English Dub Review: Welcome to Demon School! Iruma-kun “Royal One”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Iruma begins the day in his artificially inseminated Evil Cycle, much to pretty much everyone’s shock and confusion, as his typical warm and friendly demeanor has been replaced by cold glares and brash confidence. Even more shocking is what he chooses to do with this new confidence: petition the school to let the Misfit Class kids use the forbidden royal class hall Royal One, which hasn’t been touched since an ancient demon king used it in his own school days. Kalego is completely put off by this arrogance, but agrees, though only if they complete a seemingly impossible task. Get the signatures of every faculty member in the school.

OUR TAKE

This arc has begun in earnest with newly Evil Iruma hitting the ground running with all his new evil energy. And by evil I guess they mean just having a backbone which Iruma clearly did not have before. While the usual Iruma behavior prioritized being kind and nice and helping out his friends in moments of need, this Iruma has plans that he is going to enact. Namely getting all of his friends things so great that even they don’t know that they need it! As he lays out the architecture of the Royal One hall, he lists off a bunch of things that seem to have been tailor made for Asmodeus, Clara, Kuromu, and so on. Things that, like a sound proof performance hall, seem like they shouldn’t exist in a building that’s supposed to be centuries old, but I guess it’s best not to think about that too much. The point is that Iruma has been forced to shift from the enthusiastic lackey that he’s been his whole life and basically become a well meaning gang leader who knows his own minions’ strengths and weaknesses to get a job done, which is good because this plan is going to need to use everyone at their very utmost.

And that’s actually one of the more pleasant surprises of this arc that we’ll start getting into next time. This arc basically gives just about everyone in the Misfit Class a moment to show off their stuff. It’s not quite the same as giving them all a spotlight episode to flesh them out as characters, but it’s definitely a better approach than what I thought they were going to do, which was just let them stay quirky extras who would blend further into the background as the plot when on. Given how this season started with an Ameri focused arc, I was legitimately worried that so many of these characters would just be stuck being “that guy or this guy or those two guys”. This series definitely has a problem of bit characters blending into each other and I was ready to just make peace with us just already having our core cast to work on and leaving it at that, but thankfully that seems to not be the case. And we will see just how not the case this all is when we see the Misfit Class and their plan go into action next week.