#gobslay

[thevoid-isthe-onlyone-ican-trust]

Do you think my new roommate will think I am cool and popular? ʕ⁠～ꈍ⁠ᴥ⁠ꈍ⁠ʔ～｡⁠*ﾟ⁠+*⁠.⁠✧

[housespecialfriedrice]

Thanks for the reassurance, Goblin Slayer.

[zaruba-needslove]

Personally rn I feel like this scene would be one of the most underappreciated scene in the anime. Like at first glance, this whole scene btw Gobslay. Spearman and Heavy Warrior was just them talking about girls and stuff, when it's also about them talking about their own aspirations and dreams about becoming an adventurer and them questioning themselves whether or not they really are up for this life...

But then, I guess it might also be because the anime was really moving the plot quite fast, a lot of the original nuances ended up missing... or at least that's what I feel.

Like this scene...

Like unless people read his character well enough, can they figure out the other hidden meaning behind this line? As in, at least... Gobslay was still doing what he's doing rn aka killing goblins... was so that he can let other people be able to (enjoy) becoming an adventurer and go on an adventure.

I like the novel and manga version better tbh

Like... while manga included other younger adventurers besides Priestess, I like how both novel and manga imply that the reason why Gobslay wanted to become an adventurer now, was so that Priestess would be able to continue to become an adventurer.

And that was so sweet.

And this really mean a lot to his character, seriously. Because Priestess was the reason why he started going on his goblin hunt as a 2-man party, and that lead to him party up with Lizard Priest, Dwarf Shaman and High Elf Archer... and then embarking in all these not-quite simple goblin hunts that tied to all sorts of unexpected twists and villains from the Four-Cornered World!

[astroturf-enthusiast]

I'm marinating a fic idea after seeing your gobslay posts- do you think he started transitioning because it would be easier for him to kill goblins that way or did he already start as a child because it was something he knew but could not explain?

You milord have sparked something in my mind-

I think he started to really think about it after the attack on his village. As a kid on a farm he definitely was raised more masculine side anyways and just hadn't gotten to an age where he really knew how to express himself.

I think the horrors of goblins and what happened that day made femininity not only uncomfortable but dangerous. He leaned all the way into masculinity during his training with how he looked, acted, and thought, though didn't actually consider himself trans, even as people started mistaking him for being a guy around town. He hadn't really considered why he never corrected them, nor, why it felt wrong when someone didn't see him that way.

I think the first year he became an adventurer he came across a book detailing Transitioning Through the Ages of Magic and thats when he had a word for it. It was probably only a few months later that he decided it was practical enough to get it done. And he's never really spoken of it since.

Cowgirl was very supportive and the androgynous nature of elven society has High Elf Archer helping him explore gender more personally whenever he tells her

[officialauthorofanotherworld]

some random things i deleted from my book #2

Another informal post, this one'll be pretty short.

origin page: pg. 23

deletion context: unnecessary, basically filler. even if i think its "cool" and shows the liveliness of the guild/makes a point of how many parties are really in here, it's just overall unnecessary imo and i really only wanted to keep it for, well, two reasons: Reason 1: It's a callback to a old dnd campaign I ran, and also a goblin slayer reference. (Xalubisteya was the name of a PC in my Saltmarsh homebrew campaign I DM'd. In another campaign, I played a human fighter named Coile Eisner, so thats the origin of him...)

It's a goblin slayer reference because the party comp is elf - human - dwarf - lizardfolk (yes ik if it was a "full" gobslay reference i'd have another human as a stand-in for priestess)

Reason 2: I wanted a way to show Arthur getting in line in the background, and like i said in reason 1, show the different people standing about, doing various things. that's really it. imo its not a particularly strong excerpt or anything, and can be removed because it isn't really doing much. I figured i could put the stuff regarding arthur getting in line somewhere else if that was all I *really* cared about, so...

