Tate no Yuusha no Nariagari Season 2

The second season of The Rising of the Shield Hero fails to match the first in terms of interest. One of its major flaws is its overall brevity, which makes the new adventure feel rushed and forced. The first season already provided a satisfying conclusion, so the plot twists in the second season feel unnecessary. The initial episodes are fast-paced, with a continuous succession of pressing situations that leave little time to assimilate everything that is happening or to appreciate the new characters.

The cast is expanded with new additions, but some of these characters are completely marginal because there is not enough time to develop ... them properly. If the story had been longer, these characters could have been explored in more detail, which would have made them much more interesting. Other characters are better constructed but fail to make a strong impression.
Among the old cast members, Naofumi is the one who has undergone the most drastic change. He has softened, although he still shows his grim side from time to time.

Although the story develops with difficulty, there are still some moments that captured my interest just enough to keep me watching. The Rising of the Shield Hero 2 features two different types of revelations: some tied to new events, which are the ones that encouraged me to find out how the story would develop, and others inherent to the lore.

The second season raises more questions about the overall context, but the explanations that could help us understand the full picture are still a mirage. None of the many open questions are clarified.

Although three years have passed since the first season, I did not notice any significant changes in the technical aspects of The Rising of the Shield Hero. The series features well-groomed and more refined manual drawing than the first season, both in the close-ups and in the Western-style fantasy environments, thanks to a slightly flatter line, although it is not particularly eye-catching.

When the camera pans out to frame multiple subjects in a single shot, the quality drops slightly, but this does not affect the enjoyment of the fight scenes. These are once again characterized by smooth animations, skillful use of lighting, and effective visual effects.

As before, the manual drawing is supported by CGI, which is limited to rendering the hordes of monsters and human armies. The CGI stands out noticeably compared to the traditional line art due to its sometimes rigid animations, but there are few sequences in which it is present, and it does not ruin the overall viewing experience.

While the show's artistic quality is largely unchanged, with only a few technical stumbles, the same cannot be said for the script. The Rising of the Shield Hero 2's biggest problem is its short length, which results in a frenetic narrative. The viewer is bombarded with information, twists, and pressing situations without having time to digest everything. This is reflected in the superficial development of the new characters. Additionally, the protagonist's change in character may not please everyone. The second half of the adventure improves somewhat, with calmer pacing, but it still suffers from the overall brevity, which prevented me from fully appreciating some of the emotionally charged moments.

Despite its flaws, The Rising of the Shield Hero 2 is still an enjoyable watch, and I am hopeful that future seasons will address some of its shortcomings.

Personal Vote: 6.5

The only reason I gave this season a 5 was because of the average animation. Otherwise, it would be a 3.

This season was seriously just a DISASTER. Absolutely NOTHING was done right. All the things done perfectly in season 1 were just scraped and totally removed from this season. Way too bad a successor. I seriously can't understand how could they do this to such a great story...

"New characters were, useless plot points, overly confusing and boring storyline with the worst possible main villain"
This line sums up the entire season.

Conclusion: Watch this only if you want to simp on a character. Useless for ... any other reason.

This show is a piece of trash, and I’m shocked I or anyone else ever gave it the time of day. The first four episodes of season one are decent, and while the production issues which would later come to plague the series were already rearing their ugly heads even back then—bad CG, bits of clunky animation, and so on—the actual story they told, at least as far as isekai is concerned, was fairly compelling, and the firestorm of internet controversy they ignited was thoroughly hilarious. However, immediately after this, the series devolved into the most generic isekai harem you’ve ever seen, and nothing about ... it is worth anyone’s time for a list of reasons both obvious and egregious.

