#and her dad's first impulse is to give her to a Shinto shrine

[docholligay]

PGSM and Parents--Motivation

(I had Ami and then Rei but so much of it was contrasting that I did TOPICS instead of just Ami, then Rei) 

Something that always makes me squeal with delight in these episodes is the way it sets up the idea that these things Ami and Rei are known for may not be their own motivations, but instead born from the circumstances of their lives. We almost take it for granted at this point: Ami wants to be a doctor. Rei is a shrine maiden. 

But PGSM doesn’t allow for things to exist in those easy spaces. In these episodes, when we deal with Ami and her mother about her future, it’s AMi’s mother badgering her about having missed cram school, and it’s not so much that she’s worried about Ami’s emotions or feelings as she is that AMi’s grades are going to slip. She’s so out of touch with AMi that she didn’t even realize Ami has FRIENDS now (More on this in another post.) 

Not only does she suggest that AMi switch school,s but it comes out that it’s not even really a suggestion. She’s already made the interview appointment, and all AMi has to do is come along and her mother will guide more of her life. 

When we go back to Ami, writing on the message board, so small she has to use a stepladder to reach the board*, we see her promising her mother that she will study hard and become a doctor. She’s a tiny thing, and much is made of the watershed moment in Rei’s life at that age, seeing her mother die but I think more than one grand event, a thousand tiny events can add up. Throughout the episodes, Ami talks about how she has never disobeyed or argued with her mother, ever. Her mother is a doctor, her motivation for that role comes out of little more than a life long reaching for her mother.** 

If medicine, if doctoring, is what her mother has time for, and truly loves, than AMi will become that, and that to me is so much more interesting than “I am smart and smart people become doctors” 

And Rei, God do I love this with Rei, because with Ami I don’t want to say I expected it, but I wasn’t as surprised. PGSM did so much for Ami in my eyes that I was already thinking of her with different frameworks, which though I love PGSm Rei, it wasn’t as different from the concept I already had of her in my head, so I wasn’t looking. 

This moment: 

Rocked me in the best way possible. The idea that Rei had no intrinsic motivation for the shrine, that it’s simply that she was GIVEN to it, is the thing I had no idea that I wanted but absolutely did. The shrine, then, is a just another one of the complex relationships that she’s learned to live with, instead of something she sought out. It’s her relationship with Minako, with the other, with being a sneshi in general. It’s the memory of her mother, it’s her hatred of her father, even this thing, this being a shrine maiden, is not allowed to be simple for Rei. In many ways, Rei is Usagi’s foil, and for me this is just another way. Usagi’s home life is easy, her relationship with her duty, her relationship with Mamaoru, all of it is, minus tiny hiccups very easy for her to engage with and come to to terms with, adn Rei doesn’t get that. Nothing gets to be easy for Rei, ever. 

*Let’s just say for a moment that you have communicate with your kid this way--how fucking terrible a parent do you have to be not to put it on THEIR level? Like YOU are reaching THEM? I would say that PGSM is making that exact point here, that Ami has always reached FOR her mother, and not the other way around, but I don’t know that it’s accurate to say that or if I’m just bringing that TO the text

**This whole THING is why I utterly reject the canon-but-terrible fact that Mercy became doctor because both her parents were doctors it’s so boring and disrespectful to Mercy’s own character, INTO THE CANON REFUSE PILE WITH YOU ALONG WITH SO MANY OTHER DUMBASS FACTS AND ASSPULLS.

[hopeymchope]

I was surprised when i found out that Blood C was only 12 episodes. The plot seems crazy and kinda convoluted from what I've heard too

As convoluted as it seems on the face of it, most of that doesn't even come up until the last two and a half episodes or so. They seriously spend 10.5 episodes just sorta spinning their wheels, giving you a story about a high-school girl in a small town who is a happy shinto shrine maiden by day but is secretly a warrior against the forces of darkness (specifically creatures called "Elder Bairns" that feed on humans) by night. You learn about Saya's relationships and why she does this — learn about her devotion to her family/friends and the legacy of inheriting the sacred blade that can kill the monsters, you learn about the guy she's crushing on and the other guy who's crushing on her, you learn a bit about what motivated her homeroom teacher to become an educator, and so on.

Saya likes dem bad boys who’re completely emotionally unavailable. Maybe somebody should tell her that’s totally passé now? RAISE YOUR EXPECTATIONS, SAYA!

......ALL of which is largely irrelevant to what becomes the overall plot.

If it were me, I'd probably take the reveals that happen in the last two (arguably two and a half) episodes and stretch them out across the whole season. I'd be teasing underlying secrets by episode 2, drop the first reveal at the end of ep 3, and then gradually drizzle out the truth over the course of 12 eps as we work our way towards the climax.

...but fuck it. Let's spoil this thing silly under the cut. I really need to explain to SOMEBODY out there why this show is so frustrating to me. And then I can offer some super-simple solutions.

