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The Legendary Hero is Dead!
Episodes 1-3

by Nicholas Dupree,

How would you rate episode 1 of
The Legendary Hero is Dead! ?
Community score: 3.2

How would you rate episode 2 of
The Legendary Hero is Dead! ?
Community score: 3.6

How would you rate episode 3 of
The Legendary Hero is Dead! ?
Community score: 3.5

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The Legendary Hero is Dead! very much feels like a show out of time. Comedies like this were common in the 90s and 00s; farces about totally uninspiring and ignoble leads being thrust into the role of hero and mucking up the expected fantasy story in the process. It's a solid little setup, and plenty of shows have succeeded. The trend has died off, seemingly replaced instead with overpowered isekai heroes shrugging their way through RPG tropes, but it's a formula I'm familiar with and enjoyed in the past. Unfortunately, that does few favors for this show's sense of humor.

It's not even that I find Touka's comedic pervert shtick repugnant – it's that it's such predictable, tired comedy. He has two responses to everything: run away or sexually objectify the women in his life. He flips between those two modes with routine efficiency in precisely the way you'd expect every time. There's never a surprise, twist, or punchline you couldn't see coming a mile away or that we didn't already see earlier in a given episode. It's a stale kind of humor that doesn't even have the bad taste to be offensive because it's 2023, and “likes thigh highs and boobies” is eye-rollingly passé. Hell, the fanservice isn't even well-rendered. The stockings just hang on the girls' legs like trash bags. We live in a world where they can make anime entirely about a single artist's obsession with tights, yet this show comes out here with fetish fuel that would make Hiro Mashima wilt. It's embarrassing, frankly.

On a personal note, I am offended by how lacking the show has been with the undead half of its premise. Cartoons have been mining zombie or skeleton characters for slapstick and visual gags for a century. It's a proud, varied art that has been carried on through the likes of Sankarea: Undying Love and Zombie Land Saga to name just a couple, and Legendary Hero is totally dropping the ball. I would say dropping the eyeball, but it only has one joke about Touka's eye falling out. That's just plain amateur. Hell, there's a whole sequence where Touka uses his skeleton body to peep, and there's not a single bone/boner pun. For that matter, there are no gags about the obvious biological challenges of being horny without any junk. If the show can't be bothered to revel in its bad taste, what are we doing here?

On the positive side, the show has improved since its premiere. Kyle wasn't an amazing villain, but he's a solid foil who gives us somebody worse than Touka to root against. I even liked that, despite the knight's clear martial superiority, Touka wasn't intimidated because his opponent is so defined by self-loathing. Touka may be a lousy creep, but he's at least comfortable in his rotting skin, and that's a clever way to make his UberChad enemy an amusing opponent. Touka even has to pull out some clever uses of his flaccid magic sword to win the day, which was nice. Skeleton Man is decidedly less intriguing so far, but hopefully, he'll find something funny to do next episode. If I'm not inclined to root for our hero, it'd be nice to at least chuckle against the villains.

Sadly, the rest of the cast can't carry their weight. Yuna exists to give sad little flashes of fanservice, punch Touka every once in a while, and not much else. Anri is at least more functional as a character, but her stupidity seems to turn on and off as the plot needs, and she doesn't do anything to make Touka less of a chore to follow. The closest anyone has to a rapport with our hero is Marguerite since she still thinks he's the original Hero. Granted, she also comes with a ridiculous weight-gain/loss gimmick that primarily exists to assure us Touka will objectify any woman, regardless of her clothing size, but there's at least some humor to be had between her doe-eyed naivete and Touka's scumbag inner monologue.

Unfortunately, more is needed to carry a comedy show. You don't need to be sophisticated or even all that clever to make a band of oddballs fumbling through a fantasy adventure funny, but you need something. Be it sharp rapport, goofy visual gags, or just a comedic premise versatile enough to perpetuate humor, there are many ways to make a show like this work. So far, The Legendary Hero hasn't managed any of that, and it's a slog.

Rating:

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


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