English Dub Review: An Archdemon’s Dilemma: How to Love Your Elf Bride “The Quieter They Are, The More Devastatingly Scary They Are When They’re Angry”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

Zagan and Nephy continue to adjust to cohabitating together, with Zagan even showing Nephy the basics on how magic in this world works. But before they can get too into it, Holy Knights arrive to capture Zagan, among them Chastille Lillqvist, the girl Zagan saved previously, who is reluctant to capture him but feels cornered because of her society’s views on sorcerers. Nephy intervenes, revealing she actually has great magical power, and later explains that she was feared by other elves because of it, but then was expected to defend them when they were attacked. Refusing to defend the people who ostracized her, she instead let herself be captured, but still blames herself for the fates of the others. Zagan tells her to basically get over it, which makes her feel better.

OUR TAKE

Hot damn, we’re already a quarter of the way through episode count and it feels like no time has passed at all! I mean, that’s mainly because we got a double stuffed premiere last week that gave us the bare minimum establishing plots to lay the ground work for everything else to come. We met our two main love interests, see how their unique living situation began, and even set up some future plots by hinting at some other characters to come. And we begin paying that off a bit this week as we dedicate a good portion of the episode to Chastille Lillqvist, who is someone that we did technically meet last time, but is getting some proper development here. It seems her getting saved by a sorcerer like Zagan did not go all that well when she explained it, leaving her with little option than working with them to capture him for their own cause. This helps at least flesh out the idea of how ostracized Sorcerers are in this word, mainly due to the amount of power they possess, where even selfless acts like saving someone’s act are seen as frowned upon if a sorcerer is involved in the saving.

We can’t quite say that Nephy is a sorcerer yet, but she’s clearly someone who has been ostracized for her adept in magical ability, and taken matters into her own control at some point, if only briefly. And now we see what it’s like when she is forced to cut loose with all of that power, though I have little doubt that there are greater heights to that power down the road once she gets a handle on it all. In general, there seems to be a recurring theme of the more powerful magic users being threatened, feared, and manipulated, despite the ones we’ve seen or met so far are actually plenty decent people. I have no doubt that we’ll meet some legitimately bad people with lots of power in this show sooner rather than later, but it’s interesting that we have these common traits to help solidify a connection between our two leads. There’s also that knight, who is probably going to have a more prominent role later on, the bird girl from last week, and another girl who will all probably join their group. Basically, we have the makings of a big non-harem coming our way, but we’ll have to wait until next week to be sure.