TOTAL "BLOOD-C" SPOILERS BELOW

In the last two episodes, we learn that Saya's entire life has been bullshit. The entire town she lives in is made up of paid actors. The town is so small because it was built explicitly for this experiment. Saya is actually a half-human/half-elder bairn creature who was captured by a wealthy science magnate during some kind of violent incident that is never explored or explained (was she attacking someone? was someone attacking her?). Said magnate then wanted to place this unique specimen in a situation where he could test whether nature or nurture were more powerful within her. Because you see, Saya never knew her parents or had any kind of normal childhood; she grew up roaming the land and fending for herself, and she never has had any friends. She was basically violent, angry, bitter, and self-centered. With this in mind, the magnate (somehow) gave Saya false memories of a happy life and built this town and hired all these people to play along. He even gave her an outlet for her violent impulses in the form of her inherited duty to battle against the elder bairns........... although even that conflict is fake — in reality, humans and elder bairns have an ancient truce between them (one that sees humans look the other way as elder bairns annually kill a small amount of the population for their food, which is kinda fucked, but still a truce). From that foundation, our science magnate guy watched Saya to see if she'd revert to her crazed/violent/angry old self or would remain a happy and upbeat person thanks to her new life/upbringing.

The POINT here is: Her friendships and crush and such? All fake; the suggestion of who she liked was implanted, and none of those people even knew her before these few weeks. All the people she cared about who she saw violently die? Not only were their relationships fake, but so were their deaths! They're all totally different people who are also still alive! Her dad? Also fake, of course. Her duty to fight the elder bairns? Fake. The "sacred sword" is fake and unnecessary. There is no legacy of inheriting a familial battle against the monsters. Literally everything you knew from the first 10.5 episodes was all bullshit, and all those relationships/characters they spent time focusing on? They were never real or worth anything. And even if everything wasn't a complete sham? By the end of the finale, nearly every one of the actors who pretended to be her friends and family are dead. The only people left standing are Saya, the science magnate guy, and ONE fake friend of hers. The little town is even completely destroyed! Science Magnate guy just orders every "actor" still there to be killed, because he's a sick fuck!

Oh and Saya also gets seriously maimed in the last moments of the series. When the movie picks up, this injury is completely gone without explanation. I guess her elder-bairn half came with a mutant healing factor or something. 

SOOOOOOO. The follow-up movie, Blood-C: The Last Dark, takes place in the urban environment of Tokyo. Our once-chipper Saya has reverted to the version of herself that we never got to meet in the series — the one that used to be bitter and isolated and angry. She's basically a totally new character. And her sole mission is to kill the guy who put her through his "experiment" for revenge. In pursuit of this revenge, she has to team up with all-new allies we've never met before. Because, y'know, anyone who could've been carried over from the series was dead? Well, except for that one surviving fake actor-friend who gets ONE 20-second scene during the opening of the movie, and then never appears again. And in case you thought that maybe her experiences with her "rewritten" life in that small town would somehow make her want to have real friends... no, she actually doesn't. She starts to look like she might open up to one of her new allies..... but in the end, she leaves. And so she remains utterly alone and continues to wander the world with no goal and no connections.

..................why.

(By the way: The movie ends with the reveal that Science Magnate did the whole experiment/hired and killed all those people because he thought Saya was the most beautiful thing in the world and he supposedly LOVES her. He then kisses her as he dies. And with that last-second reveal, she legitimately goes from hating him/being enraged to being super-sad that she's now alone without him to love her. Y'know, the mass-murdering psycho guy. WHAT THE LIVING FUCK?!)

You should absolutely NOT feel bad that this fucker is dead.

Here's the thing: I don't think this was unsalvageable. Even if you kept the most of the series exactly the same, I think you could've made it work in the end with a few tweaks. At the end of the series we see that one of her "friends" developed guilt about what they were doing and started to legitimately care about Saya. His "acting" accidentally became his reality. (Naturally, this character is swiftly killed during the finale.)

So: Let's just do precisely that with two or three friends who we allow to actually survive. And maybe Saya's experience in the fake town really DOES alter her personality to a degree, making her a more positive person like her "rewritten" counterpart, because now (and for the first time in her life) she has friends at her back who actually care about her... all because of the magnate's stupid "experiment." With these two small changes, we can enter the movie without feeling like the entire series was pointless! We can keep watching largely the same character and some of the same supporting players work to unravel Bad Science Guy's evil machinations and eventually kill him.

Hell — while we're at it, we should keep Saya's glasses. She needed them in her "fake" life, but for some reason she no longer has them when she leaves the experiment/phony town behind, which I guess implies that even her vision issues are just a psychological implant. Or perhaps she got contacts in-between? But there's literally zero reason to throw out the elements that make her design more unique from other action-protags. And why not keep the "sacred sword" and make it a REAL supernatural weapon? There's plenty of other supernatural shit in this show, so it wouldn't be a big deal. It's not like Saya ever stops fighting her enemies with swords even though she doesn't need them; she gets a whole new one in the movie that isn't pretending to contain any sacred power. Yet her new sword is the same style and she uses it in the same way, so why not hang onto the old one from the series? Just to maintain one more element that'll make the info from the series actually mean something? 

(And obviously, you don’t make Saya suddenly care about Science Magnate guy and be sad he’s dead because he claims at the last second that his awful behavior was “love.” FUCK. THAT.)

Point is: They could've definitely done something to make the movie more connected to its source series, and therefore make the overall narrative matter. They could've even gone the opposite way of what I've suggested and make the entire TV show more of a lead-up to the movie, even! If they always knew what the movie was going to be like, just make the series about Saya in Tokyo getting to know her new allies AFTER the whole incident in the small town. And then we could just learn about what she was put through in some sporadic flashbacks. Yes, this requires a waaaay bigger overhaul to the total narrative, but if the movie is really where they wanted to go with this story, let's just fucking GO THERE. No need for pointless dilly-dallying!!!

..........WHEW.

Alas, this is all imaginary. And I can't really speak to what they were thinking with what we got.