Blood Blockade Battlefront

Episode 11

At long last, the full truth about Black and White's complicated relationship has come to light, and it's heartbreaking. No, really. It's literally heartbreaking! As with all complicated relationships, it's best to begin at the beginning, so the show turns the clock back to when Black and White were known to their loving parents as William and Mary MacBeth. It was an unprecedented case. Both the father, Benjamin, and the mother, Emma, came from pureblood caster families, but when Emma gave birth to fraternal twins, something curious happened. Baby William was born with enough psychic power for two casters, while baby Mary was born with no powers at all. It's not too hard to guess what may have happened in the womb (as evidenced by a scene where Will starts crying "He took it!" when the family dog eats his ice cream, while Mary looks on with a dull expression.) But what makes this story refreshing is that neither sibling holds the other in resentment for this imbalance. They love each other so much that they can only blame themselves instead, allowing BBB to fully explore its ideas about the "price of power" through the twins' very different childhood experiences.

For Mary, growing up in a family with powerful, confident parents and an obscenely talented twin brother, her perceived worthlessness led her to take up a martyr complex. She judges herself "guilty" of taking up space in the world for no reason (complete with a jury full of bleating sheep from her family's farm), and no matter how much love, praise, and encouragement her family slathers on her, Mary's inferiority complex just won't go away. She knows that when her parents are gone someday (a day that is coming much faster than she knows), they'll have left some irreplaceable mark on the world, and she wants the same kind of legacy to follow her life. So she takes up photography as a way to impress her existence on the world. "I was here, and I made these," she thinks to herself. It doesn't matter that she was a powerless girl named Mary, just a smudge on the MacBeth family tree. All anyone will see are these pictures of the world as she saw it, and when she's gone, people can see these photos and imagine the photographer to be anyone, just so long as the pictures remain more special than she turned out. William doesn't understand. He just wonders why Mary only takes pictures of the world around her and never of herself. So one night, he borrows her camera to take a picture of her sleeping face in secret, but the photo only comes out cockeyed and blurry. William realizes that photography is a talent his sister has, but he does not. "Of course," he thinks, "After all, I'm the worthless one."

Surprise surprise, William also has an inferiority complex that leads him straight into martyrdom, but it's completely different from his sister's. While Mary martyrs herself by living her life invisible, William seems to relish the idea of going out in a blaze of glory someday. Like Mary, he sees incredible strength in his parents, but not because of their psychic powers. (Psychic powers are scary, as William thinks when watching Scanners through his trembling fingers.) Will's powers are so strong that he could end up hurting someone just by crying too hard, and since he's so short and stringy, he ends up getting bullied and crying a lot. The strength he sees in his parents and especially his sister is both physical and emotional. In Will's eyes, he was born with incredible psychic powers, but nothing else of value. He came to this realization early, when making mud balls with his baby sister out on the farm. His mud balls were lumpy and squashed, while Mary's were perfectly full and round. When he saw this, William blew up Mary's mud ball with his powers out of frustration. Instead of crying or getting angry, Mary just wiped the mud off her face and started making a new ball. Then William began bawling his eyes out instead, and that was the first time he realized that he was "weak." He stopped using his powers entirely and worked to make himself stronger both physically and emotionally day by day, even when it put him into danger. If he couldn't become strong as a person, he didn't deserve to be strong as a caster, and no one could convince him otherwise.

Mom and Pop MacBeth are happy about both paths their children have chosen to take, and after the kids bond over a misadventure with White's camera, it looks like the Black and White twins might have their true strengths figured out after all. They pledge to stay by each other's side for the rest of their lives, so they change the world with the power they share, and their weaknesses will never matter again. It makes sense that their parents lived as shepherds outside of their world-saving job. Biblically, shepherds were heavily associated with Christ in their willingness to lay down their life for their sheep, and the twins are heavily associated with Catholic imagery in kind. William will become a great caster, Mary will leave her mark on the world, and they'll do it by sacrificing themselves equally for one another, so that neither of the two will ever fall.

Then the Great Collapse changed everything.

MacBeth is more than just a last name for these tragic twins; it's a warning. In Shakespeare's "Scottish play," the cowardly Lord MacBeth was driven to employ supernatural power to murder his rivals and achieve his goal of becoming king at the behest of Lady MacBeth. Lord MacBeth is continually awed and made uneasy by the ambitions of his wife, but when she's the one who goes insane with guilt before the curtain falls, MacBeth falls into despair and doubt, and is ultimately defeated by a cruel pedantic loophole in the prophecy he'd been using to forge his destiny. Poor Will and Mary should have brushed up on their Shakespeare before trying to make a deal with a vampire themselves.

Three years ago, Black's powers caused something to happen at the heart of New York City: The Great Collapse. Hundreds of casters perished in the process of covering up this event, including the parents MacBeth, but all White remembers is the moment that came right afterward. A mighty demon king, chief among the Elder 13, surfaced at the center of the calamity in ghostly form, undulating with curiosity between the two siblings. William pleaded with it to "take" his body instead of Mary's and promise never to harm her. He agreed, and that was it. Now the twins are living out a weird perversion of their original promise, as the elder demon inside Black pushes White to go along with his plans in return for time with her brother and eventually, his unharmed return. Together forever, and Despair makes three.

