It’s meeeee! Your friendly neighborhood King of Depravity, Femt! I’m here to tell you unfortunate citizens about my very own show, Blood Blockade Battlefront!
Oh, technically the show is about a group of superhumans called Libra and their boring new member who just so happens to possess the All-Seeing Eyes of God, Leonardo Watch. But let’s be honest, you don’t really want to hear about their adventures, do you? So I’ll only bother with those people as much as necessary.
Obviously everything starts with one of my escapades, providing some amusement from the people of the former city of New York, now Hellsalem’s Lot and overrun with things from our side, yet somehow still boring and functional. This involves a tiny gate planted on a supersonic monkey that just so happened to steal Leonardo’s wallet. The kid chased down the monkey, running in with those Libra fools in the process, but unfortunately his vision allowed them to find the real source of the problem and remove it rather than killing the monkey and unleashing the next level of hell, a process that results in Leonardo being hired by Libra. Just because he didn’t like killing. So frustratingly normal!
Up next, I…
Wait, where are my scenes?
Obviously I was being set up as the most important character. The kind of guy that some would call the main antagonist. Let me quickly go through and…
I’m hardly in this?!
How boring can you be? Didn’t the producers know to keep the camera on the most entertaining character? Aren’t I all over the opening like an important person should be? This is a travesty! This is an outrage!
I guess this is Blood Blockade Battlefront. A show that rather than being about the charming, handsome King of Depravity just giftwrapped for the studio is instead about those Libra people, Leonardo Watch, and the Boring if sometimes action-packed everyday life around Hellsalem’s Lot, a city transformed by magic yet still very much its impersonal metropolis self.
The entire thing is almost entirely episodic, consisting of one-off plots that are often not even concerned with the plot, handling major events in the background as part of the supposed comedy of the event.
And I won’t stand for that! Ha! Cut me out of most of the show? I’ll cut your review down to size! I won’t even bother recounting the members of Libra – blood-technique leader of Libra, Klaus; arrogant hothead blood technique user, Zapp; Werewolf who has the power of becoming invisible and intangible rather than transforming into a wolf, Chain; Ice blood technique user, Steven; Latecomer Abe Sapien lookalike and student of the same mentor as Zapp, Zed. See, none of them worth mentioning!
I suppose their exploits, existing as they do at the intersection of mundane urban life and magical mayhem, usually with some admittedly flashy fighting involved, could be entertaining enough for mere humans who don’t have to live in Hellsalem’s Lot, but we can do better than that!
In terms of plots I actually get involved in, Boring little Leonardo ends up in something of a bickering romance with a girl called Mary Macbeth, whose brother is secretly the vessel of one of my fellow kings, the King of Despair. Obviously he’s not as fun as me but we’re part of the same social circle so credit where it’s due. He wants Leonardo’s All-Seeing Eyes of God to once more unleash hell on what was once New York, and have it all dragged down into oblivion.
As boring as this place normally is, it wouldn’t be much fun if Despair got his way too easily, so of course Leonardo needs to rely on me!
At least to let him get up at a critical moment. I can be humble too, when the occasion calls for it. I have class, after all, and would rather watch the show than have to be on stage in any case. He links up with the rest of Libra in a struggle across the city, with the matter resolved and Despair’s plot foiled (See how that feels, Despair?!) by Mary sacrificing her present existence to become once more the last seal on the madness that transformed New York into our fair Hellsalem’s Lot! The end…
Of the first season! You didn’t think that was just done for ever, did you fools? Of course it’s not! There’s so much more of me to entertain the world!
Like the opening episode, where I unleash a horde of rapidly growing and evolving monsters to cause mayhem, and they actually manage to do an amusing amount of damage before the Libra fools take them out! And then…
Really?! That few scenes again?!
Uh… the second season is focused once more on the Libra fools – this time even more on each of them specifically, rather than on Leonardo. WELCOME TO THE SIDE CHARACTER CLUB, BOY! It explores their backgrouds, inner worlds, blah blah blah GET TO SOMETHING INTERESTING! NOT JUST TO HUMANS!
At least the first season had episodes like the third, focused around a high-stakes game of Prosfair. Even the show acknowledged that nobody wanted to hear about the drug trafficking plot. I may not play, and I’ve heard you humans liken Prosfair to your chess, but at least I recognize it as entertainment. Is learning about Chain’s hangups and forcing her to overcome disappearing by confronting her with her crush supposed to be interesting? Sure, there’s a fair amount of invisible werewolf fighting, but where’s the dismemberment for no apparent reason?
Eventually this season does come to a finale plot as well, and it’s once again about Leonardo Watch. His sister visits with her fiancee, who is actually being used as a vessel by an Alterworld entity!. This one isn’t a kind like me so it’s less interesting. It also wants the All-Seeing Eyes of God, and because of the “human relationship” between brother and sister, with people who aren’t me keep saying is supposed to be important, the invisible menace might have the leverage to get them… if the rest of the Libra crowd hadn’t come to like and trust Leonardo enough to come to the rescue unbidden.
And that’s how the show would end…
if I didn’t get one last chance to unleash my demon beasts and have some fun! For all that I don’t have nearly enough scenes, the creators at least knew to go out on a high note with a glorious announcement from the one and only King of Depravity! It’s been far, far too long since we all had a little Femt in our lives. Sure it’s just over the ending monologue, but that’s got to count for something.
Now, obviously when it comes to quality, my scenes are the highest possible grade, far beyond A+, but that has to be averaged out with all the screen time neither I nor my superior and tasteful entertainment is on camera, dragging the whole thing down to a B+; an anthology of the strange and familiar to humans, presented with humor that depends on the jaded responses of all involved to the Alterworld’s ways.
WATCH IT! IT IS THE ONLY ANIME WITH ME, FEMT, KING OF DEPRAVITY!
At least until I continue my takeover and –
(April) Fools.