Maoyuu Maou Yuusha

[Kraco]

This episode worked better than the first one. Perhaps it was due to the focus being reduced from saving the whole world to raising the standard of living in one village, which is a lot more concrete, less ambiguous, and far more reachable as a goal. Of course the very solid handling of the big and little sisters didn't hurt at all, either. All in all I found myself simply enjoying the exceedingly smooth interaction of the couple, made possible by Koshimizu and Fukuyama's impressive skills.

The head maid got the perfect voice actor for lecturing people.

[David75]

Smirked at "Everyone loves maids"

[Ryllharu]

The lap pillow request, but furthermore the "Okay, done!" line delivered so enthusiastically such that it surprised her caused an involuntary bark of laughter from me.

I thought that the demon lord's specific focus was in macroeconomics, but she appears to be skilled at education as a whole, with a passion for economics, the same way the chief maid is skilled at a number of things (such as leading armies!!), but focuses her passions on etiquette and the maid profession.

Of course I liked the fact that the maid made a point from the start that a serf will always be a serf, unless they want to better themselves and rebel against the fate laid out before them.
With apologies to Bioshock, "A lady choses, a serf obeys."
Amusing that Tomatsu Haruka plays that role twice in currently airing series (Older Sister Maid and Morgiana from Magi). I also appreciate that the demon lord opted to give her a crash course in literacy before throwing her into her main instruction group. Is she grooming a suitable successor/backup to the chief maid?


What I think stood out for me the most was the scene in the forest with the little sister maid and the hero, with him lamenting on how useless he felt compared to the demon lord. For all his talents of magic (the latter teleport was all him, was it not?), sword fighting, and personal physical aptitude, he already realized that his particular focus and passion is purely martial, and good for killing, not saving anything. He did not dwell on it.

I look forward to seeing how he intends to become a match in the realm of peace for his 'contracted partner for eternity'.

[Dark Dragon]

This episode touched on many interesting subjects.

The first was resistance to change, no matter how potentially beneficial. The village elder refused the Maou suggestion and prefer to stick with the old way. It's a sort of "while it's bad, i don't want to risk it becoming worse" sort of mentality. It wasn't until the Maou gained some leverage by becoming the teachers of the village's "nobility" that her suggestions was heeded. This touch on the need of playing political games in order to achieve your goals. I expect for this particular subject to come back many times in the series.

I agree that the sister maids scene was done very well. While people like Hero see a distinction between slaves and serfs, the head maid offers an outsider perspective when she doesn't feel the need to distinguish the two. When it comes down to it, Serfs doesn't have any freedom to choose. The head maid ultimatum to the sisters did two things in my opinion. First, it establish the ability to choose as the thing that separate human from lower life forms. Second is that she told the sisters to apologize after chastising them for their action. They did what they need to in desperation, but that still doesn't make it right. The older sister ability to recognize when a choice is given and the willingness to accept the consequences of their action made that a powerful scene for me.

I also agree that the hero scene is good. It's pretty much established that the hero is not very smart, but he is definitely perceptive. He's rational enough to admit fault in logic he believed all his life and practical enough to simply move on.

[Kraco]

I also agree that the hero scene is good. It's pretty much established that the hero is not very smart, but he is definitely perceptive. He's rational enough to admit fault in logic he believed all his life and practical enough to simply move on.

Surely half of the reason he continues to go along is the fact Maou enchanted him. But the other half is what you said, plus the simple fact he really is a hero and wants to do good, even if he's not right now sure how.

[Yukimura]

The head maid ultimatum to the sisters did two things in my opinion. First, it establish the ability to choose as the thing that separate human from lower life forms. Second is that she told the sisters to apologize after chastising them for their action. They did what they need to in desperation, but that still doesn't make it right. The older sister ability to recognize when a choice is given and the willingness to accept the consequences of their action made that a powerful scene for me.

