How do you feel about the subgenre of fantasy action-adventure anime whose premise is kicking out a secretly super-competent party member? The main character usually builds a new life and a harem of beautiful girls in pure wish fulfillment self-insert glory. Yami Healer, a new entry in this subgenre for the spring anime season, has three things that grab your attention. Will they make it worth watching? Keep reading to see if you agree!
Yami Healer — Slow Life Instead of Action-Adventure
What is this show about? Zenos, an unorthodox healer, found himself suddenly unemployed and returned to the slums where he grew up. The world of Yami Healer (Isshun de Chiryou Shiteita no ni Yakutatazu to Tsuihou Sareta Tensai Chiyushi, Yami Healer Toshite Tanoshiku Ikiru, The Brilliant Healer’s New Life in the Shadows) has a rigid caste system. Doctors can only practice if they have a license from the kingdom and charge outrageous prices. So, what do people in the slums do for healthcare? Zenos finds a niche as a back-alley doctor, serving the demihumans who live there.
As you can tell from the overly long title, Yami Healer started as a self-published light novel. It has all the usual items in these adaptations: unfair bullying, hidden talents, wish fulfillment, and the attention of beautiful girls. What separates Yami Healer from the similarly constructed The Unaware Atelier Meister? Emergency medicine and gang turf wars. How can that be a “slow life” story?
Because Yami Healer made Zenos nigh-invulnerable and a Science God of Medicine. Zenos talks about his mentor as someone who taught him medical diagnostic skills and defensive magic. That means he’s the perfect combat medic, which has two rules in an adventure party: heal injuries and avoid injury. I’m sure later episodes will explain why his former comrades kicked him out. I suspect their reasons involved healers needing licenses to practice and accept higher-profile missions. You can’t have an unlicensed slum rat traveling with you!
So, Yami Healer has low stakes for drama and cliffhangers. That leaves plenty of time for slice-of-life activity and harem hijinks.
Boss Ladies and Demihuman Harem Dynamics
Let’s meet the ladies competing for Zenos’s warm, healing hands!
- Lily — (Miharu Hanai, Twin Turbo from Uma Musume: Pretty Derby) Zenos saved the elf slave girl from bleeding to death. She serves as his housekeeper and his clinic’s receptionist. She’s jealous of her competitors’ adult body parts.
- Carmilla — (Youko Hikasa, Rias Gremory from High School DxD) A wraith who haunts the mansion where Zenos and Lily set up an unlicensed clinic in Yami Healer. She loves teasing the oblivious Zenos about the amorous attention he gathers.
- Zophia — (Anna Nagase, Ushio Kofune from Summer Time Render) The leader of the Lizardmen Gang is a thief who targets aristocrats’ houses. She was the first of the boss ladies to crush on Zenos.
- Lynga — (Mashiro Hitaka, debut credit role) The leader of the Werewolf Gang is highly territorial. That includes her gang’s turf and her claim on Zenos. She’s afraid of ghosts.
- Loewe — (Sayaka Kikuchi, Fione from Beheneko) The Orc Gang leader is proud of her muscles. Yami Healer shows off her dark skin, fashionable outfit, toned body, generous cleavage, and thigh-high stockings. She wants to warm up Zenos with her body heat.
A human knight, Krishna, will join the harem, too, but I’m here for demihuman skin, wiggling ears, and snaggle teeth. Yami Healer’s animation quality is high when it matters: showing pretty women. But dimorphic males can have googly eyes, for all I care. Watch for the panty flashes as the boss ladies fight!
Zenos, the Likable Yami Healer Main Character
One of the persistent gripes about this subgenre of the “kicked-out-of-the-hero’s-party” fantasy premise is how quickly the main character’s low self-esteem or obliviousness wears thin. Yami Healer’s spring season partner, The Unaware Atelier Meister, has a lead who has both issues. So much so that he attracts a harem who must protect the pure, pure boy. The rare exception to this formula appeared in Banished From the Hero’s Party. Red was the man! Can Zenos (Shougo Sakata, Ken Usato from The Wrong Way to Use Healing Magic) channel his obliviousness to romantic attention and ignorance of his extraordinary healing abilities into watchable anime content? So far, yes!
Zenos’s lack of recognizing female horniness is a constant source of comedy in Yami Healer, especially when the harem members bicker among themselves. But it’s also a character trait. The overly analytical and transactional back-alley doctor owes his mistrust of altruistic motivations to his survival in the slums as a child and his mistreatment by an ambitious adventurer. I see many paths for character development from this starting point.
World Building from an Underground Healer’s View
Zenos’s ignorance of licensed medical practice has the most narrative potential in Yami Healer. First, his training as a combat medic from the mysterious man in black contains many clues to how magic operates in this story’s setting. There’s also the lack of progress in healing techniques from an overly regulated and constrained medical education system, with many real-world industrial analogs for comparison.
Second, Zenos doesn’t know what he’s not supposed to know. That introduces an interesting wrinkle on the origins of his mentor, the mysterious medicine man in black. It might relate to Yami Healer’s caste system while commenting on sociological and economic issues about keeping demihumans separate from the human aristocracy. I could also throw in issues about enforcing patents or the establishment suppressing competing medical science theories. Zenos cannot understand how his time spent healing adventurers could produce techniques licensed doctors do not have. His repeated wonderment comes across as low self-esteem, but I see sociopolitical commentary.
Third, Zenos’s ethics come from his mentor’s ranking of healers.
“A healer is third-rate if they just heal injuries, second-rate if they can wholly heal a person, and first-rate if they can make the world a better place.”
By Yami Healer’s third episode, Zenos had already stopped the tribal gang turf wars in the slums. But he still considers himself a “third-rate healer.” His character development should include satisfying moments of recognizing his skills and healing the personal trauma of growing up in the slums. Literally, slow life healing anime!
Yami Healer (The Brilliant Healer’s New Life in the Shadows) streams on Crunchyroll in Japanese and English audio with subtitles in multiple languages.
Thank you for reading this blog post about Yami Healer. Have you started watching it yet? You’re missing Loewe flexing her orc biceps if you haven’t! Do you like the boss ladies’ outfits? Which is your favorite, and why is it Loewe? Let us know in the comments below.
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