Roll Over and Die – Episode 1

Content Warning: Enslavement, gore

What’s it about? Flum Apricot was prophesized as one of the legendary heroes who would defeat the Demon Lord, but her “reversal” ability meant her stats were always at zero. Viewing her as a burden, her party leader sold her into slavery, where Flum finds two things that will change her life: first, a bandaged girl named Milkit; and second, an ultra-powerful cursed sword that becomes a blessing in Flum’s hands.

I have often said that adding gay to a genre is the surest way to improve it. Robots but gay? Awesome. Cooking but gay? Awesome. Magical girls but gay? …Not that different, actually, but still awesome. And so it seems that Roll Over and Die has appeared to test my convictions. “Kicked out of the party” is one of the most unpleasant microgenres of the moment, made to cater to young men who feel as though they’ve been hard-done-by in an uncaring world…and thus, it’s totally okay for them to be cruel to those with less power than them. He had to take that slave! How else will he knock the bitch who betrayed him down a peg? Not all of them are that noxious, obviously, but it’s a deep ravine to dig out of. Does making the most misused young man at the center into a queer woman really redress the core issues at hand?

Ehhhhhhhnhh…?

Roll Over and Die’s premiere does massage the usual expected tropes in a few ways that speak in its favor. Yes, it absolutely does read differently when a young woman is marked as being “undesirable”—mainly in that it makes the threat of sexual violence much more prominent, though it doesn’t get further than verbal threats. The narrative of the “traitorous bitch” is also unstable: Flum—God, you just can’t expect me to take that name seriously when I’m currently coughing flum out of my lungs—but anyway, Flum’s party leader tells her that her closest friend in the party was the one who pushed to sell Flum off, but there was pretty clearly coercion at play. Even the “nasty” receptionist who tells Flum and Milkit they should go into sex work rather than getting an adventurer’s license was clearly trying to protect them from her obviously shady boss.

It’s also being real squirmy about the whole “give the protagonist a slave” thing. Milkit refuses to follow anyone who won’t be her master, because it’s the only path she sees to safety, and so Flum agrees in the moment to rescue her; however, both of them have been branded, so they’re on equal footing in terms of social capital. Flum doesn’t have any desire to bind Milkit to her, and so far doesn’t have any concrete way of forcing her to stay if she changed her mind, either. She won’t, of course—she’ll put on a maid outfit and fall in love with the protagonist who saved her—but I suppose I can say it feels less gross than the usual examples. But then, why have it at all? The answer is, “because it’s a genre expectation.”

That sense of box-checking is what really holds me at arm’s length from Roll Over and Die. “Kicked out” stories have a strain of petulance to them—“I am AWESOME, actually; the world just didn’t hand me what I deserved so that I could excel like I should have!”–that usually results in extremely flat, cartoonish villains, and that bears out here. Yes, there is a visceral allure to watching an abused queer girl take down wicked men in power, but really? It wasn’t evil enough for the slaver to be selling human beings, you had to make sure we knew how hugely, grotesquely fat he was? Drinking wine, fatfully, while he mocks our heroine? It’s a small thing, but like the “why even bother including it” slavery element, it makes me wary of the writing’s carelessness. Can it be a transformative revenge story when it’s so happy to use familiar shorthand? Or is this more of the I Spit On Your Grave of yuri—vindicating, maybe, but not without significant baggage dragging along behind it.

Mariko Kunisawa is wrangling the source material, and it’s always nice to see women working on yuri, but I must concede that her resume is about as full of adaptive misses as it is hits. It’s also decided to apply being a “dark” fantasy to its visuals and not just its themes. Call me grim, but if this is gonna be a blood and gore fest, I’d like to actually be able to see what’s happening when the squishening goes down. Sure, there’s something to be said for gut-level entertainment, but this episode has already run the gamut of pretty dark and serious topics for little reason beyond the shocking frisson of doing something edgy. In the end, I can’t shake the thought, “does this genre deserve to be improved with lesbians?” And I think the answer might be “no.”

…I’ll probably watch three episodes anyway.