English Dub Review: Helck “The Truth Behind Awakening”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Helck is told about how the Awakened soldiers, prisoners controlled by a spell that turns them into mindless tools. He is then recruited by an ally to infiltrate the castle and stop the Human King from continuing it, but is faced by a controlled Cless.

OUR TAKE

Hey, cool! We’re getting to the key and most impactful moments in Helck’s backstory, answering the mysteries that were established at the beginning of the series, and finally coming full circle about how Helck became the human hating warrior we all know and…well, know! And yeah, I know I’ve been giving this series a lot of shit since…well, the very start, but I am genuinely interested in seeing this play out. While the changing of Helck’s perspective on demons and humans seems to be going in a rather uninspired direction (see, demons are just people, while humans are the REAL monsters! Profound!), the whole Awakened Humans as a way to substitute for heroes is something I’m legitimately interested in seeing them elaborate on. Artificially creating “heroes” by making citizens into weapons in order to push a human supremacy ideology does seem like something using fantasy imagery and tropes to make a coherent thematic point. That said, the idea of “hero” as a concept (beyond the general idea of a person who does heroic acts) is something that this story doesn’t really seem interested in properly defining. We know Helck is a “Hero”, hence why he’s crazy strong and invincible, as is Cless. But also, there’s a sword that can hurt heroes for some reason, the Hero Killer, which we will see get broken before it is handed to Vermillio.

Unfortunately, here’s where we get to the obligatory negative portion of the review, because we still have two more full episodes of this flashback arc, as well as apparently a little bit at the start of the episode after that. And I am reminded that this arc had ABSOLUTELY NO NEED to be this long. The important parts of Helck’s backstory are that him and his brother had each other, became heroes, Helck learned that demons were people and learned about Awakened Humans, and then had to “kill Cless” and then flee to the Demon World. We are getting WAY TOO MANY EXTRANEOUS DETAILS about Helck’s backstory, and wasting WAY TOO MUCH TIME that could be used getting us back TO THE PRESENT DAY BATTLE AGAINST THE AWAKENED HUMANS. So, as much as I like the stuff they’re finally getting to here, I am then reminded by the fact that we got here way to slowly and we’re going to be stuck here way longer than we should be. But I guess now that I’m aware of it, I’ll try to enjoy what I can in the next few episodes. We’re entering the final third of the show, so ideally we should be getting into the more climactic and interesting stuff. I say ideally because there is always the chance we do basically the opposite of that, but I suppose we’ll see.