Nanatsu no Taizai 255 Review: King Arthur

The Seven Deadly Sins, Chapter 255: Child of Hope

Definitely a rather... eventful chapter, this one. We start off with Merlin hyping up Arthur and ignoring Escanor's barely-disguised disdain with this 'greenhorn', while Arthur himself have lifted the Excalibur-esque Holy Sword. We get a bit of a standoff and a repeat of last week's dialogue, before Chandler shows up and blasts Arthur... only to be immediately beheaded. while Arthur throws out an actually stupid-sounding line about "let's get something to eat after we're done here" which kind of just doesn't feel badass and sort of ruins the legitimately badass moment of Arthur one-shotting Chandler.  Apparently this is a mistranslation of a dialogue that's supposedly attributed to Cath later on. Whoops! Still badass, then. 

It's the same deal that the manga did when first introducing Escanor, one-shotting a powerful demon that gave the entire cast problems when Escanor took out Galan (or Garand, I think, he's properly called?) in a single shot. Still, it's not like Chandler's anything but a one-dimensional character, so I didn't feel like it's too big of a loss. Plus, judging by the lack of reaction from everyone present, he might still be alive? 

Oh, and Cath is alive, which... which is really stretching the disbelief of just how tough this little bugger is, unless Cussack just really likes cats and can't bear to kill one. Regardless, Arthur slices off Cussack's arm, before slicing up Cussack in half from shoulder to waist. And, I won't lie... while the execution could definitely be done better, it's still pretty badass for Arthur to finally do something that makes him actually feel like the super-chosen-one that the manga and author keeps hyping him up to be. I mean, there's still the problem, of course, that Arthur's source of strength and his sudden increase in power level came literally from a plot device with little to no foreshadowing (other than assuming that the audience is familiar with the actual real-life legend of King Arthur, the manga itself offers scant little in terms of foreshadowing)... which I still have a huge problem with. Still, the execution of Arthur being a sudden badass is definitely well done. 

We also get Zeldoris and Arthur fighting on par in terms of swordsmanship, and Zeldoris and Cussack both note that Arthur is doing a sort of dance-fighting known by a long-dead master swordsman... and we get a brief history of the Holy Sword, where it was passed down from great human hero to great human hero and it essentially imbues its wielder with the skills and power of all the accumulated human heroes and kings and warriors in the past, and that it's now chosen Arthur as the King-Among-Kings. And... and yeah, Arthur getting the sword, and Arthur in general, all definitely could've used a lot more foreshadowing and it always feels like I'm missing an "Episode of Arthur" somewhere in the past. But, well, I guess I'll just have to make my peace that Arthur will never be a properly fleshed-out character and is just the generic chosen-one protagonist. Still highly doubt that he's going to really do much to Meliodas, but it's a neat chapter to build Arthur up. Not the ideal way, of course, but for what we get, it definitely isn't the worst.