Here's the excerpt:

Elsewhere in the guild, a lone lizardfolk woman looked around confused, seemingly lost. A rough-hewn man dressed in simple traveling clothes and a mix of brigandine and leather armor, the selfsame man who had spoken to Beriyl and Taka on the carriage entered the guild and stepped into line quietly. A drunken dwarf loudly argued with their party members about early-morning alcohol consumption. The latter was an amusing display to anyone who overheard it, and went something like this:

In a space amidst the crowd, stood a member of the proud dwarven race. A forge dwarf, some called him. Suited to forge and fire, making home of mountains and caves in equal measure. Currently, he was standing with his chest puffed out, thirstily drinking from a simple leather flask. His garments were plain white and beige clothes of dwarven make, with heat-resistant fibers woven in. This was the dwarvish standard, for most of their clothing. Interestingly, what he was currently wearing seemed more appropriate for a dwarven blacksmith to wear than a dwarven adventurer. His ginger orange beard and hair were well groomed and likely an object of great pride for the man. As he gulped down the contents of his flask, droplets of liquor fell into his beard, but he didn’t seem to mind.

"You’re drinking this early?" One of his companions, an elf, called as she headed over to meet him. Her clothing was truly odd, and made her look like an exotic dancer of some type. It was completely out of place even in an adventurers guild. Compared to her, the dwarvish man’s clothing choice was normal. The dwarf in question grunted, and for a moment, removed the flask from his lips. "Yes, do you have a problem with that?" Then, he was back to drinking.

"Yes!" She cried, snatching the flask away from him. "Hey!" He protested, trying to reach for the flask. Unfortunately for him, the elf had much longer arms than he did, and the flask was quickly taken far from his reach. "Stop getting drunk before we go off on jobs, Torval!" She demanded, holding the flask far above her head. At that, the dwarf’s face grew red and he clenched his fists before bellowing up at her; “You! Give me back the flask, you damned flat-chested, knife-eared wench!" The elf’s eyes widened, and for a brief second she nearly let down the flask. "Damned?! F- flat?! At least I’m not some barrel-chested brute, like you!" For some reason, she did not take issue with the "wench" or “knife-eared” part of his insult.

"Oh, just give it back already!" He cried, jumping up and down and trying to reach for the flask, to no avail. "No! If you can't be responsible with it, you can't have it!" The dwarf scowled up at the elf. "You're not my fuckin' mother! Give me back the damn flask, or I’ll-"

"Now, now." Soothed a deep, sagely voice. A towering lizardfolk laid his massive hands on the shoulders of both the elf and the dwarf. The elf yelped in surprise at the touch, while the dwarf quietly flinched. His hands were rough and intimidating. "Let's all get along, yes?" His voice, while calm, had a forceful air to it. He wanted them to know that they had to get along. Because he wanted them to.

Craning her neck to look up at the lizardfolk who was behind her, he met her gaze with a question. “Hmm. I don’t see Sir Coile. Where is he, I wonder?’ "I don’t know, but what does that matter right now?! Xalu, Torval- he's drunk, already!"

Since the arrival of their lizardfolk friend had caused the elf to let her guard down, the dwarf had managed to snatch back his flask. "As dwarves are won't to be, no?" Xalubisteya toothily smiled, still maintaining his firm grip on their shoulders. "But if he’s drunk, he's a liability, and I don't want-" "I'm a thousand times more useful drunk than you'll ever be sober, Elise. And for your information, I’m not even close to being drunk. Just think of it as a dwarf’s morning coffee and you’ll sleep better.”

He wasn’t wrong. Dwarves could drink a lot. During drinking contests among dwarves, it was not uncommon to see entire taverns drunk dry. In fact, if there was ever any doubt that someone was actually a dwarf, a drinking game would be held. Any real dwarf could drink at least a barrel before feeling anything. As such, one meagre drink was never going to be enough to make any dwarf drunk.

"I don’t need to sleep, Torval. Besides, how many of those have you had?” The elf had a defeated and deadpan expression on her face as she said this, her arms hanging loose at her sides. The dwarf peered over his flask at the elf as if she were insane. “How many flasks?” He raised an eyebrow. “Hate to say it, but just the one.” Trying to conclude the unproductive argument between the two, the lizardfolk firmly chimed in again. "Let's all get along, yes?"

While the dwarf and elf had clearly picked their sides, he was determined to remain impartial. "Xalubisteya,” The dwarf began, turning to his lizardfolk friend. “Doesn’t it speak volumes if a drunk dwarf is more capable than a sober elf?" The elf and the lizardfolk sighed, although for the lizardfolk it was more a gusty huff of hot air that was almost steam-like in nature. “You know elves can’t get drunk, Torval. We’re always ‘sober’.” The elf muttered. Smiling, the dwarf said; “I know! That’s precisely what makes dwarves better than elves!”

