Review of Banished From The Hero's Party, I Decided To Live A Quiet Life In The Countryside

Usually a bad show just ends up being boring or uninteresting, and I drop it before watching too much of it, as it's usually obvious from the start it has nothing to offer. This show started off on course to be another normal, generic fantasy show jumping through the usual hoops I've seen many times before, which is fine. These kinds of shows can be enjoyable enough in their own way, so I kept watching. Slice of life and fantasy are both genres I generally enjoy afterall. But quite quickly this show devolves into some of the worst shit I've ever had the misfortune ofsitting through, and by the time I'm at the last couple of episodes I feel like a fucking idiot for having watched it all. I can't think of a single redeeming factor of this show -- the story and characters are just so unbelievably stupid and disingenuous I find it hard to even understand how a whole team of real people could have produced and released this. The characters are incredibly shallow and it's like they've been written by an individual who has no idea how people act and is just going off of written references of how different anime archetypes behave. The story could've been such an incredibly simple springboard to just launch a slice of life show off of, but instead they revolve almost the entire show around this generic demon lord plot and the MC's momentary insecurities.

The only meaning one could possibly derive from this show is how a person is free to live their life how they see fit, regardless of what they are inherently talented at. They spend the entire show shoving this simple rhetoric down your throat, as if anyone was under a different impression to begin with. There's no mention of how authoritative figures in your life, such as parents or teachers, might pressure you into pursuing something you might not be all that interested in at a young age, which I think is a far more prevalent problem in the real world -- here the sole focus is the persons own perceived obligation to the world.

I wholeheartedly recommend you do not watch this anime. This is the kind of handiwork that etch me closer to being disenchanted with the industry as a whole. When something shows such a fundamental lack of humanity it really makes me reflect on the writers. It makes me wonder just how bad are all those shows that I didn't complete? How much of this garbage is out there and is pumped out every season, and is it more than before? It makes me wonder where we're headed, because thinking about that after watching this anime makes me depressed. I'm glad there's still a lot of shows released I enjoy, and I can only hope they continue to survive in an environment where a show like this one receives a score of 7 out of 10.