Forum - View topicEP. REVIEW: Goblin Slayer [2018-10-14]
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Aki_Leaves
 Posts: 61 |
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You were really spot on. It really feels like the reviewer is being forced to report on an anime genre/style he doesn't personally like and is determined to review this poorly to the end. It really feels like he sees none of the redeeming qualities we do. |
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Kendra Kirai
Posts: 187 |
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Worst of it is that this is precisely the kind of calm before the storm, thoughtful episode that other shows would get praised for. The repeated patrol routine which slowly builds your anticipation because surely they wouldn't show the same thing multiple times for no reason, would they? The days of peace and rest, the festival, the fact the Demon King was beaten by Haruhi Suzumiya, with Slayers insistence that the goblins at least won't settle down now that the Maou is dead - again *subtly* pointing out that people celebrate the big, flashy victories but ignore the small everyday threats as beneath them - many of the adventurers are going to the capital to mop up the weakened demon lord armies, leaving the area less defended... It's setting up quite well that the coming Goblin raid is going to *suck*, which wasn't actually set up very well in the manga that I could see (I stopped so I could see the anime version first.) in the manga, Slayer simply finds the Goblin footprints and starts going into crisis mode. Here, it's all very carefully laid out before that revelation even comes. I've said it before, it's *perfectly okay* to not like the show, or not want to review it. But we know how reviewing works from the words of the reviewers themselves; they pick shows they want to do. This has backfired on them before, but from what I can tell, they generally were at least somewhat interested by the first episodes in the preview guides. This one wasn't. If he never wanted to review it, or never wanted to give it a fair chance, then he shouldn't have ever started reviewing it. |
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NeverConvex
 Subscriber Posts: 2293 |
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"subtle" doesn't really feel like the right word for Goblin Slayer literally announcing that the goblins won't settle down; that's maybe less in-our-faces than a bunch of shots of goblins gleefully raping and pillaging everything in sight, or murdering the Hero or something, but subtle it an't. I think it'd be more accurate to say the episode kept the continued goblin threat somewhat understated until the final shot, despite being perfectly explicit and clear that, no, this show's still totally about evil goblins and they're not at all go anywhere anytime soon.
But I do agree that this episode had a bit more going on for it than the reviewer acknowledged, and was among the better GS episodes to date. What the reviewer described as filler felt instead to me like a somewhat fumbling but at least halfway effective attempt at building a little more emotional substance into GS's character, illustrating how he and most of the folks around him have grown into actual friends, and slowly working us from peaceful, legitimately charming slice-of-life town antics towards recognizing the not-at-all-subdued-we-still-have-episodes-to-fill goblin threat to that peace. And I do think it did an OK job conveying that most adventurers and townsfolk have adopted a pretty lackadaisical, carefree attitude in the wake of the Hero's victory. Still, I think GS as a show continues to fall short in execution when it comes to humanizing GS himself. It was, for example, jarringly goofy to jump from him expressing a tender (way overly saccharine, really) sentiment about the forgotten taste of his sister's soup to his usual, impassive one-note routine. Him being a scarred, broken person is perfectly reasonable, but most of his dialogue (if it can even be called that) is written like he's not human at all, but some sort've humanoid furbie with a small finite number of pre-recorded lines about how bad goblins are. Or maybe a poorly written, goblin-themed chatbot. Between the melodramatic flashbacks and GS's usual over-the-top lack of dialogue, it feels like the author couldn't figure out how to write a character with legitimate emotional baggage, and thought that whip-lashing back and forth violently between super sentimental and super terse would be a good simulation of character writing. |
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epiphanis
Posts: 6 |
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Narratively, Goblin Slayer needs to occasionally pull back from the intensity and horror of goblin-slaying to make it's point. An important aspect of the story is that Goblin Slayer seems crazy to most of his colleagues. If we only saw things from GS's own perspective, everybody around him would seem like an ignorant ingrate. We need to see both ordinary life like Cow Girl's and the dwarven smith's, and more mainstream adventurers like Spearman and Witch, to understand just how out of synch GS is with their lives and why they don't get him -- and vice versa.
