Queen's Blade



Originally a series of one-on-one combat gamebooks based on Lost Worlds. Lost Worlds let two players duel by exchanging books that represented different characters, with illustrations representing each action you could take. In 2005 Hobby Japan released a remake of the series, but Queen's Blade's characters were designed with a more Ecchi slant and were all women. And thus the Fan Service began...

An official ecchi manga based on the backstory for the characters, Hide & Seek, was released in 2008. In spring 2009, an anime, Queen's Blade: Rurou no Senshi (The Wandering Warrior) was created. A second season, Queen's Blade: Gyokuza wo Tsugumono (The One To Inherit The Throne) aired in the fall season of 2009. A set of six OVAs, Utsukushiki Toushitachi (Beautiful Warriors) was released in the latter half of 2010.

Also, an anime adaptation of Queen's Blade Rebellion will be released in 2012, with a pair of related OVAs being released in October 2011.

The story is as follows. Every four years, there is a tournament to decide who will be the next queen of the land. The rules are extremely simple: as long as the contestant is over twelve years old, the last one standing wins.

There is also two PSP games, Queen's Blade: Spiral Chaos, and a sequel, Queen's Gate: Spiral Chaos

For shows in similar genres, see Variable Geo, Koihime Musou and Ikki Tousen.

And no, It's not related to Sarah Kerrigan!You know, the Queen of Blades?

NOTE: Only general tropes for the series as a whole should go here. For character-specific ones, check out the characters sheet.

Tropes in Queen's Blade include:

 * Action Girl: Almost everybody, with the sole exception of Hachiel, Nanael's friend,
 * World of Action Girls
 * Aerith and Bob: Played with it: We have characters with names from different cultural backgrounds (despise the whole fantasy setting the series takes place) like Spanish (Leina, Elina, Liliana, Maria, Rana, Dora and Irma), French (Claudette, Jean, Annelotte, Huit & Vingt), Japanese (Tomoe, Shizuka, Airi, and recently, Izumi from QB Rebellion), Greek (Nyx, Echidna and Artemis), English (Menace, Cute & Owen), Germanic (Cattleya and Hans), Irish (Branwen from QB Rebellion), Nordic (Ymir), Hebrew (Ramshel, Sushel and ), Arabic (Layla from QB Rebellion) and totally made-out names (like Risty, Aldra, Nowa, Alleyne and others). Nanael & Hachiel are names with a Japanese prefix mixed with a Hebrew suffix.
 * All There in the Manual: Inverted in Leina and Tomoe's cases (since most of their backstories are expanded in the anime series), but played straight with Menace, possibly since her backstory is too dark and violent even for QB's levels.
 * Alternate Continuity - The anime series, the gamebooks, the Hide & Seek manga and the Spiral Chaos games take place in different continuities, with many of the main events taking place in different fashion.
 * Alternate Universe - In the sidestory Queen's Gate: The Gate Opener revealed that the Queen's Blade universe is a literal alternate universe from our own modern world.
 * Animal Motifs: Elina's attire consists of black panties worn under a grey tiger's pelt, along with a tiger themed tiara and gauntlet. This gets taken further in the Hide & Seek manga, where various people, including Melona and Menace refer to her as, "that tiger woman", and hilariously here, where she's depicted as a cat! Her own sister Claudette, notes this as well.
 * Attempted Rape: The first frightening scene in the franchise actually played straight, when Nowa is kidnapped by a gang of rapists and thrown onto a stable floor... but thankfully rescued by Echidna at the last second.
 * The same thing happens in the Hide & Seek manga, but with Ymir and Frollu, after being kidnapped and sold to pedophiles. Luckily, Ymir gets rid of them, with help from Elina.
 * Asskicking Equals Authority: The purpose of the Queen's Blade tournament.
 * Battle Royale With Cheese: Despite the outright brutality of the tournament (and the fact that rules allows to kill the opponent without any guilt) The biggest example is  The only named character being killed for real was  and she didn't participated in the tournament in first place.
 * This is even worse in Queen's Gate Spiral Chaos:
 * Beauty Is Never Tarnished: The girls get beaten up, and even get repeatedly slashed on their breasts, but there are never scars.
 * Between My Legs: This shot is used very often, usually for fanservice.
