English Dub Review: Helck “Anne from Management”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)


The competition to become the next Demon Lord continues with a race, so Vermilio gives Helck a steed too small to ride, but naturally he finds a way to win anyway. The contest then ends early when news spreads of a castle being attacked by human invaders, so it is determined that the winner will be whoever is able to defeat them.

OUR TAKE

Something I didn’t remember to bring up while reviewing the first episode: Vermilio is FUCKING ANNOYING. I don’t know if it’s her english voice, her constant yelling, or her big dumbass hat, but she has grated on me from basically the first minute she appeared. So, it’s not a great feeling to come to realization that, at least so far, this story is not really about the great human hero Helck who wishes to be the new Demon Lord. Currently, it’s about this one annoying-ass demon who is (understandably) skeptical of his motives, tries to sabotage his progress at every turn, but will eventually come to respect and maybe even love the guy for his genuine well wishes for demons, probably sooner rather than later. This show is called HELCK, not IRRITATING DEMON LADY, so there has to be some real focus on Helck coming at some point, hopefully from his perspective, but at the moment it seems like the focus is on the intriguing contradictions that surround him as seen from an outsider’s perspective. He wants to rule over demons, he hates humans, and he killed the guy who killed the last Demon Lord who was also his brother.

Those are all potentially pretty interesting things, but I’m hoping we get to know more about them from Helck himself, partly because it would at least be learning about him from him, but also, to reiterate, I currently do not like how much focus Vermilio is getting because she annoys me. I mean I get it, we’ve got twenty four whole episodes to play around in, there’s plenty of time for us to learn all about everybody in that time. But I only have the first two episodes to work with right now and these are the things that are sticking out to me when I sit down to write about it. Aside from all of that, it’s still a perfectly fine show so far, just not really anything that’s standing out at the moment. Heck, with all the stuff going on in just these two episodes, we don’t really have a good idea of what the world at large is really like right now, but I’m sure we’ll get to that very soon. I guess I just gotta wait for another week or two for us to get there, which I’m all ready to do, but it just means that I’m not going to have a ton of nice things to say. Fingers crossed that changes soon.