Amazon's suggesting this to me and I'm just like. Nah.

Nope

I didn't even make it through the first bit of Goblin Slayer, the whole "This is what would really happen to popular fantasy groups, this is why my OC is so much better than other fantasy heroes" tone just turned me off.

The needless edge was eyeroll worthy

I hadn't heard about it for a while, so I'd thought it'd finally wound down and died after the initial burst of "snee-snee-snee, we're not like other fantasy stories"-ness

Yeah, it gets clear pretty early on that like a solid 90% of it is that the author and the target fanbase just really love brutalizing the hell out of the female characters

like to the point that even the anime was like "alright we're gonna just cut out entire scenes here because there's no way in HELL we'll get away with this"

Drove my friend and I fucking nuts, since the world itself isn't terrible and several characters are likeable, it's just. There really is no way to enjoy it properly because of just how often they're just like "ALRIGHT, TIME TO HORRIBLY MUTILATE AND/OR ASSAULT THE FEMALE CHARACTERS 8D "

to the point that everyone in-universe has to be chronically incompetent for it to work

Yeah, I got the feeling that future stories would be all about how incompetent everyone was compared to the Goblin Slayer.

Not so much that, but like

(though he does have the usual Protag curse of having to be the one to solve problems)

In-universe, it's known exactly how goblins reproduce.

SO WHY WOULD YOU HELP BY ALLOWING FEMALE ADVENTURERS TO GO ON THE MISSIONS TO SUBDUE THEM

There's similarly 0 explanation for why anyone keeps assuming goblins aren't a threat when it's a known fact that they regularly full party wipe entire teams

The conflict as it's portrayed in the story can basically only exist if everyone is incredibly stupid

and if all the higher ranking adventurers are colossal assholes who don't believe in public safety

You'd think the guilds would increase the rewards so that the high ranking adventurers would bother with them.

If they think the goblins are beneath them, fine, whatever, but when someone's actually telling you "hey they're annihilating every town they come across" the response shouldn't be "eh, they're just goblins, let someone else handle it"

I also find this funny because I think part of the setup is that like...the gods basically play with mortals the way DnD players do their characters and let them die often, but super speshul main character Goblin Slayer doesn't let them play around with him because he's just that badass. So making an actual RPG out of it is hilarious in that context.

Basically the top priority for the brand is a very specific fetish, with literally everything else deemed less important from a storytelling perspective (if not outright unimportant). Which is. Not really how that should work.

and it drives me nuts that even with that it's still one of the few properties I've come across that's actually decided "look if we're gonna have a female barbarian character, she'd better be big and she'd better be absolutely fuckin' shredded"

You can't build a story off of "These stories are Doing It Wrong" if you don't bother to explore the rest of the ramifications.

I actually just posted a video on the "evil superman" trope and one part they talk about satire that's in on the joke (they understand the appeal of the original but are exploring it via satire or deconstruction) vs not (they don't understand the appeal and tend to make very surface level criticism because they never dove deep into the original themselves)

*posted a link to a video

Platinum : Pretty much. The stuff it does do well winds up overshadowed by everything it's fucking up.

In this or any other IP with the same approach