Cinnamon Ass - Reborn Like a Zombie

Trinity Blood Episode 9 - Overcount 1 - The Belfry of Downfall

Continuing from where we left off last time, AX convenes to deal with Noelle's disappearance. Abel, consumed with grief, is inconsolable, shrugging off Esther's concerns and then handing in his gun and badge to Catherina. Meanwhile an insidious priest, Alphonse Deste, has installed a new bell in an obelisk at the Colosseum, and seeks permission to ring it from the Pope and his counsellers (Catherina and Francesco) - Francesco is for it, but Catherina (along with AX) suspect that it is part of the Silent Noise System. A massive confrontation takes place in the papal chambers, which ends with Alphonse managing to ring the bell - and nothing happens. Catherina is ordered to be taken away, but obviously this is far from over.

Hmm. I've given up all hope of Esther doing anything remotely useful ever again now, I guess she's only prominent in the ED for female eye candy purposes or something - I guess I should stop thinking that Trinity Blood is about Abel and Esther and think of it much more as an ensemble show about the AX group. Anyway, this was an okay episode - not a lot of action, but some decent plot developments (plot? In Trinity Blood? Surely I jest!) and it was solidly put together as usual, if a little unexciting.

Trinity Blood Episode 8 - Silent Noise

A slightly spoilery synopsis here I'm afraid, I'm not putting it in the extended entry because I don't think it necessarily makes much difference to the series as yet.

Abel is dispatched to investigate the mysterious collapse of a building in Barcelona, and Noelle tags along for the ride, dragging Abel around all sorts of frivolous activities whilst they're there. Kate, however, discovers evidence that Professor Barrie (from last week's episode) is also there somewhere, and that the source of the problem is probably at a church named Segunda de Familia (I think, Romanising Spanish is not my strong point!). While he orders Noelle to stay behind and remain safe, she refuses and uses some kind of scrying ability to follow Barrie's footsteps, where she discovers a secret laboratory with details of the Tinker Bell system and other plans of his.

Abel, meanwhile, heads to Segunda de Familia, where he discovers Barrie's carcass pinned to the ceiling and a maniacal vampire, Isaac Kempfer, whose organ playing via Barrie's Silent Noise System is bringing the buildings down. As Barcelona crashes down around him, Abel faces off against Isaac but unfortunately he escapes - and whether Noelle survived the destruction is doubtful.

Again, no Esther, grr. But all in all, another pretty decent episode all things said and done - I quite like Noelle, although her possible death is a little annoying. Unfortunately, I don't really seem to have a lot more to say other than that - Trinity Blood is mostly a pleasant enough show that fails to really excite me much. Next episode, however, looks to be another one from the main storyline at LAST - if there is no Esther there may well be screaming...

Trinity Blood Episode 7 - Neverland

Abel and a convict named Leon Garcia investigate a British orphanage supposedly run by the mysterious Professor Barrie, who has been turning orphans into fairies (evil fairies firing sound waves at people and so forth!). It seems as though the orphans have killed him and now hate all adults. The lead orphan, Wendy, drugs Abel and captures him, but another orphan, Peter, a failed experiment, frees him at Leon's instigation. As they try to escape, Wendy stabs Peter before facing off against Abel - she activates the Tinker Bell system, which allows the fairies to telepathically link up with Wendy to attack, but Leon destroys it and prepares to exterminate all the fairies. Abel tries to stop him, but it takes the soulful eyes of a cute little orphan (Peter, duh) to warm Leon's heart. The fairies are shipped off to London at great expense, and once again everything's nicely resolved in an episode.

Well, at least this one had Abel in. Plus Leon wasn't exactly a bad character overall. In fact, I didn't think this episode was as annoying as some of the previous filler has been; I still hanker for Esther's return to the plot, but despite the fairly annoying Peter Pan motif running through the episode (if you haven't spotted it from the summary you're dense ^_^) I found the whole thing surprisingly enjoyable - great animation as usual certainly helped, but it didn't feature any damsels in distress and had killer sonic fairies, which you definitely don't see every day!

Trinity Blood Episode 6 - Sword Dancer

Because there's nothing like disrupting the flow of the virtually non-existant narrative to keep your audience interested (can you tell I didn't like this episode very much yet?) we hop to Amsterdam, where the head of the local vampires is a man named Karel who co-ordinates his activities with various other European vampires. He sends his minions after a nun named Agnes, who was the only survivor after a vampiric slaughter at her church who holds knowledge that Karel is after, but one of them is slaughtered by a mysterious Vatican priest named Huges, who wields a sword (hence the title). Eventually Agnes is captured and strapped to a contraption that lets Karel look into her memories, where he discovers something about a "Mem Link", before throwing Huge into a pit with a large, shadowy wolf to fight. Agnes throws him his sword (and gets skewered through the stomach for it) and Huge wins, before leaving Amsterdam for his next target.