 * In the final episode of Season 1 and throughout Season 2, the Priestess Melpha actually uses this as part of her fighting technique, much to Nanael's disgust.
 * BFS: The Giant Killer
 * Bleached Underpants: Most of the hired Hobby Japan artists and designers were/are Hentai artists, notable examples being Oda Non and Koume Keito.
 * Boobs of Steel: Cattleya is the queen of this trope sporting a 120cm bust, far out-sizing most of the competition. She's tall, muscular and wields a huge sword. She wins most of her battles due to brute strength alone.
 * Boss Subtitles: Everyone gets one when a Queen's Blade match is announced. However, most of them are rather mundane (though that may be a gag since Nanael seems to have trouble remembering who everyone is).
 * Brainwashed and Crazy: for that one episode.
 * Breast Expansion: The first episode has a scene where Melona's breasts expand to a size much larger than her body, then explode.
 * Breast Plate: All over the place, pretty much literally in Leina's case.
 * In a truly rare situation, the inefficiency of said armor is actually acknowledged when one of Leina's enemies slices her in the chest in an unarmored location, with a Sinister Scythe.
 * Canon Immigrant - The Magical Stones (or at least the one Huit had in her house in the QB Rebellion's anime adaptation) are from the Spiral Chaos games.
 * Cat Fight: Pretty much the whole point to the audience, but in universe is mostly justified.
 * Clothing Damage: Everywhere you turn; the anime seems to use it as a substitute for actual wounds during battle. Airi gets a special mention because her clothes regenerate -- likely to be damaged all over again.
 * Continuity Nod: All over the place in Queen's Gate, like Junko's certain problem at the Beach Episode, and how Jubei first appeared to Muneakira. Seeing as Banpresto made the game, it would make sense that these events would be present.
 * Crossover: There's a spinoff series, Queen's Gate, whose main point in crossing over the regular characters with characters from other series and games, like Guilty Gear, Fatal Fury, Tekken, Dead or Alive, and others.
 * Also recently, there's a non-hentai doujinshi (and also comic strip) named Mobile Suit Blade in which the girls are depicted as super-deformed versions of many Mobile Suits from the Mobile Suit Gundam saga. For example, Leina, her sisters, Melona and Aldra are depicted as Mobile Suits from Celestial Being, Airi as the Gundam Deathscythe, plus many other examples. And, as this wasn't already ridiculous enough, the same doujinshi also put the girls from Queen's Blade against super-deformed, Gundam-versions of Nanoha and Fate.
 * There's also a freeware PC game named Queen's Blade Battle, who allows the player to use not only both the Queen's Blade and Queen's Gate gamebooks, but also the original Lost World books, the Marvel Battlebooks, both Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader gamebooks published years ago, and even fan-created gamebooks.
 * The entire cast appears as special guests in the Japanese online game Arc Sign.
 * A Day in the Limelight: Each episode of the OVA series deals with each character (or group of characters) between the originals series an Rebellion. The only characters that doesn't appear at all are Risty, Claudette and Irma.
 * Darker and Edgier: The sequel, Queen's Blade Rebellion (at least the Illustrated Stories, but not the anime) have a more darker narrative and setting, since the QB world transformed from a Crap Saccharine World to a full Crapsack World in less of a year. Oddly, the anime adaptation doesn't change the status quo too much.
 * The prequel manga Queen's Blade Rebellion Zero is even more darker: The Fan Service is less frequent here and sometimes not Played for Laughs or sexiness, many characters die in a very brutal way  and it's less idealistic and more cynical than the other series.
 * The Queen's Gate side-stories also counts: While the Fan Service is cranked Up to Eleven, it's used sometimes for squicking the reader, rather than the opposite. Since the novels were written in collaboration with Nitroplus, this can be expected.
 * Does This Remind You of Anything?: That milk is awfully thick isn't it? Wonder why it always coats a heroine's face, though...
 * Also, the 4th Ova episode; When Airi tries to sneak out of Cattleya's house to Drain life force, Rana pleads with her to not do so. His lines are.... well let's just say it sounds like something out an H-manga.
 * Eldritch Abomination: Nyx's staff is certainly a Lovecraftian horror of some variety, looks rather like Shuma-Gorath on a stick, and enables Nyx to use a particularly squicky Lovecraftian Superpower variant.