Reason 1: How the fuck are we not bored of this yet?
Gosh, where do I even begin? I’m so glad Mushoku Tensei came out between now and the previous season of Shield Hero, because it serves as a nice and easy example to reference when explaining why this very similar anime is, in comparison, complete shit. Isekai as a genre has grown into this unholy behemoth, and almost all of it has been awful, but Mushoku Tensei was a truly refreshing exception. In oversimplified terms, both are isekai anime with an overpowered MC who is, at least ostensibly, easily characterized as a self-insert. However, their execution sets them apart completely. Where Mushoku Tensei actually cared about developing a uniquely detailed fantasy setting whose immersion was only bolstered by the stellar background art, beautiful colors, and hand-drawn detail, Shield Hero relies on the same RPG video game standard we’ve seen used fifteen billion times by now, whose drab, ugly, lackluster banality and endless info-dumping is only made worse by the hideous art design, garish CG, stale environments, and shitty over-designed, off-model character art. It’s an anime that both looks and feels incredibly cheap, and I’m having a very hard time figuring out why this series has received so much attention, even as a light novel. I understand why it grabbed peoples’ attention at first—and we’ll get back to that in a minute—but why didn’t people get bored and drop it after it became so generic and boring? Was the first arc just good enough to keep people around, no matter how awful it got? Because as it stands now, I’m genuinely challenging myself to find any difference between this and the seasonal isekais that nameless studios pump out every season, and I seriously cannot find anything.

Reason 2: What the fuck is the author expecting me to see in this man?
Whenever a show comes out that doesn’t conform to peoples’ strict worldview, it has become normal to see internet mobs trying to “cancel” such anime. The most common source of this sort of whining and bitching is, as one might expect, lolis. Anime containing loli fanservice or lolis in general will very often find themselves the targets of raging lynch mobs screaming about how they contain or promote pedophilia, and while this may seem like a ridiculous thing to suggest, I must say, as an individual who grew up and lives in a country where the first response to gun violence in schools has always been out-of-touch elected officials blaming the sales figures of Grand Theft Auto V, this method of conflating fictional entertainment with real life social issues is actually a very common thing. However, in the anime community, these people almost always come across as virtue signaling prudes or, as is most often the case, as complete charlatans who don’t actually give a shit and who just want to ignite controversy surrounding a show they don’t like. I know reviews can be taken down for analysis like this, but I’m not technically breaking the rules as I’m not commenting on viewers of this show specifically, and either way, I don’t disrespect the hustle. I’m an attention whore myself, and I’m glad I brought up Mushoku Tensei earlier, because the controversy surrounding that series absolutely reeked of this, and it remains a good comparison for my thoughts on Shield Hero. The protagonist of Mushoku Tensei was an outright sexual deviant, and this became quite controversial not simply as a matter of fact, but also because the series and its characters seemed to go out of their own way to make excuses for his behavior in a way many found discomforting.

Personally, I enjoyed Mushoku Tensei for two main reasons. Firstly, it had a clear and impressive amount of effort put into its production, and seeing such love and care from the creators behind it gave me an inherent respect for the series. Secondly and more importantly, it was shockingly and consistency well-written in a way that most anime—and certainly most isekai—are not. But why is this relevant to the controversy, and why is the controversy relevant to Shield Hero? Naofumi is, generally speaking, a good person, and Rudeus, the protagonist of Mushoku Tensei, is not. He’s a borderline narcissist who has great difficulties recognizing his own faults, and whenever he does recognize such faults, he turns into a pouty child who’s incapable of getting out of his own head and improving in real terms. Much more damning is the fact he’s a pervert, and his willingness to cross the physical boundaries of women in his life is only exacerbated by the fact he’s the protagonist of an isekai harem and, quite crucially, knows it. Before being isekai’d, he was a disgusting otaku NEET who spent his days jerking off to anime girls exactly like the one’s who he now inhabits a world surrounded by, so his tendency to instantly view and treat the women he meets as sex objects is frankly gross. I could go on, but hopefully you get BOTH of the points I’m making here. Point one is obvious: Rudeus really is a scummy guy. But the second point is what I’m really getting at: Rudeus is a real, fleshed-out, well-rounded, flawed character, NOT a self-insert. He has some positive qualities, and he has what some might consider to be a relatable backstory, but he is far too complex and unpleasant of a character to be broadly considered a “self-insert.”