You'd think they'd at least try and sustain the storyline a little, wouldn't you? As it was, I just didn't really give a damn, especially about Sister Agnes - these one-shot female characters are terminally dull and way too stereotypically nun-like to get invested in at all. Huges will probably turn up again given the point of this episode was just to show that he's cool and bishounen and all that jazz, and it wasn't as if the action sequences weren't as nicely animated as usual or anything like that, I'm just bitterly disappointed that we're jumping around all over the place given that the series is theoretically about Abel and Esther, 'tis all.

Trinity Blood Episode 5 - Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

Abel and Esther arrive in Rome, and after a fiasco involving Abel losing his ID they go to see Katarina, who berates Abel good-naturedly. Basically, the rest of the episode is meet-and-greet time for Esther (and the audience), as she meets the other members of Ax, the Vatican subgroup that Abel works for - these include the perceptive Noelle Bow, the scatter-brained genius William Wordsworth and Kate Scott, the British commander of Ax's main battleship. We also get to see more of Pope Alessandro, but he's annoying and snivelly so the less time spent on him the better. The only particularly interesting part of the episode is when Katarina flashes back 10 years, when a mysterious spaceship crash-landed in Rome and all hell broke loose - it's insinuated that this is the origin of the Rosen Kreuz order, and that Katarina's family were killed by vampires. Abel is seen weeping over the body of a dead woman before slaughtering a bunch of vampires and later promising to protect Katarina. Plus Esther has a star-shaped birthmark (hurray, clunky foreshadowing, but that means that Esther should at least prove important!).

But all that was incidental to the REALLY BORING CHARACTER INTRODUCTIONS. I have no problem with character development, it's always welcome, and it's not as turgidly paced as some series I can think of. However, it doesn't make for a very exciting watch, and frankly the reasons I'm watching Trinity Blood are because it's got great animation and good action sequences, so an episode devoted to vaguely comedic hijinks doesn't exactly appeal to me. It's not bad, just dull.

Trinity Blood Episode 4 - The Star of Sorrow 2 - Hunter's Banquet

Gyula holds Abel and Esther captive, and reveals his plans - in order to gain vengeance for his murdered wife, Maria, he plans on destroying Rome and the Vatican Empire using a massive satellite weapon, the Star of Sorrow. Esther almost seizes the opportunity to kill Gyula, but Abel intervenes in order to stop her killing more people, saying that revenge is futile - however, Gyula finally reveals his vampiric nature and knocks both of them out before forcing Esther into dressing as Maria while he aims the Star at Rome.

However, mysteriously the Star fires on Istvan, and a mocking holographic image of Dietrich appears - he is, in fact, still alive, and reveals that he works for Rosen Kreuz and is attempting to start an all-out war between the vampires and the Vatican by convincing each group that they fired on each other. Esther attempts to make Gyula stop the machine, but his thoughts of revenge are all consuming - just before he kills her, Abel is rescued by Tres and goes Crusnik, severing Gyula's arm and leg. Abel overrides the security codes on the Star and stops it from firing, and Gyula, filled with shame, stabs himself through the heart. Delirious with pain, he hallucinates that Esther is Maria, and she indulges him by comforting him as he slips into death. Together, Esther and Abel head off to Rome, in order to attempt to deal with Rosen Kreuz...

I'm definitely liking Esther's character a lot at this point, which is helping make Trinity Blood a great deal more enjoyable - truth be told, I'm not especially invested in the Rosen Kreuz plotline or anything like that at this point. But the animation is really very good indeed, I like the characters (Abel is definitely sufficiently different from Vash so as not to be a complete clone) and I'm also rather impressed with the music - it veers a little towards the Bee Train end of the spectrum occasionally in that during some scenes it's mixed a little too loud, but overall it's pretty decent. Hopefully the series isn't going to go completely episodic again now, but we'll have to wait and see I guess.

Trinity Blood Episode 3 - The Star of Sorrow 1 - City of Blood

Abel steps off a train into the almost deserted city of Istvan in Hungary, one of the few cities not controlled by the Vampires or the Vatican, on a mission to meet "The Star of Istvan", who is a young nun, Esther Blanche. Abel's pretext is that he is there to take over as the priest of St. Matthias' church, but he is arrested for loitering and taken to the mansion of the local marquis, Jyula Kadar, who is immediately wary of the Vatican - when Esther arrives to pick up Abel, Jyula decides to monitor him using sophisticated equipment so he does not disrupt his plans.

While Abel and Esther get to know each other and she angsts about her childhood, another argument breaks out in the Vatican between Caterina and Francisco over how to deal with the vampire element in Istvan. Abel's nighttime wandering for food leads him to overhear Esther talking with a young man named Dietrich von Lohengrin, who is her accomplice in getting revenge for those who killed her adopted mother (she's already killed one of them, which automatically makes her much, much cooler than Hellsing's Seras (in anime form, anyway)). However, the police have tracked down Esther (probably via Dietrich, who works for Jyula but I assume as a double agent) and they gun down Dietrich before arresting Esther - Abel volunteers to be arrested at the same time, and while the police burn down Esther's church Jyula watches and pines for his lost love...

