Isekai is something of a touchy subject. It’s a simple concept, turned into a complex genre, which has then gained something of a bad reputation. And, I have to admit, the reputation is not entirely undeserved. Modern Isekai shows have a very tight list of genre tropes and expectations, which is why I called the genre complex. There are a ton of things that go into the common perception of an Isekai show. The style, the feel, the harem, the cheat ability, the power fantasy. And despite the fairly strict formula, these shows are everywhere. They’ve been mass-produced in recent years, and to an extent the torrent is still ongoing. With that kind of volume of shows that are so massively similar, it’s inevitable by Sturgeon’s Law alone that the average quality is going to be on the low end.
Perhaps because of this, most Isekai shows will have something about them that’s a good-faith attempt to be unique. They don’t have a lot of room while remaining perfectly in-formula, though, so in addition to a battery of ‘unique’ cheat abilities, you get shows that pick an element of the formula and either subvert it, or at least attempt to sell themselves on subverting it. KonoSuba, as a parody, is sort of the model for subverting just about everything, but more will just pick a trait. The Harem might be subverted by leaning more into romance, or the Power Fantasy might be subverted by going with the “starts out absurdly weak” trope (though these characters often become broken strong very quickly with powers that follow the Magikarp growth pattern, itself not really being a subversion of the power fantasy).
A significantly number of these shows,
for all that they did find an axis to distinguish themselves on,
don’t really succeed at escaping the Isekai quality doldrums. To an
extent, it feels like they focus on the wrong thing. Having a unique
bullet point on your outline isn’t going to make your show actually
good. I don’t intrinsically care about an Isekai show just because
“This time he’s really weak and needs to use his wits to assemble a
powerful party to win” or “This time the main guy has an
also-isekai’d girlfriend who’s taken away and he pines for/tries to
rescue the whole show” or “This time the cheat power is modern
tech” or “This time the MC is a girl”. I could care about any
of those or none of those. What matters is putting in effort. You
have to build a connection to your characters, make the audience
empathize with their struggles, and show them going through a journey
that the audience can experience through them. Along the way, since
we’re talking about shows, you need strong visuals that tell and
enhance the story through their imagery and motion, good choreography
that expresses the action and emotion in each scene, and credible
voice acting that convinces you you’re listening to a person
undergoing the circumstances on screen and not some joker in a
recording booth. These are the core details of good storytelling and
good shows and they are all too often forgotten by works that try to
‘stick to the script’ or ‘stick to the script except flip it for this
one thing’.
In short, cookie-cutter Isekai, like
other cookie-cutter offerings, gets caught up in what it thinks it
needs to do so much that it forgets the fundamentals.
And then, every once in a while in a
genre that’s smothered in copycats, clones, and soulless imitations,
you get a show that does it right. Something that has the
fundamentals down pat and reintroduces its audience to a tired genre,
revitalized to remind everyone why they liked this stuff in the first
place. For modern Isekai, The Rising of the Shield Hero is that
show. A show that, when you get down to it, plays everything in the
lazy Isekai-Harem template pretty much entirely straight with a hint
of edgelord, but that tells its story with enough pathos and core
competence and uses some of its elements cleverly enough that you’d
swear it turned the entire slate of genre conventions on their heads.
It’s also a show that was the center of
a couple of controversies, but we’ll get there.
Naofumi Iwatani is your typical Isekai
Protagonist-to-be: a young otaku in a kind of dead-end place in life,
who it’s easy to suspect might not really be missed when he has to go
save a parallel dimension, but who still isn’t too overwhelmingly
pathetic. He’s spared the typical Truck-san welcome to fantasy land,
and is instead sucked into a book he finds in the local library to
find he’s been summoned to the Kingdom of Melomarc as one of the Four
Cardinal Heroes who bear the legendary Four Cardinal Weapons.
Naofumi’s weapon is, of course, the Shield, while the other three who
appear beside him have the Sword, the Bow, and the Spear.
Naofumi at first fills the role of the
typical Isekai Protagonist in Fantasyland, being wowed by things and,
naively good-hearted, eager to help. His compatriots are a wee bit
more mercenary (or more savvy), being sure to get a basic intro to
the task (fighting off a malign force known as The Waves of Calamity)
and asking about compensation. It seems to make sense pretty
shortly, as after the four are able to talk together it turns out the
other three all know this setting and story from video games in their
home worlds. Which, it becomes evident when they bicker over the
details, are not the same version of “modern Earth” as Naofumi or
each other. One thing they do agree on, though, is that Naofumi drew
the short straw, because not only is he ignorant of the mechanics
he’s going to need, the Shield is unquestionably the weakest class.
This might also explain why, so far as
it’s been seen, Naofumi gets some comparatively unkind treatment from
the locals, up to and including the King. This is reinforced the
next day when the Four Heroes are summoned to receive the folks who
volunteered to become members of their parties (as the heroes
interfere with each other’s growth if they fight in the same area)
and Naofumi, the one who doesn’t have a legitimate offensive option
to start, gets none.
Mercy (or so it seems) comes in the
form of Myne, a gorgeous redhead who, when Naofumi protests the
position he’s been put in, offers to defect from the Spear Hero’s
prospective team to join Naofumi. Everything seems to work out with
that, and Naofumi takes his starting stipend and a lot of advice from
Myne, gearing her up (in a scene at a merchant’s shop where we learn
that Naofumi can’t pick up any weapon but the sacred shield he can’t
be parted from) and heading out to the fields to get a couple levels.
Yeah, levels. One of the really tired
things that Rising of the Shield Hero plays entirely straight and yet
weirdly makes work is that this is, in a lot of ways, a game
mechanics universe – right down to game constructs that usually
have no in-universe meaning like levels, parties, and even caps being
well-known facts in the fantasy land into which Naofumi has been
thrown. Naofumi even has a helpful HUD for his shield. In any case,
they head back into town in the evening, have a nice meal at which
Naofumi refuses to drink despite Myne’s rather pressing invitation,
and Naofumi goes to sleep.
Come morning, Myne is missing and
Naofumi has been robbed of everything but the clothes on his back.
The palace guards storm in and while they seem extremely standoffish
in their haste to bring Naofumi to the castle, he goes along
willingly, worried about Myne’s absence and the robbery until he
finally gets there. Held at halberd-point, he’s informed that he
stands accused of attempted rape, with Myne weeping openly and
telling a fake story about how he tried to force himself on her and
how she went running to the Spear Hero’s nearby room for safety.
False evidence is even presented, in the form of a torn nightgown
said to have been found in Naofumi’s room (when there was no such
object when he woke up, robbed) and the King lets loose the fury.