Being drunk, or being able to get drunk could be seen as a negative for some, but to dwarves, it was both a blessing and a boon. Of course, while elves were physically incapable of getting drunk, that meant, in theory, they would always beat dwarves at their own pastime; drinking games. Smiling to herself, Elise kept that realization confined to her thoughts.

Elsewhere, as the argument came to an end, Taka found he had been completely wrong. Not even an hour had passed before he found himself face to face with the receptionist.

edited 6-12-24 5:48 PM

ooh, additional fun fact about Coile Eisner:

I was inspired by L. Lawliet and Byleth Eisner. Coile's name is a mix of two things:

Eraldo Coile, one of L. Lawliet's alias' in Death Note, and Byleth Eisner's last name... Eisner.

Hence, Coile Eisner. And i think it's an awesome name. He's a mercenary, proficient with longswords, kinda no-nonsense and stoic, gets creeped out by weird party members and won't hesitate to leave in the middle of the night if he doesn't like you ;D

(some more context is, when i played him my party members, when he died, cut off his head and attached it to their belt.... and then he woke up in the tavern in the original reality they were from, with all the memories of the awful torment they'd put his head through (unspeakable tbvh, it was gross) and said "yeah alright i've had enough of these genuine psychopaths" and ran tf away to a different town so he could keep doing his merc stuff without being near borderline sociopathic dysfunctional freaks who endangered his life at near every turn lol

[bakaiju]

Slayers Omake Chapter 2: Tiny:

Chapter Summary: The Party goes on a peculiar quest that ends in a peculiar way...

Other link: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13104259/15/Slayers

[0o-sam-o0]

GobSlay-san by Dovahgein

[kurara-black-blog]

This might be wrong because I don't have the best of memories and might be remembering something wrong, so read this at your own caution.

People have been wondering about the Goblin Lord probably being alive already in Year One because of the barbarian adventurer, and all I got is that... We don't know what's the life expectancy of goblins.

Goblin Slayer is ~20 in the main series, and ~15 in Year One, so that means the Goblin Lord has been alive for at least about 5 years. We don't know how fast goblins age, but I'd guess it doesn't take more than a year or two, since they depend on numbers. So, 6-7 years.

We also can't tell how long it takes for them to "evolve" into other classes, or if it happens thanks to more experience instead of time. I'm guessing it's with more experience, since we don't see a lot of high class goblins when comparing to the amount of low class "normal" goblins. The Goblin Lord supports that theory by being a cunning goblin, therefore different than the others, so he triggered an "evolution." Shaman Goblins learned to use magic. Hobgoblins probably adapted to (probably cold) areas where they can roam freely (according to an in universe theory).

Another factor is that we don't know how much time passes during the Goblin Lord flashback. It all could be done in a matter of months.

So, I'm guessing the Goblin Lord has been around about 7-9 years.

Now... I can't confirm any of this, and worse, I don't know if that applies to every goblin. Because the class changes the goblin's anatomy, so it might also affect the natural lifespan.

(also... Aren't goblins half human? Or half whatever-humanoid-woman-they-got?)

EDIT: Newer chapters say that Gobslay has been hunting goblins for 10 years. I'm not sure if he's counting the time he spent training, or if he really is 25 (or if it's a translation thing), and I can't ignore the fact his adventures with Priestess took place in one year. But at the end, all that does is confirm that the Gobling Lord has been around for about 7-9 years.

[goblins-worst-nightmare]

Gobslay san by MasonicCurve

[msyuksanh]

30_iguchiyuka_30 / Iguchi Yuka‘s Instagram (2018.10.27) ま！も！な！く！ ゴブリンスレイヤー初のニコ生！ はっじまっるよーーーー！！！！ 男前なお二人、準備万端だよ🙆🏽‍♀️ #鷲崎健さん #梅原裕一郎さん #本当に男前だな！ #ゴブリンスレイヤー #ゴブスレ わたしは#牛飼い娘役です🐮

Very! Soon! The very first Goblin Slayer Nico livestream! It’s gonna staaaart----!!!! These 2 manly guys are ready to go 🙆🏽‍ #WashizakiTakeshi-san #UmeharaYuichiro-san #Theyreallyaresomanly! #GoblinSlayer #GobSlay I play the role of #CowGirl 🐮

[tokai-teio]

ohh!!!!!

