Fuzzy’s Impression:
As a huge fan of the Goblin Slayer manga, I’ve long awaited the release of its hyped anime adaptation. Who wouldn’t want to see crushed goblin heads in glorious, colored animation?
Goblin Slayer begins from the perspective of our innocent priestess Onna Shinkan, a rookie adventurer ready to enter the real world. She does what all adventurers of her world do, and that is join the Adventurer’s Guild. Like any Adventurer’s Guild we’ve seen from MMORPGs, there’s a ranking system for adventurers along with a bulletin board of missions to take. Our priestess is granted the rank of porcelain, the lowest of all adventurers. Sounds great, right? A new adventurer ready to take on the world.
Unfortunately, the world of Goblin Slayer has a level of darkness hidden beneath its fantasy surface. The terrors of Goblin Slayer reveal themselves quite quickly as our priestess joins her first adventurer’s party. It’s all happy smile and introductions, but it’s clear something is amiss as they discuss their mission to clear out some goblins. We’re introduced to a fighter, a boxer, and a mage; all classic fantasy classes we’ve seen a dozen times before. They’re given little development beyond their flames of youth, but what else do you really need for goblin fodder?
They embark on their journey and enter the depths of a goblin cave, ignoring the pleas of our priestess to go back and think of a plan. Everything goes downhere from this point as they’re ambushed by goblins from the rear, their mage is stabbed by a poisoned blade, their fighter is beaten to death, and their boxer is beaten by a hobgoblin. Yikes. I knew it was coming, but it’s still pretty traumatic to actually see it animated.
From the despair on our priestess’ face to the brutal silhouettes of goblins smashing their clubs down, the show is not ugly. It’s not particularly gorgeous of a show, but its art style is attractive when it needs to be. The color palette is also quite dark since goblin slaying usually occurs below ground, which makes the bright green of the surface world even more liberating.
As for music, the show’s theme for the Goblin Slayer himself is amazing. This intense, DOOM like soundtrack is perfect for our resident goblin murderer, and made his first appearance so much more epic than it should’ve been. The distant light of a torch in the cave, his glowing red eye snuggled perfectly in his suit of armor, and an aura that screams kick ass.
The ownage session that followed was extremely satisfying, as it always is when justice is served. Perhaps it’d be annoying if Goblin Slayer slew goblins because he was covered in plot armour, but his methodology screams of experience and careful planning. From the short swords for cave fighting to the coat of goblin blood to mask his scent, he’s clearly someone who’s had plenty of time to think about this.
Overall, I’m very satisfied with the first episode of Goblin Slayer. The most controversial aspect of the source material is the entire goblin reproduction cycle, which revolves around raping females of other species. It’s gross and some would say a bit much for establishing hate towards goblins, but I don’t think it’s that bad after this episode. It’s toned to the point where it’s quite disturbing, but not overly milked to the point that it’s getting old. We’ll see how they tackle it in the future episodes!
Chance of Watching: 100%
Chance of Blogging: 100%
Berry’s Impression
So I had been really excited to tackle this show. There was lots of hype surrounding Goblin Slayer when it had gotten its anime announced. It sounded cool, the PV made it seem exciting, and Goblin Slayer’s design was just really cool. So I was psyched to watch it.
I did and I’m gonna pass. I’ve seen really brutal and violent anime, and I don’t mind them. But what I do mind are rape scenes. The scenes this episode shocked me and I kind of just…sighed. This is a dark fantasy show so I had a feeling that I would see this type of stuff but not this bad. And from what I’ve seen people say, there are even more rape scenes later on that are worse than this so I simply just can’t watch the rest. It’s awful and makes me very uncomfortable so I just have to skip this.
Other than those scenes, the actual episode was fine. I was dreading for the characters from the beginning when the other group approached our cute little priestess main character, talking about slaying goblins when they’re the lowest ranked people. The receptionist girl didn’t even try to help them out, so what the fuck. My dread grew and grew as the group got more overconfident, with the dude with the sword accidentally hitting his blade against the cave. Clear sign that he has no idea what the hell he’s doing, so I knew things were going to turn bad. And it did. Very bad, very savage, very brutal. I was glad when Goblin Slayer appeared and started slaughtering those disgusting goblins. Once he appeared, I was a lot more calm but the goblins already did so much damage. I’m glad priestess girl made it out okay, albeit a little traumatized.
The animation was pretty good, but what stood out was the rock music that played when Goblin Slayer did cool shit. It was pretty awesome.
And that’s kind of it. I can’t handle rape scenes, I don’t know how anyone can. But this just isn’t for me. This is the exact same reason why I just can’t get into Berserk, as much as I want to. I look at the manga art and I’m just blown away with how amazing the art is. But graphic rape scenes? No thank you, I’ll pass. So I’m disappointed. I’d really love it if historical and dark fantasy shows in the future had less of that.
Possibility of watching: Nope
Possibility of blogging: No thanks
Insightful interview with Goblin Slayer’s author, Kagyu Kumo, courtesy of Youtuber The Anime Man.
Some interesting bits:
Kagyu’s writing style is influenced by older dark/classic fantasy novels like Lodoss Senki and Orphen, inspired by tabletop RPGs of the time . He hopes he can spark a revival of the classic genre he grew up with, against the current trend of lighthearted reincarnation/video game mechanics-type fantasy novels.
Kagyu firmly states the Slayer is not the MC of his world (ie. the world doesn’t revolve around his exploits alone); he’s one of many individual adventurers in the wider world, each with their own thoughts and stories. Hence his usage of a 3rd person perspective in the books to show a more world-centric view.
The Slayer was modeled on gritty US superheroes like Batman, Punisher and Kick-Ass. Kagyu likens him to a small-time hero operating in his local area, compared to other series where the MC has to Save the World from Cosmic Doom.
He tried coming up with actual names for the Slayer, but didn’t like any of them. So he just named him, and all other characters by job title.
His advice to wannabe LN authors is to keep on writing and finish what you start; keep doing it over and over and it’ll eventually lead to something.