If anyone wants a synopsis of the relevant novel for this storyline you can read it here. While this obviously contains massive spoilers, the anime adaptation is totally and utterly different from the novel. Cue cries of hysteria from hardcore fans, obviously, but I still really liked this episode, even if it is a little less convoluted than the novel (which isn't exactly rocket-science anyway).

The most important thing about this episode, however, is the introduction of Esther. On the Annoying Female Lead scale, where at the top we have someone like Yuiko from Loveless and at the bottom we have someone like Yoko from Twelve Kingdoms, Esther does not rank too highly at the moment. True, she's vaguely ineffectual, but she doesn't have a teeth-rendingly cute voice and she can obviously kick some ass if she needs to. We'll have to see where the series takes her character, hopefully she'll get some half decent development.

Trinity Blood Episode 2 - Witch Hunt

Abel and another priest from the Vatican, the robotic gunslinger Tres Iques, investigate a church where vampires have been killing each other, and discover a small girl, Elyssa, hidden in the cellars. Elyssa is a powerful telepath, who awakens horrifying flashbacks in Abel (which, according to the credits, involve someone called "Cain Nightroad", presumably his evil brother or somesuch?) and obviously caused the vampires to attack each other. While Elyssa hates the priesthood, Abel manages to befriend her, but Tres is under orders to either keep her confined for the Vatican or kill her as she is basically a weapon - Abel deactivates Tres and hands Elyssa over to a nun who turns out to be a vampire in disguise seeking to use Elyssa for Rosen Kreuz, so the bishounen duo rides out and smites some eldritch butt.

I enjoyed this episode more than the first one because Abel wasn't being quite so Vash-like - while he still had moments of humour, he wasn't being accidentally great or anything like that. The moppet was annoying, as to be expected, but overall things were pretty good this episode, with some great animation once more and some juicy angsty backstory to get into eventually.

The one real problem with this episode is that it doesn't follow on at all from the previous one - Tres is now working with Abel after having been in about five seconds of the previous episode launching rockets from a giant airship, and I have no idea how they ended up investigating the church or anything. Not that it really matters, but it WAS a little offputting at the start of the episode.

Trinity Blood Episode 1 - Flight Night

OP - Dress (bloody trinity mix) (Buck-Tick) - goth-rock from the group behind the OP for Nightwalker which sounds pretty much the same as the original version from the early 90s. Yet again, Gonzo haven't managed to finish their OP off properly for the first episode (too much footage from this episode and presumably some forthcoming ones) but it still looks pretty good

ED - Broken Wings (Tomoko Tane) - Engrish! SO MUCH ENGRISH! Also much slushiness as we see the two main characters cuddling and yearning and stuff.

Thousands of years ago, a war raged across Earth, after which vampires appeared, possessing superhuman reflexes and drinking the blood of the human race. The anime begins as Abel Nightroad, a jovial and seemingly clumsy priest, is travelling aboard the airship Tristan when it is attacked by a vampire that takes over the ship's controls. The Vatican's ineffectual Pope is convinced to attempt to shoot down the airship, despite the protests of the Pope's intelligent older sister Katarina. Abel fights the vampire and reveals that he is actually also vampiric in nature, codenamed "Crusnik", manifesting a massive scythe of blood which he uses to defeat the vampire (by making him rip out his own heart!) after the vampire reveals he is working for the insidious Rosenkreuz. They are saved from a Vatican missile by a mysterious figure, and Katarina exposits that Rosenkreuz is apparently part of an evil group known as Contra Mundi - so we've got our central conflict nicely set up.

Oh, and there was a random barmaid named Jessica who knew how to fly the plane, but she's not in the opening credits or any of the promotional material for the series so I don't think she'll ever be coming back.

I'm not quite sure what I want to say about Trinity Blood. I liked it, that's for sure - the first episode has really great production values, the action is tight and exciting, and Abel is an interesting protagonist. However, having read up on the series beforehand I know this episode is completely invented "filler" and in some ways spoils a few things - the reveal that Abel is a vampire doesn't come until right near the end of the first novel, for instance. EDIT: this is all wrong, I didn't realise how screwy the timeline of Trinity Blood is, cheers duckroll. Ignore this, but I still think they could have left the whole nanomachine-vampire-scythe thing until later in the series.

Yet that gripe aside, the world of Trinity Blood looks to be particularly interesting, with the machinations already going on in the Vatican, their rivalry with the vampires, and whatever plotline gets developed from here on in. I presume the next episode will introduce us to the other main character, Esther, but we'll have to wait and see I suppose. Except no, it doesn't, as it's another CD drama adaptation. Once again, duckroll proves my idiocy.

Immediate comparisons will obviously be drawn to Hellsing, being another stylish vampire series from Gonzo, but I don't think it's really a valid comparison - to be frank, there's much more of a plot here, and it's not quite as "badass" since Abel is a bit of a moron as well as a massively powerful force of destruction. Plus I think it looks much nicer (if more conventional).

So, looking forward to next week, then. Thursday night is definitely big on anime for me this season, what with Trinity Blood, Honey and Clover AND Speed Grapher all airing then.