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| Overall | Art | Animation | Character Design | Music | Series Story | Episode Story | Reviewer | |
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| Unevaluated |
 Stretch
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[series:4270#628] | ||||||
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(Two-and-a-half episodes watched): I had gotten the impression (in part from warnings at the beginning of episode one), that this show might be little more than animated pornography and therefore entered with a good deal of trepidation. Thankfully, while there is some (like the maids that serve Hero Keyarga being under the impression that it is their duty to sleep with him whenever he pleases), it didn't seem to be nearly as explicit or common as I had feared. This show seemed to be mostly plot with some ecchi, rather than vice-versa. The premise of this series reminded me of The Rising of The Shield Hero, and I even thought they might have the same original author, but apparently they don't. The impression I got from episode one was that this seemed fairly original and intriguing. Keyarga is semi-evil, being out for revenge, but it's hard to blame him and his opponents are quite evil, so this looked like fun. He did say that he intended to 'heal this corrupt world' so maybe he intends to do some good. He has invented something he calls 'predatory healing' which turns healing into a weapon, and I'm curious how this will work. He has taken precautions to prevent the same (bad) things happening to him this time around as happened last time. He knows that while they pretend to respect him, people like Princess Flare/Freya only intend to exploit him, and he plays along for now. All the details about how he developed his abilities and reset the clock were kind of confusing, but I get the gist. So, after one episode I was optimistic. Must download more episodes! Episode two, however, made me feel that my suspicions going into episode one hadn't been all that wrong after all. Keyarga's revenge against Flare was so sadistic that it almost made me feel sorry for her even though she could be described as a sadist herself. One thing it definitely did was snuff out any hope I might have had that he is ultimately an understandable person who is only administering an appropriate amount of punishment to bad people. It looks like there won't be any good guys in this show, and instead it will try to appeal to our most base urges--the wish that we could kill any man we don't like and screw any woman that we do (or even the ones we hate, as a means of humiliation). There's no way that this show would have run on network TV here in the US, even in its 'censured' form. Another problem is that it was hard to suspend disbelief: why didn't Flare's screaming draw any attention? And Keyarga simply slipped away amid the chaos he created? He seems to have so many skills and abilities that he is virtually invulnerable. This is all a shame, because it wouldn't have been all that hard to turn this show around and make it genuinely intriguing. A little more cleverness and a little less brutality would have done the trick; just make it possible to argue that the bad guys are being taught a lesson (or that Keyarga is learning one himself) rather than just being snuffed out. For episode three I watched the uncensored version for the first time, and got a rude awakening. It turns out that my original impression of this show as primarily porn had been quite correct. We see all sorts of sado-masochistic-erotic material that was ugly and disturbing--like the flashback to Flare once pouring the drug Keyarga was addicted to upon her crotch so that he would lick it clean. Curiously, I didn't feel 'dirty' after watching this--these stunts were so outlandish that they sometimes made me laugh. But when Keyarga underwent three brutal beatings by different characters in a row I got the message that this is definitely not the sort of show I want to watch. The formula seems to be that others do unspeakably cruel and demeaning things to Keyarga, which justifies him returning the favor, which he does. And that's it--no morality, no clever scheming, just the sex and violence. What I will be doing is making a careful search of my computer for any trace of this show and deleting them all. Last updated Friday, March 12 2021. Created Sunday, March 07 2021. | ||||||||
