Endro! – Episode 8 – What It Means To Be a Hero

While Rona is smitten towards Yulia since she is a hero, Rona feels that Yulia isn’t heroic enough. She asks Mao to help her change that.

Last time, Rona has strengthened her bonds with Yulia’s party members. While Seria and Mei help her during class, the most notable is how Fai acts. She is now sharing her food with Rona, which surprises her friends. After all, Fai didn’t share food in the past.

While Rona seems happy with the progress she made with Yulia’s friends, something is missing. It’s obvious when she looks at the stack of books with stories focusing on various heroes. She soon realizes that Yulia haven’t done that many heroic things and lives a life as any normal girl would. In other words, it doesn’t quite fit the image that Rona expected. With that, she wants to change that.

Since Rona knows that the Demon Lord will get Yulia fired up, she tries to bribe Mao to help her out. Yes, Mao seems reluctant at first to faking a Demon Lord battle. Once Mao saw one of Rona’s guards take a gold bar out of his pocket, she had to do it.

In short, Mao worked to fake the Demon Lord kidnapping Rona. It’s quite amazing how Rona constructed a fake Demon Lord palace. Rona even had her four bodyguards wear costumes to act like the Demon Lord’s four generals. Combined with Mao’s transform Cartado card, it made this whole act look convincing.

Of course, when Yulia and her friends heard the news, they had to go and save Rona. The funny thing is that Yulia is not focused on defeating the Demon Lord. This is quite telling. Things got more suspicious with the rolling boulder. When Fai tried to smash it after Mei tripped on a step, it was fake. They find out that the boulder is made out of paper.

It’s quite obvious that Mao wants to go easy on them. Besides the fake boulder, she used Pomuruns as enemies. It’s funny to see Seria’s reaction when she saw them. Of course, this doesn’t seem to satisfy Rona at all since this seems too easy for her crush.

While the fake Four Generals presented a challenge, they eventually surrendered after Yulia said that she will save Rona no matter what. It’s obvious that her body guards are doing this to make Rona happy. In other words, hurting Yulia and her friends wouldn’t be good. Still Rona seems perplexed why the Four Generals surrendered just like that.

While Mao believes that she thinks that her job is done already, it wasn’t enough for Rona. While Mao doesn’t have her Demon Lord powers anymore, she has a card that allows her to transform into one. Once the heroes came, it becomes quite obvious that Yulia doesn’t care about defeating the Demon Lord, but rather saving her friend, Rona. While saving the world is important, in her eyes, saving best her friend from harm is more important.

Eventually, Rona calls out to stop the fight and said it was fake all along. I think Rona finally realizes that she was caught up with the hero stuff that she never realized who Yulia is as a person. After all, Yulia treats Rona as her precious friend despite her friend being a princess. Yulia calling Rona by her first name instead of addressing her as a princess makes this obvious.

Still, I think this is a good lesson for Rona to learn. She should accept people the way they are rather than trying to make them into something that they aren’t. Let’s face it, Yulia won’t have all the qualities of an ideal hero. Then again, there isn’t a hard list of things he or she needs to be to become a hero. Even one can view someone saving their friend as heroic as they are risking their life to save their loved ones from danger. From the looks of it, it seems that Rona is even closer with Yulia now that she put behind her hero obsession. ¶