Recap: Emi receives a threat from the mysterious entity that tried to kill her and Maou. Maou goes on a date with Chiho and discovers the source of the recent earthquakes.

Jel’s Thoughts: The fact that I think the busty loli girl is the best character at this point is only reinforcing my feeling that something has gone terribly wrong with this show. Chiho may not be complicated but she is at least the character she’s set up to be. I guess I even like her plucky initiative in making a move on Maou. So to my surprise, Chiho gets a pass. She’s not part of the problem. My problem is still with the development of Maou and Emi not lining up with their backstory, and this episode only made things worse.

First up we have Maou, who’s overall Evilness was even further marginalized by introducing an actual bad guy. Then we had his transformation back to demon form at the end of the episode. There has to be some reason why he’s a good guy at this point and one of my theories was transforming into a human made him, well, more human. Apparently that’s not the case since as soon as he was back to Demon Satan Overlord his first instinct was to save everyone.

I’m also not sure exactly what his intentions were in going on the date with Chiho. I’m assuming it was to investigate if the earthquakes were whatever planet blah blah link thing he was thinking of but I don’t think that was really made clear. For I could tell he could have just been playing along to be nice or maybe he really did want to go on a date with her. Whatever his motivation it was just another example of him being way more nice than an EVIL SATAN DEVIL LORD should be.

Then we have Emi, who continues to be a walking bundle of clichés. I rolled my eyes as they made sure to point out that she is really only 17 or 18, as if to scream, “DON’T WORRY GUYS, YOUR POTENTIAL WAIFU IS NOT AN OLD HAG OVER 20.” I winced even harder when she started spouting the “DON’T DIE YET, I’LL BE THE ONE TO KILL YOU” lines. I’ll admit the suggestion that the home world/dimension doesn’t want her back either does her character a lot more good than it does Maou, but the way we’ve seen her act I’m not really surprised they don’t want her.

I feel like the characters are written so off base at this point that maybe they’re just building us up to flip the script. Maybe Maou was a good guy all along and just misunderstood? Maybe Emi was a destructive Machiavellian force that no one really liked? Considering how proud Maou was of his evil demon heritage in the first episode and how he now wants to conquer Japan, that would take some serious backpedaling. But I can’t think of any other reason aside from this story just isn’t very well written. It makes it impossible for me to care when the show is asking me to. I do wonder if I’m missing something as I know there are relatively sane, normal people out there that like this. Maybe someone out there can enlighten me, because I’m just not seeing why.