Do ya prefer goblin slayer or gobslay chan?

i prefer goblin slayer, but gobslay-chan is very nice too because that sounds like something guild girl would affectionately call him

[animebw]

LONG Reflection: Goblin Slayer

Hoo boy. So. The rational side of my brain just wants to put this show away now that I’ve finished it and forget all about it. Controversy aside, the fact remains that Goblin Slayer just isn’t that good of a show, and I feel it would be better consigned to the dustbin of internet history that given any serious thought. Anything else feels like tempting fate in the worst possible way. But sadly, my worse instincts have won out here. I have not been able to stop thinking about Goblin Slayer ever since I started binge-watching it near the end of the Fall 2018 season, and the conclusions I’ve reached on how it ended up exploding into the big deal it was and the outlook it actually presents are... well, they warrant discussion. More discussion than one of my usual short reflection reviews can do justice to. So in what I hope won’t become a trend anytime soon, I’m instead going to analyze Goblin Slayer in the form of a LONG reflection, meaning that by the time I’m done writing this post my wrists are going to beg me to end their suffering out of pity. At the very least, I’ll feel better having gotten these thoughts off my chest. And hopefully, I’ll end up having something worthwhile to say on the matter. Warning: Full spoilers in effect below the “keep reading” bar, as well as content warning for discussion of rape and sexual assault.

So, just to get this out of the way first, my score for Goblin Slayer would be a 4/10. Once you get past the godawful first episode it mellows out a bit and better finds its voice as a slightly grittier dungeon crawl experience with a pack of moderately interesting characters. It suffers from a boring production- even excluding the poor CG shots of Gobslay-san’s armor, the direction is flat and the animation pretty lifeless- but the writing does work in the quieter moments when we’re allowed to settle into the unease of Goblin Slayer’s unmoored place in the world, and there’s even some poignancy in his tale of overcoming trauma and coming to terms with his corner of life in a vast and uncaring universe. I just wish those moments were frequent enough to overcome the overall blandness and the screeching stupidity of its louder, more obnoxious stabs at edginess. But there’s something just underneath the surface of this show, something deeply uncomfortable that no amount of better polished production values or more frequent quieter moments could fix. And that brings me to the focus on this likely far-too-long “essay”: what I came to understand about the rape scene in the first episode that blew the internet’s collective stack when it first aired.

Because what I’ve realized is that the rape scene isn’t actually the problem with this show. It’s just a symptom of what’s really gone wrong. So let’s see if we can reverse-engineer from that scene to figure out how we got to that point in the first place.

The first question we need to ask was, why was this scene hated? Anime has had plenty of tasteless assault subplots, even in this same year (Magical Girl Site comes to mind), so what made this particular scene blow up the way it did? Why does it suck? Well, a lot of reasons; the characters aren’t well established enough for us to care when shit goes south for them in the goblin den, it feels gratuitous and overblown thanks to the Epic Rape Orchestra backing it, and the framing is ickily voyeuristic (seriously, I have literally seen some of those shot compositions in actual rape hentai). But I think the real reason it ended up rubbing so many people the wrong way was that it was a rape scene where the victim didn’t matter.

Consider: the fighter who gets assaulted has maybe five lines of dialogue prior, none of which give us any real sense of who she is as a person, then she gets raped, and afterwards, she has barely thirty more seconds of screen time (and no more dialogue) before she’s shuffled off the show for good to waste away in a convent for all time. It treats her as disposable, somebody who doesn’t really matter. She’s a prop, somebody to be broken and tossed aside once her purpose as a one-use tragedy-generator is spent. The scene is all about establishing how evil and monstrous the goblins are so we root for them to get smashed; the fighter barely even factors into that equation at all. It’s a rape scene that’s all about the rapists and doesn’t seem to care at all about the person they victimize. It didn’t care about the fighter’s trauma, or how this event affected her, or what her reaction to it was at all. Her pain didn’t matter. Which, you know, aside from just being generally gross, is also bad writing. If the point is to make us hate the goblins, why would you do so little to make us care about the people they hurt?

And were this isolated to just that one scene, that would be the entire conversation. Just a shitty scene executed poorly. Curtain, case closed, move on. But something occurred to me as I kept watching the show: it wasn’t just the fighter who the show didn’t seem to want to address the trauma of. It was the priestess too. I mean, she also goes through hell in that first episode, seeing her new companions brutalized right in front of her eyes. And she ends the expedition understandably crushed and sobbing, completely unsure how to proceed from here. But the next time we see her in the next episode? It’s a month later, and she’s already gotten over it and is making cute anime girl exasperation noises about just how gosh darn silly Goblin Slayer is. Again: a character is put through hell and back, and the show shies away from confronting it.

