Waxing Rhapsodic about Death March (Part 1)

Hi fellow anime lovers! So maybe “waxing rhapsodic” is an overstatement. Death March certainly has its share of flaws. Yet it seems to me that there’s a couple of areas where it really shines in ways I’ve not seen in other isekai shows.

The first thing that struck me even from Episode One was that, despite the (unsurprisingly) over-powered nature of our protagonist, the series consistently establishes that his power is limited in interesting ways. Awesome asteroid-summoning spell? Too destructive, has no practical value. Conveniently maxed-out musical talent stat? Still doesn’t make him any good at playing specific instruments. Amazing magic skills? Useless in overcoming socially-approved discrimination and slavery.

Compare that with, say, SAO, in which the limits (no magic, permadeath, etc.) are set out ahead of time, and then special players like Kirito and Kaiba basically cheat around those limits and come out as superheros/villains. Or last year’s In Another World with my Smartphone, which spends the whole time establishing how amazing the protagonist is without really setting any limits. In some ways, Death March is closer to Log Horizon, which showed how the presumably awesome aspects of being a video game hero (super tough, super-powered, infinite revival from the dead, immortal, etc.) would actually destroy human society the moment they became part of the real world. Shiroe, the protagonist of Log Horizon, basically saves the people he’s responsible for through his wits, which though amazingly Holmes-esque are fallible and certainly not a superpower. And Satou of Death March doesn’t even have that to rely on!

It’s especially intriguing to me that Satou is (almost) powerless in the face of social injustice such as slavery. After his initial attempts to reject slavery altogether, he concludes that neither the slaves he rescued nor the society they are part of are ready to abandon that unjust institution. He therefore has to answer the question, “If I cannot by myself overthrow this custom entirely, if even the three slaves I’ve rescued don’t want to be without a master, what can I do to better their lives nonetheless?”

In other words, Satou is forced to confront a situation where the ideal and the real don’t mesh, and can’t mesh at least for now. If the slaves themselves wanted to be free, the story might go in a different direction: perhaps Satou would have led a slave uprising, or been part of a fantasy version of the American Civil War. Those options are off the table in the current scenario. Another, more poignant, version of this situation played out in Heroic Legend of Arslan, where our heroes kill a slaveholding lord (he tried to murder them first) and then announce to the slaves that they are free—only for the slaves to attack them and seek revenge for the death of their beloved master. Arslan, for his part, doesn’t give up his dream of abolishing slavery—but as a viable contender for the throne he also has a chance to make sweeping reforms to his country. Satou, it appears, has no such option.

So instead Satou opts to serve as master for the three slaves he has rescued from death. (I just noticed that’s an odd phrase, “to serve as master”, implying that he is serving the slaves. There’s a modicum of truth to this.) Initially he decides he won’t buy any more slaves, but changes his mind when he meets two more whom he feels sorry for.

Death March does not make any argument that slavery is good, of course. (Which would be a sickening proposition very much out of keeping with the calm feeling of the show.) The focus is on the question, “How do we come to terms with injustice when we can’t set things completely right? When is it permissible to compromise, and to what extent?” And like any good story, it leaves the answer open-ended: Satou’s answer might not be the correct one—but would we do any differently in his shoes? Would we stick to our principles at any price, or accommodate compromise for at least some reasons?

Stay tuned for Part 2 to find out about the second aspect of Death March I found unusual and intriguing!