My fear that How A Realist hero Rebuilt the Kingdom was going to walk us back through crop rotations wasn’t too far off the mark as this week our new king, Souma, has Liscia ride them out to a cotton field in order to explain cash crops to her. A conversation that probably could have taken place more efficiently inside his office and why are the King and Princess of a country allowed to just ride around without an escort?
Anyway, Realist Hero makes the point that you can’t eat cotton in perhaps the most long winded way possible before outlining the basics of trade and what happens when there is surplus supply before we switch gears to Souma wanting to recruit some more staff.
What sort of staff?
Staff with talent.
Um…
No particular talent. As his incredibly long speech to the entire population essential tells them that if you the best at anything just rock up and tell me. By the way I’ll pay you a lot of money if you actually are.
The realist hero may have bitten off more than he can chew here.
I’m trying to imagine the type of person who would actually answer that kind of advertising campaign. Essentially the person who thinks they are all that and usually are all talk with no ability to actually produce anything.
It seems weird that when Souma is trying to introduce some fairly specific economic reforms in Realist Hero that he isn’t more specific around the types of skills needed to assist in this process. Research and data analysis would be incredibly useful to start with (particularly if he’s ever going to get out from underneath that perpetual pile of papers on his desk). Having representatives from the different industries would also probably help him out.
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But hey, why be specific when you can have a bunch of people on mass just show up expecting a big pay-day. Nothing could possibly go wrong with that plan.
I think it was during Souma’s speech that I finally realised the main problem Realist Hero is going to face going forward. Realists know that not every problem has a solution. Perhaps the kingdom is in too dire a position to be saved without external support. That won’t be where the story goes but it is a more realistic view than what Souma presented at the end of this episode.
The other problem that kind of occurred to me while watching this episode was that Liscia, despite having a bit of a spunky personality initially, has already simply become the girl who stands and looks impressed while Souma explains things to her.
Doing this under the guise that one day he’s going to not be king anymore and Liscia might be the leader doesn’t change the fact that they’ve more or less turned this potentially interesting female character in an early Dr Who companion. That is on paper Liscia looks like she might be a strong, female character but the plot has already sidelined her in favour of the protagonist.
Outside of that, this episode also introduce Souma to magic. His specific magic power is apparently to put his consciousness into objects and so he magics up three quills to make his work go faster. I guess that’s a practical application for an anime power.
Two episodes in an I’m very on the fence with Realist Hero and whether I’ll continue through with watching this one weekly. Episode three will be my decider and maybe this one would be better just to binge at the end of the season or maybe just pass on altogether.
Images from: How a Realist Hero Rebuilt the Kingdom. Dir. T Watanabe. J.C.Staff. 2021
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Karandi James
Are all isekai shows created by the same person? I ask because the character designs are totally indistinguishable from each other. It doesn’t matter what silly title you give them, they could all be interchangeable with one another and nobody would notice.
Anyway, thanks for watching these show so I don’t have to! 😉 😛
I still enjoy isekai shows and while there are a lot of similarities there’s always a bit of joy in uncovering the identity of a new show.
This summer is not an outstanding anime season. Realist Hero is the kind that should have had me in its hand, rather like Spice and Wolf did. It doesn’t.
I’m crawling back into my Slime cave.
There’s still a few shows to come out and there’s enough decent shows, if not amazing.
Thanks for the heads up about Realist Hero. It sounds a bit on the boring side. Maybe I’ll skip this one.
It so far has not been super impressive. Could get better but there’s plenty of other titles this season.