Effectively standing summarily convicted, Naofumi is made aware of
his fate: he can’t be banished back to his home world because the
magic that summoned him doesn’t work that way, and in any case the
severity of his crime is such that (at least in the matriarchal
nation he’s in) he’d ordinarily be put to death. Owing to his status
as one of the summoned Heroes, though, he’s given what amounts to a
stay of execution: stripped of all support he might have had, he’ll
still be required to fight the Waves when they come. Naofumi is
trapped in the game until he (presumably) dies playing.
The final jab to a horrified and
uncomprehending Naofumi comes from Myne. As he’s ushered out of the
hall, she sticks out her tongue and makes a taunting gesture, letting
the audience and perhaps more importantly Naofumi know that this is a
malicious frame-job on her part. And that blow is the end of the
kind, naive, isekai dork Naofumi. From here on he’s quite reasonably
a bitter and mercenary person who trusts no one without extraordinary
proof. Once bitten, twice shy.
And now, sadly, we reach the first
point where I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the apparent
controversy around The Rising of the Shield Hero, Myne’s false
accusation and how it’s handled. You can still find a number of
articles from about when the show that was first coming out leveling
some fairly serious accusations of misogyny and just about every
social ill at just about everyone involved with Shield Hero – the
fans, the studio, the director, and most especially the writer of the
original material, who works under a pseudonym with their real
identity not publicly known. There’s another issue that also ruffled
about as many feathers as this jumping off point later, but I’ll get
to that when we get to it.
For my part, I don’t think the author was trying to make a statement about anything related to the real world. I think they were trying to break Naofumi literally as hard as he’d break, and that they used one of the more classic betrayals of human literature. I’m not a biblical expert, but there’s even a story there with a very similar setup. Second, I don’t think anyone is supposed to consider Myne ‘normal’ or assume that her actions are representative of how anyone else would act. Naofumi does (at least at first) but part of the point of Naofumi’s early arcs is that his pain has blinded him, making him wrongly incapable of seeing or believing in the goodness of others. This is increasingly obvious as the show goes on, because it becomes ever more clear that Myne is actually our primary villain. She’s something of a cunning manipulator, but more than that she’s repeatedly shown to be both a complete sociopath and a compulsive liar, and more crisis situations in the show are the result of her greed and cruelty than have much of anything to do directly with the Waves. She’s about as representative of women as a more obvious psycho like Junko Enoshima, or any utterly unrepentant and irredeemable male villain is of men, which is in either case to say not at all.
In any case, Naofumi is tossed back out
in the world seething and disgraced. Along his walk of shame to the
gates, since he still needs to level up if he wants any chance of
survival, he meets the smith who saw to him the previous day. The
smith at first rebukes him, but on seeing Naofumi’s reaction thinks
back to what he saw the previous day, when Naofumi was basically
putty in Myne’s hands. Though the analysis is silent, we get the
sense that he’s perhaps the one person with the right perspective to
doubt the public story, and comes to the conclusion that one way or
another Naofumi is probably innocent. He gives Naofumi a cheap cloak
at least, and Naofumi, quite disinclined to take charity, promises to
pay him back before marching on
From here, Naofumi gets himself into a little pattern. He may not have any offensive capabilities from his weapon, but he’s pretty hardy against anything resembling damage, and basic punches and kicks are enough to take out the noob monsters (toothy animate balloons) just outside the capitol, letting him gather low-value materials to both upgrade his shield and pay the bills. For the latter, the majority of capital merchants are naturally disinclined to deal fairly with him, but Naofumi changes their tune by subjecting them to some vicious balloons chewing on him under his cape (seriously, these things seem less dangerous than cats, but still not something you want your face shoved into) and reminding them that he’s already walking free for capital crimes so it’s pretty unlikely anybody’s going to bother him for generic thug behavior. Doing that gets him a fair due (mostly because that’s all he’s asking) from those who wouldn’t otherwise give it, and he’s able to both pay the smith back and support himself.
As an aside to all the D&D players
in the audience, this is why “Bad Reputation” is a perk in Fifth
Edition. Or at least what it might look like in action.
In any case, Naofumi is surviving, and
even slowly improving at least his income as he learns how to harvest
useful herbs and synthesize basic medicines, but he is sort of
hitting the wall in terms of his combat abilities without any
offensive support to take down tougher monsters in more profitable
areas, and the next Wave draws ever closer. About at this point,
Naofumi is approached by a flamboyantly dressed man with a giant
grin. Seriously if you told me this was (classic) Doctor Robotnik as
a circus ringmaster, I’d believe you. What he actually is, is a
shrewd and surprisingly friendly guy who thinks he could do some
profitable business with Naofumi. After all, what Naofumi needs is a
party member who can fight for him, and this guy is a slave trader,
able to offer Naofumi a minion who, cursed with a magical brand to
enforce their status, will be literally incapable of disobedience,
deception, or betrayal. Naofumi visits the slave market and is
impressed by some of the higher end products, practically captive
monsters, but his budget is much more modest than that, affording him
only a sick little raccoon girl named Raphtalia. Young, weak,
traumatized by a former cruel master, and pretty much at death’s
door, she’s not worth a lot… but she’s better than nothing, so
Naofumi makes the deal.
And there we get the second big controversial element of Rising of the Shield Hero for Western audiences: Naofumi goes ahead and buys a slave. Rational choice for the character in his position or irredeemable evil? And either way, is this something that’s acceptable to put in media?
Naturally, real slavery has often been one of the more horrific abuses humans have enacted on one another. And yet pre-modern societies across the world were often pretty big on one form of bondsmanship or another, all of which would probably be considered pretty awful to modern mores, even if only a few of the more bitter abuses typically get coverage in popular histories. Horrible or not it’s an inescapable element of the times for much of humanity from the dawn of civilization until now.
Personally, I don’t think artists are
under any obligation to depict fictional worlds as we wish things
were, free of hot-button injustices. Plenty of art comes from
reflecting brutal reality, or even the dark end of possibilities. To
be quite honest, the vast majority of our fictions take place in
universes we shouldn’t want to live in because of how they’re torn by
conflict or rife with cruelties, and when it comes to making such a
world I feel that the scope of human experiences, including the very
worst, and even beyond it need to be at the disposal of the creator.
Which brings us to asking how the
element is used. In the kingdom in which Naofumi finds himself,
slavery appears to be legal but widely distasteful, with a focus on
the enslavement of intelligent or semi-intelligent magical creatures
and “Demi-humans” (people like Raphtalia). The fact that the
Slave Trader’s business, as friendly and helpful as he may be, is
creepy and uncomfortable is fully on display.
