REVIEW: Black Blood (manga) by Hayate Kuku, translated by Kat Skarbinec

Black Blood is a BL sci-fi one-shot manga. I bought my copy new.

Review:

The year is 3020 C.E. Ethan is a cyborg soldier who has traveled to the planet Peridot in order to take a break from the battlefield. He'll be working security - on Peridot, whose only inhabitants are a few human scientists, their family members, and some weird native plant-like things, that should be a piece of cake.

Since Ethan can handle the high oxygen content of the planet a bit better than most of the other members of Peridot's security, he's assigned to help Mihail, an enthusiastic botanist who's finally been given permission to go out and do some fieldwork. As Ethan gets to know Mihail, he starts feeling things he hasn't felt since before he became a cyborg. His emotions were dialed down so that he could handle battle better, and there's very little of him left that's still organic tissue...but maybe even he can still feel love?

Overall, this was a fairly sweet, low-angst volume. It didn't take long for both Ethan and Mihail to figure out that they had feelings for each other and that those feelings were mutual, and there didn't seem to be any taboos about fully human folks being in a relationship with cyborgs. And, hurray, there were no rapey moments. All sex was consensual.

I did have a few questions. What/who was Ethan originally fighting for? If his body was so high-tech, why wasn't he still on the battlefield? Who paid for his cyborg parts? Were there still any fully human soldiers left, or was it just cyborgs vs. cyborgs forever? What was his life like prior to becoming a cyborg, and how much of it did he remember? And as far as Mihail went, how the heck did he manage to crossbreed Earth plants with Peridot plants when he wasn't even sure that Peridot plants were 1) plants or 2) even living beings?

I probably thought about all of this more than I should have for something that was more feelings and sex than plot. Anyhoo, I loved Hawk, the most prominent minor character and basically a reader stand-in. He served as Security's maintenance cyborg. His excited support for Ethan's developing feelings for Mihail was adorable, and I was amused at his idea of an appropriate gift to a military cyborg with a crush on a human.

Extras:

One page of full-color artwork.