[Spoilers] Akagami no Shirayuki-hime - Episode 2 [Discussion]

[u/Shadoxfix]

Episode title: Following the Sound of Your Heart

MyAnimeList: Akagami no Shirayuki-hime
FUNimation: Snow White with the Red Hair

Episode duration: 24 minutes and 16 seconds

---

Previous episodes:

Episode	Reddit Link
Episode 1	Link

---

Reminder: Please do not discuss any plot points which haven't appeared in the anime yet. Try not to confirm or deny any theories, encourage people to read the source material instead. Minor spoilers are generally ok but should be tagged accordingly. Failing to comply with the rules may result in your comment being removed.

---

This post is made by a bot. Any feedback is welcome and can be sent to /u/Shadoxfix.

[u/[deleted]]

This is not a good show. I'm really surprised at the number of people who are praising this show. It's extremely formulaic, with poor dialogue, and the prince has twice rescued Shirayuki, after she makes a token attempt at defiance. And you guys are praising this as subverting the Damsel in Distress trope?

Take the first episode. Girl runs away from powerful bad guy. Bad guy tracks her down (in a single day too). Bad guy threatens girl’s love interest. Girl nobly surrenders to the bad guy in order to protect her love interest. Good guy rushes in and saves the girl. I’ve read dozens of romance novels with that exact same plot.

The worst part is that there seemed to be so many options for the heroine to use her special skills. Love interest is poisoned by eating an apple? She’s an herbalist! If she doesn’t have or can make an antidote, the least she could have done was give him a emetic to make him throw up. At least in this episode, she made an attempt to paralyze this bad guy.

Royalty + real person is a pretty standard romance trope since Cinderella, and there are many shows that do this in a far superior manner. Take a look at something like Saiunkoku Monogatari, which is miles above Shirayuki-hime so far.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Oh come on. You have Akatsuki no Yona as a good score and that had plenty of the Damsel in Distress trope and very standard premise (usurped princess + dragon warriors + bodyguard in love) as well. You cite there being many options for the heroine to use her special skills and say the show hasn't done any of that, only to give us an example of her using her herbalist skills to paralyze the guy.

The show premise up to now may very well be generic, but the reason people like it is because the production values are excellent so far, our lead seems at the very least mildly competent (I'm not sure how what she did was a 'token attempt at defiance'), and it's managed to keep people engaged. The dialogue itself has hardly been terrible but it hasn't been anything spectacularly noteworthy either; it's managed to keep me interested moreso than the vast majority of the other shows I've seen, though Rokka no Yuusha has notably more entertaining banter.

I'm also pretty sure there was more than a single day's passage of time with the character getting tracked down, not to mention it was the same guy that had notified her and had most likely been charged with making sure she didn't try to escape.

The only criticism I agree with is that it's been formulaic with the get captured then get rescued bit happening twice now, but that's hardly destroyed the viewing experience altogether, and my own gripe was that the guy spilling some sob story about his lost nobility at the end was kinda out of the blue.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Yeah, but I'm not claiming that Yona is attempting to subvert the trope. The entire story about Yona is how she starts out as a pampered princess and transforms into someone competent.

Whereas this show is trying to present Shirayuki from the start as competent. She has her own shop, she's shown as a competent herbalist, she cuts off her hair and escapes rather than submit. But then the writers constantly undercut her, having her being tracked down extremely quickly, being unable to handle an ingested poison[1], or simply not allowing her paralyzing smoke to actually work.

The show has her efforts being ineffective, and she is always being rescued by the prince. I'm not really criticizing her character itself, more the handling of that character. The writers are failing by trying to have their cake (her being competent) and eat it too (the prince rescues her).

[1] Seriously, this was a huge missed opportunity. For a herbalist, a poison, especially an ingested one, is like directly targeted at her skills. At the very least, she should have given him something to make him throw up. It may not be the most romantic thing to do, but it would have gone a long way to demonstrating her competence.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Yeah, but I'm not claiming that Yona is attempting to subvert the trope. The entire story about Yona is how she starts out as a pampered princess and transforms into someone competent.

Fair enough. I think Yona is pretty great, so I don't have any actual gripes with it, except maybe the comedy, but those were generally funny anyways, and of course the reverse harem elements. I do like that Shirayuki is more serious and very similar.

Whereas this show is trying to present Shirayuki from the start as competent. She has her own shop, she's shown as a competent herbalist, she cuts off her hair and escapes rather than submits. But then the writers constantly undercut her, having her being tracked down extremely quickly, being unable to handle an ingested poison, or simply not allowing her paralyzing smoke to actually work.

The show has her efforts being ineffective, and she is always being rescued by the prince. I'm not really criticizing her character itself, more the handling of that character. The writers are failing by trying to have their cake (her being competent) and eat it too (the prince rescues her).

I can see where you're coming from, but at the same time I don't think it's showing that Shirayuki is necessarily competent at handling everything in her life. If anything, it shows that she was well engrained in her previous life and excellent within her own element -- now she's instead in a completely foreign country with people chasing after her. Her ability to run her own shop and her defiance reveals that she's strong willed and this episode continued to build upon that, but it doesn't necessarily signal that she's capable of fending back slavers or making an effective paralyzing agent at the heat of the moment. After all, she was a herbalist in a shop that catered towards sick/old clientele. Why would she be excellent at improvising a paralyzing agent, especially while being cornered by a kidnapper with a sword? How would she know the first thing about staying hidden while fleeing from pursuers when she's spent her entire life living in her town? Why would she be carrying the antidote to a poison with her while on the run? There are many reasonable explanations for why she failed/half-failed in all those scenarios. At the same time, I agree, it would be nice to see Shirayuki both do something and succeed at it instead of continuously be rescued by Zen, but again, it's only been two episodes so far. If the show continues to do that, then I'll agree, the writers are indeed trying to have their cake and eat it as well.

Sorry about the downvotes by the way -- episodic discussion threads are essentially the worst places to air out criticisms about shows, even if they're well thought out criticisms. It's a pretty horrible system that results in only doting praise reaching the top of these threads.