Rather than just re-enacting MacBeth, Blood Blockade Battlefront takes elements of the famous play and applies them to the twins' martyr complexes rather than the original royal couple's lust for power. (Although power-lust is definitely a thematic fascination of BBB's that I'll come back to later.) Lord MacBeth (Black) has the power to take the throne (become a caster), while Lady MacBeth (White) can only encourage him, but she is the one who possesses strength between them, leading Black to make poor choices at a cost to his soul that can never be regained. We've seen from past episodes that Black does not entirely resent the presence of King Despair in his body, and it is entirely possible that he originally summoned him out of a desire (conscious or subconscious) for power, only to find out that demons don't really "share" power, preferring to just take human freedom and use it for their own designs. (We'll learn more about this when we finally see Black's side of the story.) Because she was responsible for her other half's turn to ambition, Lady MacBeth (White) succumbs to extreme guilt verging on insanity. In the play, she locked herself away and wandered the halls scrubbing at her hands relentlessly to get rid of imaginary bloodstains. In BBB, White locks herself in the hospital even though she's not sick and refers to herself as a ghost, neither living nor dead. In her case, however, this "delusion" is reality, and her brother doesn't know because he's already been betrayed by a cruel pedantic loophole in his deal with the devil.

White is still alive, but she's also already dead. The parents MacBeth not only erected the barrier responsible for saving the world, but they also erected barriers around the hearts of their children to protect them from harm. After his deal with Black was struck, The King of Despair possessed him, took away White's gun, and fired a bullet into her chest while she was unconscious (and Black was unconscious inside his own head). This didn't actually harm her thanks to the barrier keeping HL together, but when the barrier does dissipate, White's heart will literally break as the bullet plows through her. (That's why she's been writhing in pain every time the barrier weakens.) By the time White figures this out, it's too late to turn back. She's already handed Leo over to her own killer, all in the hopes of getting her brother back. Thanks to his wicked scheme's endgame, the King of Despair will never have to face any consequences for breaking their promise. Yes, his hideous evil plot has finally been revealed to the audience: he's doing all of this just so he can die.

Wait, what?

It seems The King of Despair himself despairs because death has forgotten him. After millennia of existing with no joie de vivre, he's decided that death is a "privilege of the living," and that he has to experience it so he can finally feel alive. The other Elder 13 we've seen have corporeal forms and desires, from Femt's Depravity to Aligula's Monomania, but Despair is substanceless by comparison, and even its King takes no pleasure in the emptiness he represents. (Side note: Aligura has been changed to "Aligula" in translation recently, which frankly makes a billion times more sense.) This Elder can only fulfill his potential by bringing true despair to the world, by ending it and ending himself on Halloween night. (Femt thinks choosing this date is a tawdry cliché, but he also thinks Despair's plan isn't going to work out. Maybe it has something to do with his true name? I'm dying to know what it is myself!)

This also makes King Despair's murder of White all the more chilling, as his motives—to leave his mark on the world even if his identity remains invisible—echo her own wishes in a sick and selfish way. He whispers that even a monster like him "had hope once" and "loved Mother Mary," as the camera cuts from the pivotal gunshot to the virgin Mary under a crucifix. The show is too short to spend time exploring its own demonology, but if the Elder 13 are really meant to be "original vampires" with roots in Catholicism and labels that suggest they hold dominion over certain vices, they're probably fallen angels of some kind: creatures that gave up communion with God for the pursuit of power. That makes them a more cosmic reflection of the very human battle Libra fights every day in Hellsalem's Lot.

It all comes back to power after all, as Zapp put it back in episode one, "Hellsalem's Lot is a place where people come to obtain the impossible." We've seen many episodes of the show where people gave up something precious in pursuit of a miracle, and it's never been worth it. The final episode hasn't aired yet, but I think Blood Blockade Battlefront is firmly on the side of modest happiness in communion with your loved ones over the pursuit of power, ambition, or martyrdom, even if it's for a good cause. William and Mary had the right idea when they resolved to use their own strengths to protect the other's weaknesses, but as White and Black, their mistake was not allowing themselves to just be weak together. There doesn't have to be a greater goal pushing their lives forward, or some higher purpose for Black and White to exist. They can just be, even if that means they're two weak humans in a world that might not remember them. They always had each other, but now the sacrifices of strength they made have pulled them apart, leaving them alone in their weaknesses. These are all lofty ideas to stand behind, so while the rest of Libra will be up to their eyeballs in damage control next week, it'll probably be Leonardo's responsibility to find the right path forward and save the world (and maybe even the twins!) from self-destruction.

Holy frijoles, this episode. If they packed any more thought-provoking or feelings-squeezing stuff into it, I think my heart would explode, and it took me 2,000 words to cover just a small fraction of all the references and ideas it managed to throw in my face with style. (I didn't even touch the massive rabbit hole of implications in the episode title, "Paint it Black.") That A grade needs two more pluses on it to properly convey my enthusiasm. Bring on the finale!

Rating: A+

Blood Blockade Battlefront is currently streaming on Funimation.

Hope has been an anime fan since childhood, and likes to chat about cartoons, pop culture, and visual novel dev on Twitter.