 * Expy: All the characters are gender-swapped versions of some character/archetype from the original Lost Worlds books, and sometimes, of some character from an already-existing series that their original designers created beforehand.
 * During the second QB Rebellion OVA episode, the female leader of the thieves whom Siggy and Ymir fights against her looks like a white-haired version of Han Juri.
 * The human boy who works for Huit in the first episode of QB Rebellion TV series looks like a composite expy from both Jimmy Olsen and Tombo.
 * In the second episode of QB Rebellion TV series, one of the fighters in the illegal fighting match looks like BlackRose.
 * Elves vs. Dwarves: Averted. Ymir befriends a lot with them, especially with Nowa. (As long she doesn't try to sell steel weapons to them).
 * Fashionable Asymmetry: Most of the characters, though many cases fall into the explanation about armor.
 * Fan Service: Every single character caters to at least one fetish, with large breasts being the most common.
 * Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Hinomoto, which is clearly Japan, and in fact derived from an alternate way of reading the kanji. Amara, where Menace comes from, is an equally obvious stand-in for Egypt. Also, in Queen's Blade Rebellion, we have Shai-Fang, which is a stand-in for China.
 * Fluffy Cloud Heaven: Nanael hails from one, complete with Greco-Roman architecture.
 * Gainaxing
 * Genre Shift: Queen's Blade Rebellion shifts from fighting in a tournament to waging a war against a queen.
 * Gondor Calls for Aid: In pure fantasy style, the final battle of the first season sees every major named character fighting against an army of the undead.
 * Hand or Object Underwear:
 * Alleyne covers up herself beneath her (skimpy) outfit with a fig leaf. Even the forest elves have to have some modesty.
 * Melona: Her hair ends in hands which cover her breasts. Remember, she is basically made of goo.
 * Echindna's snake Kenta is her underwear.
 * Hidden Elf Village
 * High Fantasy
 * High on Catnip: Done to Elina by Nyx to comedic effect when she surprises her with catnip powder, after learning Elina was susceptible to it. The accompanying flashback even reveals that her sisters used to use it to keep her under control. Sadly for Nyx, it backfires when
 * High School AU: The bonus omake included on the DVDs, which take the cast out of their fantasy world and into a modern day one, with no change in fanservice level per episode. Although fitting that much fanservice into a 3-minute episode doesn't leave room for much else.
 * Hime Cut: Tomoe
 * Hoist by His Own Petard: Reina defeats Melona during their second encounter by plugging up her nipples, causing her breasts to swell up with her acidic fluid and explode.
 * Hot Chick with a Sword: The show is all about hot women with weapons, but the personalities who fit the trope would be Tomoe, Alleyne, and Claudette.
 * Hotter and Sexier: The original books and related merchandise, the original line was only Ecchi, but later editions really cranked up a few notches in the Fan Service department, arguably becoming borderline Hentai.
 * Improbably-Female Cast: Given the target audience and premise of the franchise, this is not surprising; still it's worth mentioning if one wants to take the story a bit seriously. There are only a few remotely significant male characters in the whole franchise, and even so they are basically token motivations (Owen and Count Vance) or enemies (Delmmore) for the female characters; basically if a man isn't a Satellite Character, he will definitely be a Cannon Fodder, a Mook, a Posthumous Character, or any other defining role that clearly denotes how useless and unimportant he will be within the story.
 * Intro Dump: The first episode of season two has Nanael listing pretty much everybody to quickly bring the audience up to speed.
 * Loads and Loads of Characters: Excluding named males, secondary characters, and the licensed characters from Queen's Gate, there's about 19 named characters that appears in both the gamebooks and the anime series. The sequel, Queen's Blade Rebellion adds another 12 new characters (and counting), and that's excluding returning characters. So, including the prequels, there's about 31 named heroines to this date.
 * Male Gaze: Practically every scene.
 * Marshmallow Hell: Nanael gets caught in Tomoe's bosom and finds that she has a tough time breathing.
 * And the number of times Cattleya casually flattens her son's head into a breast three times bigger. It's not hell for Rana though neither heaven, just run-of-the-mill.
 * May-December Romance: Irma and Echidna; this is also a Mayfly-December Romance as Irma is a human, while Echidna is an elf of more than 500 years of age.