But there is the issue that this horrid
situation is pretty convenient for a character who’s supposed to be
our main hero. He’s going along with buying a little girl with the
intent of arming her and throwing her into combat. That’s not cool.
But… I think it’s handled pretty
well.
First of all, the fact that Naofumi
isn’t exactly a stable individual after his disgrace is fully on
display. He’s not just garden-variety angsty: he has developed and
to an extent continues to develop a seriously pathological worldview
founded on mistrust and profit. He could be a spokesman for
Planescape’s Fated, because he sure as hell sees only their warped
and extreme Social Darwinist crab bucket philosophy as the truth even
if he hates it. Sorry I keep bringing this back to D&D by the
way, I guess if we’re stuck in a Game Mechanic ‘verse I have to use a
game I like as a touchstone. In any case, Naofumi isn’t a role
model, and it seems like he wasn’t meant to be, at least not until he
overcomes some of the deep flaws he’s developed.
Speaking of the fact that he kind of
hates the cruel and abusive world he sees… we get a lot of scenes
of how Naofumi doesn’t actually pass on his suffering. When he
extorts the merchants, all he demands is fair treatment. When he has
Raphtalia, he treats her like a person who’s valuable in her own
right rather than like a slave. The only reason his association with
Raphtalia works is because Naofumi doesn’t take advantage of it. You
could say that he’s perpetuating a harmful stereotype of a “good
master”, but I’m go out on a limb and say that doesn’t come off as
the intent. He may be a broken person who sees the magical slave
crest as the only way he can trust someone to not stab him in the
back anymore, but he’s still a modern person with modern mores and he
acts on them – he never really treats Raphtalia like property,
seeming to see the magic brand more as an insurance policy against
getting burned again than anything else. Frankly, he treats her a
lot better than he treats himself.
Third, as we get deeper into the show,
we do see how much of an anomaly Naofumi’s kindness (grumpy though it
may be) makes him in terms of slave owners, getting windows on other
masters who, as natives, are probably more typical and who highlight
that the system itself is cruel and unjust. It’s not sugar-coated as
a whole, and is used as part of a general package of social ills for
the native society (along with despotic feudal rule and the abusive
power of a Church able to lean its weight on secular policy).
Finally, Naofumi isn’t allowed to
benefit from his (arguable) misdeed unchallenged. Granted, he’s not
really allowed to have anything unchallenged over the course of the
show, but it’s kind of important here.
In any case, Naofumi is now plus one
little raccoon girl. He nurses her back to health (trivial given his
ability to synthesize medicines with his magic game mechanic shield),
gets her fed and taken care of, indulges her wishes even when she
doesn’t dare exactly voice them, and takes her to the one smith who
kind of likes him to get her equipped right. During that visit the
smith gets an even bigger clue that Myne was playing Naofumi (there’s
a party mechanic that would let him share experience points, which
she didn’t tell him about, claiming all the day one benefits for
herself. The smith is able to tutorial him on it for Raphtalia.) and
helps get them set up to… not take on the world, but at least not
really get in trouble in the noob areas either.
After that, the two of them spend some
time training and incidentally bonding. It’s here that we get to see
that the old Naofumi isn’t exactly dead – he’s still nice to a
fault in at least some circumstances, he just hides it behind a sour
disposition. Raphtalia is a quick study (Game mechanics ‘verse, yo!)
and the two of them start making actual headway while Naofumi’s
connections in town – mostly with other merchants like the smith
who find from experience they can trust him as a reliable associate –
grow, helping him really stand up even if general perception still
considers him a monstrous dastard.
We learn more of Raphtalia, how she
lived in a village that was destroyed by the first Wave (which
appeared before the Heroes were summoned and did untold damage until
mundane forces fought it off), her parents killed before her eyes and
all the other survivors enslaved in the wake, ultimately leading to
where we found her. This comes up because Naofumi and Raphtalia
actually try to take on a minor dungeon. Inside, they encounter a
dog monster. It’s fairly strong and more importantly it looks a hell
of a lot like the one that killed Raphtalia’s parents, causing her to
lock up in utter terror. After realizing that she’s unable to fight
despite his insistence and need, Naofumi orders Raphtalia to run and
save herself, even though he’s likely to fall there without her. Of
course, the threat of losing the first person who was kind to her
since the death of her family galvanizes Raphtalia to action and we
get the cliché where she conquers her fears and, in the process,
dispatches the enemy.
Having come through that harrowing
situation, some things stay the same – Naofumi and Raphtalia go
through the same routines as before and seem to have a similar if
slightly closer relationship. Other things have changed, though. In
addition to having overcome her night terrors and such, Raphtalia’s
no longer entirely interested in being offered toys, and wants to
have the same meal as Naofumi rather than the kid’s lunch set that
had enchanted her on their first visit to the restaurant. Oh, and
she’s also gone from looking like a ten year old little kid to
looking like a sixteen-to-twenty-something year old young adult.
This sudden metamorphosis from being
kind of a daughter or little sister figure for Naofumi to more of a
peer with what seems to be a burgeoning crush (underplayed well at
the start, but the show does play its harem aspect straight enough in
the end, like most of its isekai elements) is eventually explained to
be a quirk of demi-humans: they may look like regular humans with
animal ears and tails, but they are more supernatural creatures in
tune with the game mechanics of the universe: improving their stats
and level will cause them to undergo immense physical changes,
including (in Raphtalia’s case that’s apparently not that unusual)
growing up prematurely and swiftly as we see. In some ways, that’s a
tricky thing to do right from a writing perspective. The transition
from child to adult for Raphtalia, especially since her mind seems to
age right along with her body, could have come off as introducing a
whole new character if it was played poorly, but the scenes of her
and Naofumi going through their daily routines together show how
she’s stayed the same in a lot of ways as well as how she’s changed
and help to maintain continuity.
Don’t tell Naofumi, though. He’s…
kind of slow when it comes to noticing that Raphtalia has changed.
In any case, the time that’s been
running out finally runs out, and the next Wave arrives. The other
three heroes seem to have the boss on lock so rather than getting in
their way and suffering their scorn, Naofumi and Raphtalia support
the defense of a small town just outside the capital, saving the
people and the few newbish guards that had been assigned to protect
them alike, earning in at least the eyes of those present a new
reputation of both competence and relentless honor. When the other
three heroes fell the boss and the Wave ends, all four are summoned
back to the capital for something of a debriefing. Naofumi doesn’t
want to bother going at first, since he knows there’s no love lost
between him and anyone in the palace, but the offer of a generous
stipend convinces him to at least attend the stupid party and brood
in the corner until he can get paid.
