The Legendary Hero is Dead!

Episode 4

Probably the biggest hurdle with covering The Legendary Hero is Dead! is gauging how serious to take, well, anything about it. While it's not strictly a parody, nearly all of the show's identity is built around undercutting its purposefully generic fantasy tropes. So when Touka or another character starts monologuing about their sad past and the music gets heavy and dramatic, you kind of spend the whole time waiting for it to be revealed as a lie for comedy's sake. It's not a great place to be, honestly, since it paints what are seemingly genuine attempts at drama as unserious and disposable, even when they're not meant to be.

In a series with a stronger grasp of its own tone, that wouldn't be a problem. Fellow undead series Sankarea: Undying Love was able to flip between serious family drama and sexy zombie shenanigans without missing a beat – embracing both the gore and camp of horror media to great effect. Sadly, this show does not have the deft directorial hand of Shinichi Omata to guide it, so instead it ends up feeling like a collection of half-measures. I can appreciate the show trying to make Marguerite a sympathetic figure rather than just a doormat for Touka that occasionally turns into lazy fat jokes. I genuinely hope that Touka's backstory is true, just to give him a bit more texture outside of being a bony pervert. Right now, though, I don't have a lot of faith that it'll happen, because everything preceding this episode made the characters out to be cheap, paper-thin vehicles for a repetitive handful of jokes.

If I'm stuck in the middle of the show's attempts at character development, I'm at least all for its pacing. In other shows, the speed at which this episode flits from plot beat to plot beat would be bad, but Legendary Hero's actual story is thin on purpose – an excuse for punchlines that only advance to facilitate more jokes. So moving quickly through Mr. Bones' Wild Ride doesn't really hurt anything, and in fact, helps smooth over some of the more tiresome gags. Sure, it's eye-rolling that Yuna and Marguerite both get their clothes ripped off during fights, but we move past it so quickly that it's at least not wasting your time. Mr. Skeleton isn't at all compelling or funny as a villain, but since we don't linger on his ridiculous motivations for turning the world into skeletons, it's easy to move past without thinking about it.

Then there's this episode's cliffhanger, which reveals that the only way for our hero to power up and win this battle is to drink the princess' pee. You know what? Sure. Go for it. I took the show to task last time for being painfully basic with its perversions, so I'll give it props for at least picking a fetish that doesn't show up in every shonen sex comedy under the sun. It's still not pleasant by any means, but at least it's memorable. I'm not sure how I ended up in a game of chicken with a hypothetical animated golden shower, but I'll take being mortified over being bored.

So, uh, I guess that's progress? If nothing else this episode didn't annoy me the way previous entries did. The brisk pace of both plotting and punchlines kept it moving and allowed the running gags and predictable reactions to go down smoother than they might have otherwise. It's not every day I see an episode of television end on the image of a woman about to piss in a skeleton's mouth. There's a good reason for that, but if you're going for bad taste, I can respect committing to it.

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The Legendary Hero is Dead! is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.