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Ashabel
 Posts: 350 |
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That's not quite true. In the novels, the Goblin Slayer's internal monologue makes it clear that he knows he's crazy. He outright admits at one point that he remembers being able to talk like a normal person when he was a kid, but something inside him is messed up to a degree where he can't do it anymore. A major weakness of the anime is that it still relies on gaslighting basically its entire cast in some awkward attempt to make Goblin Slayer the One True Hero Who Knows The Truth Of This World. In the novels, it's made very clear that other experienced adventurers do know very well how dangerous goblins are. The reason why they react to Goblin Slayer the way they do isn't because they think goblins are weak and fixating on them is stupid, it's because they don't understand why anyone would fixate so much on doing very dangerous quests with disproportionately low pay and almost no recognition. Goblins are numerous like vermin, they claim countless lives every year, and they just keep on coming regardless of how many of them are killed. In that sense, at least dying to a dragon amounts to going down in a blaze of glory. Dying to goblins just makes you a fraction of a statistic. So nobody wants to do it when it doesn't even pay enough to keep your party fed. But instead of delivering this very basic information, the anime still pretends that everyone in the series is stupid and ignorant of the true threat of goblins, and Goblin Slayer is the one true woke dude in the whole world. It's a very half-assed attempt at making the series more of a power fantasy that cheapens its world-building in the process, and weakens any further attempts at nuanced story-telling it tries to set up. Goblin Slaye animer basically makes alterations to the novels' base storytelling that end up cheapening its core narrative to a degree where its attempts at nuance and poignancy feel completely unearned. The result is that ten episodes in, the reviewer simply stopped buying whatever it tried to sell him. |
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ZeArNkN
Posts: 95 |
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Is anyone else watching the simuldub as it comes out? Episode 7 was really intense. Hayden Daviau has got quite a set of lungs. Her screaming was so guttural and terrified. She's got some real talent. And everyone else wasn't too bad either.
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GhostD
Posts: 999 |
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Well I guess it was worth the wait considering ep 11 delivered. Heres hoping White Fox delivers on the ending just as well.
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NeverConvex
Subscriber Posts: 2293 |
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Yeah, Ep 11 was legitimately a pretty decent return on the themes the show's built up so far. Still pretty far from perfect, but a satisfying ride and certainly the show's best episode to date.
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S0crates
 Posts: 227 Location: Banned - Noticed our poor ethics |
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Just got around to watch it. That last episode was great.
I hope they announce some sort of continuation once it's over. |
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pwnagemaster
Posts: 89 |
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There should be plenty of material. They will have covered LN volumes 1 and 2, and they pulled a little bit from 3 and 4. The 9th volume was just released a couple weeks ago. |
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GhostD
Posts: 999 |
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That ended as well as I hoped and the last bit where GS would return is definitely a good thing in my book.
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NeverConvex
Subscriber Posts: 2293 |
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The last two episodes feel super on-the-nose and somewhat clumsy to me, but I can't fault them for thematic content. GS grew in a natural-...ish... fashion, and it was rewarding-ish. Good job, Goblin Slayer!
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Kendra Kirai
Posts: 187 |
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Thematically, I think moving this mini-arc to the end of the season, and later on than in the manga and presumably the novels, works better.
In the manga it feels like two, three days after Priestess shows up, Slayer is ready to accept people, going on actual adventures rather than extermination missions, etc. By moving it to after he's actually met people and made, if not friends, then good acquaintances, it makes his growth into not being so single-mindedly obsessed much more reasonably paced. And we now know for sure that the adventurers of THIS city at least won't underestimate goblins so much, after fighting them in a horde and seeing just how sneaky, cunning, and even dangerous they can be, and not just to newbies. That's usually how it goes; people with no real experience with a thing assume it to be less dangerous, or easier to handle than it really is, because they've only had to deal with a taste of it. Cooking for yourself is much different from cooking in a restaurant. Taking out the trash is much different from being a garbage collector. Killing some ants is very different from being an exterminator. Chasing off a Goblin or two that was told to simply scout the place is much different from fighting off dozens who are actually attacking. People who haven't had to do any of that tend to assume that anybody who fails at it is just too weak, or unskilled, or lazy, or stupid, or any number of things. "They couldn't even handle a nest of goblins? Bah, they're better off dead." |
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Yune Amagiri
 Posts: 929 Location: France |
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Actually, this scene wasn't about the Priestess visualizing a lambda goblin but the recollection of the Goblin Lord himself, this is one of the multiple informations that were narratively said in the LN and lacking in the anime ( i've count way too much of them ) . While the technical aspect could have been better, i enjoyed this adaptation in the whole and i'm glad to see it continue in any format. Last edited by Yune Amagiri on Sun Dec 30, 2018 11:23 am; edited 1 time in total |
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jenthehen
 Posts: 835 Location: Cincinnati, Ohio |
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People want Goblin Slayer to be MORE (more nuanced, more like the less black and white newer fantasy we’re used to - Game of Thrones for instance), but it’s just not. It’s D&D slice of life with a side of LOTR bc the author is really into that stuff. It can be entertaining, but it doesn’t seem like a deep story ... I wish the author WOULD entertain some of the concepts of what if there were good goblins, but 4 books in (for me) and it doesn’t seem like that’s the point.
Harem, slice of life, male power fantasy ... it does really well at that, but it may just not be anything more. |
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