English Dub Review: Helck “The Power of Heroes”

OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)

In his pursuit of answers about the demons, Helck meets Azudra, who explains the greater complexities of the Demon Empire and the nuances of the perspective of demons. When he returns home, he finds that many don’t care about learning more about demons, as well as the newly Awakened “Heroes” that will lead the charge against future demon attacks.

OUR TAKE

We continue Helck’s walk down memory lane with a surprisingly substantive episode that answers a few questions. For one, we see the beginnings of his empathy towards demons as he meets Azudra, someone who I didn’t know he had previous familiarity with, and learns more about demons as a people. And knowing what we do about why he eventually came to despise humans as a whole, naturally him telling people about what he’s learned only leads to them preparing to fight more demons. Remember that this whole flashback is going to go on for another few episodes (which is what drags it down another point or two for me), so we’ll be seeing more of how Helck gradually loses hope and love for the people around him. With this new perspective that demons are just another type of person, seeing HIS people see and treat them as monsters is going to be at odds with that new knowledge. I’d make a modern real world parallel but honestly this show is kinda beneath that. Either way, this isn’t helped by them having unlocked Awakening to turn humans into essentially demon killing machines, which in the present we’ve seen only become more advanced and harder to combat.

If I had to guess about how the remainder of this flashback will shake out , it’s looking like Helck will either kill Cless before he becomes an Awakened to lead to the shock of his return later, OR it goes the other way and Helck kills Cless AFTER becoming Awakened, but with the same outcome. We may also see that all of these friends Helck makes as a mercenary also become Awakened, which would certainly play into the reasons why he wrote his entire species off by the beginning of the story proper. And considering what we’ve seen happen to them IN the present day, we can hardly blame him. Still, maybe it’s because I’ve seen plenty of “demons are the good guys and humans are the bad guys” subversive takes that this doesn’t really hit as hard for me as it might want to. It works well enough in its own context, which I guess is all that’s required at the end of the day, but it’s not exactly the novel twist it may have thought it was. Ah well, just another nine of these to go. And another three or four more of this flashback specifically! Perhaps by the end of that we can finally get back to the main story and have this go somewhere substantial.