And likewise, all the other brutalized woman we come across in the goblin’s lairs (and pinned to their shields during the big army battle in episode 11) barely ever say so much as a syllable before they’re shuffled off to presumed, offscreen safety. At the very least, the elf has a moment in episode 9 after almost being raped where she’s visibly shaking at the thought of confronting goblins again so soon, but that’s pretty much it. For a show that sells itself on taking place in a world where bad things happen to people, Goblin Slayer doesn’t seem to want to explore how these bad things affect the people they hurt.

With one big exception: Goblin Slayer himself. Like I mentioned earlier, the story of his trauma and how he copes with it lies at the center of the show’s narrative, and it’s easily the best part. There’s a warmth and understanding to his pain that doesn’t sugarcoat what he’s been through while still showing how he’s learned to live with it and continues to figure out how to process it. His sister gets raped and killed in flashback without so much as a how do you do, but Gobslay-san is constantly allowed the opportunity to explore his pathology and how the events of his past affect him.

So it’s clear the show does want to explore the trauma that living in this dangerous world can inflict. But why only him? Why do none of the girls- the people who, it should be noted, are by far at the most risk of being brutalized by goblins in the first place and thus would realistically have the most intense, visceral reactions of the horrors they perpetuate- have the chance to explore their trauma in the same way? It feels like an obvious storytelling decision, right? Why only tell a rape story about the victim’s friend and not the victims themselves? So that begs the question: if the show doesn’t want us to think about these girls in terms of how they interact with the darkness of this world, then how DOES it want us to think about them?

Well, I do have an answer for that. And unfortunately, it’s not a good one. Because thinking about the way all the show’s female characters are introduced, a very noticeable pattern emerges. The Cow Girl’s first appearance on screen is a big fanservice panning shot of her naked back followed by a massive boob jiggle. The slow-talking witch character likewise spends the vast majority of her introductory scene with the camera focused on her gargantuan tits and thighs. One of the first things that happens to the elf on screen is the dwarf mocking her for being flat-chested while the camera focused on said chest, just in case there’s anyone in the audience who needed to be reminded of this fetish that they might like. The first thing the priestess says is “I’m fifteen and therefore an adult, so it’s totally okay to lewd me because I am adult. And fifteen. Did I mention I’m fifteen?” Okay, slight exaggeration on my part, but don’t try to pretend that wasn’t the not-so-hidden intent behind that particular bit of worldbuilding.

In other words, all of the girls are introduced in a way that primes you to think about them sexually. First impression leave lasting impacts, and the first impressions for pretty much every female character in the show influence you to think about their waifu qualities before anything else. And all of them, including the only one who isn’t introduced tits-first (the guild lady), are implied at some point later on to be in love with self-insert protag Gobslay-san. So we have a situation where the person adjacent to rape is allowed to have a fleshed out arc about trauma and recovery, but the people who are actually at risk of being raped are instead made to be fanservice vehicles. Their trauma doesn’t matter to the show; their tits do.

That said, there is one big sticking point to this analysis, one female character who’s arc does, in fact, center around her trauma after being assaulted by goblins: the Sword Maiden. The scars they left on her, both literal and figurative, have yet to fade, and she admits to still feeling intense fear of what might happen if they find her again. So much so, in fact, that she helps raise goblins underneath her city just to make her people understand firsthand the fear she’s suffering (I think? It wasn’t explained that clearly in the show, so someone correct me if I’m wrong), and- and this is the real important part- she implicitly wants Goblin Slayer to literally fuck the trauma out of her. And honestly, I don’t think that’s a bad route to take in isolation. I can buy the emotional state of wanting someone you trust to overwrite a traumatic experience for you, and I even see the logic in having a professed goblin-hater be the person to purge the evil thing the goblins did to you. There’s potential there for a pretty interesting take on the subject.