It turns out, though, that the visit
may not have been such a grand idea, because Myne is still there to
help make a scene, and she has the best ammo she could get: telling
the Spear Hero that the lovely young lady Raphtalia is Naofumi’s
slave. Yeah, for once she doesn’t even have to lie to start a mess.
Spear Hero naturally takes quite aggressive exception to this
behavior and Naofumi blows it off. Spear challenges him to a duel
with Raphtalia’s freedom at stake, and Naofumi points out that,
already without honor, he’s got nothing to gain by accepting and
nothing to lose just giving that idea the finger. Unfortunately for
Naofumi, the King decides to order him to accept, and arrangements
are made. All things considered, Naofumi does frighteningly good –
the Spear Hero is more directly powerful, being higher level and
aligned with a weapon-like, um, weapon, but Naofumi has a broad set
of skills and the hard won knowledge of how to use them to fight
dirty. Victory seems near, but Myne interferes with the duel by
casting magic at Naofumi, throwing it to her Spear Hero.
Naofumi calls out the cheating, but
Myne uses wind magic, which is difficult to see especially when most
anyone set to judge the affair probably doesn’t want to see it.
Raphtalia struggles, but is hauled to have her ‘curse’ (the slave
brand) removed while Naofumi… is not having a good day.
This is probably my favorite single
sequence in the entire show, at least from the perspective of its
cinematography. We see Naofumi’s vision of the world around him dim,
leaving him in a dark place of his mind’s own makings, as he
considers what it is to lose again. He believes, absolutely and
without question, that Raphtalia will abandon him and leave him back
at rock bottom. He let himself hope, and can’t handle his hopes
being dashed again through a series of injustices and for essentially
no reason other than petty spite.
In the pit of his despair and rage, he
finds something. Glitchy words flash over his HUD – Do you hate
this world? Do you want power? Naofumi’s answer is wordless but
definite, and the mysterious force informs him that the Curse Series
has been unlocked.
In the real world, Naofumi is writhing
on the floor. It’s no big moment out there, he just looks like he’s
stewing over his defeat, even though we know within he’s caught in an
absolute tempest of nondirectional rage, hatred, and despair.
Raphtalia, meanwhile, is having her slave brand removed despite her
protests. The mark is erased with a little holy water, and Spear
Hero hopes the pretty girl will be grateful for her freedom, only to
receive a literal slap in the face from Raphtalia, and a damn good
(if short) talking down that, whether it bounces off his dense skull
or not, he needed to here regarding minding his own business. Then,
with no compulsion laid on her, she goes right to Naofumi.
In the real world, this probably looks
mostly like a quiet hug and the two of them leaving together, but
that’s not what the audience sees. We’re confronted with Naofumi’s
darkness within, and inability to see the truth even as Raphtalia
forms a presence that tries to comfort him. She has to really
struggle to reach him, and fight to break into the dark place where
he’s isolated himself. When she finally breaks through, the light
she brings with her (figurative but represented literally) is almost
divine relief. Naofumi is moved to tears, in shock and disbelief, as
he finds his trust unexpectedly rewarded and for the first time is
able to shake his myopia and see Raphtalia for who she is, particular
now, and what she’s become in his care.
He’s nowhere near healed (I mean,
there’s that enigmatic curse series thing for one), but being able to
really trust Raphtalia is a good start.
The next episode opens at the slave
trader, as Raphtalia insists on getting her brand redone, despite
Naofumi saying that she doesn’t have to. The Slave Trader comments
on how well Naofumi has taken care of her (in his own way, citing her
now-massive market value), but has something else interesting on
offer besides: an ‘egg lottery’ that would let Naofumi cheaply buy
the egg of some unidentified magical creature in a slightly obvious
nod to Gacha elements. One’s cheap enough that Naofumi bites,
willing to see what will hatch. From there they go on to the town
they protected, where they set up to stay at the inn and for a little
while at least run minor quests.
The egg hatches, revealing itself to be
some kind of bird creature. It grows up quickly (thanks to Naofumi’s
magic skills) into a chocobo sort of thing called a Filolal, and
Naofumi uncreatively names it Filo.
Soon after, the Spear Hero and party
roll up. They have the title to the town (the paperwork that makes
the Spear Hero a landed noble with jurisdiction) and an insane,
soul-crushing toll proposed by Myne on anyone entering or leaving.
Naofumi wants to mind his own business, but grumps in Spear’s general
direction about how absurd his demands are. It’s clear that the
Spear Hero had no idea what money in this world is worth, but before
he can finally use that cobweb-filled brain of his, Myne (also
enraged on receiving a message from the so-far absent queen) steps in
and makes a challenge of it, staking the rights to the village on a
race between the Spear Hero on his royal dragon (a sort of riding
velociraptor) and Naofumi on his Filolal. Naturally, the fact that
such dragons are generally held to be the better and faster mounts
isn’t enough, and she and her goons try to cheat Naofumi the whole
way with magically conjured potholes and the like. Naofumi, ready
for the inevitable treachery, uses his skills to avoid the hazards
and manages to win anyway, a result enforced when the Queen’s Envoy
points out that she noticed the real cheating.
After the race. Filo does her pokemon
evolution thing again, transforming from the typical ostrich-like
Filolal into a larger, chubbier form that does at least seem to be
much stronger and swifter. And, if that wasn’t enough, it turns out
that Filo now has another trick: the ability to shapeshift into a
humanoid form, currently a little blonde girl with wings. After a
fetch quest to get her a magic dress that will actually keep through
transformation (like the Gacha moment, an actually funny nod to how
things usually run in games), Naofumi begins traveling: in bird form,
Filo is more than strong enough to pull a cart (and enjoys the
exercise quite a lot), and there are more opportunities to be had
farther out, with Naofumi getting in the good graces of merchant
associations through his fair but mercenary attitude. Along the way
he ends up helping quite a lot of people with his medicine trade and
occasional adventuring. He even cleans up a mess left behind by the
Spear Hero, who gave a town a cursed seed in order to solve a famine
and didn’t stick around for it to turn into a giant plant monster.
His deeds along this way, which he sees (or wants to see) as utterly
transactional because he always gets paid somehow, earn him the
nickname and new identity as the “Savior of the Heavenly Fowl”.
Also in this section we get the idea
that the Harem trope is alive and well in Rising of the Shield Hero.
They make a delivery in a hot springs town and we get a lower-deck
section focused on Raphtalia and Filo, each jealous of the other
(more Raphtalia of Filo but still) and looking to make some sort of
overture for Naofumi while he’s resting, ultimately being stymied in
their efforts, bonding some, and getting Naofumi something from the
both of them.
