This week was a fluffy episode with Filo and Raphtalia butting heads, competing against each other for Naofumi’s attention and sneaking off on their own little adventure in hopes to find some goods to please him. Of course things didn’t quite go according to plan, but it ended up turning out better for the two of them since with their combined efforts of having defeated the Silver Razorback, they were able to sell it for a high price, and use that money to get Naofumi a thoughtful gift, a tool for crafting.
But before that, as suspected, the missing seed from last week’s episode was responsible for overriding the village. The residents’ were foolish enough to have accepted the seed that was picked up by the Spear Hero, despite having known about the lore of it’s wrath of overtaking the town for some time. Naofumi was able to defeat it with the medicine he had been able to brew, and was able to obtain a useful skill to help switch up its properties so that he could be used safely to grow food for the village as initially intended. However Naofumi was smart enough to not carelessly give it away for free. Sure it could have been a charitable move, but he knew that he if he were to do that, the village will never stop asking him for favours and end up depending on him entirely. He knew that from the moment he stepped in to deliver the medicine, and for that reason, he wanted to get out of there as quickly as he could, but the elder was a step faster in begging him to help deal with the vines monsters that have taken over their village. So since the villagers really didn’t have anything to offer, they ended up doing a trade of taking the new fruits that have been harvested in exchange for the formerly cursed seeds.
And I have to say, I am loving Naofumi’s side job as a traveling merchant. He has met some helpful people, such as the one who has mentored him and given him pointers and jobs to various places that require his assistance. Better yet, it makes me happy to see Naofumi had found something in this world that he actually enjoys doing. Crafting and gathering is something is has become a lot of fun with ever since he had gotten the opportunity to learn it, and his shield’s abilities enables him a lot of skills to work off of that.
Not much to talk about this time round, but it looks like their next quest will be a troublesome one. They will be traveling east to look to craft and sell medicine that can potentially be used to addressed an epidemic. We have seen fallen adventurers, and a corpse of an enormous dragon. It’s hard to say right now whether or not that dragon is responsible for the epidemic itself, or is just another victim of it. Either way, I’m looking forward to seeing how things are going to play out as it is bound to be a dangerous job.
Most source readers like Naofumi’s calculative, no-free-lunch personality here; they find it more realistic and refreshing over the usual no-strings-attached charity of most shounen heroes. It breaks the cliche of the all-loving, all-forgiving hero which they find to get quite unrealistic and annoying in such situations.
The author themselves summed up Naofumi’s character as like a “(broken) mirror (shard). He responds to kindness with kindness,…evil with evil…he has some pointy edges, but in the end he’s a symphathetic character who cares for others”.
After digging around, i finally understand why i feel uncomfortable when reading Shield Hero. When i was reading the manga and light novel, i always feel creepy about how the main character mind work, his inner though and the punishment for the people who frame him. Then i find out that the author admits that he base all the antagonist on people he don’t like in real live and it all make sense now, Shield Hero basically a revenge fic. I also quite uncomfortable with his attitude of ” since you hit me, it now make it okay for me to do anything to get back at you”, especially regard the punishment for the Meldy character in the novel and the fact that that punishment exist in the first place.