The Master of Ragnarok & Blesser of Einherjar Episode 4: Is Crop Rotation Really The Best They Can Do?

With the majority of this episode being kind of chatty filler and backstory before the conflict kicks off, I had plenty of time to wonder why so many anime in historical settings focus on the introduction of crop rotation. Any ideas?

This has happened a few times now (admittedly I don’t watch a lot of historical anime) where a protagonist from the future, or someone from a different culture is interacting with a less sophisticated one, and for whatever reason to show off their advanced knowledge they devise a system of crop rotation. I’ll admit crop rotation is a lovely idea and we do need to thank it for a lot of things, but when you think about the myriad of other developments that could be equally beneficial, it makes me wonder why this one is the one we come back to again and again.

And the Ragnarok faces the issue of introducing the idea to fill some time early on in the episode, but it doesn’t really want to become a farming anime and so we quickly just leave people to it and move on. At least Maoyu had the decency to make the idea a central part of the ongoing developing plot. It kind of made it feel more like it was necessary rather than feeling like a tacked on aspect just to point out that the main character does in fact have some knowledge.

But forget all of that, or at least so that anime says after crop rotations, naked girl in the room getting rejected, pep talk from hero boy, naked girl declaring she won’t give up, and finally we reach minute 15 where suddenly we need to get serious because the Lightning Clan are going to attack. You know, the clan we heard about last week when that random just kind of walked into the celebration and then seemed to agree to some shady deal with the temple. Anyway, he’s apparently an unstoppable one-man army who for whatever reason still takes his army but only uses the strategy of charge straight ahead, so I guess we’ll find out how the wolf clan will beat him soon. I mean, they might change things up and have the wolf clan lose but then I’m not sure where the plot of this has left to go.

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Thanks for reading.

Karandi James