English Dub Review: The Master of Ragnarok & Blesser of Einherjar “A Long-Awaited Revenge”

Revenge is a dish best served cold.

Overview (Spoilers!)

We open on an idyllic stream, where the girls are splashing about. Yuuto watches with… some other guy. I have no idea who he is, but just you wait—he’s about to become very important.

Yuuto and Just Introduced Guy have an audience with the patriarch before Yuuto. The different coloring here implies that we’re in a flashback—but for some reason, it wasn’t present in the last scene, even though that was a flashback too? Huh, go figure. Anyway, the old patriarch names Yuuto his successor. Just Introduced Guy doesn’t like that, so he kills the patriarch and flees.

In the present day, Al and Chris inform Yuuto that the Panther Clan has used cavalry against the Hoof Clan, which should be impossible without the stirrups Yuuto “invented.” Felicia determines that Just Introduced Guy—who is her blood brother, Loptr—must have used his technology-copying rune to steal Yuuto’s (already stolen) idea. Loptr sent Felicia a message asking her to leave the Wolf Clan and join him, but she refuses.

The next day, the two clans battle it out. Although the Panther Clan utilizes Yuuto’s hit and run strategy to their advantage, the Wolf Clan saves themselves with their superior crossbow techniques. Yuuto’s men appear to surrender by sending out caravans covered in white sheets, but soldiers are hidden inside, ready to attack. Protected by giant metal walls, the Wolf Clan surrounds the Panther Clan.

Yuuto is tormented that he’s fighting an old friend. Suddenly, Loptr’s best girl Sigyn uses her rune to mess with Yuuto’s head; she appears before his eyes, singing and taunting him. She also bewitches the Panther Clan soldiers to become zombies without fear.

Loptr tries to attack Felicia, but Yuuto gets in the way. But Run turns the tide of the battle when she arrives riding… a camel? Horses hate the smell of camels, so they flee, securing the battle for the Wolf Clan.

Our Take

Even more than the creepy fanservice, I’m annoyed by this show’s habit of introducing extremely important characters randomly, with no context, and expecting us to both understand and care about what’s going on. And this show just keeps doing this. Loptr is a very important figure in the lives of both Yuuto and Felicia. They’ve both experienced this really traumatic betrayal—the old patriarch was killed in front them—and they’ve never alluded to it before now. They’ve never given any hint that this happened to them. It’s like different people wrote each episode of this series but didn’t communicate with each other about it at all, in any way, until they’d finished making the whole series.

So the first scene of this episode? Immensely confusing. They give no indication that it’s a flashback, so I didn’t understand why the Wolf Clan was relaxing in a stream… right after they made a big deal about only taking off a few days for the hot springs vacation. I didn’t know who Loptr was at all, so I had no investment in the scene whatsoever. Big surprise coming from this show, though.

Now that I know that Loptr’s Felicia’s real, actual blood brother, I’m really concerned by the fact that he points out the “view” (i.e. hot half-naked girls). And I’m just as concerned that Yuuto—who is sworn to love only Mitsuki, who has been deeply uncomfortable with advances from the other girls throughout the series—agrees that he “won’t deny the view.” But yeah, I was so confused that I went back to make sure I hadn’t accidentally skipped an episode.

All the emotional moments in this episode are cliché and phoned in, too. The patriarch whispering his dying wish to Yuuto, as Yuuto sobs over him? I’d care about this a lot more if the patriarch wasn’t a generic Wise Old Man character and was actually a person—or if this moment wasn’t a Generic Last Dying Wish moment, either. Then Yuuto mumbles something about how, despite his smartphone secrets, he doesn’t understand human emotion. Okay? He’s never been worried about that until this moment, though?

Also, Loptr’s rune is way too perfect for this situation. I mean, a rune that can copy any technology when Yuuto’s main talent is inventing technology? That’s pretty convenient, isn’t it. Although I’m not sure knowing his rune is enough to determine that he’s definitely behind the Panther Clan attacks, so I’m not sure why Yuuto immediately jumped to that conclusion (also, how does Chris know who Loptr is at all?).

I also don’t understand Felicia and Yuuto’s attitudes toward Loptr at all. Yuuto even goes so far as to say they’re going to hell for fighting someone they were once so close to. Like, hello? Loptr murdered a man in cold blood, tried to kill his own sister, and, in this case, attacked them first! Why would it be bad to fight back? The writers could have used this plotline as an interesting portrayal of what it’s like to love people who do bad things—but they fail it write it in any sort of complex way. It just feels like Yuuto is way underreacting to Loptr’s obvious evilness.

My favorite part of this episode is the informative title card before the commercial break. It reveals to us that the old patriarch was Loptr’s real, actual blood father (maybe say something so important, you know, in the actual episode)? It also claims that Loptr killed his father “unintentionally,” which is just… blatantly false. He murdered him. Did the person who wrote that not even watch the episode?

By the time the battle rolled around, I was so annoyed that I could barely focus on it. I enjoyed the Trojan horse-like techniques utilized by the Wolf Clan, and the camel sequence was admittedly funny and clever. But Sigyn? What was the hell going on there? It was confusing, extremely weird, and of course, fanservicey as heck. Incidentally, when she bewitched the Panther Clan soldiers, I mistook them for the Wolf Clan army at first because the two groups look identical.

Even though there’s less fanservice, this episode is as much of a narrative mess as the last, if not more so. What happened to that Lightning Clan guy? Isn’t he coming back? Why did we need another big antagonist? I get that they were trying to tug at our emotions by making a fight personal, but due to generic dialogue and poor planning, the writers certainly didn’t succeed.