Reading this made me chuckle a bit as I don't feel that stealing food to survive is 'wrong' but after some introspection it struck me that what the maid was saying was that difference between humans and 'lower' life forms is that humans have the ability to choose to suffer and die for an abstract concept while animals never make the choice to suffer or die except for pragmatic reasons.

The same force at work in making starving people feel guilty about stealing food to survive is the one at work when honoring people who sacrifice something of themselves, up to and including their life, for the sake of something outside themselves. Thinking about it in that context it becomes a lot harder to hold the position that stealing is okay when you're starving even if the person you're taking from won't miss what you're taking, but at the same time it seems like a pretty hard sell that every individual should feel willing to give up their life in the service of an ideal when that ideal doesn't necessarily enhance their life at all.

The maid's logic seems to deny any fundamental value to humanity beyond our capacity to choose to die for an ideal. However, this makes the assertion that we are 'superior' to animals spurious Only humans have the abstract thinking capabilities necessary to conjure up an abstract principle and assign it a 'value' above the 'value' of being alive. Since only humans can conceive of and judge behaviors using this value system it seems circular to assume that non-human behaviors are 'inferior' because they don't seem to adhere to a human spawned value system.

[Kraco]

They were insects because they sneaked into the mansion's barn and stole food, just like vermin, and then didn't choose to face the consequences but like animals wanted to flee. The head maid is clearly the kind of person who only helps those who help themselves. Plus she's honourable, as expected of Maou's servant, so she won't count criminal activity as one helping oneself. Of course you can read however much you want into it, but is she really such a complicated person, even if this ought to be a semi-complicated series if it's about reforming the societies of the whole world?

[Buffalobiian]

I thought Head Maid explained herself already. She dislikes people who can't or don't choose their own fate. The serfs didn't want to be serfs, but also didn't take any initiative to step up from their social class.

[Dark Dragon]

Reading this made me chuckle a bit as I don't feel that stealing food to survive is 'wrong' but after some introspection it struck me that what the maid was saying was that difference between humans and 'lower' life forms is that humans have the ability to choose to suffer and die for an abstract concept while animals never make the choice to suffer or die except for pragmatic reasons.

I feel that stealing food to survive is definitely wrong. It is something done out of necessity, but you are still taking something that belong to another. I ask myself if i would take such a course of action if face with such a situation, and the answer is yes. I would still however have to accept that my action is out of self-interest and will deprive someone else of whatever i am stealing.

It is arrogant to assume that an actions is justified just because it stem from desperation. In a situation where you're stealing from another person who is also starving and the choice is between your survival or theirs, can that also be seen as right? Is it only "right" if you're stealing from those who "won't miss" whatever you're taking? Is it right then to steal from those who have no relation to your situation, but is an acceptable target because they are successful?

Abstract ideals are precisely why human are above animal. Things like Ethics, Rationality and Compassion can all be considered abstract ideals. We have a greater capacity and potential for impact in this world. Whether that impact can be seen as negative or positive depends on the person actions and who you ask in regard to the impact of those actions.

Your capacity as a human being to understand abstract concepts is precisely what enable you to have a certain amount of understanding for animals and denounce these abstract concepts. If you were like an animal and think precisely on the basis of pragmatism then there is absolutely no reason to feel sympathy for any other species besides our own unless they somehow directly support our need for survival.

[Yukimura]

@Dark Dragon: I'm sorry if I offended any human supremacist feelings you might have but the primary thrust of my argument was not meant to take a position on the issue of whether humans are or are not superior to everything else in the universe in any objective or even subjective sense, but to say that the concept that humans are superior (and thus are subject to expectations that animals aren't ) is itself an abstract concept which humans came up with and kept around because it was useful to humanity as a species to give individuals a reason to put the community above themselves. While I think this is a useful abstraction for human interactions I don't think it's necessarily meaningful outside of the scope human interactions and thus universal.