And really, can you blame them? Filo
is literally called out as having imprinted, and there’s no hint of
reciprocation (and she’s childish enough she may not have a perfect
understanding of what she means), while Raphtalia’s relationship with
Naofumi has been the crux of a lot of development. It’s underplayed,
I suppose, and the girls at least don’t go typical Harem Comedy on
Naofumi (nobody’s beating him up for being dense – Raphtalia gives
a pout face at worst – and he’s not walking in on the girls
changing or falling onto their breasts) but the core interest is
still there.
The “Savior of the Heavenly Fowl”
reputation sees him called to another village where one of his hero
compatriots has left a mess: a dragon was killed by the Sword Hero in
the area, and its rotting corpse seems to be releasing a pestilent
curse that sickens the townsfolk. Naofumi and company go out to deal
with the body, but find they may have bitten off more than they can
chew when it reanimates as a zombie dragon on being disturbed. The
monster swallows Filo whole, which causes Naofumi to go berserk.
Literally and magically, this time.
That “Curse shield” from before activates, wreathing Naofumi in
dark flames and doing a number on the zombie dragon, while rendering
Naofumi blind with his own rage and despair. Raphtalia rushes in and
manages to pull Naofumi back to himself with choice words and a
cooldown hug, but gets burned in the process. As the dragon falls,
Filo bursts out of its gut (I guess there wasn’t much there to crush,
digest, or burn her) and it seems like all is well… at least until
it’s confirmed that Raphtalia’s burns from the Curse Shield can’t be
healed without potent holy water, and that the only source of that is
back at the miserable old capitol.
On the way back, the trio run into a
random young woman, named Melty, who slipped her escorts to hang out
with some Filolals and is now quite lost. She and Filo hit it off,
practically forcing Naofumi to accept escorting her to the capitol,
which is at least where they wanted to go in the first place.
Mercifully, we’re spared the horrors of video game escort quests, and
they drop her off without issue.
Before Naofumi can really get anywhere,
though, he’s once again intercepted by the Spear Hero, who goes over
the moon for Filo (not realizing she’s the ‘ugly bird’ Naofumi had
before and is in fact insulting his ‘angel’ to her face) and
challenges Naofumi to a duel in the middle of the town square.
Naofumi protests the collateral damage, but Myne sanctions it… only
to get shut down by the arrival of Melty.
We learn a couple of things really
quickly in here: Myne is a princess of the kingdom (under her true
name, Malty), but despite being the younger sister, Melty (also
princess) is the heir presumptive, Myne having been passed over
because their mother sees right through her elder daughter’s bad
attitude. Filo takes bird form and makes the Spear Hero blast off
like Team Rocket (for neither the first nor the last time) and Melty
wants to talk with Naofumi about important business. Naofumi,
however, doesn’t want to listen, having been screwed over by her
sister and father far too many times to feel generous towards
royalty.
Also not on Naofumi’s friends list is
the Church. He does manage to get the Holy Water, but only after the
low level priests try to cheat him, and later, when it turns out
everybody’s level capped and he has to go back to have that cap
raised, they outright refuse him service in the end. And the
problems keep coming when Naofumi runs into the Bow and Sword heroes
and has an argument with them – they charge him with stealing their
quest complete rewards, and he points out that he’s been cleaning up
the messes they thoughtlessly left behind (the dragon for Sword,
starving peasants in the wake of a hero-led revolution from Bow)
Sword actually seems to listen a little, but they both still hate his
guts.
Things aren’t all bad: a group of
soldiers from the village Naofumi saved in the last Wave wants to
fight with him in the next one. He seems to blow them off, demanding
they raise a lot of money as a pledge for him to take them seriously,
but when they come back with the cash he instructs them to use it to
gear up. He also visits the slave trader again, getting advice on
what to do about the level cap issue. He offers that Naofumi could
go to a different nation, since each one has a Dragon Hourglass (the
thing the church here holds that counts down to the Waves and allows
level cap upgrades) and many would be much better disposed towards
Naofumi, seeing as the Shield Hero is a venerated figure for the
demihumans (who dominate in some other lands even while being
enslaved here) rather than a reviled one.
Yeah, it’s worth noting at this
juncture that the distaste for the Shield Hero isn’t just Naofumi’s
reputation and it isn’t just for being “Weak” like the other
Heroes related – it seems there’s some serious race and culture
divide that means the nation they were summoned to venerates the
Church of the Three Heroes – the Sword, Spear, and Bow. So a lot
of humans are predisposed to not care much for Naofumi.
The Wave arrives shortly. Naofumi and team defend helpless villagers again, but the Wave drags on for hours with the boss still up. With most of the lesser monsters cleared out, Naofumi leaves the continued defense to the NPC crew and rides off on Filo with Raphtalia to see what the hell is going on.
Naofumi finds the other three heroes
having a disagreement. Still treating the situation they’re in like
a video game, each is fixated on how that boss (a giant flying ghost
ship) would have been taken down in their world’s version of the
game, despite the fact that they all disagree and all seem to be
barking up the wrong tree. Naofumi takes the time to process the
scenario and with Raphtalia’s help exposes the true enemy, called the
Soul Eater. It’s too much for the others, but Naofumi busts out the
Curse Shield (having somewhat better control of it now, not that it
doesn’t try to overwhelm his mind) and manages to mangle the creature
with an overpowered new move.
There we go, folks! It took a while,
but the Isekai Cheat Power is now in full effect. True, Naofumi’s
Curse Shield is a little harder to use than many, seeing as it is
associated with horrible curses and often brutal backlash, but it
does still function like other “Cheat” abilities in the end,
letting him take out enemies that should be far above his weight
class. Recall, he’s stuck with the newbie level cap and had a slow
start. The other heroes should theoretically know better what
they’re doing and be drastically his better in terms of levels, yet
they get repeatedly bested like a pack of chumps throughout this
scenario, when Naofumi is left standing and fighting.
Speaking of which, after the Soul Eater
falls, a third party finishes it off – a kind of scary woman with
twin war fans who introduces herself as Glass, and an enemy of the
Four Heroes of this world. She says some cryptic stuff and, after
blowing away the others with her opening salvo, seems oddly
appreciative of Naofumi as ‘the only real hero here’.
I’ll be honest, even though she’s
clearly an antagonist, I kind of like Glass. She doesn’t have a lot
of time to make an impression here, just the last act of one episode
and the first act of the next, but she’s got a cool design, a solid
theme, a fairly refreshing attitude for a show where most of the
human antagonists have their disdain pushed to the maximum, and the
right kind of mystique to actually make you want to know more about
her, why she fights, and what she’s all about (rather than the kind
of ‘mystique’ that sorts out to ‘actually boring’ or ‘pointlessly
cryptic’.)
