It’s refreshing to see an anime series being very very clear about how awful it’s going to be:
Though by this time you already should have a good idea how much of a pedoshit show this is because Uchi no Maid ga Uzasugiru! is not shy in showing how much the titular maid, really, really loves little girls. So much so she goes into the job agency wanting a job where she gets to dress up a little white girl in clothes she makes herself. And whaddaya know, by some miraculous coincidence she gets a job doing exactly that, as the maid to a little blonde half Russian girl whose mother died and whose father is too feckless to care for her himself. The rest of the first episode is basically this girl trying to escape her sexual harassment while her father remains oblivious. There’s a hint of a decent show in here, where a lonely, embittered little girl is drawn out of her shell by her cheerful, kooky housekeeper, but since every other shot is the maid lusting after her, it isn’t this show. The only unalloyed good thing about this is the workout ending theme which is cute and adorable.
In everything else, our blonde protagonist has the right idea. Blow it all up. As should be done with Goblin Slayer, the other show this season with a heaping big chunk of rape in it. But here it’s meant to show how Serious and Dark and Gritty the show is and how goblins are irreemable villains whom it’s okay to ethnically cleanse. No, really:
You know how sometimes people hold up frex X-Men as a metaphor for the American civil rights struggle of the sixties? Well, it works the other way around too. Genocide is fine when it’s fantasy genocide, when you can just create a race that’s inherently evil. It’s something that has haunted fantasy and science fiction for a long time, all the way back to Wells’ Morlocks if not earlier, because there’s always a desire for guilt free genocide. The whole idea of an inherently evil race is of course pure fascism, but it remains surprisingly popular even with people who should know better. Using rape as your way to sell the evilness, with all the shitty tropes that come with it, is the icing on this shit cake.
Let’s look a bit closer at what this first episode did. We start off with the girl above, wounded and stranded in a dungeon before we go into a flashback where she gets her adventurer card and she meets up with the three other members of her party as they decide to go for a dungeon raid to rescue some girls kidnapped by goblins. You know they’re going to get slaughtered within five minutes, which is exactly what happens. The sole bloke in the party gets killed off screen, the magician with the glasses loses them, then gets stabbed in the stomach with a poisoned blade. The healer girl tries to fix her but fails, as their fighter is overpowered, stripped and raped (offscreen fortunately). Healer girl escapes with the mage, they get cornered and then the goblin slayer rescues her before slaughtering every goblin in the cave, including the children as mentioned above.
Getting a bunch of mooks slaughtered to prove how dangerous and evil the villains are is a bog standard plot device. It’s the way it’s done here that’s the problem, especially the way the camera lingers on that one woman being stripped before being raped. What’s more, it’s deliberately made worse to drive home the point that goblins are inherently evil, to justify the slaughter of them. It’s not unlike how in real life horrible crimes are used to paint entire groups of people as inherently evil (frex the attempt to portray trans people as predators just because they want to pee in the right bathroom). That’s what makes this such a repellent series, even setting aside the rape (if you can).
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