JINZO BAIRN

     Did I mention the monsters of the week are called "bairns?" Well, now I have! This one resembles a limbless, silently hovering jinzo statue, until it springs to life and sprouts a pair of big bulky preying mantis limbs made of stone! A nice eerie contrast between its monster limbs and expressionless humanoid face. Its flexibility is possible only due to the many cracks throughout its surface, and can only be defeated when it stretches its neck just enough to leave a sword-sized gap in its throat.

FLOWER BAIRN

   A real cool design for a plant monster; its top is one huge, pink flower with a circular mouth in the center, while its body is a blobby cluster of pale lumps, each bearing a red eye. Tentacular roots sprout from the central mass as its only appendages, and each can split open at the tip into an additional eel-like mouth!

TRAIN BAIRN

    This monster disguises itself as an ordinary train, but no one who boards its ever seen again! When Blood steps inside, its surfaces morph into stretchy, gummy pink flesh, and she's attacked by two internal rings of teeth. The outside of the thing turns out to resemble something like a big pink sea cucumber, with a simple ragged mouth-hole beneath four circular, brightly luminous pink eyes. I also like the network of irregular white stripes and markings down the sides, crudely resembling a pattern of windows and doors, with the darker back calling to mind the roof of the bus. It's always fun when a mimic monster's natural appearance is completely organic, even believable as a naturally evolved animal, but still represents the inanimate object it disguises itself as. It's also a really sad looking creature, giving a distinct impression that it doesn't really want to be here.

MONK BAIRN

   This is a lady monk who can control fog, and fights with impressive martial artistry our heroine struggles to overcome! But most importantly, when this lady takes off her hat, we see that her entire head and neck is just a big naked eyeball on a meaty stalk. I KNEW she'd be cute!

CENTIPEDE BAIRN

   A very weird and unique design for a centipede-man-monster! Most of the body is just a scaled up centipede, but at the head end is a bulky, muscular human torso with beefy arms. These arms are used as front legs, and are attached backwards, so the hands face towards the tail end. Two huge antennae sprout off the shoulders, and there are four round black eyes between them, but there doesn't appear to be any mouth at first. When it does open its maw, it's nothing but a massive, circular mass of black flesh studded with dozens of black fangs! So much is anatomically screwed up with this poor entity!

SPIDER BAIRN

  They call it a spider, and it spins webs like a spider, and it has a bunch of long skinny appendages it walks on, but not one single part of this beast is otherwise spider-like in the slightest! Rather, it resembles something between the head of a frog and the head of a whale, with fat dark lips and six transparent, yellow bubble-like eyeballs. It doesn't have much of a "body" so much as some extra, lumpy flesh beneath its head, but it has five short, straight arms enging with huge, four-fingered hands, and its incredibly long, thick fingertips function as a total of twenty "legs." A final detail, and my favorite, is the strange little lump of flesh on top that's almost shaped like a cute, goat-like additional head, with little yellow ungulate eyes and ear-like antennae.

  A beautifully absurd design, and I generally love when something represents a particular kind of animal this abstractly. Does it have any real connection to spiders at all? We'll never know!

CERBERUS BAIRN

  This one is a giant fleshy dog with humanlike arms instead of ears, which isn't a whole lot for me to talk about, but it's responsible for the most painful and awful looking deaths in the entire series when it uses those arms to simply pick people up, and pull them apart.

SHADOW BAIRN

   An armorphous black mass that can disguise itself as someone's shadow, and that's it really. Another that's difficult to review, but it's here for completion's sake, and they do give it quite a bit of personality in its animations! It usually moves around as a shapeless blot, but it takes a gooey semihumanoid form a couple times, and can form five-fingered hands when it needs.

BIRD BAIRN

  This bairn is just a large griffonlike bird monster, but it controls two "lesser" insect-based bairns with stranger designs. They almost look like big chitinous snake or lizard heads, with finger-like appendages instead of teeth. Each has two big, crustaceoid forelimbs and a grublike abdomen, but no other appendages, and they float through the air by no obvious physical mechanism. There's also a grey lump in the center of each abdomen, like a boulder embedded in the bug's rear end, and I'm not sure what exactly that represents. It must be significant, the way it's visually highlighted by the bright yellow of the abdomen. Maybe it's the organ that allows them to hover?

ARMOR BAIRN

  This Bairn resembles a normal looking guy in an extremely oversized suit of samurai armor, with stag beetle mandibles as horns and a whole bunch of sword-wielding arms. I feel like the armor itself is probably the monster, possessing the guy inside, but I'm not sure we ever know who he is.

SKELETON BAIRN

  This Bairn consists of a woman's head, notably fully fleshed, with extremely long black hair she can control. But her spinal column is completely exposed, and...that's it. No ribs, no pelvis and no limbs. Just a floating spine with a head on top. Extremely haunting! The hair is primary weapon, armor, and even disguise, since she can wrap herself in it to look like she still has a body. Calling this thing a "skeleton" is both generous and a little misleading, but it works. One of the coolest visuals in the show.

RABBIT BAIRN

   The final bairn has a notorious reputation that precedes the whole series, since gifs and clips of it used to circulate the internet with no context. It resembles a huge, hairless, white-skinned rabbity humanoid with an only barely rabbity head, mostly just a lump with a cartoonish jagged opening for a mouth. Its eyes are very thin, yellow vertical slits, and its ears read more like simple feelers, with a pair of palp-like protrusions sticking up from the lower jaw.

   The primary threat of the "rabbit" is that it can replicate itself, and the other is that these many rabbits can morph their arms and hands into seemingly any shapes they want, resulting in some truly grotesque and brutal sequences as they proceed to massacre an entire town. Several of them morph their hands into giant, fleshy sacs they stuff full of people, and at one point a rabbit morphs its claws into a whirling "blender" contraption it stuffs down into its sibling's people-pouch. It was hard to think off how to word any of this in a coherent fashion. It's an incredibly messy, nasty sequence and sadistically imaginative, though I have to say it's still not as viscerally awful as the way the dog bairn rips someone in half, and that wasn't even all on-screen.