Though he can weather her attacks well,
Naofumi can’t land a hit on Glass, and the fight ultimately ends due
to the Wave’s remaining timer expiring. In the wake of that the King
summons Naofumi to explain how he could be so strong, but Naofumi
basically flips him off (despite Melty trying to get the two of them
to make up, in a way that reveals she clearly has no idea how bad
things were) and leaves the capitol, receiving on the way a warning
and a token from a mysterious lady (actually the Queen’s agent we saw
earlier) telling that the Church is planning some big move against
him. Melty chases after and catches up to Naofumi on the road,
trying to convince him to come back and make up with her father.
She doesn’t get far into her speech,
though, before one of her guards tries to kill her.
Naofumi fights the guards off, but a
little magical trickery means that the story that gets spread around
with convincing magic “video” evidence is that Naofumi butchered
the guards and kidnapped the crown princess, meaning his party is now
public enemies #1, #2, and #3. They even concoct a story that he has
a brainwashing power, which means that when Myne and the other three
heroes catch up with Naofumi, they don’t believe Melty’s own words on
the matter. The sword and bow heroes, though, are swayed over the
course of the encounter to at least doubt what’s going on, between
Naofumi’s own scrupulous fighting style and Myne’s flagrant disregard
for her little sister’s life. Naofumi manages to pass on the clue
about the church and escape with the help of more of the Queen’s
agents, who invite Naofumi to head to her to meet in safety. He
declines at first, still planning to make for a rival nation who
presumably wouldn’t extradite anyone involved, but intense border
security forces a change of plans.
On the way to her mother, Melty steers
them to an actual good guy noble, who manages a population of free
demi-humans and actually believes Melty and Naofumi. However, he has
a much less kind neighbor who comes calling with the brute squad,
arresting our friendly noble and ‘escorting’ Melty to his manor when
she gives herself up to protect Naofumi, Raphtalia, and Filo who are
still hiding. Raphtalia in particular seems very disturbed by this
new arrival, and when they chase him down to rescue Melty and their
noble friend (the latter of which the jerk noble is torturing for
fun), it turns out that there’s a good reason: the cruel lord was
Raphtalia’s former master.
Raphtalia rebukes him, and has the
chance to strike him down as he begs for mercy.
Now, in this sequence we get a couple
things of note. Throughout the show so far, Raphtalia has saved
Naofumi from the darkness within. However, in this arc, it’s
Naofumi’s turn to give some care and emotional support back to
Raphtalia. While hiding from the brute squad, Naofumi keeps
Raphtalia calm, and here when she’s considering whether or not to
kill her abusive one-time master, Naofumi reminds her how she’s
grown. He doesn’t tell her to not do it, as that kind of naive
kindness isn’t really in his own character any more, but he does give
Raphtalia the perspective to choose with a cool head what it is that
she wants to do.
We also get an extended flashback to
Raphtalia’s past, how she and her best friend were rounded up and
purchased by the lord, how he beat and tortured them for fun while
keeping them deprived in dark cells, and how they fell ill leading to
Raphtalia being sold off. It’s a lot of sequence, and gives us
grounding for Raphtalia and where she really came from that we didn’t
get in the early episodes. Her treatment, and that of her friend
alongside her, is viscerally brutal. It’s also got some good tragic
irony – in her last days, Raphtalia’s friend pinned her hopes on
dreaming of the Shield Hero (again, a positive religious icon in
Demi-human populations), hoping to one day be saved, travel in his
party, and perhaps even fall in love. You know, like Raphtalia
pretty much did thereafter, even if Naofumi probably isn’t everything
her friend would have dreamed the Shield Hero to be.
It’s also really powerful when (after
resolving the issue with the lord – Raphtalia doesn’t kill him, but
then he decides to attack her out of a sense of wounded pride, which
ends with him going out a second-story window) Raphtalia returns to
the dark and sealed slave pens. She frees one of her other old
friends (who takes a moment to recognize her, seeing how she’s grown)
and plenty of others… before discovering the remains of her best
friend, who succumbed to illness and was apparently just left to rot
in the cell she and Raphtalia had shared. The discovery reopens a
lot of emotional wounds, even though Raphtalia must have suspected
what she’d find, and we get the third Naofumi-Raphtalia note in this
sequence where captain grumpy promises Raphtalia that her departure
had meaning, admitting that she saved him from falling to darkness,
not just magically via the Curse Shield, but as a person.
This whole sequence also brings me to
something I wanted to address… tell me again that this show doesn’t
acknowledge how horrific slavery can be, that it’s sugar-coating
Raphtalia’s existence and experience. This part is absolutely
gruesome, and shows what’s going on when there’s an actual native
with actual investment in the system is involved. At no point is it
ever implied that Raphtalia’s former master was acting in any way not
in accordance with the principles of his world and nation. In fact,
he’s shown to be particularly pious, suggesting that he’s part of
core culture. And what he does, and I mean pretty much everything he
does, is stomach-turning and horrifying. As it should be, given the
material. No excuses are made here. If you’re still uncomfortable
with Naofumi’s actions or how friendly and helpful the slave trader
is, that’s fine, but it’s worth taking notice of a fact that the show
tells a broader picture than it did in the first couple of episodes.
In a sense, this is why I do these
long, involved, full-spoiler reviews. It’s possible for an episode
or even a moment to kill a show, but it’s rare, and even if it does
happen that way any show deserves the time and effort to view it in
full and really digest it before passing judgment. Sometimes things
are exactly what they appear to be, other times you discover more or
at least gain a better perspective on why things are they way they
are. It’s not, however, really possible to do literary analysis in
good conscience on scraps. But that’s how it is done, in a rush to
get a hot take out there into the wider world, to be the voice that
really matters.
And I don’t expect the same diligence
from a normal viewer. It may not be fair to judge a book by its
cover, but if you’re judging a book by its first couple of chapters
(or a show by its first couple episodes) and you find you want to put
it down, go ahead and put it down. You shouldn’t invest your time in
entertainment that doesn’t entertain you. But as a critic I feel the
need to do better, and I hope that my reviews, shorter and more
easily digested than an entire series, if only by a small margin, can
provide perspective for when you might want to stick with something
that starts weak or drop something promising.
Back to the continued trials of the
Shield Hero, after the slave pens are liberated and the friendly lord
prepares to go home with more people than he arrived with, it turns
out that the cruel lord of the local area wasn’t quite dead after
falling out that window. Bleeding and broken, he crawls to a statue
that marks where a terrible monster was sealed away by a former team
of the Four Heroes, who couldn’t best it. He invokes his church
pendant and breaks the seal, unleashing the titanic T-Rex-like dragon
on the world. It squishes him first but… yeah, still probably
should have killed the guy when you all had the chance. None of the
characters seem able to hurt it, but Melty figures out it’s focused
on Filo, and together with Naofumi and Raphtalia, lures the beast out
of town and away from where it could hurt people, preparing to fight
it at a lake in the nearby woods.
