Articles with the Tag Killing Bites

First off, don’t start off your underground death match tournament series by having your heroine abducted and sexually assaulted. No, not even if she kills them all.

Yeah, so I’m getting annoyed at Killing Bites. It showed some promise with its first episode to be a fun, thrashy action series, despite the sexual assault, but four episodes in that promise hasn’t been fulfilled yet. Part of what annoys me is the high level of fanservice: that Ratel fights in short shorts and braless is one thing, but a whole subplot in episode three where some sort of nerd club ropes her in to make sexy sexy photos is just insulting. As is the old show them your tits and grab the enemy’s attention trick Ms Tree always used, but that was the eighties and it was acceptable then. It leaves a bad taste in the mouth these days.

Then there’s this asshole, our supposed viewpoint character, an utterly useless waste of space who’ll no doubt be pivotal in some way to make Ratel win the tournament. It’s a common weakness in anime that insists on these sort of characters, perhaps afraid that their audience wouldn’t accept a proper female protagonist in a series like this. But it only dilutes the experience when I have to spend over half each episode with mr dependable over there. Especially because most of his screen time is him either being an idiot, being scared shitless or having things explained to him, really, really slowly. Juuni Taisen last year proved that you don’t need such a character and having one here seems like a step back.

Which brings me to another point: the fight to exposition ratio is too low. There was the introductionary fight in episode one, a few quick fights in two-three and then in episode four the death matches finally started, only for Ratel’s first fight to end in only a few seconds. Again, Juuni Taisen did it a lot better, with most episodes having one or more fights to hold the interest. Worse, for a show called Killing Bites surprisingly little killing is done. You’d think Leo up there was killed? Nope, shows up in episode three fit as a fiddle, with only minor injuries. In short, so far Killing Bites is not edgy enough where it counts yet has all this sleazy fanservice stinking up the show. I hope this improves now the tournament is underway.