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EP. REVIEW: Cautious Hero: The Hero Is Overpowered but Overly Cautious


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Gina Szanboti



Joined: 03 Aug 2008
Posts: 11306
PostPosted: Thu Dec 19, 2019 8:17 pm Reply with quote
Christopher wrote:
Rosalie's rejection of him in the aftermath is met with a few more running-gag smacks from Seiya and an argument that he deserves comfort and understanding from his family in his last moments.

No, that was not for him but for Rosalie. Seiya didn't want her to have to live with hating her father and regretting that she didn't speak to him before it was too late. The compassion was for her, not him. Had Seiya not done what he did, her last memories of her father would be him telling her he was willing to kill her if she got in his way, instead of a pat on the head from the remnants of the man she knew growing up.

As for the baby thing, I don't think the explanation was a metaphor. He was so over-awed and over-powered that he literally became a baby. That's how his troops found him. Demon Lord magic seems a good enough reason for this series. I'm not sure why you want every single thing explained when the gaps are so easy to fill in.
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Nojay



Joined: 20 Jan 2016
Posts: 112
PostPosted: Fri Dec 20, 2019 9:24 am Reply with quote
The last shot in episode 10 is Seiya by himself with none of the others with him. I think this is the first time in the entire series we've seen him portrayed as alone. Any other time he's been on-screen Ristarte has been there too.

My guess is that he's ditched the excess baggage (literally, in Mushroom's case) and is heading off to face the Demon Lord by himself.
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thedarkemissary



Joined: 07 Apr 2010
Posts: 88
PostPosted: Sat Dec 21, 2019 5:15 am Reply with quote
So, is noone gonna bring up that in 10 episodes, this is like the 5th time they've done - PLOT TWIST!! the good guy is a bad guy. You've had the priest dude, the dragon queen, the villager man, now this warmaster guy (I'm sure I'm forgetting one or more). At this point Seiya's paranoid "possibility ally might be a bad guy" joke isn't even a joke anymore.
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NeverConvex
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Joined: 08 Jun 2013
Posts: 2267
PostPosted: Wed Dec 25, 2019 1:51 pm Reply with quote
A few minor quibbles with rushed plotting aside, I found this most recent episode surprisingly moving. This weird little show's really managed to get under my skin somehow.
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Yuvelir



Joined: 06 Jan 2015
Posts: 1529
PostPosted: Wed Dec 25, 2019 6:11 pm Reply with quote
The final hardcoreness of that final frog maou is very representative of this series' mood swings. Hell, that claim about what he was going to do to the princess might as well have been a quote from game of thrones or something.
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NeverConvex
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Joined: 08 Jun 2013
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PostPosted: Wed Dec 25, 2019 7:01 pm Reply with quote
Oh, yeah! I had completely forgotten about that when I wrote my reply above -- wow, that scene, er, escalated rather quickly.
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#844391



Joined: 09 Sep 2015
Posts: 517
PostPosted: Fri Dec 27, 2019 12:25 am Reply with quote
Ep 11,

Damn, this episode was heavy, and it actually shed light on a lot of little things. It was pretty obvious Aria knew Seiya from before but there were a bunch of other things that stood out.

Seiya finishing off already dead enemies makes a ton of sense now, as the demon lord he thought he killed came back from the dead and killed everyone he cared about. He never wants to make that mistake again.

Seiya being so hard on Rosalie and slapping her around and telling her "You killed your men with your recklessness" is because he sees his old self in her and knows first hand what the consequences are like.

And finally, Ristarte is litterally Restart, as in restarting her life as a goddess, or possibly giving her another chance with Seiya.

I've got a ton more respect for this series after seeing some of these revelations, there's probably some more I missed.
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Gina Szanboti



Joined: 03 Aug 2008
Posts: 11306
PostPosted: Fri Dec 27, 2019 3:25 pm Reply with quote
Christopher Farris wrote:
So in spite of all that planning and payoff, the show comes off even more than before like it's had no idea what it actually wants to do.

I think it's always known what it wanted to do, and it did it. It's just that what it wanted to do wasn't what you wanted it to do.

It's not a perfect series by a long shot, but a lot of your complaints have been addressed later on, and yet you still gripe that it didn't address them exactly when you wanted it to, in exactly the ways you wanted it to. I guess I just don't think the alternate story layouts you keep proposing would have been either feasible or had the same impact if done your way.

I really liked this episode, though I admit I found a couple of things a little confusing, but I'm pretty sure that's my fault and not the series'.
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Chrono1000





PostPosted: Fri Dec 27, 2019 5:03 pm Reply with quote
Christopher Farris wrote:
Cautious Hero has gone from irreverent genre commentary to a diatribe by the author on their pet peeves about how illogical the accepted style of heroism is. People need to be cold, pragmatic engines of careful analysis and preparation, or be viciously punished until they are, it seems.

What happened with the past version of Seiya looks to me like a case of hubris which was a common cause of death for Greek heroes. Seiya had a talent for being a hero but that made him arrogant which causes him to make a mistake that leads to tragedy. The tragedy in episode 11 was horrific but I thought it was one of the most emotionally powerful scenes in the show.
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Cryten



Joined: 19 Jan 2019
Posts: 978
PostPosted: Fri Dec 27, 2019 6:34 pm Reply with quote
I think the reviewer is right in that the info dump tragedy comes off a bit as trite. Going all super grim while listening to a not ristarte being so faithful to the reckless hero just triggered a bunch of ambivalent distrust in the series. It really didn't need more then arias back story into a tragic death. But the story enters uncanny valley territory of writing, IE it takes me right out of the show and makes me think about how the show is written instead. Setting it up was done right but the sheer amount of tragedy leaves no time to process it.
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Fred Lougee



Joined: 01 Oct 2018
Posts: 127
PostPosted: Thu Jan 02, 2020 2:07 pm Reply with quote
Does anyone here do old school RPG like D&D? Reason I ask is that I used to quite a bit, not so much lately because other things, but I have know people who played a lot like Sieya. And it wasn't that they were overly cautious by nature. It's that they had a sort of "game PTSD" from being in campaigns run by DMs who thought they were being clever but were actually just sadistic jerks.
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DRosencraft



Joined: 27 Apr 2010
Posts: 665
PostPosted: Thu Jan 02, 2020 5:30 pm Reply with quote
Fred Lougee wrote:
Does anyone here do old school RPG like D&D? Reason I ask is that I used to quite a bit, not so much lately because other things, but I have know people who played a lot like Sieya. And it wasn't that they were overly cautious by nature. It's that they had a sort of "game PTSD" from being in campaigns run by DMs who thought they were being clever but were actually just sadistic jerks.


It's interesting you mention that, because that is what it feels like happened with the writing here, from a sort of reverse perspective. It feels like the writer(s) thought this was a good and reasonable story (the attempt at the deconstruction of isekai heroes), but as they got near the end realized that few thought the joke was funny, tried to course correct at the last second (grim-dark info dump), and made things even worse, before trying to pull it back again at the last second with the "happy" ending.

Or maybe the actual message all along was that the isekai hero emerges from a specific place in the zeitgeist and that in of itself makes an alternative form improbable, if not all but impossible. The return to the familiar model despite the initial appearance that the story would deviate from the norm may have been the author's belief that there was never a real alternative short of the hero losing.
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