ENDRO!

Episode 8

Now this is more like it! Endro~!'s handling of Rona last week, reducing her to a mere trivia-spouting machine of repetition, did a disservice to a character who had made a pretty good first impression. This episode refocuses away from that, back to how she reacts to the disparity between her expectations and the reality for Yusha. As we saw a couple episodes ago, that's a more interesting angle, and the show crafts a heartfelt and surprisingly affecting story out of it by the end.

It's funny to think that Yusha and her party have been sidelined for almost four weeks now, as Mao and Rona rotated in to steal the spotlight. Maybe it speaks to a difficulty in creating full episodes out of the fluffy and relatively uneventful storylines of this hero's party. Of course, it might also be that the writers have realized it's more interesting to watch them through third-party observers who can offer their own commentary on those antics. That's the catalyst for this episode's plot, where Rona decides that while hanging out with the crew is certainly pleasant enough, it's hardly heroic or adventurous. I mentioned before that Rona seems to at least partially function as a surrogate for the members of the audience who wish this show had more monster-battling and less slumber parties, which certainly comes to the fore this week.

From an outsider perspective, it's nice to see how readily the team has welcomed Rona into their group, treating her like just one of the girls, (which becomes important by the end of the episode). But from Rona's perspective the whole setup is too simple. She opines that "The hero isn't even slightly heroic!" to Mao, seemingly oblivious to the fact that for all her wishing for a daring dungeon rescue, she simply isn't in that kind of show. So she decides to change things the only way she knows how: by bribing her teacher to play the part of the Demon Lord, a role we know Mao is all too qualified for!

There is a seeming incongruity that isn't touched on in Rona's plan, since the end of her debut episode implied that the Princess was aware that Mao was the former Demon Lord. That idea doesn't really come up in this week's conversations, excepting that she opted to hire Mao specifically. It's not really a big deal, since the dynamic the pair share for the rest of the episode is pleasant enough and the heart of the situation remains prominent. But it does make me wonder if I wasn't misinterpreting something a few episodes ago.

Either way, it's fun to see how far Mao has come down from her initial demonic role. Now she doesn't even want Yusha and the others to get hurt, so the dungeon she builds to run them through for Rona is effectively on Easy Mode, complete with included recovery points! Rona's comical contributions to all of this are also good, like how she'd had her own Demon Lord castle constructed just in case she needed somewhere to be kidnapped, or how her interpretation of the four villainous generals are just permanently-shadowed costumes with mean faces drawn on. These are all reminders that even though Rona is trying to swing the show in a more traditionally adventurous direction with Mao along for the ride, they're still envisioning a pretty silly take on the situation.

But of course the best part of the episode is the climax where all the feelings come out, and Endro~! proves again that it can work its story on multiple levels. Mao's questioning of Rona's motives result in the overarching question of why audiences enjoy seeing stories where our heroes fight and triumph in general. Rona's trying to set up situations that mirror the stories she latched onto growing up, but why did those resonate with her so much in the first place? Just as she realized several episodes earlier that Yusha doesn't perform heroics just because she's landed the job of Hero, Rona comes to understand that she doesn't like Yusha simply because she's a Princess opposite that Hero. All the hanging out and casual funtimes she enjoyed with her friends were valid on their own terms, highlighted by the point that Yusa regularly referred to Rona by her name and not her royal title.

This is where more of the simple brilliance in Endro~!'s conceit shines through. These fantastical adventurers are people with their own down-to-earth lives outside of the quests we see in many other anime, but they're still heroes because they'll jump at the call to do the right thing. The dungeon they go through can be real or fake, but what really matters are the feelings our group discovers along the way. This makes for a feel-good show where Yusha's reaction to finding out she was tricked is earnest relief that her friend wasn't really kidnapped. As she comes around in her own feelings, I was somewhat worried that Rona would still default to her storybook hero-worshiping personality by the episode's end for the sake of a gag, but that doesn't end up being the case. Symbolized by her own change in how she addresses Yusha, Rona genuinely seems to have grown through all her experiences in the past couple episodes.

Rating: A-

ENDRO! is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.