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EP. REVIEW: That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime Season 2

Tofu-Kozou from Kitarou is simply a yokai that carries tofu. He's no threat to anyone and gets bullied by humans. My comment was meant more generally and not specifically addressed to the plot of this story.

yuna49 wrote:

Tofu-Kozou from Kitarou is simply a yokai that carries tofu. He's no threat to anyone and gets bullied by humans. My comment was meant more generally and not specifically addressed to the plot of this story.

I could be wrong but I don't think @johan eriksson was referring specifically to Slime but rather fantasy in general. IMO it depends on whether the show can establish a good unreasonable reason, as difficult as that might sound. If one fantasy race eats the other then it's not racism to fear them: that's just prey-predator dynamics. On the other hand, if the discrimination is borne from misconceptions, for instance: they only think the other fantasy race eats them because that race looks scary, then I think that might be a better case. Do some yokai eat humans in Kitarou?

@Johan Eriksson 9003 I think you greatly underestimate the likelihood of retaliation in the case of killing the leaders or holding their army hostage. For the former, it’s not difficult to think of fairly recent example of killing a military commander leading to retaliation against the ones who did it (which was also an example of underestimating the possibility of retaliation for such a strike) (I’m referring to the assassination of Qasem Soleimani by US drone strike, if it wasn’t clear). For the hostage taking situation, I think it could make the call for an international coalition to put them down more compelling. Certainly, they would still be alive, but for it to force them to the negotiating table, they would have to believe there was a serious threat that they would execute the prisoners, which would be a war crime. Since they have declared a holy war against the monsters, I don’t think their first instinct will be to negotiate with them or surrender, at least without significant losses. If anything, they would be inclined to call their bluff and either martyr some of their soldiers and make Tempest look bad, have them release the soldiers with no concessions and plan for the next attack and make more certain that they have taken out Rimuru before taking out Tempest, or stall until the international force can rescue them and subjugate Tempest. It’s hard to think of a situation where hostage takers don’t end up looking like villains to most people, whereas it’s easier to frame honorably killing invaders on the battlefield as justifiable self-defense.

Of course they need to follow the rules of war, but the accusations I’ve seen here that he would violate them are based purely on speculation, assuming he would kill innocent civilians if they’re weren’t an invading army coming, assuming he wouldn’t accept their surrender in order to kill them, assuming that they would surrender without great losses. Ultimately we need to see what happens this next episode to see how it happens instead of going off our darkest imaginings of how it plays out. We can discuss how he goes about getting those 10,000 souls after we actually see how he does it (and no, source material readers, this is not me asking for how it goes down, so I don’t want to see the answer now, even in spoiler tags). Personally, I’m not ruling out stuff like half killing 20,000 to get 10,000, but we will have to wait to see.

2) What do you think "taking hostages" in this situation means? We aren't talking about capturing children or random soldiers here, we are talking about capturing the actual leaders of the attack and thus forcing them to accept terms of surrender. In medieval warfare that's how you win.

3) Self-defence is only applicable if the nation is in danger and there is absolutely no army that won't surrender if their leadership is captured. Rimuru is far too powerful for this army to pose any real threat to Tempest while he is there. With his power, he can easily disable the army with minimal casualties so there is absolutely no need to kill a large number of soldiers to make them surrender. Killing the army would be willful murder on his part. Pure and simple.

In your statements that Rimuru could stop the invasion by taking the leaders hostage, or repelling their forces without inflicting much damage, I think you are severely overestimating Rimuru's position.

It is true Rimuru has the advantage over the invading force, but it is only because the Church thinks he was killed by Hinata Sakaguchi. She is the leader of the Church's imperial guard, and we have already seen that she is more than powerful enough to kill Rimuru.

If the Church was aware that Rimuru was still alive, there is no doubt that Hinata would be at the head of the invasion force, probably along with more members of the imperial guard. Judging from the result of his first fight with Hinata, Rimuru would have almost no chance of winning. He would most likely be killed this time, since Hinata would be on the lookout to figure out how he survived his previous defeat.

This is the one and only time that Rimuru will have the upper hand when facing these forces. If Rimuru merely repelled the invasion force with only inflicting light damage, the force would soon return, but this time with Hinata and the imperial guard at the lead. Taking the leaders hostage would end up with the same result.

Think about it for a moment, if Rimuru takes the leaders hostage, forces them to agree to a truce (by threatening to kill them?), then what? Let them go? Then they just regroup with Hinata and the Church's imperial guard and invade again. I doubt they would feel any obligation to honor any truce they agreed to under threat of death, especially a truce with monsters. It seems unlikely that Rimuru would be able to hold them hostage indefinitely, since he cannot kill them and I doubt Rimuru would be able to stop Hinata from ultimately rescuing them.