They’re interrupted by a mysterious
presence warning Naofumi to not use the Curse Shield, and then the
arrival of the being that sent that message – a kaiju-sized version
of Filo, the Filolal Queen Fitoria. She beats the dino-dragon pretty
easily, but then has much to say to our main cast.
And, I’ll be honest and come right out
and say it, I don’t much care for Fitoria or her sequence that
follows.
Essentially, Fitoria serves as an
exposition dump and motivator. She reveals that she is the way she
is because, like Filo (who is special by the same token) she was
raised by one of the Heroes in ages past. She explains that the
Curse Series is corroding Naofumi’s soul when he uses it, and gives
him an item that should hold back or halt the corruption. She gives
us some cryptic talk about the Waves, and that there will be a choice
somewhen between saving the world and saving the people, and that the
latter is drastically harder, a route many have embarked on but none
have seen to completion.
And, most critically, she says that the
four heroes will need to work together in order to resist the Waves,
and because of that if Naofumi can’t mend bridges and drag his
comrades forward, she’ll just kill all of them so a new set can be
summoned. Even in character this is treated as… a little crazy.
Fitoria is ancient but she’s also forgotten a lot, and comes off
almost like a broken robot, following her purpose even if she’s lost
track of what any of that actually means for people. It could be
interesting, but we spend two episodes with her pretty much blaming
Naofumi for the fact that the other heroes hate his guts because he
hasn’t attempted to reconcile over the pretty huge hurdle of “They
think he’s a would-be rapist at least”. They didn’t take his word
for it before, why would they have done so later?
In some ways, she’s kind of an opposite
of Glass – technically a friend, but so overzealous,
uncompromising, and in some ways unpleasant that it’s hard to like
her.
In any case, Fitoria deposits Naofumi
near one of the other heroes, as she senses it, declining to do
something really useful towards her main goal like mediate the
discussion to come, and sends him on his way. Meanwhile, the Sword
and Bow heroes investigate that lead Naofumi gave them, which leads
to them discovering something and then being attacked by a mysterious
force that kind of resembles a nuke. Well, that’s interesting,
especially since any heroes dying was also a fail condition according
to Fitoria as the waves would become stronger with fewer heroes
active and you can’t resummon one until they’re all down.
In any case, by process of elimination
that means the hero Naofumi is being railroaded into an encounter
with is, of course, the blockhead with the Spear who is disinclined
to let him get a word in edgewise, much less heed any he does happen
to say. He blames Naofumi for killing Sword and Bow as well, and
Myne reports the church provided evidence implicating him, leading to
a party-to-party fight that ends with Spear subdued. Before they can
start to pull any of that apart, though, Filo senses something, and
instructs Naofumi to put every possible defense between them and the
sky. It turns out it’s all needed, because a massive attack,
presumably the same one that hit Sword and Bow on their
investigation, falls and leaves Naofumi, his party, and their
defeated rivals at the bottom of a quite impressive crater.
After that, the true culprit reveals
himself as none other than the Pope, wielding a magic weapon said to
combine the powers of all four Cardinal Weapons and powered by the
legion of faithful he has with him. The Sword and Bow heroes, not
actually dead, arrive shortly after, revealing they were saved by the
queen’s agents and that she’s bringing an army to deal with the Pope
and his goons in short order.
The Pope goes through his motivation
and reasoning, revealing that his goal was to remove the “Heroes”
that he found quite disappointing given the trouble they caused and
the sins they gave into, along with the monarchy standing between him
and creating a ‘pure and holy’ theocracy. This especially bothers
Myne, since she’d been in on a fraction of the scheme and thought
she’d be put on the throne with the church’s help removing Melty. It
may be difficult, bordering on impossible, to feel sorry for her
shock that the shoe’s on the other foot, but the fact of the matter
is the Pope’s still a problem, and moreso because he seals himself
and the heroes and their parties into a magical barrier to fight it
out without interference.
The heroes team up to take him on, but
before they do Naofumi gets a good moment pointing out that he’s kind
of right about their behavior, calling out the Bow Hero’s ego, the
Sword Hero’s carelessness, and the Spear Hero’s… well, all of that
put together and then some. The fight is well choreographed, with
lots of opportunities for big swings in tempo, which is good because
it does go on for quite a while. Ultimately, the Pope and his fake
ultimate weapon are destroyed by Naofumi pulling out a new Curse
Series power that nearly kills him in order to conjure a giant metal
skeleton snake from the ground that swallows the Pope up and shatters
his weapon in its jaws. I’ve got to admit, that’s pretty metal. The
barrier falls and the queen arrives, arresting the Pope’s remaining
followers and promising to save Naofumi.
After that, we get possibly the most
satisfying episode in the entire show. The Queen, aware of what’s
been going on, puts her husband and elder daughter on trial for their
crimes. I feel a little bad for the king, since he’s given a
sympathetic if poorly explored motivation and is clearly horrified by
anything darker than “Disgrace the Shield Hero”, particularly
when the charges of conspiring to assassinate Melty come up against
Myne, but as for Myne herself… watching them use a slave crest as
lie detector magic (because it zaps her with agony when she lies) and
force her to confess all the horrible things she’s done in front of
an increasingly horrified (or baffled, in the case of the Spear Hero.
He’s kinda slow) crowd is pure schadenfreude. It shouldn’t feel
good to see her essentially tortured in a public display, but when
she’s quite literally doing it to herself with her continued and
seemingly compulsive attempts to lie about how much of a monster
she’s been, it’s hard to not smile. Again, schadenfreude.
The schadenfreude stops when the
sentence is announced – Myne and the king are set to be executed.
Naofumi watches, and it seems the schadenfreude isn’t quite doing it
for him either as the guillotines are prepared. Despite everything
he’s suffered, he’s still too softhearted to ignore Myne pathetically
begging for her life, and steps in before the blades fall to suggest
something else.
He’s going to make her regret it,
though. Despite interceding out of what’s clearly a discomfort with
the idea of executing those two, he plays up his alternative as the
greater cruelty, forcing them to live with their disgraces. And as a
follow up, he even has their names forcibly changed. Legally and
functionally, the former king will ever after be known as “Trash”
and Myne either “Bitch” or “Slut” (since she had her real
name and her adventurer pseudonym, both of which are replaced). The
queen breaths a sigh of relief, having intended to offer up her own
life as an alternative if she was really going to be forced to
execute her beloved husband and wayward elder daughter. Justice
served, Naofumi and his party head onward, ready to face the world
with their names cleared and heads held a little higher.
