Ranking of Kings #18 — The Gentrification of Evilville

February 17th, 2022

 

Who could have seen this outcome!

Impressions:

You'd think if they were going to do a whole episode dedicated to the evil witch's backstory, they would have come up with something slightly less stupid. Hell, they could have… nay, should have… just left it as ignorant villagers were scared of magic. That's a perfectly servicable and understandable backstory. Instead, she was part of a kingdom of wizards who were at war with the gods, but they were a universally benevolent society of deity slaying wizards, so they went to Evilton, a society of bandits and thieves, and gentrified it because that's just how benevolent they are. Overnight, apparently. Literally brought an entire civilization from thatch and pottery to the industrial era overnight. But wait, the bandits and thieves of Evilburg were… wait for it… EVIL, and betrayed them. This really makes sense and is more tragic to you, writers? This is what we're going with? We're also continuing to ignore Miranjo's previous monster led invasion where she assassinated the previous queen and insisting that she's good at heart too? Uh, okay. Kind of seems like she ought to be taking revenge on Evilland or 'the gods', wherever they apparently futzed off to having conquered all their opposition, but sure. She was unjustly murdered by the band of murderers whose civilization her mother's people invaded and tried to take over during their holy war.

Okay, fine, let's get back to the present where yet another character is magically revived from death's door, because as I had pointed out to me last week, unless you're a mother in a flashback, you're not dying in this show. I'm pretty sure even that one dude in the Ginyuu Force was carried off by the magic snake after his tragic 'death' flashback. So the two stabbings in the last five or so minutes of this episode are also not likely to actually mean much of anything with the magic wishing queen sitting around the corner, not to mention the magic snake with phoenix down powers also waiting right off screen for its chance to be relevant.

 

Posted in Ranking of Kings | 4 Comments »

4 Shouts From the Peanut Gallery

  • NeclordX says:
    February 18, 2022 at 4:38 pm

    Im aware this may sound weird and may be even a bit racist, but as a person who lives in a country with gipsy community…well, I’d lie if I didn’t say I kind of relate with the good hearted wizards here and can understand them to a certain degree, and honestly I see the outcome as predictable but also relatable and plausible.

  • DmonHiro says:
    February 19, 2022 at 12:43 pm

    As a Romanian, also living in a place with a lot of gypsies… this is literally how 90% of them actually act. I’m not even kidding. This was so realistic is actually pissed me off that the wizards were THAT STUPID. I mean, OK, you trust them once and they fuck you over, that sucks. But to stay there and keep getting fucked over? I’m sad it happened, but how fucking dumb were the wizards?

  • ZakuAbumi says:
    February 19, 2022 at 5:30 pm

    I see less issues with the good-natured wizard people who can’t not trust people (still bad, mind you) and more so with the Evil People Of Betrayal (with a one-liner tacked on that they had bad circumstances too like everyone in the show so they can’t help but be evil but please forgive them because nobody is truly evil after all) who even have evil slit eyes just so we could give Miranjo her own backstory. Even though it was just a copypaste affair of the orc’s from the episode before. Everyone here has a backstory to reveal that they are not truly what they seem to be at first glance. That worked well with Bebin and Hilin at first but by now, you see it coming. Man, the story didn’t even have the guts to have literal hellhounds be evil, even they were being mind-controlled. And now the cliffhanger is that Kage might have turned into a big, evil monster? Give me a break.

    >I’m pretty sure even that one dude in the Ginyuu Force was carried off by the magic snake after his tragic ‘death’ flashback.
    His fingers twitched at the end of that episode so of course he’s going to come back. Not to mention we only saw a teaser of his backstory and that’s not enough. We’re gonna spend the rest of this cour in the courtyard. At this point I’m mostly just interested in finding out whether the other two generically evil guys who got offed by Ouken will get revived or not. They had no backstory and no indication that there were not evil otherwise so they might be the first two legit kills in this fanatasy war series… 17 episodes in?

    Ousama Ranking is that weird fake Justin Trudeau quote on how if you kill your enemies, they win turned into a show. And everyone keeps winning and losing at the same time, which is probably why the second cour feels more and more like a stalemate.

    • Aroduc says:
      February 21, 2022 at 8:41 am

      It’s such a weird stance to put down that everybody is rounded, has their good points (even when embarking on decades of murder), that we should try to forgive everybody… but also there are people who are just inherently evil. They’re the others. The evil others. They are just evil in literally all ways. Whether gods or barbarian culture or what.