English Dub Review: Clevatess “Hero’s Duty”

Put that blood back in your body

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Alicia recovers from her fall, Clen investigates further, and Nell pays the price for wanting to be free.

OUR TAKE

Ugh, we’re still in this dreary cave full of bandits and this episode is just more misery and blood and death. Like I get that the one of the underlying themes of this finding hope and belief in the spirit of humanity even in the darkest of places. And this MOST DEFINITELY a dark place. But it feels less and less like we are seeing the spark of human love and empathy break through a terrible starting point and more and more like this series just likes seeing women being horribly injured and maimed. Alicia is essentially a form of undead, (zombie, lich, or what have you), so she’s bound to get banged up from a battle only to rise again with some sort of gruesome regeneration thanks to Clevatess and his magic. That makes sense and we get to see a clear example of it here. But Nell is just a poor, sad creature who has just been through the ringer ever since her mom left and her abusers turned on her instead. Beaten to the point her teeth fell out, raped and giving birth to a stillborn, and trapped in this awful place with her abusers for all of time until she steps out of line and gets beaten some more.

I just…don’t see the story significance in seeing how terrible a time this woman is having. Especially since shortly after getting back to her regular level of misery, she’s taken to an even darker cave or the purpose of being eaten by a giant cave monster. Clen arrives, making me think he’s about to save her (apparently Clen uses masculine pronouns so I’m going with that) but…nope, she’s still eaten. EXCEPT, the creature fears Clen so much that it vomits a half-digested Nell up, making me wonder if it just would’ve been better if she was left to die in the stomach acid. I’m simply baffled at how grim things are getting for this character specifically that I find it hard to care about anything else going on, especially with our leads. Alicia lets herself sink to the bottom of a water way to probably lure in some ancient monster fishes, so hopefully next week we can be just DONE with this arc. It can really only go up from here once we’re literally above ground, but I genuinely don’t know how much more of this I can take.