For example, I would agree that stealing, even when desperate, warrants an apology or some other expression of remorse in the abstract morality that most of humanity can mostly agree on (thanks to the expansion of Western ideology throughout the world). However at the same time I think that what truly matters is not that a thief apologizes to the person they stole from but that the victim, and perhaps the greater community as well, have their feelings of disquiet about the theft assuaged in some way, however that needs to happen. It seems to me that the maid lives by a similarly flexible morality system considering she only cared about the 'serious crime' of runaway serfs until she decided to philosophy bomb the uneducated serfs into trading their freedom for the hope that the the demon queen would be a better master than their former landlord. Of course from our perspective we know the demon queen will be a gracious and wonderful employer who will enrich the lives of the children but if you step back from what we know about the demon queen and take a more cynical stance it looks like the maid just convinced the children that it was in their best interest to exchange their dubious freedom for a new master and the maid and picked up two cheap laborers to help her with chores for very little effort.

[Dark Dragon]

Sorry if that last post came off as aggressive, it wasn't meant to be. I'm not offended at all by what you saying, i was merely stating a fact that human in general have a greater capacity than animals to accomplish things if they wish to do so. I'm not saying that human are superior in any sense, simply that we have the ability to impact this world in a much greater scope than any animal can. A large a part of this is due to our ability to recognize and understand abstract concepts.

In that sense then, the ability to choose to suffer and die for an abstract idea has certain merits.

Which goes back to what i feel the maid really presented them with, a choice. Before her proposal, their only course of action was to continue stealing and hiding out until they reach the capital and somehow create a life for themselves. This course of action is solely for the purpose of survival with little regards for anything else, so in a sense this is the same line of thought an animal would use. I'm pretty sure that the older sister had no idea they would be treated so well. I think they she must've had a fairly good opinion of them after how well they were treated up to that point. The older sister choice then become an unstable future on the run or what could be a fairly stable life as maids. Up to this point, they lived as serfs so a life as servant is a step up (from what i know of medieval culture anyways). The important thing i took away from that scene wasn't so much the job offer at the end. What stood out was when the maid admonish them for their actions. This created a choice for the two to choose between accepting abstract concept such as wrong and right (the human thing to do) or continue focusing on surviving (the life of an insect).

[Kraco]

You are looking at it from a little too far away, Yuki. It was not some wandering knight who was spending a night at a local lord's mansion and happened to apprehend two runaway serfs. And then, thinking everybody has their preset place in the great feudal system, felt pity for them and suggested their join the random lord's service staff instead of return to their original lord who must have been horrible for them to run away in the first place.

She has been Maou's head maid for who knows how many years. Of course she knows Maou will be a good master. And since she's proud to be the head maid, she obviously considers maid a fine profession. This is what she thought and planned immediately when she saw the girls, I bet. But she was spartan enough to want to see if there's any spirit and decency in them or if they are through and through escaped slaves and will never be anything more.

[Yukimura]

@Dark Dragon the biggest beef I have with the position that the show, and I think you as well, seem to be advocating is that it is trying to say that accepting stability and predictability even if you're a slave or have no opportunity in life makes one superior to those who pursue freedom even if it brings uncertainty. It's saying that being a cog in a machine that you know is going somewhere is better than being your own machine and not knowing where you're going to end up but deciding for yourself where you're heading. I don't think it's necessarily an incorrect view, but I also actively reject the notion that it's necessarily the correct view. I don't think it's good to encourage people to content themselves with being mere cogs in someone else's machine to the extent that I feel the maid and queen are doing because they think their 'machine' is superior to anything the humans could possibly come up with.


@Kraco: I think you are giving the queen/maid more credit than they deserve just because they're the next best thing to tautologically 'good' because they're the protagonists. The queen and maid seem to be chock full of their own moral superiority to the entirety of humanity and they are playing the role of the noble white man stretching out his hand to the poor savage to destroy everything that he is and remake him in the white man's image. While the circumstances of the show will undoubtedly make it seem like the demons are always in the right and the humans are always in the wrong it still rings hollow to me because it's based on the same sort of colonial era European arrogance that the morality of a technologically superior culture is inherently better than that of more primitive culture. It may be dressed up nicely by eliminating any indications of failings or shortcomings within the technologically superior culture but that doesn't mean we have to choose not to see it for what it really is.