 * Merchandise-Driven: The Visual Battle Books are what really ignites any other related product for the franchise, from figurines to Anime/Manga and Video Games; Hobby Japan itself are endorsed by other companies to make merchandise of their products, so making some for their in-house creation comes off as expected.
 * Miko: Tomoe
 * Mood Whiplash - The franchise seems to love this trope a lot, especially in the anime series and the Spiral Chaos games, normally at the halfway of the plot:
 * First season:
 * Second season:
 * Rebellion (Anime):
 * Rebellion (Illustrated Stories):
 * Rebellion Zero:
 * Queen's Blade Spiral Chaos:
 * Queen's Gate Spiral Chaos:
 * Muscles Are Meaningless: Averted with Cattleya and Risty, who least on a raw strength level, far outclass most of the fighters.
 * Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Ninja Shrine Maidens.
 * Nintendo Hard: Compared with the Super Robot Wars games they based of, the Spiral Chaos games are much harder than the regular SRW games: You begin the game with few characters and some of them, especially Jean, are too weak to pick a fight against many enemies (especially named ones). You don't have a battleship or something equivalent in those games for recovering HP for free and you have to use items for that, and you have buy them or get them from defeated enemies and unlike the recent mainstream SRW games, the Spiral Chaos games use the classical SRW method of upgrading your character (your weapon and each part of their armor and each upgrade cost money). You have to use Jean for recruiting the Monsters Girls while you manage to find the rest of the cast and, above all, grinding (or cheating, if you like it) is almost mandatory in those games.
 * The one thing Queen's Gate has compared to SRW games is that it has a "Free Battle Mode" to train your other characters so that they won't get left behind.
 * Numerical Theme Naming: All the angels from the Queen's Blade universe (excluding Layla from QB Rebellion) are named after numbers in Latin and ending their names with the Hebrew ''-el" suffix. For some odd reason, Nanael and Hachiel have their names beginning with Japanese numbers (seven and eight, respectively) instead.
 * Panty Fighter
 * Perpetually-Shiny Bodies
 * Perspective Flip: Hide & Seek is about Elina's Stern Chase of her sister
 * Playing to The Fetishes: Oh, boy...
 * Special mention goes out to Melona, a Slime-Girl (aka Goo-Girl).
 * Positive Discrimination: Though women in the series can be both good and evil, all of the evil ones get at least something approaching a Pet the Dog moment or a Morality Pet. Not only are men usually faceless outlines or crow-fodder, they're all evil or lecherous assholes.
 * Rage Against the Heavens: Aldra. Well, against Heavens and Hells, really.
 * Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: While this is normally averted in the TV series for obvious reasons (except during the final battles from both seasons), it's played straight in the Spiral Chaos games: Including the TV series along, we have five princesses (Leina, her sisters, Ymir and Cute, each one with different personality quirks), a thief (Risty), an angel (Nanael), a sword-wealding miko (Tomoe), an half-elf (Nowa) and her instructor, a normal Elf (Alleyne), a Mercenary Elf (Echidna), a big-breasted Monster hunter (Cattleya) and her son (Rana), an assassin (Irma), a dimensional-traveling gunslinger (Alice), a Magical Cook (Maron), a queen (Aldra), a nun (Melpha), a street-fighting Ojou (Lili), three ninjas (Shizuka, Mai Shiranui and Junko Hattori, make it four later with the inclusion of Taki, or five if we also include Kasumi), a Magical Girl (Ink), a nurse (Kotone-chan) a Power Ranger-wannabe (Wonder Momo), two humanoid girls with massive power (Dizzy and Noel Vermillion), a jungle girl (Cham Cham), a ninja maid (Iroha), a Medieval dominatrix (Ivy), two Gender Flipped Samurai (Jubei Yagyu and Sanada Yukimura), a Gender Flipped Three Kingdoms General (Kan'u/Aisha), a girl infused with an evil sword power (Pyrrha), the reincarnation of the last Tsaritsa of Russia (Katja) and her servant, a pedophile bully (Hana), ... and a perverted male Cleric. (Jean)
 * The villains are not better about this: We have a Slime Girl (Melona), a Wraith Maid (Airi), a lesbian Cleopatra-wannabe (Menace), and her talking perverted sceptre (Setra), a Witch (Dora), a vampire (Lamica), a Bunny-heared Idol Singer (Luna), a gothic gunslinger (Aine), a Mecha-otaku (Humina)
 * And in Queen's Blade Rebellion, due of the change of genre (from fighting in a tournament to waging a civil war), in the heroic side we have a  princess (Annelotte), a underage-looking genius elf (Huit), a Robot Elf (Vingt), Two Ghost-hunting sisters  (Tanyan and Sanyan), an half-angel half-human girl (Layla), a Stripperific jungle girl (Luna-Luna), a Samurai (Izumi), a Slave (Branwen) and many of the returning cast of the previous series.
