English Dub Review: The Misfit of Demon King Academy “Mother’s Words”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Anos easily defeats Emelia’s brother with his father’s new sword while accompanied by his fan club’s theme song (which is thankfully not dubbed because I imagine the dub actors had more dignity than that). Lay wins his match too, but seems to have switched sides and is fighting for the Royalists, though Anos suspects this is more extortion than anything else. Further investigation finds that Lay’s mother is quite sick, to the point that she’s even see through, but she’ll get treatment as long as he works for the royals. She also explains that Lay was always quite passionate about sword fighting but never found anyone he didn’t have to hold back with until he met Anos. Since Misa is half-spirit like Lay’s mother, Anos gives her the ability to lend her Misa’s own energy, though it doesn’t seem to be a permanent solution. Eventually Lay comes back and stops this before Misa can wear herself out.

Meanwhile, Emelia attacks Anos’ mother and fangirls as revenge for him defeating her brother, nearly killing them. She drops all pretense and just rants about purebloods being better and hybrids being less than scum. Anos soon arrives and heals them, then maims and kills Emelia as payback. He does revive her, but also curses her to always be reborn as a hybrid. Later, the final match begins between Anos and Lay begins.

OUR TAKE

One episode to go in this middle arc of the season, though all of the developments in this episode just continue to be about how Anos is amazing and everyone else is either totally in love with him or horrible people who are against him, with no in between. Even the nice people who are on the opposite side of his are actually being controlled and actually love him, even in a bro-y way like Lay. And if you cross him, you’ve got to be a horrible racist who needs to be given curses more worse than death. But Anos is so awesome and cool despite everything happening so clearly he deserves all of this adoration and love and the world just needs to admit how great he is and then things will be great forever! And blah blah blah blah blah. Basically just a reiteration about how I can’t take anything seriously here and how there’s no stakes to be invested in because there’s no chance of the hero learning or growing or changing. One particularly nauseating scene in this regard would be Anos saying he’ll always remember the names of the fangirls, despite the fact that there’s no way that anyone ever could consider ANY of them more than just one hivemind of a cringy concept.

But hey, next week sees the climax of this story arc where Anos and Lay will finally have their duel. Only they’re not fighting each other really, it’s just that Lay is being manipulated to do so, meaning that the fight will mean nothing in terms of character development and probably be undone soon after to stop the REAL enemy, who is probably that one Demon Emperor from last episode, so that Anos can then handily defeat Lay and come out on top because of course he will. How could you have a wish fulfillment character without having him win all of the time forever and always getting all of the girls and power ups and cool weapons and awesome stuff? Who gives a crap about plot when you can just feel like all the people against you are bad and all the people who are with you are great and nice? Moral ambiguity? Actual risk and reward? Get that shit out of here, I wanna stay in my basement and pretend the world is already just serving me and my goals! Just halfway to go, still six episodes left…lord help me.