The maid shit all over the older girl's hope and pride by insulting her for running away from her life as a serf without a concrete and well thought out plan, but she doesn't acknowledge the fact that if the girl and boy hadn't worked up the courage to leave their serf life in the first place they never would have chanced upon the wonderful and benevolent queen and her stuck up maid. They probably would have lived out their lives as meaningless serfs on whatever random fief they came from and never had a chance to make something of themselves, but according to to the maid they're still insects until they beg her to make them what she considers human.

In my view the kids demonstrated plenty of agency by leaving a life that was probably quite survivable but had no chance for a meaningful future and they earned their human dignity by refusing to be pigeonholed into servitude just because society said that was their only option.

Also, the maid coughed disdain all over them for their plan to go to the capital and beg and scrape to make a living, then turns around and more or less demands that they beg the demon queen for assistance instead or else they'll be turned in. I'll grant that it was nice and unnecessary for the demon queen to accept the kids request to serve in exchange for help becoming more self sufficient but the only real difference between what they were planning to do and what actually happened is that they ended up begging someone for help before they got to the city.

[Kraco]

They are living medieval times, apparently under a feudal system to boot. I don't know how virtuous you are expecting them to be, but clearly Maou and Hero are more so than most. You are also badmouthing Maou far too much; if her goal is to end the endless war and replace the war dependent economics, I don't know how that's as bad as you make it sound like by saying she's trying to cram her own values down everybody else's throats. Some feudal countries of the old had the famous system in place that if a serf escaped their fief to a citystate and managed to avoid trouble and capture for a year, they would become free citizens of the city. If this land Maou chose has such a law in place, those two might in fact become free people in addition to gaining education and experience in Maou's service. No matter how you look at it, it must be a better choice than walking heedlessly into a random big city they know nothing of and hope for the best.

[Dark Dragon]

You're reaching a little bit too hard, i'm not advocating anything.

You should reread your argument again since you're contradicting yourself. You're saying that the show is advocating stability and predictability over freedom, but also complain that the queen and maids are showing "white man superiority" by imposing their superiority.

The thing they're doing to "impose" their superiority is to convince the village to take up this new method of farming, which is completely foreign to the villagers. They're trying to convince the villagers to give up predictability and stability for a chance at a better life and more freedom. They're doing precisely the opposite of what you're suggesting the show is advocating, but then you're also suggesting what they're doing is wrong.

First of all, the children are girls. I think you would've notice that if you bother just watching the show instead of spending so much time being indignant of the "message" that you think an anime is trying to advocate.

You also completely missed the point of the scene involving the maid and children. She is admonishing them because their course of action essentially relies on the kindness of strangers. Their course of action was simple and without any forethought to what might be ahead. At no point during the conversation did she admonish them for running away, only their plan for what to do after escaping.

They have no belonging, no plan, and no skills. This isn't just "uncertain" future, because they're certainly guaranteed to end up as beggars unless some miracle happens. You can throw the world freedom around as much as you want, but beggars in the medieval period realistically have little more freedom than slaves.

Your earlier post also said that there's merits in pragmatism and it isn't necessarily inferior to abstract ideas like freedom. The maid presented the children with two choices. The head maid obviously thought she's presenting them a choice between a life where they give up immediate freedom for greater potential in the future or a path for an immediate false sense of freedom, but realistically give the children very little choices.

We can look at it from the older sister point of view and forgo any knowledge of these people except that 1) They were willing to help serfs (this is an era where serfs and slaves are treated little better than animals) 2) They seem to be fairly wealthy 3) The maid seem to have strict conducts for behavior. She is then given the choice of enter their employment (It must be noted that in this society, servants are considered to be above serfs) and give up her new-found freedom, which consist of leaving their home, cold, wet and hungry and not a particularly bright future to look forward to. It can then be argue that she made the practical choice by ensuring that the two of them will have shelter, food and clothing while giving up an abstract idea like freedom.