But in context and execution, a lot of things go wrong that end up putting the final nail in the coffin of just what philosophy is driving this show. There’s the obvious problem of Sword Maiden also being a heavy fanservice character, her erect nipples literally pressing against her tunic. More substantially, though, is how her trauma is framed. We first learn about her being hurt by goblins in a fanservice-heavy bath scene with Priestess, in which her scars are juxtaposed against shiny naked moe flesh. And when she confirms what happened to her with Goblin Slayer following his “resurrection”, the camera again puts heavy focus on her breasts as she’s describing the horrors done to her. Both times, the Sword Maiden’s trauma is associated with eroticism. It associates her rape in the viewer’s mind with how sexy she is. The text says “this is horrible”; the camera says, “yeah, but don’t you want to fuck her anyway?” Once again, looking at the girls sexually takes precedence over actually exploring their emotional states.

And SPEAKING of that resurrection, sweet tap-dancing Christ is there a lot to unpack there. Gobslay-san wakes up basically naked in bed next to an equally naked fifteen-year-old girl (sorry, fifteen-year-old “adult”), who naturally gets a full fanservice panning shot of her nudity. They couldn’t look more like a couple who just had sex if that was what actually happened. And this is how the world was written: sleeping in the same bed as a virgin saves you from near death, apparently. Really think about that for a second: Goblin Slayer just saved Priestess from getting sexually violated by goblins at the near cost of his life, and she repays him by symbolically giving up her sexuality to him in everything but technicality. That’s... really kind of fucked, isn’t it?

And this is the same scene where Sword Maiden comes in to try and seduce him with the sexiness of her debilitating trauma. In other words, we find ourselves in a situation where sex is both the reward for saving a girl from rape and the cure for healing a girl from rape. No matter what happens to the girls in this world, the implied end result is that they will all happily sleep with the view self-insert protagonist.

So now, take a step back and consider where we find ourselves. Goblin Slayer takes place in a world where sexual trauma is a thing, but only for the guys who see rape happen. Where the girls who are actually at risk of rape or outright victims of it don’t get the chance to have that trauma explored in the same way. Where they instead are set up to be objects for the audience to drool over much like goblins ourselves. Where pretty much every girl is implied to want sex with the valiant man coming to save them from being raped, either as reward or cure. This is the world the show presents. So what does that tell us? What was Goblin Slayer trying to accomplish with all this?

Well, in short, what all this reveals is that Goblin Slayer is, quite simply, a power fantasy. In fact, it’s one of the oldest power fantasies of global popular culture: the fantasy of the big strong man who protects women’s purity for himself from the evil, inhuman monsters trying to steal it from its rightful owner.

Yes, in the end, the most remarkable thing about the uncomfortable rot at the core of this story is just how unremarkable it turned out to be. From classic monster movies in the US like King Kong and The Creature From the Black Lagoon to classic tales of captured damsels in need of rescue, the pungent well Goblin Slayer draws from is a well of familiar tropes across storytelling traditions that have since fallen out of favor in a less chauvinistic world. It’s the reason the women’s trauma doesn’t seem to matter: because the only thing that matters is that us guys are there to save them and get rewarded for it. It’s the reason we’re pressed to look at them sexually instead and why they’re implied to want sex themselves: because that’s what we’re protecting for our consumption. It’s also why the goblins are irredeemably evil creatures who we can feel justified in seeing slaughtered without mercy: it gives us a perfect villain to defeat that makes us, no matter how pathetic and miserable we are in real life, seem heroic by comparison, and thus fully justified in helping ourselves to that sweet, sweet virgin purity. Because we’re not the bad guys! We kill the bad guys! So we don’t have to feel bad about wanting this as a reward! It’s totally justified!

I realize I’m being remarkably crass and explicit, perhaps uncomfortably so. But I want to drive home just how skeevy this all is. Underlying every decision Goblin Slayer makes in regards to its portrayal of rape is the desire to prop up this fantasy. This fantasy where us straight guys can feel justified looking at girls sexually and wanting to fuck them even as they’re being brutalized in the worst way possible, because hey, at least we’re saving them, right? This is not a new discovery. Goblin Slayer is only the latest example of a storytelling template steeped in well-worn, toxic value systems that’s been around for centuries now. I repeat: the rape scene is not the problem. It’s only the most obvious example of the problem. And no amount surface-level fixes to the animation or plot structure could wash that stain away.

