Episode 2 "Long Day of the Trainee Volunteer Soldier"
With "ERASED's" Satoru and "Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash," some part of me is starting to feel like this is the season of introspective male protagonists.
But this is not a bad thing despite how terrible it sounds.
The second episode of "Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash" is much more engaging and beautifully crafted than episode one. While I was intrigued by episode one, episode two has offered a theme that is worth sticking around to discover for at least 12 more episodes. That theme involves humanity and our ability to commit violent acts for "survival."
The opening scene this week was impressively subtle, giving a taste of characterization about how the people of the guild are coping in this world that they're not sure is the one that they belong in. It gives you just a taste of this idea about memory that the series is building.
Do we really remember who we are and what we were? Or is everything just a fabrication? Does any of it matter in the present?
The best two scenes of this episode however involve the guild's first killing of the goblin and then Haruhiro's brief thought about how they're still poor even after doing something that none of them wanted to do.
It's actually quite impressive for a fantasy series to approach the subjects of survival and "necessary evil." Or so, I have probably only seen this theme once before and it was not to this magnitude. "Sword Art Online" examines the kind of violence that appears "necessary" through the specific the Laughing Coffin guild and all the many deaths that took place in both the MMO and the real world because of the way the game was designed.
But "Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash" diverges in one key difference which is - the guild cannot eat if they cannot kill these goblins. The recognition of that dynamic makes this week's episode feel much more interesting than your run of the mill fantasy series.
The stakes are much higher for the guild to learn to kill things that they believe to be real.
Overall, the second episode of "Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash" is the reason why I believe most anime takes two episodes to get into. It usually takes two episodes to expose the important thematic elements through character and plot devices. In this case, if this series is going to really explore the struggle to survive in a world that seems familiar and both not, "Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash" has set itself apart from almost every other series of the genre in recent years.
