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Blood Blockade Battlefront
Episode 8

by Jacob Chapman,

Shrouded in mystery he may be, but if there's one thing we know about Blood Blockade Battlefront's newest character, "Raju Jugei Shizuyoshi," it's that he is the king of all ice burns. His righteous takedown of Zapp is so impressive, I feel obligated to transcribe it in full:

"This sack of crap who calls me Master has become a garbage pile that doesn't understand the first letter of the word discipline. He's like a heap of swarthy, rotten, toxic, sticky rice. If you took raw displeasure, formed it into a human shape, and filled it with snakes and scorpions, it still wouldn't be as unpleasant as this one. He spends his days in idleness, in a self-indulgent mental state nowhere near moderation. It's hopeless to even look at him. What a wretched state of affairs. For all he eats, and the gas he passes, he's worse than the dead corpse of a stepped-on bug."

Shizuyoshi is such a god of sick burns that he makes Zapp say all of this about himself, and this is the kind of stuff he thinks about the people he likes! Yes, Shizuyoshi is Zapp's "loving" teacher, and he's arrived to give his sloppy student a fresh lesson in hard knocks. (Okay, he also arrived to help fight off the army of Blood Breeds rapidly converging on Hellsalem's Lot, but that plot point has been a long time coming.)

Zapp's daily routine has become pretty disgraceful under Klaus's laissez-faire leadership. Every morning, he wakes up next to a slightly annoyed call girl, runs to the bathroom to vomit from drinking too much the night before, drives to the nearest fast food place, stuffs his gut, blows any money he has on slots and horse-racing, gets more cash by mugging his own would-be muggers, gambles into the wee hours of the evening, and then drinks himself stupid(er) with call girls at tacky bars. Rinse and repeat. He really does seem like "incorrigible human scum" as Steven would put it...but is there more to it than that?

Zapp's lifestyle makes a lot more sense now that we've met his master. Shizuyoshi is considered a "Blood Battle God," the very pinnacle of achievement in blood-martial-mastery, so accomplished that he invented the "Big Dipper" style of tiny, deadly blood-strings that Zapp uses. All the same, you'd much rather have Shizuyoshi on your side than be him. When he first appears in the city, Steven and K.K. can't tell the difference between him and the vampire he's battling (until they break out some hand mirrors.) Shizuyoshi has sacrificed everything in his goal to become a perfect vampire-killing machine. Whether he was human or alien once, no one can tell. All that's left of him is a shriveled old arm and a barely visible face under a monstrous skull-helmet. Zapp is actually forced to insult himself out loud because he's translating: Shizuyoshi literally can't speak English. Whatever's left of his vocal cords can only rumble out a sound akin to a didgeridoo, recognizable only to Zapp because of their long history as master and pupil. Shizuyoshi's inhumanity also creates a problem for the innocent bystanders he's supposed to be protecting. While he does a laudable job of subduing the Blood Breed, it's up to Libra to save civilians from all the collateral damage in his wake. It's impressive that he can take down a monster this bad mano a mano, but there's not much point if his methods leave no one alive to protect. He's an indispensable addition to the team, but all his criticisms of Zapp could easily be reversed onto his own unique set of flaws.

When you consider that Shizuyoshi "likes" Zapp enough to try and make him his protégé, the poor guy's rebellion of excess makes perfect sense. The closer to "Blood Battle God" you become, the more of your humanity you must lose, and gosh-darnit, Zapp loves his human life. Why not pork out on the food that makes you happy? Why not bed a different girl every night? Why not indulge the adrenaline thrill of "easy come easy go" and make every new day an adventure? Why not have it all, so you can fight the bad guys with B-grade blood powers while still holding onto the things that make life worth living? Considering Nightow's religious beliefs, the old wisdom about lapsed Catholics seems particularly relevant here. Nobody parties harder than the guy who started partying late.

Still, a little balance is definitely in order, so Zapp's master presents him with a test. Shizuyoshi has rendered a mighty Blood Breed dormant, as it rushes to regenerate inside a dark egg (which bears a striking resemblance to Alucard's hellhound-void). If Zapp can kill it in one shot, he can continue to live his life of sloth on his own terms. He only gets the one shot, because if he's even one tenth of a second too slow, the vampire-egg's backlash will turn him into mincemeat. (If by some miracle he survives the backlash, he will be dragged back to boot camp, which Zapp considers a fate worse than death anyway.) Klaus, being the big softy that he is, pleads with Shizuyoshi to let his student off the hook. It isn't worth testing him at the risk of his life. While Klaus would be right in almost any other circumstance, Shizuyoshi's tough love turns out to be just what the doctor ordered for everyone's favorite dick-suck. Zapp finds his vindication not in the challenge itself, but in his own uniquely stupid solution.

Shizuyoshi is too inhuman to understand that desire and reward can be even more powerful motivators than discipline or fear, but Zapp's good frenemy, Chain Sumeragi, knows just the carrot to pit against Shizuyoshi's stick. She fakes a ludicrous phone call to a hot friend of hers that Zapp has been lusting after, loudly declaring for all to hear that this blonde bombshell wants—nay, needs—Zapp's galleon in her harbor right this very second. Oh, if only he weren't hopelessly headed for the hospital or the funeral home!

