Maid-chan no Anime: Strike the Blood

Konnichiwa! Maid-chan desu!

Vampires are fearsome creatures, aren’t they? They drink human blood (and prefer that from the neck of young girls), can fly or change into the shape of a bat to fly. Sometimes the legends also tell us vampires are very strong.
But legends also tell us that Vampires can be killed by putting a wooden stake into their heart. Maid-chan was always especially impressed by this part of the legends, because what creature would not be killed by that? Pitiful humans never put logic in their legends!

But legends are where those vampires are from. Ever wondered how vampires would live in today’s society? Would they have problems with lamp lights?

It is no wonder that many works of fiction have vampires in their line up of characters, and that also applies to animes. One of them is Strike the Blood.

Main character is Akatsuki Kojou. (Akatsuki can mean “red moon”. Kojou is not written that way, but it certainly is no coincidence.)

He lives on a man-made island in the middle of the sea, where humans and demons live more or less peacefully together.

Kojou was a normal student until three month before the start of the anime, when the super strong vampire Avrora Florestina made Kojou the 4th progenitor (there should only be three). Kojou cannot remember what happened and nobody else does (or reveals) the reason why.

For Kojou, life has become hard. As a vampire he now hates the sun. At the same time he doesn’t want others to know about him, especially his little sister Nagisa.

But of course some people and organizations know about him, one of them being the Lion-King Organization. They train orphans into weapons to supervise and if necessary fight demons (or vampires), and one of those girls is Himeragi Yukina.

Yukina is a Sword Shaman and gets the order to observe the 4th progenitor. But while her fighting skills are doubtless very honed, her observations skills – or concealment skills – are… questionable.
It also does not help that she is quite cute and on the very first day she observes Kojou gets unwanted attention by a pair of demons which ends in a fight.

Unable to hide from Kojou anymore Yukina explains her role, but forgets to mention that she is moving into the apartment beside Kojou and also into the school class of his little sister. Their Middle School is on the same campus as Kojou’s High School.

Such begins the observation of Kojou, and maybe you can by now say what genres Strike the Blood is. There will be fights and some more or less comedic love troubles. And some fanservice of the ecchi sort. (But only one pantsu at the start, Maid-chan wonders why at all? It looks out of place.)

Speaking of fanservice, there are of course other girls that will develop a crush on Kojou, who, of course, will be totally ignorant of all this love.

Really, just once Maid-chan wants to see such a Harem Guy deeply thinking about the girls that cling to him!

The girl that already loves him for a long time (and who will do a lot of the fanservice) is Aiba Asagi.

Asagi is a genius programmer and often gets called by the company that manages the island to help with the computer system. She often uses an AI called Mogwai (or is used by Mogwai).

At first glance she looks very outgoing, but a large part of this is actually Asagi trying to impress Kojou because she is unable to put her feelings towards him in words.

To help her, their common friend (and secret observer of Kojou) Yaze Motoki often arranges for opportunities.

At the start of the anime, the fresh vampire Kojou still lacks a lot of his powers, because he cannot control the familiars he inherited. The reason is that Kojou is still a virgin.

A virgin of blood sucking! What did you think Maid-chan was referring about??

To be honest you are not totally wrong, because the blood sucking instincts of the vampire nature only come out when Kojou is sexually aroused, which leads to a lot of misunderstanding with Yukina about her perverse sempai.

Yukina is also the first girl who, in a dire situation, gives her blood to Kojou to awake a familiar.

She is followed by her childhood friend, former roommate and boy hating colleague Kirasaka Sayaka.

This is the general pattern of the series. An enemy appears, there is some running and fighting and then Kojou has to suck the blood of a girl who are all willing to do this because they have fallen in love with him.

Maid-chan guesses a lot of you are now thinking “I want to be a vampire”, right?

There are also two important “girls” who (probably, who knows?) have not fallen in love with Kojou.

One of them is the Minamiya Natsuki. What looks like a young lolita girl is in fact Kojous teacher and probably the mightiest mage on the island.

Everyone just calls her Natsuki-chan, and her usual reply when Kojou does it is to hit him with her umbrella (or a book or a newspaper roll) and to tell him to not put -chan on the name of his teacher!

There is also the homunculus Astarte, whose artificial life gets saved by Kojou after Astarte tried (on orders) to sink the island.
Natsuki takes in Astarte as a “probation” for her deeds, but more likely because Natsuki-chan just wanted to have a maid.
Yes, a maid of a goth-loli. Maid-chan would roll her eyes if she had real ones.

Anyway, Maid-chan has warned you enough about the blatant appeals to a certain demographic. Let’s get down to business.

Conclusion

On the execution side Strike the Blood is a bit above the standard. The graphics are nice but nothing extraordinary and the CGIs are way less disturbing then in (unfortunately many) other cases.

There are a lot of hints for a big background story, but not much of that is shown by the anime’s end (based on the first six of eighteen light novels). The main focus is on Kojous relationships to the girls.

The pace of the story telling is alternating. Sometimes it feels like everything flows, then the next part feels extremely hasted.

Partly because of that most of the different characters feel like they lack a bit of motivation or drive. They don’t make real decisions and the falling in love part sometimes seems to be happen like a lightswitch. One single incident and the boy hating girl wants Kojou’s promise to phone her anytime he feels to. At least once a day.

The genre is what the genre is, so Maid-chan will not make fun out of the loving girls, but Maid-chan would really like them to have a better motive.
It is possible, as Asagi shows. The only in-love girl that does not know that Kojou is a vampire is by far the deepest character in the show.
Maid-chan really wants to hug her and pet her head. Asagi deserves better than this troublesome guy!

Still Strike the Blood is a fun series to watch. On the totally objective Maid-chan scale it gets a 7/10.

And if you ever happen to become a vampire, remember: For safety reasons it is better to have more then one source of blood! (Maid-chan special fanservice today)

See you next time!