So, that was Rising of the Shield Hero
and… wait, we’re still going? There’s more?
Four episodes more, to be precise,
representing another entire arc after the fall of the Pope and
justice for Naofumi. It’s a weird choice; the battle with the Pope
seems about as ‘final battle’ as it possibly could be, and the trial
kind of ties up most of Naofumi’s major arcs, so it feels kind of
like launching into a new adventure is… mostly unnecessary. All
the same, I think as weird as it feels in the moment, it does
actually help a lot with what we actually get.
At the start, the Four Heroes actually
sit down and talk. It doesn’t go well, exactly, but it does teach us
something very interesting: each of the Heroes shares his own game
system tips with Naofumi, and the council breaks down when they start
arguing about the fact that the way one hero proposes isn’t the one
another knows. However, none of them are the system Naofumi has been
using, and when he later tests what he’s been told, he finds that
everything works – every upgrade scheme and every side effect (like
rapid travel) that the others were complaining about, suggesting that
if they actually shared their techniques rather than letting their
egos crash into each other, they could be radically stronger.
Naofumi tries to share this a couple
times, but gets stymied along the way. They’re bound, you see, for a
special archipelago where they can quickly gain insane amounts of
experience for little effort, and the other heroes are, on the way
there, stricken with miserable seasickness, and once there are more
concerned with their leveling efforts. A stranger Naofumi meets,
named L’Arc, and said stranger’s shy partner, are a little more
tolerable to hang out with, and it seems that Naofumi’s even made a
friend. However, in some downtime, they discover a Dragon Hourglass
hidden under the water, and its sands are running out, suggesting
that a Wave will soon strike here. The Kingdom musters its navy to
fight, and it seems like those upgrades are going to be put to the
test. The Sword, Spear, and Bow heroes are mostly useless against
the giant sea monster, though one of Bow’s retainers actually does
some support-level heroics. This leaves Naofumi and his friends
against the beast, but when it falls. L’Arc and his friend turn on
Naofumi.
As it turns out, L’Arc and his friend
are allies of Glass, who is a full Hero of her own world. They don’t
quite explain themselves, even when Glass herself arrives, but
between everything the lot of them have said and done you get the
sense that they believe that the only way to save their own world is
to have the one to which Naofumi has been summoned fall to the Waves.
This also, I believe, gives some insight into how there might be (as
Fitoria said) a difference between saving the world and saving the
people, suggesting that it would be possible but insanely hard to
ultimately preserve both.
Naofumi isn’t very interested in that
right now, though. His head is in the fight and he’s dedicated to
trying to win, doing a fair job against L’Arc and then facing down
Glass for a rematch. She’s still extremely powerful, but is
impressed with how far Naofumi has come, and on top of that Naofumi
discovers that a mana-draining attack he gained from the defeated
Soul Eater the previous time is super-effective against her, putting
Glass on the back foot. He hesitates to kill her, though, and the
Bow Hero’s little henchwoman actually manages to render Glass unable
to fight (getting her drunk from the fumes of some weapons-grade
alcohol, to which Naofumi is immune), which forces L’Arc to grab her
and scram.
In the aftermath of the battle,
Naofumi ends up recruiting that random cute bookish girl from the Bow
Hero’s party who helped out in the battle, mostly because (as she
quickly explained) the other party members, jealous of her success,
framed her for destroying some of the Bow Hero’s gear and got her
kicked out, which had her quite depressed. However, there’s not
really any time to do much with her, she’s just a clear plant for the
upcoming seasons.
We also spend a few minutes getting
ready for everyone’s continued adventure. Naofumi names his reward
for his heroics in the sea battle, being named lord of the lands on
which Raphtalia’s village once stood. We see him establishing a base
of operations there, inviting a lot of the friendly merchants from
the castle, along with various other civilians with which he’d built
a good rapport. He also initiates the process of finding and buying
out the contracts of the other former citizens who are scattered in
bondage, bringing them home to be a community in peace once again.
Taking up the lordship also represents
a shift in a minor character arc: even through the trial, Naofumi
wanted to prepare Raphtalia for the day when he ultimately leaves the
world that treated him so badly, so she could stand on her own
without him – a fact that quite disturbed Raphtalia, who didn’t
want to think about Naofumi leaving her behind. Now, it seems more
like he’s making plans to remain in the world and wrest his own place
out of it, much to Raphtalia’s joy.
In other news, the Sword Hero has
gained a chip on his shoulder, training like a maniac to catch up to
Naofumi. The Bow Hero, disregarding events, resolves to keep acting
like a cut-rate super-hero. And the Spear Hero is still a
well-meaning idiot while Bitch, with him, is still… well… a
bitch. The Waves are coming back, and more adventure awaits. And
with two more seasons of Rising of the Shield Hero announced, we’ll
actually get it.
The Rising of the Shield Hero is a
great show. It’s a rarity in that it breathes life back into a host
of tired tropes that together make an extremely tired genre, not by
revolutionizing anything but by making you remember why they worked
in the first place through smart writing, excellent direction, and
above-standard characters.
So what if it’s a Video-Game Universe
Isekai? The show actually leverages that with the explicit summoning
of the Heroes and the way the partial knowledge of the Bow, Sword,
and Spear makes them more dangerous to themselves and their allies
than if they were fully ignorant.
So what if the hero has his Cheat
ability that can defeat most encounters? There was actually an
effort to keep it balanced from both ends – it’s problematic enough
that there’s real incentive to not just disrespect everything, and
Naofumi faces plenty of challenges that can’t just be punched out
with overwhelming Curse Series power.
So what if we’ve got a little bit of a
Harem? Raphtalia, Filo, and (if you count her) Melty are developed
characters in their own right. They’re a good cast first and a Harem
a distant second (a trait shared by other excellent shows such as
Steins;Gate).
Further, even though this show goes
very much for the dark and edgy end of its material, it never feels
like it strays too far down that road, into pointless darkness for
the sake of darkness. There’s always enough hope and redemption,
tiny though it may be at first, to keep the show watchable.
And, lastly, despite the controversies
that attend the show, it really does handle the troubling elements
well, so that I don’t think it deserves the finger-wagging it got.
All in all, I have to give The Rising
of the Shield Hero an A. I recommend it highly, and would look
forward to the additional seasons on the horizon. With 22 volumes of
source material there’s a lot to get through, and it’s just a matter
of seeing how it all shapes up from here.