With different versions of the same story is told you are bound to get people saying one is better. So I’m here to do pretty much that! No, I actually want to be a little more objective with this comparison. After all, no series is perfect. This is more about how the different versions handled the storylines and characters. For this series of posts, I’m gonna be looking at Blood+.
Have you ever had a show that, no matter how much time passed, you just keep coming back to? It could be a trashy rom-com, a mindless action adventure, or even a sophisticated well thought out work of fiction. Whatever it is it just keeps drawing you back in. Well, that’s what Blood+ is for me.
The series of Blood+ has an interesting history. It started out as an animated 45-minute film called Blood: The Last Vampire. This film was later adapted/inspired the Blood+ anime and that anime was later adapted into a manga and light novel. There were also other series that were adapted from the film, but for this post, we’re gonna focus on the Blood+ anime and manga. (Also while the Adagio manga says it can fit with both canons, certain elements of it’s plot prevents it from fitting with either, so we will be ignoring it for this post.)
It’s worth noting, the anime out dates the manga. This is an unique situation in the anime community. The common argument is to default to the manga being superior because “it’s the original” and “closest to what the author intended”, but here the manga is an adaptation of an adaptation, throwing that whole argument out the window.
But before I start comparing notes, I should mention the different lengths for each series and the results of them. The Blood+ anime comes in at a whopping 50 episodes while the manga tells it’s story in just 5 volumes. this leads me to believe the anime was allowed to keep going as long as they needed to tell their story and the manga was given a much stricter cutoff point.
Plotlines Cut From the Manga
In an attempt to streamline the series a few things were cut from the manga, the biggest of which were the love triangles. Manga-Kai isn’t in love with Manga-Saya, none of Manga-Diva’s chevalier aren’t in love with Manga-Saya, and Manga-Hagi… okay, so M-Hagi is still in love with M-Saya. But in this version of the story makes it so that love is either reciprocated or one-sided with no competition. In 5 volume series you don’t have a lot of room for a bunch of romantic drama. You have time for some drama but not as much as the anime had.
Another big thing that was dropped was the Schiff storyline entirely, which is a shame because one of my favorite characters was a Schiff. This added with other small changes results in removing one of the major themes of the anime from the manga. The chiropterans being terrible creatures that only brings pain and misery to everywhere they go. While this element does play a part in the narrative of the manga, the scientific experiments conducted by Diva’s team appear to be less advanced and less numerous. So chiropterans are still hurting people in the manga, just nowhere near the scale that the was in the anime.
Next time I’m going to look into the differences with some key characters and later go more in dept on how the differences affect each plot.
I Think Thinks 