Because you need to know more about anime

So, Black Blood Brothers. Apparently it doesn't even have an English wiki entry yet, so I don't have much background for you just now. I watched the first episode, though, and I can lead you through the perilous world of, you guessed it:

Anime Vampire Show #5923117a

Right into the intro, and it's decent. More heavy rock than pop, but this isn't really surprising. At this point, I'd like to hear some freshly-scrubbed, just past legal Japanese girl sing about fluffy clouds and love over vampire-frolicking, it would be an interesting change.

The show.

I should get this out of the way right now. This guy wants to be Alucard so bad it hurts. Look closely there, he even has an Edwardian knot tie, just like our favorite sociopath in red.

He's a bad-ass, and I'm sure you're as shocked by that as I was. For a reason we're not given, he's able to cut through over a dozen vampires -- with machine guns -- less than two minutes after we're introduced to him. Jirou is his name, by the way, as though that matters. "Not Alucard" is good enough.

I'm sure some of you, out there, in your dressing gowns and your bubble wrap (freaky), are whining that it's not fair to compare this to Hellsing. Look, here's the deal: it's new, it's got vampires engaging in violence, and they didn't bother to pull their thumbs out of one another's asses long enough to give him a different-colored coat and wide-brimmed hat. I should say, though, that I like his hat. It's a little like a cartoony witch hat, with the inexplicable metal hoop. V could wear it, except it's red, so if V ever did a Christmas special, he'd wear this hat.

Oh, by the way, moments after Jirou cuts a dozen men apart like ham meat, a woman shows up, taunts him with a mysterious shared past (you didn't think they'd forget something as important as a mysterious past, did you?), and proceeds to dodge all his attacks, hint that she's on the side of whatever bad guys this show will hem and haw over before revealing ten episodes in, and refuses to kill Jirou, despite wrapping him up in an apparently deadly (or acidic, anyway) rosary.

Oh yeah, all the vampires, unless they get killed, seem to have telepathy. Whatever, you know what, Japanese vampire buffs? Go to hell.

Wait! There are more clichés! People not connected to the main characters that get way too much screen time in the first episode! A mysterious bad guy with weird hair that we know nothing about!

You may want to know, then, if anything saves this show from obscurity and late night, quickly cancelled graveyard runs on Starz Action. Well, it's this:

They gave the main character a little brother and a sunny disposition.

But wait, you might say, what the hell? And well you should.

First, Jirou has a little brother, something like ten or twelve years old, I guess, and he's dressed in Victorian, Edwardian, something period but not Renaissance, clothing. He's your standard cute, golden-ringed hair fluffball, who treats viewers to over a minute of shouting "brother" (I can't be arsed to check what it is in Japanese for you people, I'm not being paid) and banging on Jirou's coffin top.

Upon waking up -- in the middle of a huge firefight on a ship -- Jirou smiles, and wishes everyone a good morning ("ohayo," I remember that much, kisama). He then proceeds to use telekinesis to slam his little brother into the walls and deck while admonishing him for not following directions.

So, why should you watch this? It seems to have more of a sense of humor than most vampime I've seen -- Hellsing had a few rare moments of humor (one of the things abundant in the manga which is showing up untarnished in the OAV), but not many. So, rejoice, and watch a vampire commit child abuse in front of a crack military/S.W.A.T./whatever unit.