KARMAN
KA
Moses's companion and the sharper edge of the two. Where Moses carries the Delta 67 experience with a kind of exhausted dignity, Karman carries it with anger, which is the more honest response and the show knows it. They are inseparable in the way that people become inseparable when they have survived something together that nobody else will ever fully understand. Blood+ uses them to make the world feel larger than the war between the two queens, and that matters for the fifty episodes it takes to get to the end.
KARMAN THROUGH THE ARCHIVE //
CHIROPTERAN GENETICS & RULES //
Open page →Escaped experimental soldiers · sunlight · the Thorn
The Schiff are sentient artificial Chiropterans created as experimental soldiers. They escape rather than accept the purpose they were made for.
They are powerful, but their bodies come with brutal limits: sunlight is dangerous and the progressive condition they call the Thorn eventually crystallizes and destroys them.
They are powerful, but their bodies come with brutal limits: sunlight is dangerous and the progressive condition they call the Thorn eventually crystallizes and destroys them.
THE SCHIFF & THE THIRD SIDE //
Open page →The Schiff do not arrive as Red Shield allies or as Diva's loyal soldiers. They are escaped artificial Chiropterans trying to solve the fact that their own bodies are killing them.
Why it matters
Their existence breaks the neat two-sided map of the series. There are now people created by Diva's system who do not consider Diva their Queen and have no reason to trust Saya either.
The project that creates the Schiff is interested in useful bodies: speed, strength, weapons and obedience.
The Schiff themselves want time, freedom and some control over how their short lives end.
The Schiff themselves want time, freedom and some control over how their short lives end.
Why it matters
Blood+ uses the gap between those two descriptions to turn a weapons program into a story about people the program never intended to recognize as people.
The Thorn begins as a mark and spreads until the afflicted Schiff crystallizes and dies.
There is no stable adulthood waiting for them if they simply hide long enough.
There is no stable adulthood waiting for them if they simply hide long enough.
Why it matters
Their desperation is not abstract. Every alliance, attack and mistake happens under a clock they can see appearing on one another's bodies.
The Schiff pursue Saya because they have been led to believe her blood may cure the Thorn.
When Irene drinks Saya's blood, it kills her instead.
When Irene drinks Saya's blood, it kills her instead.
What changed
The group loses both a friend and the explanation they were using to justify hunting Saya. Their survival plan has to become something more complicated than finding the correct Queen and taking what they need.
Moses and Karman survive the same manufactured existence without becoming the same person.
Moses tends toward restraint and exhausted dignity. Karman carries more visible anger at what was done to them and at how little future they were given.
Moses tends toward restraint and exhausted dignity. Karman carries more visible anger at what was done to them and at how little future they were given.
Why it matters
Blood+ does not let "the Schiff" erase the individual people inside the group.
After learning that Saya is not their cure and seeing the larger machinery that created them, the surviving Schiff gradually align with Saya's side.
What changed
They do not join because she is a Queen. They join because their interests, experiences and choices finally point toward the same enemy.
By the final campaign, the surviving Schiff are making choices about whom to protect and what kind of end they are willing to accept.
What changed
Their story no longer belongs to the laboratory that made them. However short their lives are, the last part of those lives is theirs.
