Spring 2022 First Impressions – I’m Quitting Heroing

Streaming: HIDIVE

Episodes: 12

Source: Light Novel

Episode Summary: Leo Demonheart was once hired to be humanity’s savior. Using his immense physical and magical ability, he and his comrades handily defeated Echidna, the Demon Queen. But rather than a hero’s welcome, upon his return Leo was met with apprehensiveness or, in some cases, downright hostility. The people were afraid of his seemingly demonic abilities and shunned him, leaving him without a place to call home.

With little to lose, Leo makes an unexpected pivot and approaches Echidna with a request for employment. She’s immediately hostile to the proposition, but her four generals are somewhat more open-minded. They agree to hire Leo on a trial basis, but he’ll have his work cut out for him; the demon forces are in shambles after having been both mismanaged and defeated by a hero. Can Leo whip them into shape and gain Echidna’s trust?

Impressions: The tale of the conflict between the hero and the demon lord is ubiquitous in fantasy anime, to the point where it’s almost gone beyond being a trope to become a baseline genre expectation. Oftentimes this conflict is pretty straightforward – we root for the hero as they gather up their forces and seek victory over unambiguous evil. But what if that “evil” wasn’t quite as unambiguous as expected?

This series introduces our antagonist as someone willing to attack, but not to kill. Someone with ethics that might actually be more robust than your typical anime bad guy. Her four generals are personable and in a certain light are somewhat endearing. Their actions don’t seem born from malice, but perhaps more from mismanagement coupled with their various personality issues. As the episode unfolds, you get a sense that the enemies are simply somewhat quirky people with different perspectives on how this society ought to be led. It’s honestly both a little bit amusing and even kind of charming.

Then we get to Leo, around whom this weirdness is orbiting. He’s not bad as far as anime fantasy protagonists go; for having been essentially abandoned by the people he worked, well, not very hard to save, he still manages to maintain a can-do attitude. And yet… there’s something about him that really rubs me the wrong way. Perhaps it’s his casual assumptions about his own abilities as compared to others (he claims to have gathered an adventuring party despite not really needing one due to his enormous strength and firepower) and the general lack of awareness that seems to stem from it (like a gifted kid who’s been told his whole life that he’s much smarter than those around him). He arrives to Echidna’s crumbling fortress ready to argue logically why she should hire him, while completely ignoring her obvious emotion at being confronted by the person who humiliated her.

I think many of us have been approached by people from our pasts who seem to have gone through life completely oblivious to the ways that they’ve hurt us. The way it manifests to me is being contacted out of the blue by random high school acquaintances wanting to shill for their most recent MLM scheme. While logically I know that whatever situation they’re in that brought them to that is probably shittier than mine, it still hurts to be treated like a potential piggy bank for people who couldn’t have been bothered to be kind to a nerdy kid in high school.

Leo is giving off that vibe here, and I think the only thing that could potentially rescue the show for me would be him developing some modicum of humility. That said, this premiere isn’t the most striking or compelling, so I’m not sure I could stick around to watch its meandering even with the promise of some character development.

Pros: I appreciate that Echidna is painted as someone with complex motives and morals. Her quest to take over the world seemed to have been hamstrung by her unwillingness to kill anyone in the process of utter domination. Because we see so little of her throughout this episode, this lends her an air of mystique that turns her into a much more intriguing character than the protagonist we see much more of.

Cons: The premise of this anime reads somewhat like a parody of many other fantasy series – in short, it’s meant to be a playful twist on the formula. Yet, in practice I found it mostly pretty dull. There are mild attempts at humor as the four generals recount their ill-fated previous encounters with Leo but there’s just something about the timing and the delivery of the dialog that just ends up feeling very rote.

Content Warnings: Comical violence. Underage character in love with the hero.

Would I Watch More? – If I were to describe this episode in a word – eh. It actually took me a couple of sittings to get through the entire thing, mostly because I couldn’t manage to focus on it for more than a few minutes at a time. Is this partly just a fluke of my own attention span? Absolutely. Does it bode well for me watching any more of the show? Sources say, probably not.