Quote:
Originally Posted by Twi
No, you don't understand. An antagonist does not mean a person to beat or kill in a fight. It is just a person who is actively opposes or is hostile to them. By this definition you have the king and princess, the other three heroes, and the other antagonist of the first arc which counts as spoilers so I'm not saying.
Him having no ATK is an interesting gimmick in that it forces him to rely on party members, but that doesn't matter considering there's no merit to fighting any of them. What does matter is the fact that the series is largely him cleaning up their messes and showing how much better he is than them because he does things that should be common sense and has half a brain. He doesn't do anything clever, he just so happens to be the one who has the highest level.
A protagonist is as good as the antagonists they overcome. And there might be a lot going on outside of king and b***h, but the story doesn't draw attention to that until well into it and we still have to deal with the other heroes just being stupid or petty throughout it.
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It's still quite excessive in my opinion to call it a glorified revenge flick. It's a story of redemption and misfortune, of how far down one can sink when circumstances are stacked against them, how hard it is to come back and the people it takes to do so. I'd say the other heroes etc. aren't really major sources of conflict and weren't meant to be; they were merely meant to be sources of futility. The real conflict is his personal despair and rage at the unfair and impossible situation. Revenge frankly wouldn't work with that conflict, and would even go against it. Not every story about a person who's seriously wronged is built around revenge.
Also, I wouldn't say this is "about" or "supportive of" misogyny OR misandry. There are good and bad men and women. Just because some women are jerks or some women fall for men for flimsy reasons doesn't mean it thinks women should be servants or that women are bad or anything negative about women, just like its having men who seriously don't understand women and jump to conclusions and say and do incredibly stupid things, to the point of sometimes seriously hurting innocent women, doesn't mean it's suggesting that men are inferior or bad in any way. Both sides of the coin have very good people and very bad people, and there can be good points in the bad and bad points in the good, just like normal people.
Finally, I think the level of intelligence that should be expected is kind of overestimated. From the outside looking in there may indeed be a lot of points where we think "WTF is wrong with these people" but really they have significantly less reason to make the connections we make. A guy who's played an MMO may recognize some things, but even if he has played a few games if they're completely different from what he's now experiencing or he hasn't really confirmed that it's got anything more than a couple minor similarities to games then he's not going to pick up on things that quickly. And if people had played a lot of extremely immersive games that indeed do resemble the world too much, it's not that surprising that they'd be firmly set in their worldviews, and quick to dismiss any view that doesn't match what they personally can see and remember.