Final Thoughts – Goblin Slayer

Honestly, I haven’t watched or had an inclination to watch any more of this.

I stopped after six episodes as that’s my usual standard for writing an Update, and after one of you guys told me that it was, in fact, just going to be a wish fulfillment bloodfest where the title character never has to face consequences for being a murderous psychopath, I instantly lost all interest in it, because we already have lots of those. The side characters are mildly interesting but nothing I haven’t seen before, and I’ve yet to hear a single positive opinion on how the whole thing turned out, so…yeah, dropped after six episodes. It’s still not the worst thing I’ve ever seen but I don’t have the time or motivation to go back and finish it.

5/10, if only for its looks.

Updated Impressions – Goblin Slayer

Definitely held up the way I was hoping for.

The tone of this show has gone back and forth between the Dark Souls vibe it was giving me for the first few episodes, and a dark take on something like DanMachi, but thus far I’m pretty hopeful for this series sticking the landing, and I’ll tell you what I’m basing that on.

Thus far, the characters have been explicitly stopped from framing Goblin Slayer himself as some kind of hero, and pretty much everyone that actually goes adventuring with him will understand by the end that he’s goddamn crazy. He doesn’t fight goblins because he’s altruistic, he does it because he’s a vengeful psychopath trying to rack up a body count. Luckily for society, his attitude pretty much only extends to goblins, but what I’m really looking for out of Goblin Slayer (which will get it an 8- or 9/10 if the rest of the show can hold up, for the record) is to get a proper follow-through on that idea. I want to see the man really acknowledged as the crazy murderer he is. If that doesn’t happen, it will sour my opinion on this one considerably.

You may have noticed that I won’t be giving this one a perfect score even if it does everything I want it to, and that’s simple – the director still tries way, way too hard to push the TNA every chance that he gets. While I get that some elements of this are from the source material, actually seeing them played out is just distracting, and we absolutely did not need any graphic rape or implied rape, particularly when the women’s (and it is always women, because every monster sees them as a sex object first) savaged body is framed for titillation. This is an element that gets on my nerves in any show at all, because I don’t understand the reason you’d want to put it into a broadcast show. Speaking pragmatically, there is already plenty of actually-explicit hentai out there to pander to rape fetishists, so I don’t really get why they would come to something that can’t show anything happening.

That’s currently dragging on me a lot, so for the moment, it’s getting a 7/10.

Premiere Impressions – Goblin Slayer

So going into this, the first thing to be aware of is that the first half of this premiere is brutal, yet more or less predictable garbage.

Our heroine teams up with a generic party of heroes that inevitably end up getting savagely killed (and raped, onscreen) by the goblins they adventure to fight. It’s obvious from the moment they set out that none of them are going to survive, and that makes it hard to really be upset when it happens, but luckily it also means that Goblin Slayer only wastes the bare minimum of development on them until the title character shows up.

So, based on that, Goblin Slayer can be described as a fantasy series in the modern vein of Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon?, where it’s essentially an MMO world, except it’s not actually an MMO and the universe just works like an RPG. However, Goblin Slayer’‘s world is less Final Fantasy, and more Dark Souls. It’s damn brutal and terrifying, and while civilization still exists, venturing outside of it is dangerous to the point of needing a license to do so.

The second half of the episode follows through on this, with the hero being a pragmatist who has analyzed the environment and takes all necessary precautions for fighting in a dark, narrow cave. He takes no prisoners and does what he has to do. This instantly sets him apart from most fantasy protagonists, shying far away from idealistic, wide-eyed Chosen One-types.

I’m actually eager to see where this is going, though. The latter half of the episode is very strong and unlike much that I’ve seen before, and aside from having a problem with the animation of Goblin Slayer himself (whenever he’s not in close-up, he’s rendered in CGI), this one is shaping up pretty nicely.