Our world may be one of fantasy, but that doesn’t make our reality any less harsh. Strange creatures of every variety roam the land, from the mighty Demon Lord to the lowly slime, but there’s one infestation in particular that’s been devastating the human race; Goblins. Too weak for higher level players to pay any attention to, but so devious in their tactics that lower level players quickly find themselves overwhelmed and eviscerated for their efforts. They invade settlements, pillage them for all their worth, and abduct young women to forcibly bear their young. There’s only one man in The Guild who's strong enough to deal with them, and also crazy enough to do something about it... One mysterious, stoic adventurer who is literally named Demon Slayer.
And now, my dear young warriors who have chosen to follow him on his quest to rid the world of all Goblin vermin, I implore you... Roll for initiative!
Goblin Slayer was produced by White Fox, which is a detail I was definitely not expecting when I set out to write this review. I haven’t seen every one of their titles, but out of the several that I have seen, they all looked leagues better than Goblin Slayer does. I don’t think any of them had particularly high budgets, but they felt like they were managed well enough that it didn’t matter. Even comparing it to Girls Last Tour, the only other title on the list to share a director with it, they barely have a few surface level similarities.
Budget saving tactics, for example, are distractingly blatant. It’s not unheard of to animate characters walking through closeups where you just move their model up and down, but this show tends to add extra movements(clothing, hair, etc) that don’t really sync up to the main cycle, creating a very uncanny feeling. What’s even more egregious is that the main character... A walking suit of armor, for all intents and purposes... switches from hand-drawn to CG constantly in-between shots, and that’s just for walking animations. You don’t even see clouds move in the sky, and that shouldn’t be too difficult an effect to pull off. The action scenes are fine, though I suspect that the fact that most of them take place in darkened settings may have allowed the producers free reign to drop the frame rate without anyone noticing.
As far as the environment goes, the artwork is more or less fine, despite the flat color palette. The character designs, on the other hand, are kind of an eyesore. They look like they started out as generic, but then just had a ton of extra details dumped on them in a lazy attempt to make them look less so. This makes them look kind of like characters you’ve seen before, but boring. The only exception to this is arguably the Goblins themselves, who’s design is simple, but effective. They’re humanoid creatures, mostly small, but with cold, empty eyes and large, gaping, fang-filled mouths that were made for tearing flesh and then cackling about it. They remind me of a green version of the Falmer from Skyrim, and those fuckers were scary at lower levels. I can definitely see these bastards terrorizing a fantasy civilization.
The English dub, which would usually be an exception in cases like these, is honestly pretty awful. The cast is entirely made up of either outsiders who mostly work in music and video games and only occasional dabble in anime, or newcomers who haven’t even been working in the industry a full decade yet. Seriously, there are only two names involved who are prolific enough to have Wikipedia pages. This is usually a sign that an anime has such a poor reputation that any voice actor who’s established enough to turn down roles without slowing the momentum of their careers took one look at it and declined outright.
I found myself watching most of this series in Japanese, not just because the subtitle dialogue had more wit and personality to it, but because just about every character sounded more natural in their speech. For one major example, in English, the main character just sounds boring and one note with a metallic twinge that doesn’t even go away when his helmet’s off. He sounds like Lucario from the dubbed Pokemon movies. His register stayed flat in Japanese, but at least there was an undertone of emotion to his voice. He could convey just enough pain, intrigue or whatever else he was feeling to add some actual humanity to his dialogue, subtle as it may have been.
I don’t often make a strong recommendation of sub over dub, as I am a hardcore English dub nerd, but this is one case where you’d be seriously better off reading the bottom of the screen.
I did not come into this show blindly. I try to go into most anime with as little info as possible when I finally sit down to watch them, normally years after they’ve left the zeitgeist, but if you were on any social media platform in 2018 that had even the most tenuous connection to anime, you heard some kind of shit about Goblin Slayer. It’s a controversial show, and because the first thing anybody hears about is that controversy, that's probably where I should begin. I will now be initiating a trigger warning, as we’re about to talk about rape. Good God, I need to find a new hobby.
