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Romelia Senki: Maou wo Taoshita nochi mo Jinrui Yabasou dakara Guntai Soshiki Shita, episode 3
Alternative Names
A History of the Romelia
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I think it was more harmful in this episode compared to last. I am going to include some manga panels as examples below, so I am going to put it in some spoiler blocks, however, I haven’t included anything outside of content covered in this episode. Honestly, I could include a lot more than this, but I just chose three examples, all from the same manga chapter (chapter 3).
Al's Inspirational Speech
First, let’s look at what Romelia was thinking in the lead up to Al’s speech to inspire his fellow soldiers to charge into battle when they were hesitating. In the show, we just see her lay out the plan and then charge off…there was then a bit of awkward silence until Al spoke up and gave his speech. In the manga, Romelia charges off again, but this is what she is thinking while she does it:
…she knows that they aren’t about to follow her just because she asks. Instead, she is setting Al up to give his speech and naturally grow into that leadership role. As proof, let’s also look at what she is thinking immediately after his speech ends and the men charge into battle:
Ray's Hesitation
Another example from this sequence is why she singled out Ray to follow her and kill the injured demon. In the anime, she just tells Ray to follow her and then has him finish it off. But why? How did she know that Ray would struggle with this? Well, let’s look at this small bit of internal dialogue that was left out:
…now it makes sense how she knew that Ray was hesitating. It’s a small line of text, but it motivates her actions a lot.
Al's Reward
At the end of the battle, Romelia gave every soldier 1 silver, and gave a Al an extra silver in recognition of his merit. We see Al then proceed to buy an extra sheep and share it with the rest of the men in celebration of their victory. We see Romelia kind of smirk knowingly at this…but what is actually going through her head? What is the reason behind this reward system? Let’s look at the manga. Here is her internal dialogue after Al buys the extra food to celebrate with everybody:
…so she is using this both as a bonding experience due to the feast, but also as a way to help them burn through their money to motivate them to earn more.
Just showing her taking a quick glance at Ray’s spear before she told him to follow her would have taken maybe a single second. Just her eyes moving down, and a cut to the clean spear tip before cutting back. It would have been so simple and would have made such a big difference. But that’s something I see more and more. Direction is getting worse, and studios either put the wrong people in place, or they simply often don’t have people anymore who understand what made the source worth adapting in the first place.
But does everything really need to be presented so explicitly and unambiguously? It’s as if the audience were completely incapable of picking up on the clues provided elsewhere. In my view, there were already plenty of hints to realize that Ray is stressed, struggling, and not fighting the way the others do. It’s not exactly difficult to deduce that Romelia noticed the same things during the battle that we, the viewers, did. I don’t think adding that scene would have changed much.
Honestly, being treated like an idiot, having everything spoon-fed to me, is often far more irritating. I believe that adaptations should follow their own rules. You simply cannot translate every single line from the source material to the screen while maintaining a structure that actually works in a completely different medium. From my perspective, anime creators actually make such changes, which could help convey events more effectively on screen, far too rarely. Instead, they cling rigidly to the manga panels, which often results in terrible pacing and uninspired direction. Of course, I’m not saying that Romelia stands out in either direction in this regard; it’s just a general observation of mine. But at the same time, I think this in this case this particular scene was not needed here at all.
I am more of a purist. The way I see it, whatever is in the source should also be in the adaptation. For me, the adaptation work should be about how the same story/plot/narrative/information/etc. can be delivered in the new medium. If something was important enough to be mentioned in the source, it should be important enough to be in the adaptation as well. I absolutely agree that not everything has to be spelled out, but a quick hint that something has happened when it did so in the source is not spelling it out. As in the example, a quick glance down is enough, and it doesn’t need a voice-over of her thoughts or added dialogue of her asking why the spear tip is clean. But it makes all the difference between Romelia being some omniscient character and her being an observant one.
In this Ray example, as an anime-only viewer, I personally just thought she had seen him during the fight and didn’t think more of it when she singled him out after the battle. But at no point did I get the impression that she was especially observant of the little details and that that is why she was able to help Ray. It might be a small thing, and it didn’t take away from the anime for me since I didn’t know that I got a different impression of the character, but that doesn’t change the simple fact that my impression of the character was different from what manga-readers had of her. And that’s a failed adaptation in my view. I’m not going to drop the show over it, but now that I know that the source handles the narrative so much differently, I’ll keep wondering what else they fucked up. You could also just say that I have Bookworm PTSD and am overly prickly about this sort of thing.
Sure enough.
I wonder why they chose to just ignore that entirely. Why didn’t they have Romelia narrate her thoughts?
I just read through the first few chapters of the manga, and yeah - not only are there all sorts of details provided by Romelia’s thoughts (like what she actually did in the hero’s party and why she wasn’t particularly surprised when Henri broke off the engagement, both of which are revealed early in chapter 1, but still haven’t even been addressed in the anime) - there are little bits and pieces expressed through the thoughts of multiple characters all the way through it. And none of it’s in the anime.
I really wonder what they were thinking. It just seems too dumb of a decision to have made it all the way through production.
Ah well…