 * And in the Villanous Side in Rebellion we have some of the heroines turned-on villians a Ghost pirate (Captain Liliana), a Valkyrie (Mirim), a nun (Siggy), some of the returning villains of the prequel, and the Swamp Witch, a very powerful and mysterious figure who is behind all the events.
 * Ramming Always Works: Many characters, especially Leina, really love to use this tactic against their opponents.
 * Rape Discretion Shot: This page from Hide 'n Seek, complete with falling rosebud, makes it clear that, without having to show it.
 * Rapunzel Hair: Tomoe, Aldra, Alleyne, Nowa, and Airi.
 * Really Dead Montage: When.
 * Rock Beats Laser - In Queen's Gate Spiral Chaos, due to the fact you have to travel to different worlds with different technological levels, it's not unusual that the Queen's Blade heroines (who are from a Medieval setting) had to fight against more advanced opponents like robots, people with guns, or even
 * Secret Test of Character: Applies in episode 5 of the Utsukushiki Toushi-Tachi OVA, where Nanael plucks a Holy Grape and is banished to the Swamp. Down in the Swamp she eats the grape and decides to become a Fallen Angel, then running amok. After nearly killing both Hachiel and Melpha, she is suddenly returned to heaven by the Chief Angel, who reveals the whole thing is a test of character, which she somehow passed.
 * Schedule Slip: Of the American DVDs. And also Queen's Blade Rebellion, since they haven't posted more episodes due to Hobby Japan trying to promote the QB gamebooks in the U.S., but it will resume on December 2011.
 * Brother-Sister Incest: The anime stops just short of outright stating that this is Elina's intent toward Reina, but throws every possible hint of desired (and eventually enacted) intimacy short of sex: Elina wants to bathe Reina, dress her, and spoon her. Hide & Seek makes it blatant by showing Elina getting worked up over Leina's hot sweaty body.
 * The third Rurou no Senshi omake shows Claudette having similar desire towards Elina. In the manga, she becomes jealous over Elina fighting to be with Leina instead of her! And, according to this, Elina has the hots for her too! She's even drooling!
 * Show Some Leg: Everyone, but Risty gets a special mention since her thong/crocs combo shows the most (i.e. everything).
 * Shout-Out: The game Queen's Blade Spiral Chaos includes many shout outs from many mecha anime (Gundam Seed, Gundam Wing, Great Mazinger, Super Robot Wars, etc.) and some non-mecha too (Fist of the North Star, Tales of Phantasia, Guilty Gear, etc.) Justified, because the game was programmed by Banpresto, the creators of the Super Robot Wars series.
 * Also, if you press the Select + Start buttons together to activate the Panic Mode, in the first game, you will see Leina in a 8-bit RPG game Dragon Quest-style and in the sequel, you will see Jean and Maron (the new original character) parodying Mega Man instead.
 * Many stages from the Queen's Gate Spiral Chaos game are named after episodes or titles from other anime series, mainly from the Mecha genre, like "Blood-sucking Princess of Sorrow", Booby Trap , The Melancholy of Ink and
 * The masked male Mooks that appear in Queen's Gate Spiral Chaos looks like the ones from Shocker. (With even their high-pitched yells, to boot.)
 * While it could be a coincidence, and from all the things they could reference in the series,
 * In the Queen's Blade Battle fangame, if you put both Melona and Captain Liliana in a tag team, their tag team is named Ungrateful Undead.
 * Slasher Smile: Melona
 * Spell My Name with an "S": Until the official website for the anime spelled things out in English, some characters didn't quite have a lock on their names. Note that this page isn't even consistent.
 * Spiritual Successor The Spiral Chaos games technically are spiritual successors of the Banpresto's Playstation game Super Tokusatsu Wars 2001 which was the first game using the Super Robot Wars engine, but with human-sized characters from the Tokusatsu genre like Kamen Rider, Kikaider, etc.