People are always going to have different opinions about whether or not rape should be used in a story. Some people say it should be avoided unless absolutely necessary. Some people say it doesn’t matter because it’s fiction, fiction is fake and your feelings are stupid. Me, I’m somewhere in the middle. I believe any kind of subject matter can be explored in a story, as long as you do it right.
My go to example of this has always been Berserk. Spoilers, by the way. There’s a scene towards the (animated) end, where Casca is raped by Griffith while Guts is pinned down and forced to watch. In the nineties series, this scene was quick and to the point, with most of the focus being on Guts as he struggles to get free. In the third movie, however, this scene is not only extended, but the focus is mainly on Griffith and Casca, as the rape is displayed in graphic detail, with every thrust shown to you in all it’s glory. Basically, they turned it into porn. Both versions are disturbing, but only one of them disturbs you on the level that you’re wondering who in the fuckity fuckity fuck fuck FUCK thought one of the most brutal and tragic moments in anime history needed an ahegao.
In Goblin Slayer, the Goblins are rapists. They abduct young women to rape them, they rape female adventurers who attack them, and they raped the main character’s sister when they were little. Rape is being used in the narrative to make the villain come off as more evil and deserving of extermination with extreme prejudice. There are definitely problematic elements to this, as will always be the case when you have women harmed in any way to further a male character’s story arc, but at least the show’s heart was in the right place. At least it’s acknowledged that Rape Bad, and Rape Not Porn. Granted it’s a little sus that they didn’t allow any nudity in those scenes, so it’s like sure, a woman got groped and stripped by tiny monsters, bent over and rammed repeatedly from behind by a giant monster who visibly dug its claws into her hips, but because they hid her nipples I guess it’s still TV friendly? I dunno, anime’s weird sometimes.
My problem with it goes a bit deeper into the lore, towards a detail that’s implied in the anime, but outright confirmed in the manga; The Goblins have a good reason to rape. I feel dirty typing out that sentence. There are no female Goblins, so they rape humans to reproduce and survive. Not only does this not make any sense from a biological perspective, as a species that evolved to survive off of the unwilling reproductive help of another species would be totally nonviable, but you DO NOT give someone a reason to rape. You can explore the motive and mindset of a rapist, but rape should never be seen as a necessity. You know all those anime, like Shiki, who explore the idea of humans no longer being on the top of the food chain, and how predators need to eat? You can’t do that with rape.
But oh well, at least they didn’t write a story arc where one of the Goblins’ rape victims decided to cope with her trauma by helping the Goblins rape more people so more people would understand what she went through OH WAIT THEY DID!
Even with all that aside, though, it’s obvious what kind of show this is. The show wastes no time establishing the fact that Goblins are a clear and present threat to humanity, and yet it seems like everyone in The Guild aside from Goblin Slayer... Can I just call him Orcbolg from here on? I know that’s not his actual name, but it feels weird to keep calling him the title of the show. Anyway, aside from Orcblog, everyone in The Guild is either too weak to deal with Goblins without getting killed, or too high level to care, which wouldn’t be such a huge problem if they weren’t so over-the-top obvious and unsubtle about it. The rookies talk themselves up like the future saviors of humanity, only to get torn to shreds and violated. The veterans are obnoxious, entitled douchebags who mock Orcbolg for dedicating his life to such an easy target. Hey, buddy, you should be going after money and glory like we are! What a loser!
This whole scenario was designed to prop Orcbolg up and make him look like a badass. He talks in meaningless platitudes, always knows exactly what’s going to happen next, and he doesn’t speak any more than necessary unless he’s dropping huge exposition dumps about his backstory and personal beliefs regarding Goblins, and yet despite the fact that his primary motivation is the fact that Goblins killed his family and raped his big sister to death when he was a child, he seems far more concerned with exterminating Goblins than he does with actually saving or protecting their female victims, implying there’s nothing actually altruistic or pure about his campaign of vengeance. He is every single middle school edgelord who’s ever exorcised his loneliness by roleplaying a tortured lone wolf antihero power fantasy.
