Maoyuu Maou Yuusha

[Yukimura]

@Dark Dragon the biggest beef I have with the position that the show, and I think you as well, seem to be advocating is that it is trying to say that accepting stability and predictability even if you're a slave or have no opportunity in life makes one superior to those who pursue freedom even if it brings uncertainty. It's saying that being a cog in a machine that you know is going somewhere is better than being your own machine and not knowing where you're going to end up but deciding for yourself where you're heading. I don't think it's necessarily an incorrect view, but I also actively reject the notion that it's necessarily the correct view. I don't think it's good to encourage people to content themselves with being mere cogs in someone else's machine to the extent that I feel the maid and queen are doing because they think their 'machine' is superior to anything the humans could possibly come up with.


@Kraco: I think you are giving the queen/maid more credit than they deserve just because they're the next best thing to tautologically 'good' because they're the protagonists. The queen and maid seem to be chock full of their own moral superiority to the entirety of humanity and they are playing the role of the noble white man stretching out his hand to the poor savage to destroy everything that he is and remake him in the white man's image. While the circumstances of the show will undoubtedly make it seem like the demons are always in the right and the humans are always in the wrong it still rings hollow to me because it's based on the same sort of colonial era European arrogance that the morality of a technologically superior culture is inherently better than that of more primitive culture. It may be dressed up nicely by eliminating any indications of failings or shortcomings within the technologically superior culture but that doesn't mean we have to choose not to see it for what it really is.


The maid shit all over the older girl's hope and pride by insulting her for running away from her life as a serf without a concrete and well thought out plan, but she doesn't acknowledge the fact that if the girl and boy hadn't worked up the courage to leave their serf life in the first place they never would have chanced upon the wonderful and benevolent queen and her stuck up maid. They probably would have lived out their lives as meaningless serfs on whatever random fief they came from and never had a chance to make something of themselves, but according to to the maid they're still insects until they beg her to make them what she considers human.

In my view the kids demonstrated plenty of agency by leaving a life that was probably quite survivable but had no chance for a meaningful future and they earned their human dignity by refusing to be pigeonholed into servitude just because society said that was their only option.

Also, the maid coughed disdain all over them for their plan to go to the capital and beg and scrape to make a living, then turns around and more or less demands that they beg the demon queen for assistance instead or else they'll be turned in. I'll grant that it was nice and unnecessary for the demon queen to accept the kids request to serve in exchange for help becoming more self sufficient but the only real difference between what they were planning to do and what actually happened is that they ended up begging someone for help before they got to the city.