survivors is an almost comically unlikely character who has no business at all staying standing at the end, and yet makes it out anyway. And the flip side to this is when a character who seemed important, who you expect to last a long time, dies surprisingly quickly. Magical Girl Raising Project combines both of these types of surprises to great effect.

I guess I can see the validity in your argument that the appeal isn't a literal random number generator approach to character death, but a sense of metafictional narrative "reward" for "good play." The minor character who survives Blood-C isn't random, but the only member of the supporting cast who doesn't make a poorly-considered blunder, who plays "safe" narratively and comes out of it alright as a byproduct of that. At the same time, Danganronpa's minor character survivors seem truly random. You could argue that they all played "correctly" by not murdering anyone, but that's only half the equation, and most of the cast that was murdered was effectively random. (Also, the minor characters who survive are generally idiots when it comes to solving the cases, which is an even bigger part of the game.) Yet it's still exciting to me to see which ones survive specifically because one of them is just SO unlikely that it becomes audacious, outrageous.

The Scream franchise makes this point explicit by establishing literal rules for surviving a horror movie, and then plays around with whether characters play by these rules or break them. (It also does the inverse of what I'm talking about, by casting and promoting recognizable big-name actors like Drew Barrymore in roles that get instantly offed.) This meta-horror culminates in Cabin in the Woods, which is all about what I'm talking about: the entire plot hinges on a goofball minor character unexpectedly surviving, thwarting the "narrative rules."

I've always had a lot of sympathy for the sort of shady, opportunistic minor character who is just trying to survive, because that kind of character is inherently waging a war against narrative convention. I've always liked when these types of characters do survive, and disliked when the narrative inflicts on them some moral comeuppance, perhaps for this exact reason. (It's why one of the few survivors of Fargo is Hennepin.)

For the first time since 2017 (when I first watched Blood-C), there's a new addition to my top anime

Below you'll find 100 icons of Saya Kisaragi from Blood-C. No credit is necessary.

tw: for horror and gore in the series.

[ Link ]

Below you'll find 100 icons of Saya Kisaragi from Blood-C. No credit is necessary.

tw: for horror and blood content in series.

[ Link ]

Below you'll find 100 icons of Saya Kisaragi from Blood-C. No credit is necessary.

Tw: for horror and gore content in the series.

[ Link ]