What’s this?
A player falls asleep, only to wake up in the world of the game they were playing. Arc has the powerful abilities and weapons of his character, but there is only one problem: he also looks like that character. An adventure in a fantastic new land awaits him, if he can just get used to being a walking skeleton.
Skeleton Knight in Another World is based on Ennki Hakari‘s light novel series and airs on Crunchyroll Thursdays.
How was the first episode?
Nicholas Dupree
Classification:
If any other show this season gets off to a worse start than Skeleton Knight, I’d be terribly surprised. It is not “just” that this premiere begins, from the first literal second, with an attempted rape sequence. It’s also not “just” that said scene is gratuitous and directed with an eye for audience arousal, and is a cheap attempt to set up our hero’s paper bad guys for the kill. It’s just that this would be a gross and horrible opening for a dark fantasy like goblin slayerbut it’s a truly lousy first impression for a release that’s 90% dumb shit with our skeletal player protagonist, Himbo, making his way through a standard swamp isekai setup.
Because that’s pretty much what this episode is about. Our hero, Arc, wakes up with a skeleton body and magical armor, realizes he’s been isekai’d, and basically stumbles into a tutorial quest with his mastered skills, laughing the whole way. And while the actual story is generic as hell, Arc himself makes a pretty good introduction. He’s just excited to be in this new world, he doesn’t think to ask any questions about how it happened, and he goes through each new discovery with an almost contagious enthusiasm for fantasy life. He still slows down too much when he’s shuffling his various video game abilities, and the world itself is devoid of anything interesting, but I could honestly imagine myself following this literal jerk for a few episodes, especially if the OP’s wacky animation slapstick is any promise. honest.
But all that goodwill died once we got back to the scene of the rape. It’s such lazy, shameless writing that it stops the episode dead in its tracks. It exists solely to create some undeniably evil bandits for our hero to bravely kill, allowing him to take lives without guilt (literally, the show admits this right after) and earning the affections of the waif he saved. It’s the same kind of pirate and exploitative garbage that appeared to ruin sword art online every season like clockwork, and it’s especially out of place in what is otherwise a goofy comedy. Also, it gets even worse when we see the attack from Arc’s perspective and we know that he could have stepped in sooner, but he was busy worrying about his chances in a PVP fight and literally waited until the last second. Then, once it’s over, we’re back to the silly fun with The Bone Boi as he celebrates his new life in this fantasy world, making the whole thing feel like a bad joke.
So kudos to history for ensuring that I won’t bother with more. You took whatever charms or diversions you managed to generate and threw them away. If other viewers have more of a tolerance for this kind of trashy writing, maybe it’s worth following up and seeing if this is a one-time aberration. But for me, there is nothing interesting or special enough in the rest of this show that I would risk seeing another scene like that.
Rebecca Silverman
Classification:
Do you have a repeating isekai story to tell that draws heavily from four hundred other similar series? Need a way to spice up and draw attention to your project? Well then, may I suggest not using rape to do that? Skeleton Knight in Another World‘s The first episode opens with a graphic (or at least graphic enough) rape scene that returns almost shot-for-shot at around fourteen minutes. It establishes that our hero, who thankfully isn’t the rapist, is a good guy, because he saves Lady Lauren and her maid Rita, but there doesn’t seem to be any reason to show us the exact same scene of sexual violence twice in the same room. episode. The opening salvo seems like a cheap deal to make viewers pay attention, and while I remember the same scene happening in the source material, that’s not an excuse. If your story isn’t interesting enough to draw viewers in without surprising them, maybe you should rethink your plot.
Other than that, the rest of the episode is also a bit shocking, surprisingly bland, that is. Arc, the eponymous skeleton knight, fell asleep playing his game and woke up as his character, only he forgot that he left with the skeleton structure when he was creating it, so now he’s afraid to take off his armor in public. If he wanted to be a bad guy like his bone-related cousin Ainz of Sirwould be ready, but in this story, his character is a holy knight, so the whole skeleton thing is a bit of a problem. So is the fact that everyone sees his ridiculously pretty and powerful armor and assumes he’s gainfully employed, because that armor is all he has and he’s hungry. Watching him try to fit in with an ordinary town is the funniest part of the episode, because he’s making things up as he goes and the townspeople randomly assign him a backstory.
He’s also incredibly excited to have his own isekai experience, though he doesn’t put it that way. Arc is disappointed that his new world seems more medieval than fantasy based on medieval Europe, and any bits of fantasy he can find excites him, whether it’s an elf, an orc, or the fact that he can use magic. . (He never answers why he doesn’t use his fire magic to roast himself some food.) Of course he teleports himself off a cliff trying to figure out how to use it, but it actually sounds good for how this would work. .
If the sexual assault had been left out, this would be a passable show. Not innovative, but bland in a harmless way. But it does have the rape scene and that’s enough to make me say that the best option here is to stay away, because a combination of bland and offensive doesn’t leave much to recommend it.