Ranking of Kings

What happened? I was absolutely in love with this show for the first 10ish episodes, it had started to feel like it was on a narrative downswing once bojji went to the underworld to train, but would pick up again when they returned for the major climactic battles at boss kingdom. But holy shit, it just feels like they dropped the fucking ball pretty hard on it.
The danger just isn’t there anymore, so there’s no stakes and suddenly it feels like it’s much more of an actual kiddy fantasy show than a subversion of that expectation. I’m holding out that the lady miranjo story line is as good as it’s been built of to be because right now it’s all that’s keeping me interested.

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Also, semi related, but they did not earn that scene where desha tortured and killed a literal baby gigante or whatever they’re called. He says that’s how war is but goddamn they did not do a good job of keeping that tone consistent enough for the show, so it just feels like desha should be held way more accountable for that then he is.

It constantly feels like the author is forced to juggle between keeping the story light-hearted for younger auditory and getting his edgelord boner out. Desha going from "i'm here not to kill anyone" to the flashback of a tortured baby orc within two episodes is one hell of a tonal whiplash.

Desha didn't torture the baby. It was the mercenaries. He killed the baby to put it out of it's suffering and to keep the men on his side after Gigan's betrayal.

Same honestly.
I already know that everyone is kind, have a sad backstory and will most likely be fine. awful writing

Another shounen with a fun premise that promises many twists to the more common shounen tropes ends up failing to avoid being a generic shounen in itself.
Subversion of tropes isn't the only thing you need to be doing to appear "unique" and "original".
It's still good, just not as good as I had hoped it would be. 7/10

>Subversion of tropes
The bad thing about Ousama is that it completely stopped subversions and went for generic power of friendship path.
One of the strongest things about the early story was how every character is not what it seems, they all were unique and intriguing mixes of tropes you don't typically see.

Yeah, giving even Gigan of all side characters a pity backstory made me lose all faith in the rest of the story.

Based brainlets failing to see the tone of the series even if it makes itself obvious as early as chapter 3 or 4. Yes it's a children's story about an underdog character retaking what's rightfully his and the artstyle should be obvious it draws inspiration from children books, also the characters not being generic isekai villains is a plus, not a minus.

>I’m holding out that the lady miranjo story line is as good as it’s been built of to be
It's funny reading that because in reality the Miranjo storyline is what ruins the entire series and reduces any potential interesting characters to irrelevant trash forced to orbit around the Uchiha-like plotline that takes so much space and is unknown to anyone but two characters. You might as well drop the series right now because there's no payoff that will ever make the time spent on this worth it.

My problem isn’t with the tone so much as it is with how the story got incredibly predictable. I always expected it to keep a relatively lighthearted tone, but the show was building itself up to have realistic stakes, realistic character motivations and, most importantly, it was anything but predictable. There was so much shit going on and every twist was good, surprising yet still completely believable, it always felt like there was more that hasn’t been revealed and every answered question brought up more questions, the whole thing was a masterclass at keeping me invested, but lately the show keeps playing the whole fantasy thing completely straight and has become PAINFULLY predictable.
To be clear, I still totally have hope that the show can still be good, shows like Mob Psycho 100 can have strings of predictable shonen episodes and still stay good by sticking the landing with a great resolution, But it’s not looking great right now.