The Rising of the Shield Hero Episode 17

The Rising of the Shield Hero Episode 17

A Promise Made

So, remember last week when Fitoria told Naofumi that she was going to kill the four cardinal heroes if they refused to resolve their differences and work together? Well, apparently this was a bit too complex for Naofumi to understand at the time, and so she had to explain it again this episode.

And, in case you still don’t understand, I’ll break it down for you here one more time. Basically, the heroes need to work together because the later waves will be so powerful that they’ll lose otherwise. However, Naofumi and the other three heroes aren’t exactly on the best of terms.

So, if they refuse to cooperate, then new heroes who will cooperate will have to be summoned. The only problem with that is that in order to summon new heroes, all four current heroes must be dead. In short, Fitoria is threatening to kill the heroes so that a new batch can be summoned.

This was all information Naofumi was previously privy to, and so he should have understood what she meant when she explained this all the first time around. But, Fitoria does give Naofumi one last out.

If Naofumi can prove to her that he and his party are strong enough to fight the waves on their own, then there’s no reason for them to have to team up with the other three heroes. This also means that she won’t have to kill the heroes in order to summon new ones.

Fitoria vs. Filo

However, this test of strength isn’t exactly what Naofumi had in mind. Rather than testing his power, or the combines power of his party, Fitoria takes Melty hostage and requests a one-on-one duel with Filo in their human forms.

I’ll be honest, I’m not entirely sure why the duel was restricted to their human forms. Regardless of which form they fought in, Fitoria has the clear advantage, so I don’t really see a point to this rule. Even if Fitoria wanted to remain in human form due to her massive Filolial form, she still would have had the upper hand against Filo’s Filolial form.

Fitoria from the anime series The Rising of the Shield Hero
Fitoria

This is the time when you might have thought that Filo had a chance at winning. Perhaps she would be so overcome by the power of friendship that she’d be able to defeat Fitoria. Well, that’s not what happened.

Filo does show off an apparently impressive display of magic toward the end of their fight, but she still only manages to scratch Fitoria. That said, this display was just enough to convince Fitoria that Filo, and by extension the rest of Naofumi’s party, potentially have the capacity to become strong enough to save the world.

It’s also sort of revealed that none of this really had to do with Naofumi, the rest of the heroes, or even the safety of the world. While those are all certainly important in one way or another, Fitoria really just wanted to test Filo, and this situation was the perfect way to make Filo fight all out.

The Next Filolial Queen

And, why was Fitoria trying to test Filo? Because she wanted to see if Filo has what it takes to become the next Filolial queen. It turns out she does, but it’s still unclear exactly when the next Filolial queen will actually be needed. Is Fitoria getting close to the end of her life, or is Filo just an insurance policy?

It was also reiterated that the reason Filo has such great potential among Filolials is because she’s being raised by one of the heroes. I believe I went over this in last week’s review, but I’ll briefly say it again: this goes against the world building from when Naofumi first purchased Filo’s egg.

I get that conflicting information like this can be present in source material, but when a story is adapted into a new medium, plot holes should really be patched up. This isn’t an uncommon practice, there are many examples of authors intentionally changing things in anime adaptations of their series’ to improve upon their original work.

Anyway, what does becoming the next Filolial queen even do for Filo? For starters, we can assume that in the future she’ll have an army of Filolials following her every order, but that’s probably not something she’ll get until she officially becomes the queen.

For now, Filo gets a boost to her base stats as well as a cowlick which reappears when ripped out. The cowlick doesn’t actually matter, but I figured I’d include it considering it’s the part Filo cares most about (in a negative way).

Past Heroes

Towards the end of the episode we’re also told a bit about Fitoria’s past and the past heroes. I believe she mentioned that it’s been something like 300 years since the last heroes were summoned, so let’s just start with that.

Based on that time frame, there shouldn’t be many people alive who remember the last time the heroes were summoned. Even Fitoria has mentioned that Filolials don’t normally live anywhere near as long as she has, so we can assume that most other races don’t either.

However, we also learn that Fitoria has lived longer than she can even remember. As she puts it, she’s lived longer than a Filolial’s memory lasts. So, although she remembers being raised by a hero and the promise she made to that hero, she can’t even remember which hero raised her.

A previous hero from the anime series The Rising of the Shield Hero
A previous hero

We can assume that she was raised by the Shield Hero considering he tends to be the one on the side of demi-humans, but it’s never actually confirmed. However, another hint towards his identity is that the hero who raised Fitoria wore green, which is the color of the Shield Hero.

At the very end of the episode there’s a scene involving Ren and Itsuki as they try to uncover the mystery of the four cardinal heroes. They seem to uncover a dastardly plot of some sort, but it’s not entirely clear what it is just yet. Is this what the hero who raised Fitoria was afraid of?

Conclusion

What did you think of this week’s episode of The Rising of the Shield Hero? As with a few of the more recent episodes, I didn’t think it was actually all that good. It wasn’t bad, but I don’t think I’d call it good either.

Also, in case you didn’t realize, this post is going live on Thursday rather than Wednesday. For the foreseeable future this is when my Shield Hero episode reviews will now be uploaded, and Wednesday will be an off-day. The Boruto episode reviews will also be replaced with miscellaneous anime reviews until a major arc comes back.

For more information regarding scheduling changes make sure you follow me over on Twitter @DoubleSama, or join the Discord server and check out the “Updates” channel.

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My review of the next episode is available here.

One Reply to “The Rising of the Shield Hero Episode 17”

  1. The fight was very cliche and very unoriginal. It’s the typical “winning through sheer willpower” against a much stronger and more experienced opponent trope. Filo’s a very one-dimensional character, so I was hoping that she’d demonstrate some quality other than strength to win the fight I also did not feel a development of his character despite the fact that this arc could have focused exclusively on her so all these episodes seemed to me a fillers.
    So really the plot has not advanced much so I feel that they stretch these arcs for some reason besides retaining crucial information in the first episode I liked that Naofumi was asking questions, While that makes sense why has Naofumi stopped asking questions? There are so many instances where he should have asked some questions, The filolial queen can jam his rage shield, says that he shouldn’t rely on that power. So she should know something about it. But he never asks anything about it to her should have asked him about the history of the previous heroes and why that history resulted in everyone looking down on him.

    Another intrigued me, the king said that the heroes cannot work together as that would inhibit their growth but Fitoria said it would instead be essential to be working together. Is this just one of the king’s way of trying to fuck everybody up? exactly what happens with the kingdom and its problem of treating the heroes? I hope there is an explanation of this too.

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