Orcbolg is completely socially inept to the point that he seems to lack basic self-awareness outside of combat. He’s dedicated his life to the subject of Goblins, to the point that he pays little attention to anything else, and his cadence is consistently one-note and uninflected. He comes off, to me at least, as a neuro-divergent individual, and before anybody calls me out on that, I’m on the autism spectrum myself. I know what I’m talking about. His main story arc is about opening up and accepting other people into his life, and he’s constantly AND I MEAN CONSTANTLY having basic social interactions explained to him, and yet based on the way he’s presented in contrast to other characters, I seriously doubt any of this was intentional.
The rest of the cast is just as strange. Priestess(yes, everyone’s name is just a description of their role in the story, don’t ask me why) is a young maiden whose life Orcbolg saves once, so she dedicates her life to following him. She’s not useless, thankfully, and she contributes to the story in meaningful ways, but she also spends a ton of dialogue either singing Orcbolg’s praises or describing to the audience in detail whatever he’s going through at any given time.
He also meets an Elf, who despite being over 2000 years old is extra as hell and over-reacts to literally everything, showing no signs of the experience, wisdom or maturity that a character who’s that old should have; A Dwarf who I’m pretty sure was supposed to have the same kind of bickering dynamic with the Elf that Gimli had with Legolas in Lord of the Rings, but it just comes off as annoying; And a lizard priest who has a somewhat Native American design, talks with over-exaggerated importance like a phony wiseman and calls upon his velociraptor ancestors in battle. The less said about Sword Maiden the better.
In his peripheral, you have a large-breasted childhood friend whose purpose is to spend half of her screen time in a state of TV-safe nudity, exposit about Orcbolg’s backstory and be in danger in the story’s climax, and a receptionist at the Guild’s front desk who, like literally every female character who survives long enough to do so, falls madly in love with Orcbolg. If you’re not seeing the problem with all this, these are the kind of characters who could only work in the realm of satire. They’re vicious unintentional parodies of popular fantasy anime tropes, and they wouldn’t stick out as badly as they do if the series they were in wasn’t so damn gritty and grim-dark in it’s presentation.
In theory, Orcbolg does have a pretty good character arc... As I mentioned above, he starts out as a loner, but over time is forced to open up and accept the help of others, and his arc does pay off in a two episode finale that is, I will admit, pretty damn fun to watch. The last two episodes are easily the highlight of the series, even though they start with Orcbolg confronting a weakness he has that... I’m pretty sure was never set up or foreshadowed before that moment? A much bigger problem with his arc, however, is that more than half of it is delivered to us through exposition over the course of the series, and that’s not a unique issue. This series is loaded with exposition. I wouldn’t be surprised in more than eighty percent of the spoken dialogue in this show wasn’t explanations of why people are who they are, how the world works, how situations work, how Goblins work, what is specifically happening in any given battle, etc. It's extremely tell-over-show, it's inconsistent in tone, and it doesn't feel mature enough to handle the subject matter that it took a risk on. All in all, it's pretty lame.
Goblin Slayer is widely available from Funimation. A movie called Goblin’s Crown is also currently available, and a second season has been announced to air in the near future. The manga and translated light novels are available from Yen Press.
There's an expectation that Goblin Slayer induces rage or disgust in people, but I can't find that kind of passion in me towards it. Aside from the final two episodes and the design of the Goblins, there’s really nothing I like about it, and some of the story decisions it made were downright reprehensible. So why don’t I hate it? Why doesn’t it boil my blood, like so many similar shows? Well, it boils down to something that's common among creatively minded people. For example, Stephen King basically disowned Rage, a terrible book about a school shooting that wound up allegedly inspiring real world violence, and that’s the kind of story Goblin Slayer strikes me as. I can’t hate it, because it feels genuinely like the product of a novice writer with an itch to challenge himself with dark and edgy material. I don't think there's any consensus on why the creator hides his identity publicly, but I wouldn't be surprised if that had something to do with it.
Personally, it’s not the most putrid anime I’ve ever seen by far, but I can't recommend it to anybody. I give Goblin Slayer a 1/10.