I think the slice of life portions of this show was good, but it fell on it's face with the serious main storylines. I quite enjoy watching Rit and Red being lovey dovey, and I was very interested in the struggles of the Hero's Party and Ruti after Red left the party, but again like the serious main storyline it fell on it's face in the end. I think all the problems started in the episode when the rebellion of the townsfolks vs the guards happen, which is when Albert got his hand chopped off by Red, and Albert and the goat demon left to turn Ruti into a drug addict. That's also when Ares became a total farce of an antagonist by becoming insane, he was kind of a bad antagonist before then but it became truly bad when he went over the top due to his insanity. By the time he was killed in the last episode, I found his death had very little meaning nor satisfaction as he was just a crazy person being crazy, a prop being discarded from the story. Whereas before when Ruti punched a hole through him, and then healed him, he was actually a character back then.
With this finale episode, I think I know why the show made him go insane, it's because Ares' position was too much like Theodora's, and they wanted to make them different when they really weren't, which was a problem. They can't go making Theodora's motivations seem understandable while choosing to save and forgive her in the end, while not doing the same for Ares if he wasn't insane. Red even said he was saving Theodora because she's a friend and it would hurt Ruti if one of her party members died, but wouldn't that also apply to Ares? His insanity made it so he couldn't be reasoned with, and they could just overlook that stuff with Theodora, the show couldn't have done that if Ares wasn't insane and not over the top. I'm glad they at least gave Ares a respectable funeral because all that talk about Theodora being spared because she was just doing what she thought was right, had actually save many people before by being in the hero's party, and deserves to be the hero instead because of her motivation for such, all that also applied to Ares. I know Ares was a hated character because of how he kicked Red out of the party, but the show was purposely not giving him a fair chance to not be so hate-able like they did with Theodora. They went over the top with Ares by having him go insane, slashing up Red and Rit's bed, stepping on Mr Crawly Wally, and even having the bad guy drug maker hate Ares and call him a villain. It was way way too much over the top, which made his antagonist character no longer credible.
As for the interesting stuff with Ruti's struggles of being cursed with the Hero blessing versus what she wanted from life herself, the show messed that up in the end as well. Instead of being an interesting character who learns to carry on despite her baggage, or work through them to either get by or lighten her load, they instead just eliminated her baggage out of nowhere. She can now experience positive and negatives things, and choose her own fate by ditching her responsibilities. That pretty much destroys her character and her struggles because her not being able to experience positives and negatives was what made her interesting, and ditching her responsibilities makes her look horribly selfish. As other commenters have pointed out, she choose to allow countless future deaths by ignoring her responsibilities, it would have been no different than if she refused to save the village held hostage by ogres which she went off to help in the end. It was a terrible resolution to her character arc, she didn't even try to prepare a replacement for her quitting by having Theodora become Hero. It was mentioned briefly to Theodora she could become the hero, but without actually showing more about it like Theodora forming her own party like how Albert's party reformed after he left, it just looks like Ruti's shirking her duties big time. I just can't stress how underwhelming and disappointing this was with how they pissed away such an interesting dilemma they had for her character. I would recommend "I'm quitting Heroing" for another anime which handled a similar hero's dilemma so much more superbly, but warn you'll have to watch it right to the end for it's full effect because it's not going to seem like it until the end.
Well, I did this rewatch to prepare for S2, time to see if they were able to go somewhere with this story, or if it just gets even worse. I want to give S1 a 7/10 for the stuff I enjoyed, but I can't bring myself to do so with how bad the serious stuff ended up. 6/10.
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