My Status as an Assassin Obviously Exceeds the Hero's

Episode 6

This episode does a great job of building up the show's mystery. As I mentioned last week, from the beginning of the series, we've been inclined to believe the demons were more than they seemed. After all, if the Human King is evil, the demons must be, if not good, then at least misunderstood, right? Meeting Yoru only reinforced this idea with the Demon King inviting Akira to his territory and making no active moves against our hero despite being able to see everything he's doing.

However, all of that has seemed to have changed. Now the Demon King wants Akira dead and Amelia captured. Of course, this contradicts what Yoru's been told, which means one of two things: 1) Aurum has gotten false orders from higher up the chain of command or 2) the Demon King has changed his mind.

In this episode, it's heavily implied that the latter is true—that, once the Demon King discovered Amelia's resurrection powers, his original plans to befriend Akira went out the window. All signs point to him wanting to resurrect his lover. However, given the rules of Resurrection—namely that it must be used almost immediately after death—this seems impossible. Yet, if, for example, he had found a way that it would work but at the cost of Amelia's life, then his sudden change in attitude towards Akira makes sense. Akira would never stand for that, and Amelia wouldn't willingly do it—thus the need to kill Akira and capture Amelia.

Speculation aside, the Demon King's complete 180 makes us wonder if both demons and humans aren't equally bad. Yoru does her best to make Akira understand that there are plenty of good demons, but that certainly goes against what we've seen with Aurum (and, by proxy, the Demon King) as he was willing to sacrifice the entire population of a major human city just to capture Amelia. Then again, the Human King captured and sacrificed his own mass of people to summon a class of Japanese students to this world.

This, in turn, brings us to our new character, Lia. While she explains how the sacrifices were captured—and, coincidentally, how Amelia ended up in black slime where Akira found her—through her tragic backstory, she didn't quite land for me as a character. The dual cliché of her being both a beastman (which, of course, is introduced as a secondary love interest after the primary elf love interest) and being yet another princess was a bit too much for me. Moreover, she is pretty much one-note at the moment. Hopefully, my opinion will change as she is further developed.

Lastly, I noticed in this episode a dramatic drop in animation quality. Yoru suddenly lacks lip flaps most of the time, and any time static shots could be used instead of actual movement, they are. That said, the longest series of these works rather well as they are used as a visual complement to Yoru's expository dialogue, and have a creative color palette to make them more visually interesting. Here's hoping that this week's animation woes were just a blip and things will get back to normal soon.

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My Status as an Assassin Obviously Exceeds the Hero's is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.