That, above all else, was why the rape scene ended up kicking up such a fuss. Because even if the audience couldn’t put their finger on it, they could sense those deeply uncomfortable undertones- the lack of caring about the victims of assault, the sexual framing making us want to imagine fucking girls while they’re being violated- that would only become more clear as the show progressed. It’s also, unfortunately, why the show ended up being a beacon for so many assholes who picked up on the same subtext; I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Goblin Slayer’s defenders seem to have an inordinate amount of actual goddamn Nazis mixed in with them. No, that doesn’t mean everyone (or even most people) who likes Goblin Slayer is a Nazi or a bad person or anything like that. But when I see so many of this show’s loudest defenders attacking its critics with rape threats, death threats and Holocaust memes, I think it’s entirely fair to consider what the show might be doing to attract that kind of audience.

Art does not exist in a vacuum. It is influence by and in turn influences the culture that consumes it. No one piece of art can change your beliefs, but trends over time can influence their audience. What art communicates matters. What art tells its audience, intentionally or not, is worth discussing. And if there’s anything I want you to take away from this absurdly foolhardy exercise of mine (seriously, my wrists are quite close to dying right now), it’s that these kinds of questions deserve to be discussed, even if you don’t want to discuss them yourself. If you like Goblin Slayer, like Goblin Slayer; your taste in art does not reflect your moral character, and anyone who tries to make you feel shitty for liking what you like is an asshole. But don’t be afraid of people like me who see these issues in Goblin Slayer and similar pieces of entertainment and want to talk about them (I’m quite interested to see how the discourse around Shield Hero shakes out this coming season). We’re not here to take your anime away from you: we just want to see it get better. And if nothing else, I hope you came away from my ramblings with a bit more insight into the many ways we can look at anime.

[zaruba-needslove]

Hehe...

Ngl I missed seeing GobSlay's Gate scroll shenanigans... not to mention that this one was quite hilarious. I love how this battle was one of the rare few times we get to see how the GobSlay's party actions affect the result of Hero party's battles. Unlike yanno... the battle at the Elf forest, or stuff that we never got to see involving the dark elf and Hecaconcheir... and so on.

Like really...

Though the series running gag be that no matter how much GobSlay's party's action affected the grand scheme of things, the guy himself won't ever realize how important his role had become ever since meeting Priestess.

[zaruba-needslove]

Hey.... lookit that , it's that scout who'd literally strip you naked out of every single armour and clothes 😂😂😂😂😂

A part of me was happy that episode 9 really included a flashback with the captain's team 💖💖💖

Also seriously, to see the Captain being animated, as well as the rest of the team and hear them talk too... it's incredible! Like we don't even know if there any plan to adapt Daikatana into a proper anime... yet we're kinda getting it now 💖

Yet, is it just me... or we didn't really get to hear the Captain's voice despite the fact that he's supposed to also join in with actvating the spell with Female Bishop/Sword Maiden and his cousin? Aaa.... anime, please no cheating me with the captain! 😛

So we're really moving on to the escort mission, which would later revolve around the adventure at the capital and meeting the princess and the king. i guess season 2 gonna end with the battle with the Demon Hand at the old dungeon. That's nice tho. Cos this part of the LN series was one of my favourites.

It's also nice that we still get the bits with the Gillmen, since the part about GobSlay insisting that they're not goblins were funny.

i can't wait to see Priestess meeting the Princess and later the King, and I wonder if anime gonna slip some hints that I've been suspecting for awhile about Priestess. Hope the anime would still include the meeting with the former Female Fighter.

That said, it's too bad about how anime skipped the first Harvest Festival arc and jumped to the Goblin's Crown. Because most of the goblins and other bosses are all connected. From the ogre, the goblins attacking the farm, frontier town, water town, dark elf, hecatoncheir goblin king, the goblin shaman, demon hand and so on, it didn't feel right that some of those fights were left out.

But I guess I'll live with that. after all... we can always reread the adventures.

[zaruba-needslove]

This scene was one of my favourite scenes involving the two.

Also reason I love this pairing more than with Sword Maiden, Guild Girl or even Cow Girl. There's something about Priestess and GobSlay's relationship and trust between each other that wasn't quite the same as the other girls.

[zaruba-needslove]

Reading Goblin Slayer light novels atm so imma like...

Every time I reached a point where some random character immediately got killed by being bashed on the head or had rocks hit their heads or having some poisoned knife stuck on their foot etc just when they start to abandon their rear guards or remove their headgears thinking that it wasn't important, the more understanding I get towards Gobslay's insistence to keep wearing his complete armour on at all times no matter the situation cos man... you can never be too careful with goblins lol