I've been watching quite a few anime as of late and there's some overlap in terms of a lot of these. And no I'm not simply referring to the marketable stuff like waifu's or the Comedy genre tag that I look for specifically. It seems like every time I watch an anime that takes place in a fantasy setting the title of Hero is not a moral disposition or even something that represents a grand person who does grand deeds as a result of a grand prophecy or what have you.
To be clear not every Fantasy Anime I've watched necessarily has a "Hero" character. Obviously many series have been attempting to ask questions about the lines between heroes and villains for a long time. The Fate series, while not strictly fantasy, has many characters in the form of Heroic Spirits who are Heroes by classification but may not necessarily be a Hero in terms of a Good Moral Alignment. However, while the Fate series has Heroes that can run the gamut between good and evil, the Fate series also very rarely paints even characters squarely in the good or evil morality as strictly good or bad people. This is not the occurrence I'm referring to.
I'm also not referring to a situation where the hero is the strongest of the Human faction but is otherwise a good person anyway, like Hero Kanon from Misfit of Demon King Academy. Demon King Academy has a huge theme of humans being far more evil than they seem to believe they are yet Hero Kanon stands in stark contrast to this as not only is he the only human that Anos Voldigode viewed as a genuine friend and equal but also a human that views other humans as utter scum for how low they'll sink to accomplish a goal where Anos always proved that he would sacrifice himself for those he cares about. In this case, the human species as a whole veers toward the evil end of the moral spectrum but Kanon himself does not.
In this case what I'm referring to is the term Hero being used as a classification almost like its their Job title or race yet the characters in the Hero camp are concisely not in the Good Camp that you'd expect. There are a few examples I can cite off the top of my head but as far as I can tell the first instance I can identify comes in the form Redo of Healer. We've had evil main characters and Hero downfalls prior to this but many of those series usually make a clear moral distinction between heroes and villains.
More specifically, from a narrative point of view, Hero in Redo of Healer is a class of characters that have a few notable differences from other people in the setting but the general idea is that they do not have limits on their ability to grow and can break other people's limits through the use of sexual bodily fluids. By the way, if you're asking right now if Redo of Healer is a hentai, technically it isn't but its subject matter and presentation suggest that it may as well be.
Anyway, the Heroes are divided into multiple other sub-categories with Healer being one of them. Now, the Healer Hero ends up reversing time and getting revenge on the other heroes for the vicious deeds they committed against him but it's worth noting that the Healer isn't a good person either. He may be doing the world a favor by making people aware of how awful the heroes are but at the end of the day he's still committing and causing atrocities to get it across. He's no more a Good person than any other hero is, he just happens to be in opposition to the others.
Likewise Rising of the Shield Hero is one where Heroism seems to be separate from the moral alignment as well. I won't talk about this one too much just because I haven't seen it but a big chunk of this story's premise seems to be placed on the other heroes being scum in their own rite and Shield Hero just happens to be making something of himself separate from them. I don't know if he'd classify as Lawful Evil, Neutral Evil, or Lawful Neutral given the way he goes about things but it is clear that if he is in the good alignment, he's the only one of the heroes who is.
A, as far as I understand it, series with a similar application to Shield Hero is a recent anime called Beast Tamer in which the hero is tasked with defeating the Demon King and the Hero's party ostracizes the Beast Tamer from their group because they view him as a liability in combat and generally very weak.
Now, one of the more predictable things about this anime prior to finishing up episode 1 is that the Heroes seem to think of carrying gear and scouting the area as less of a valuable skill than it actually is. It's sort of like the first episode of Goblin Slayer where the Priestess' first party chooses not to properly prepare an invasion of a Goblin Nest because they think it'll be a piece of cake only to face a rude awakening when the Goblins are not as trivial as they expected. This is somewhat of a similar situation, Rain was carrying the gear and scouting the area which, while not solving the quests outright, definitely streamlined the process, giving them the lay of the land and also causing them to not waste so much time or energy on gathering or carrying supplies.
To be clear, Goblin Slayer is not this sort of series. Goblin Slayer very much paints its heroes in a very positive light morally, Goblin Slayer's maturity is more in the removal of the romanticizing of the Adventurer Job. Being an adventurer isn't easy, it's bloody, there are people who do it solely for the money, and even low level enemies like Goblins can still be incredibly dangerous if not handled with care. Goblin Slayer's theme is more about not underestimating a supposedly weak faction as opposed to the moral alignment of anyone in said faction.
The Hero's Party in Beast Tamer, though, they're very vainglorious only doing the job to gain the recognition that comes from completing it yet they abandon Rain due to viewing him as completely worthless only to find that things don't go as planned without him. Even before you get to the episodes of the party struggling, it's going to be clear that the hero's party will have a much more difficult time without a courier to carry their stuff or a proper scout to survey the area.
We get other revelations about Rain pretty quickly, like he's apparently abnormally strong for a Beast Tamer and he's also able to gain the properties of those he contracted with to improve his own base abilities and, as of Episode 7 there's an implication that the character that is said to be the Hero may not actually be the Hero. I don't know if it'll lead to Rain actually being the hero but the idea seems to be that while Aurios (I think that's how you spell his name) is descended from the Hero, the Hero's application of absorbing the blood of others to limit break and gain power to defeat the demon king is a lot more similar to Rain's abnormal ability to make contracts with entities he shouldn't be able to and the boons therein. But since I'm not certain, I'll let it slide.
For now though, let's focus on the fact that not only do the heroes abandon Rain when they view him as worthless, yet their plan for overcoming that difficulty is bringing him back only to abandon him when their job is done. And once that fails and they get their shit pushed in by Rain and his familiars, they contract him to obtain a Shield from the Lost Woods that they were unable to navigate. After he obtains it in only 2 days, where they got no progress in 7, they decide to invite Rain back to the party to defeat the Demon King only to reveal that they haven't changed at all. They don't have a newfound respect for Rain nor do they believe that they did anything wrong by mistreating him. They simply view him as a benefit to their goal.
So I have two predictions about the way this series is going to go: either Aurios actually is the hero, at which point being a hero doesn't equate to being morally righteous, making it a formality based on tradition. Or, it'll turn out that Rain is the actual hero, thereby completely nullifying the point of this post. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.
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