 * Stripperiffic: 99% of all characters. Lampshaded in 2nd episode of the second season when Tomoe comments on the other fighters.
 * Literally the point of the game. Battles can be won by doing a "Perfect Knockdown", that is, stripping the enemy of all their "armor". Pictures are presented.
 * There Can Be Only One
 * Too Hot for TV
 * Tournament Arc: The whole second season is about the titular tournament.
 * Trademark Favorite Food sausages for everyone! Eaten quite ....strangely at times.
 * Translation Convention: It's heavely implied during all the series that none of the Western characters (Leina, Elina, Nowa, etc.) speaks Japanese at all and they speak a language based in glyphs (Althrough it's implied in Rebellion to be English, with a different, alien typography). On the other side, Tomoe and Shizuka speaks Ancient Japanese, but it's never explained how they managed to understand the language of the rest of the cast, since both girls never traveled outside their country in their lives. In a very funny twist, they tried to learn the language using a very old scroll with Russian greetings instead.
 * This is a plot point (of sorts) in Queen's Blade Rebellion: While is never mentioned on-story, Tanyan supposedly speaks with a Chinese accent, but Sanyan speaks the local language without any accent at all.
 * Also, it's also implied that the non-human characters (Alleyne, Echidna, Ymir, etc) speaks in their own languages, but they are possibly bilingual since they have to interact with humans a lot (especially Ymir).
 * Three Amigos: While they are not always together (except in few episodes and in the Spiral Chaos games), Leina, Tomoe and Nanael can be considered as such, since they were the first characters released as gamebooks when the franchise began in 2005. They also appear in the cover of Queen's Blade Spiral Chaos (despise not being the main characters at first) and their respective V As sang the ED theme of the first season).
 * Melona, Airi and Menace are also a villanous version of this trope.
 * Vapor Wear
 * Airi literally. Ironically, Besides Tomoe, Her outfit reveals the least.
 * Villains Out Shopping: Melona, Menace and Airi in episode 7.
 * Villain Song: The second season ending theme, "buddy-body", sung by Melona, Menace and Airi.
 * Wardrobe Malfunction: The DVD version of the anime applies logic to everyone's outfits - which is to say, if their nipples would slip at a given point, they do.
 * Where the Hell Is Springfield?: We don't know the name of the country or even the name of the continent where the series takes place.
 * In fact, both the animated versions and the gamebooks makes it clear that the continent when all the story takes place doesn't have a name and it's only refered on-story as The Continent. This is possibly intentional, since there's very few things written on stone about the whole setting, other than the rules of the titular tournament, so the authors can put any kind of stuff without worrying about contradicting themselves about the setting.
 * World of Buxom
 * X Meets Y: The game books and the both anime seasons: Dungeons and Dragons (or Record of Lodoss War for a better Japanese equivalent) meets Soul Calibur with a dash of Words Worth (ecchiness).
 * And the sequel, Queen's Blade Rebellion: Queen's Blade meets The Water Margin with a dash of Star Wars.
 * The Spiral Chaos games: Queen's Blade meets Super Robot Wars.
 * The sidestory Queen's Gate: The Gate Opener: Queen's Blade meets Read or Die meets Alice in Wonderland meets The Wizard of Oz.
 * The fan doujinshi Mobile Suit Blade: Queen's Blade meets Gundam
 * You Taste Delicious: In the third episode, Leina is tricked into oil wrestling Echidna (she thought it would be mud wrestling like earlier in the episode), during the match Echinda licks some oil off her check, which might be the tamest thing she did to her in the match.
 * Airi said this to everyone she met; since she "eats" life-force she can sense what her enemies will "taste" like, even anticipating that Nanael would "taste" so bad it might kill her a second time. Although Airi really only drained a few characters and a bunch of extras.
 * The fan doujinshi Mobile Suit Blade: Queen's Blade meets Gundam
 * You Taste Delicious: In the third episode, Leina is tricked into oil wrestling Echidna (she thought it would be mud wrestling like earlier in the episode), during the match Echinda licks some oil off her check, which might be the tamest thing she did to her in the match.
 * Airi said this to everyone she met; since she "eats" life-force she can sense what her enemies will "taste" like, even anticipating that Nanael would "taste" so bad it might kill her a second time. Although Airi really only drained a few characters and a bunch of extras.