Filthy Casual for Life

Not all anime are blessed with the ability to hook you on the first episode. I spend a great deal of my time executing the “three-episode test” to determine if something is up my alley. However, there are three exceptional anime that immediately grabbed my attention with their first episode.

GOBLIN SLAYER

Who could forget the opening scene? It is preceded by a warning. “This show contains scenes that some viewers may find disturbing. Viewer discretion is advised.”

An inexperienced party is being killed and/or raped by a group of devastatingly violent goblins. The last surviving member, a priestess, sits watching her party being brutalized. A goblin sniffs the air and begins to laugh when it realizes the priestess has urinated herself. Just as her fate was about to be sealed, Goblin Slayer comes to the rescue answering the goblins’ violence in kind. The opening was dark and gritty and absolutely brilliant.

DEMON SLAYER

Tanjiro goes down the mountain with charcoal to sell to the nearby village. It’s beginning to get dark. One of the locals stops him and forces him to spend the night. Tanjiro enjoys a nice warm meal and goes to sleep. The next morning, he heads home, but he suddenly gets the whiff of blood. He runs toward his home only to find his entire family slaughtered.

From that point, I was hooked. The episode then introduced his sister turned demon and his initial struggle to keep her alive from a demon slayer. The demon slayer, against all instinct, allows the demon sister to live and instructs Tanjiro to seek out a man for training. The episode had me wondering about the path Tanjiro and his demon sister must take.

SOLO LEVELING

It isn’t until the end of the episode that I got hooked in. We meet Jinwoo who is a weak hunter that really has no place partying up to clear gates. However, he endures the mockery and fear. While they are exploring a gate, they discover a second dungeon. Things do not go as planned. Something is off. They should have turned around. The statues in the dungeon start to pick them off. The deaths are brutal. Jinwoo is traumatized as he looks around and sees death littered around him. He comes to the conclusion that they’re going to die. The episode leaves off at this cliffhanger.

How about you? Is there an anime that caught your attention in the first episode?