Unlike the current invasion force, Rimuru and Tempest face two other threats that they cannot handle at their level of power: the above-mentioned Hinata Sakaguchi and the Demon Lord Clayman. Rimuru understands this, and he stated that does provides some of his motivation to become a Demon Lord, along with the hope of reviving his slain friends and subjects. Rimuru has realized that unless he obtains the power of a Demon Lord, Tempest will ultimately be destroyed.

1) But Hinata isn't there right now, and that gives him options.

2) Why would Hinata join in with Falmuth when she has acted alone up until now?

We have already established that if Rimuru uses restraint on the invading force and enforces a peace-treaty on them, Falmuth's hands will be tied. If they need to invent justification for an attack then there is no way that they can break a treaty willy-nilly and expect help from the church or other nations. Any treaty worth its salt would also expose the previous attack for the farce it was and force Falmuth to pay reparations, thus putting them in an even worse position and improving Tempest's image. It doesn't matter whether they feel like they should honor the treaty or not, it is about what breaking it would mean for their position in the world. You can't set of international relations as a factor and then ignore how those politics would play a part here.

4) So killing 10 000 people will give him his friends back and make him stronger? Cool, so what will killing the other 10 000 people in the army do? No matter how you spin it, what Rimuru plans to do is overkill and evil as all hell. Not to mention that if he really plans to enforce his peace with strength and power, that just kinda proves that he is a tyrant at heart.

5) Even if we accept that doing this will give Rimuru some tangiable benefit, you are still just trying to justify evil acts, not convincing me that they aren't evil. If strength is necessary there are other ways to do that except mass-murder, and treating people's lives like currency to get your own friends back is also evil. This wouldn't bother me so much if the show didn't insist that Rimuru is still the best person ever and he will totally get right back to building a brighter world where humans and non-humans get along...right after this one act of wanton slaughter that will tooooootally not have any consequences because it is just...so justified guys.

Hinata was not acting alone when she attempted to kill Rimuru. She is the head of the Church's imperial guard. Her eliminating Rimuru was a key part of Falmuth's and the Church's plot to eradicate Tempest.

If Rimuru had been in Tempest, he would have been able to stop the 3 offworlders sent by Falmuth to create the pretext of humans being attacked in order to justify the invasion, not to mention the troop of knights who followed after.

The plan was for Hinata to eliminate Rimuru before he could return to Tempest. It was no coincidence that she was attacking Rimuru at the same time that the offwordlers were entering Tempest.

If the invasion force is stopped without Rimuru obtaining the powers of a Demon Lord, Hinata and the the rest of the Church's imperial guard will lead the subsequent attack, kill Rimuru and wipe out Tempest. The subsequent attack will come because the motivations of the invaders will remain. Falmuth wants to preserve their trade monopoly and the Church preaches that monsters are not civilizable and therefore should be destroyed, so they cannot allow a peaceful civilized city of monsters to exist, since it contradicts their teachings.

I do not agree that it has been "established" that Falmuth's hands would be tied by a peace treaty they were forced to sign. As I said previously, Falmuth could claim that any treaty signed while their king was being held hostage by monsters was made under duress and would not necessarily have their hands tied by it. Our world's history is full of broken treaties, so I am not as convinced that they are as ironclad as you seem to think they are. Also, the leader of the Church (Falmuth's coconspirator) is not accompanying the invasion force, so how would Rimuru force them to agree if he cannot take the Church's leader hostage?

As far as the exact number he needs, the 10,000 human souls figure came from the legend. It is a nice round number, which is generally what legends contain. Right now, we don't know for sure how many souls will actually be required for Rimuru to become a Demon Lord, and we have yet to see how many he does kill.

Also, sadly in our own world, peace between rival nations is ultimately enforced with military strength and power, both historically and in present times. Without getting into politics, just looking at the vast resources countries devote to maintaining their military power, will demonstrate that unfortunate reality. With that in mind, it seems somewhat naive and unfair to call Rimuru a tyrant for pursuing the same policy.

I would call being able to prevent everyone in Tempest being killed, more that just a "tangible benefit". As I said previously, if Rimuru does not obtain the power of a Demon Lord, not only will he be unable to revive his dead friends and subjects, everyone left in Tempest will be killed by the inevitable subsequent invasion.

Your suggestion that Rimuru should find another way, besides becoming a Demon Lord to become strong enough to prevent everyone in Tempest from being killed, is essentially meaningless, since no alternatives have been presented in the story. If Rimuru had years to pursue another option, perhaps the Great Sage could finally figure out how to free Veldora, who could then become Tempest's guardian dragon. However, Rimuru has at most a few weeks before the second invasion force led by Hinata and the Church's imperial guard would arrive.