[Kraco]

It can then be argue that she made the practical choice by ensuring that the two of them will have shelter, food and clothing while giving up an abstract idea like freedom.

It would be quite an insult to all normally hired servants to suggest they lost their freedom by getting employed. It's a vastly different thing compared to a serf forced to serve in the landlord's manor, for example. It's just a job like any other. They are escaped serfs, that is, outlaws, who were offered respectable work on a silver platter.

[shinta|hikari]

And no one in this world dislikes maids.

[Dark Dragon]

It would be quite an insult to all normally hired servants to suggest they lost their freedom by getting employed. It's a vastly different thing compared to a serf forced to serve in the landlord's manor, for example. It's just a job like any other. They are escaped serfs, that is, outlaws, who were offered respectable work on a silver platter.

I put it in that manner in order to be consistent with Yukimura argument. I don't believe that they are giving up much freedom at all in the situation, but he certainly seems to think so. I already made note earlier in my post that a position as a servant is far superior than the life they had as serfs.

[Yukimura]

I will concede that my argument is stated in a contradictory way with respect the whole 'stability and order' issue and I think it's because I failed to properly grasp for myself let alone relate in my post the precise parameters my disquiet. I don't perceive the demons point of view to be 'we favor any stability and order over individual freedom and every other way of doing things is a dumb animal' instead I perceive it as something like 'we favor our way of doing things over anything any human has ever come up with, and we expect our ways to lead to prosperity, and those who don't agree with us are [insert passive mildly insulting word] , but we'll try to help the [insert passive mildly insulting word] people anyway because we're so noble and selfless'.

My problem with the demons stems primarily from the impression I've gotten that they think they have it all figured out and are incapable of being wrong in any debate with humans or human cultures. My hostility towards them and their positions stems from that sense of arrogance and self-righteousness rather than true disagreement with their stated goals and positions on their merits alone. I do not actually believe they are wrong about the benefits of their intended improvements to society or that the children would have been better off not taking the 'deal' in the objective sense, but the delivery method of their kindness sets off my warning bells for arrogant ivory tower idealist/holier than thou missionary types and I react rather vehemently to such.

Given time I am expectant that we'll see the demons simply living by their ideals and winning people over through demonstrations of the superiority of their way of thinking to everyday life without lectures or sermons and hopefully the sense of their arrogance will fade away and I can just accept that they are Lawful Good without any misgivings. That said I would be especially happy if we see something where the superiority of the demons positions is challenged in some meaningful way (i.e not just some obviously selfish lord trying to defend the status quo b/c it benefits him) and they have to actually struggle to come up with ways to convince people that theirs is a better way in the face of credible opposing ideology. I would also like to see the hero being something other than a passive observer at some point but as it stands now I'm not holding out too much hope for that.

[Dark Dragon]

While i do think that your view on the story is a bit too cynical, however i can see where you're coming from.

There are a few hints so far that might assuage your concerns. In the first episode, the demon queen mentions that the demon side is equally guilty as the human for the continuation of the war. This means that her action doesn't necessary stem from any innate sense of demon superiority. I think it's the same for the head maid, but in the sense that she consider it to be a profession to take pride in. In a way she feels insulted that people who are essentially doing the same job she is (faithfully serving a master) are so incapable of "grasping their fortune".

As far as the hero neutrality goes, the scene at the end of the second episode is simply him contemplating his usefulness in this situation. We have the demon queen doing her as much as she can to change the villager's mind and even the children are studying and training. He find himself incapable of doing much other than swinging a sword, which is a dilemma many warriors faces in time of peace. I would suggest that this mean the show is very aware of how insignificant the hero role is currently and we will probably see a shift to where he becomes a proactive force in changing the world.