In comparison, Naofumi was a real character for about four episodes, and ever since those first four episodes (which were not the most brilliantly written pieces of literature in the first place), he has been a classic, hollow, lifeless self-insert, and this is where the controversy becomes relevant, because what is a self-insert? Why is it used as a derogatory term? A self-insert is a protagonist who the author deliberately designed to be as generic and unremarkable as possible, while simultaneously being as relatable as possible, but only by means of the most inoffensive, broadly applicable, and unchallenging personality traits imaginable, all for the soul purpose of creating a clear and inviting non-character for the audience to project themselves onto to achieve maximum escapism when watching a show, which itself is also deliberately pandering in whatever way. This is usually considered to be a negative way to construct a character, because not only is it cynical and manipulative, but because it is simply a recipe for an awful script. If you’re watching anime because you want to actually watch an anime and not insert yourself into it for whatever indulgent, masturbatory reasons you may have, and you actually want to be treated to quality storytelling, then this approach to constructing a protagonist is obviously contemptible. Naofumi going from a brooding, expressive, angry MGTOW to some generic light novel man and falling squarely into this self-insert trap can be criticized on these terms, but watching this season, I’ve started looking at this show from a slightly different angle, because this show features slavery. And that’s fine. I mean, slavery exited in real life, so why shouldn’t it exist in fiction, right?

My reaction to these kinds of things being included in anime has always been to simply shrug it off and ask, “Who gives a shit?” But then I started to truly appreciate the angle Shield Hero was taking. In the first four episodes of season one, back when (despite not being the best anime ever made or anything) the show was actually decent and able to be invested in, the initial handling of slavery didn’t seem particularly eyebrow-raising to me. Regardless of the inherent evil of the institution, he used it to rescue Raphtalia from a horrendous situation, and her thankfulness didn’t seem inappropriate to me. When taken out of context, sure, presenting a character as being happy to be someone else’s slave might make you question the author’s intentions, but in context, it worked given the nature of the setting, the circumstances of the story, and the personalities of the characters. But what happens to this dynamic when the characters lose their personalities? What happens to this dynamic when the protagonist goes from being a desperate man raging against a corrupt system maliciously rigged against him, using whatever means he could and taking advantage of whatever institutions were at his disposal to gain victory, to a generic, unchallenged, deadpan self-insert with an afterthought of a personality? And most of all, what happens when this dynamic becomes unnecessary? What happens when new waifus willingly becoming slaves just becomes a fun little gimmick of the story? At what point do we start asking ourselves if, actually, the slave harem was the author’s fetish all along, and at what point did he expect his audience to self-insert with his Ottoman Sultan harem-having slave-driving protagonist?

Reason 3: What is even the fucking point anymore? (Spoiler: there is no point.)
The plot of this season picks up pretty much exactly where season one left off. There’s lots of boring, generic new characters to replace some of the side characters from the previous arc, and while the main cast obviously remains the focus of the story, everyone feels like a complete husk of whatever they once were. Filo, for example, has always been a hollow character, so I guess calling her a husk isn’t much of an insult, but Raphtalia lost any spark of life she previous had and has devolved into your standard mid-class pandering waifu, and as I’ve discussed now at great length, Naofumi is a self-insert. Just stoic Mr. Isekai Man who everyone loves and who can do anything. They info-dump the plot to come, then it comes, and there’s a new setting, so they info-dump all that, and life goes on with a string of unexceptional, over-the-top, villain-of-the-week monstrous perverts for white knight Mr. Isekai Man to save all his women from and gain the love of everyone. If I’m to bring Mushoku Tensei back for one more comparison, I guess it should be: what is the fucking point? Mushoku Tensei is about Rudeus coming to respect himself on his own terms while also learning to value the bonds of family which he in his past life was too self-centered to grasp. Shield Hero was, at one time, briefly about learning to love and trust in an unfair world you never understood and which valued you less than dirt. Its theme was poignant and empathetic. But those days are over now. They were over in 2019 when, over the course of a single episode, the series transitioned from betrayal and redemption to atrociously animated sequences of the villains humiliating themselves with goofy retard music playing clumsily in the background.

Season one started decently, and quickly descended into mediocrity and failure.
Season two is just mediocrity and failure from start to finish.

Thank you for reading.