I will agree, that the situation is forced by the plot of the story. The only way Rimuru can prevent everyone in Tempest from being slaughtered is to become a Demon Lord, and the only way to do that is to consume 10,000 or so human souls, so in the story as written, he has no choice (and implies that means he should not be held accountable). I can also agree, that once Rimuru made the decision, he did not seem to be all conflicted about the cost, especially when compared to characters in other stories in similar situations. Rimuru's apparent complete lack of internal conflict after choosing this path does weaken his characterization in my opinion.

I think it's kind of avoiding the key issue to debate whether Slime successfully writes Rimuru into a corner from which killing all of the enemy soldiers and using them to revive his pals is his most ethical option. Obviously, it's possible to construct a world in which that's the only sensible choice. Maybe Slime will do so, having Hinata show up and pressure him so badly that he can't hold back and carefully control the parameters of who he harms when dealing with the invading force; or, he'll be clearly pressed to the brink, facing destruction for himself and Tempest unless he can ascend to become a demon lord; or some such.


But the bigger issue is: if it goes that route, will Slime treat the slaughter this involves with the kind of care it deserves? Or will it brush it off as a joke; write an artificial way out of considering it at all; or lazily celebrate it as an unambiguous good, just an expunging of 20,000 moustache-twirling bad guys and not something to be thought about twice? These 3 would all be painfully ineffective ways to write that kind of situation -- a waste of dramatic potential, and a kind of whimsical disregard for a grave choice. Better not to write the arc at all than to ruin it like that; these are the missteps I'm worried Slime is going to make. The latest episode didn't do much to assuage these concerns, unfortunately; we got one moment of determination from Rimuru at the end of the episode, but otherwise this may as well be just another Tuesday for all he seems to have meditated on the massive bloodbath he's about to carry out.

So what I am hearing here is that the church is no more able to just attack Tempest without justification than Falmuth is. Hence why they needed to kill Rimuru somewhere secluded and keep him from stopping their framejob.

Again, you just admitted yourself that the church needed the framejob of Tempest for their plan to work. If Rimuru sends the army packing with no major damage and forces them into a civillized peace-treaty there can't be a second attack because the justification they invented has vanished.

Of course it would be signed under duress, it would be part of the terms of surrender. This is literally how you win a midieval war. No one ever tried to actually kill the opposing king or his knights on the battlefield. They were high-value targets to be captured and ransomed back to their country. When England captured the French king in the 100-year war he was basically treated as a "guest" and paraded around until he coughed up a huge amount of gold and signed the agreements the English wanted him to sign. And yes, treaties are broken, but there are usually consequences to that and the show has established that these consequences exist in this world. That is what would tie their hands.

If you seriously believe that every peace in history has been enforced through threat then I am begging you to read something other than America-centric history books.

Yes, this is precicely my point. The story has forced a setup where Rimuru has to commit an unspeakably evil act and it still pretends that this won't have any consequences for him. It can either continue to portray a semi-realistic world where people aren't either mustache-twirling bigots or innocent victims or it can skip that and just have a world where might-makes-right and the protagonist is a self-aware asshole. Right now it tries to have it both ways.

4) So killing 10 000 people will give him his friends back and make him stronger? Cool, so what will killing the other 10 000 people in the army do? No matter how you spin it, what Rimuru plans to do is overkill and evil as all hell. Not to mention that if he really plans to enforce his peace with strength and power, that just kinda proves that he is a tyrant at heart.

Live by the sword, die by the sword

Fallacy: Rimuru is evil, evil because he is going to kill all the soldiers coming to kill him and his people.

Please explain to me, what 'right' do the Falmuth soldiers (the actual invaders) have that allow them to conduct a genocidal campaign against Tempest population (both civilian and military. IE the victims), yet the audience sympathizes with their poor and unfortunate souls, instead of their victims. "Were coming to kill you, rape and murder your citizens, burn your buildings (and some citizens too,) to the ground; but please think of us before trying to kill us."

Quote:

Live by the sword, die by the sword

The moment those Falmuth soldiers crossed the border with their swords, they signed the contract for that quote above. It doesn't matter their reasons. They've come to kill, murder, and torture. Thus, they also must be prepared to die also, by their enemies hand.

All of those Falmuth soldiers are free game to die. They've already signed the dotted line. It doesn't matter how many of them they are, it doesn't matter their reasons, all that matters is they are coming to kill you. That is it. You destroy the enemy utterly, so that they don't come back again to do the same.

Why are we sympathizing over the Falmuth soldiers. We know what they are coming to do. The Tempest citizens are the victims, so why do they have to bend the knee.

If a pair of knife wielding maniacs break into your house, are you going to fight them fairly with your kitchen knife, or are you going to use your gun. To kill them before they kill (or worse) you and your family.