Zapp destroys the Blood Breed egg with perfect finesse. Shizuyoshi is elated! Why, with just a little more practice, Zapp could succeed him as the new master of the--nope, Zapp is off and running for the promise of poontang. (Side note, if you never wanted to see Zapp Renfro with a beer gut and a hard-on, you are SOL for this episode.) This episode's intent, like every BBB episode, is chiefly to entertain and astonish with crazy flights of action and comedy, but it's fun to read between the lines for what the show is saying about the merits of humanity in all its sloppy imperfection. Especially when it's couched in boner jokes.

Of course, "Zapp's Longest Day" is a two-parter, which means they've only taken out one half of a full vampire. Leo's God-Eyes can't read the true name of the dormant Blood Breed by looking at it, because the unstoppable monster they've been fighting is only the bottom half of a full vampire. Shizuyoshi "comforts" Libra by telling them that another student of his is bringing the rest of the Blood Breed to Hellsalem's Lot by plane. Not only is their battle only half-completed, but they have an entirely new problem on their hands. The mighty tentacles that protect the barrier of Hellsalem's Lot swat down any aircraft that attempt to enter. You can only get to Alien-Manhattan by boat these days, and Shizuyoshi is going to try and fly in a Blood Breed? He's as much trouble as he is help.

This all leads us back to the ongoing plight of Leo, Black, and White. It turns out that the siblings' true names are William and Mary, which can't be a coincidence, but I don't have enough information on the connection to comment any more than that just yet. Their parents were two of the thousands of talented "casters" who sacrificed their lives to stabilize the barrier between Earth and the Alterworld. The portal is just a fun-and-games oddity now, but when the Great Collapse first started, it wasn't just out to swallow New York City, but the whole of both worlds. Black and White's parents gave their lives to make Hellsalem's Lot possible, and this haunts the twins in the present day. They share a memory of something horrific that bears an eerie similarity to Leonardo's memory of the time he received his God-Eyes. An all-powerful figure hovers between the siblings as White looks on in horror, helplessly clutching a gun to echo Leonardo's helplessly clutched camera. The figure reaches out and touches her brother Black instead, and then...!

Well, we don't know yet. All we know is that White is no longer sick, only staying in the hospital to protect herself from something outside, and occasionally tempting fate by wandering into the courtyard cemetery where her parents are buried. We also learn that Black the Blood Breed is a distinct entity from Black the Human, and probably the figure that possessed the kid in that flashback. Black pleads with the vampire inside his head to leave his sister out of his nefarious plans, but the creature just laughs at him. "I'm not forcing her to do anything. She's doing this because she wants to." So it's confirmed; poor Leo is being seduced for the sake of some monstrous plot, and we get a big hint as to what it might be when we see the fabric keeping Hellsalem's portal stable began to fray and wither.

On the subject of Leo, the connection between his relationship with Michela and the Black-White relationship has now become so direct that it leaves us with an interesting question: if Black and White both feel like the weak sibling holding the other back, maybe Michela feels like she's letting Leo down as well?

Rating: A

Broadcast Dub Thoughts

No bones about it, this is a fantastic dub, and I really do hope it pops up on Toonami as soon as possible. The casting is inspired, leaning hard toward casual naturalism in the human characters, and leaving cartoonish excess to the alien side of things. Aaron Dismuke as Leo and Phil Parsons as Klaus pull their superpowered roles down to earth with emotionally resonant effect, leaving all the ham and theatrics to Ian Sinclair's Zapp or Josh Grelle's Femt, and creating an ideal balance between comedy and drama for the show right from the start. We haven't heard as much from them yet, but Trina Nishimura's Chain and Megan Emerick's White are also great fun as undignified comic relief ladies, a staple of Nightow's and one of many unique flavors that make the show stand out. Funimation has put in their best effort to bring the show to life as vividly and thoughtfully in English as it was in Japanese, but the real crowning achievement is the adaptive script.

Several weeks back, I mentioned that Blood Blockade Battlefront was in sore need of a dub because of its unusually fast pace, and watching that manic first episode in English is infinitely easier than it was in Japanese. It's not only less confusing thanks to the erasure of the language barrier, but whoever was in charge of the English script (currently uncredited) seems to already understand the show on a deeper level than just line-by-line adaptation. The English version plays with word and phrase placement just enough to enhance the story's clarity as much as possible, and sometimes even illustrate theme in clever ways (as when Femt mentions "original sin" while juggling an apple). The added effort makes the show both easier to follow and uniquely meaningful in English, while still retaining intent 100%. (Okay, Zapp utters the phrase "fricking noob" upon his introduction, which feels a little awkward. The rest of his barbs are much crasser and more in-character, though! But nobody says "fricking noob," Funi.) It's a challenging show to adapt, but I think BBB is their best broadcast dub effort yet, and I look forward to hearing more of it in the weeks to come.

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.


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