Welcome to Demon School, Iruma-kun Season 3

Episode 12

I didn't like Orobas before, but this episode made me positively despise him. There's something inherently of the bully in his actions; they may be due to his innate power and bloodline ability, but that doesn't mean that he has to use them the way that he does: dredging up people's worst memories to use against them. Yes, yes, he's a demon and all that, but most of the demons we have encountered in this series aren't actually as bad as the humans Iruma used to live with. Orobas is clearly the most demonic of the lot, and that's not because of his powers; it's because of how he uses them.

That he's doubling down on the illusions of past horror with Iruma suggests that he sees the other boy as the biggest threat to his demonic supremacy. He's probably not wrong, and he also probably isn't aware of the depth of Iruma's trauma, but that in no way detracts from the sheer horror of what he does. PTSD is no joking matter, and if I may play armchair psychologist, that seems very much to be what Iruma is suffering from. He's got every right to – what he went through at the hands of his parents looks comedic on film but was clearly a nightmare to live. That's actually one of the most powerful moments in this episode: the visuals of what Iruma's parents did are played for laughs, but they don't detract from the very real danger and torment of his earlier life. When he begins to hallucinate his Misfit Class friends rejecting him, that's when we really see the damage his parents did. Iruma clearly never believed that he would belong anywhere or have people who cared about him. Losing them, therefore, has become his absolute greatest fear in life. Now that he knows what it is to live comfortably and happily, he can't go back, and to make him think that he must is perhaps far crueler than anything Orobas even intended.

Seeing Iruma work through his flight response to land on fight was difficult for me to watch, because I've been there. It takes extraordinary strength and willpower to stand your ground when everything is screaming at you to run away so that you don't get hurt again, and I can very nearly forgive this season for having futzed around so much because of how well done this episode is. This is what Iruma was training for – not to win the harvest festival, but to win against something in himself, whether or not Bachiko knew it. From a storytelling standpoint, it is also likely why the Misfit Class was truly broken up into small groups; this moment of strength would not necessarily have been possible for Iruma had he been with Asmodeus and Clara. And now that he's gone out through the darkness of his own psychological demons, it's going to be very hard to hold him back.

If this episode made me despise Orobas, it also kind of made me love Naphula. The stinky little monster clearly has a heart much bigger than their body, and if they couldn't stop Orobas from casting his spell, they still did their level best to save Iruma; it's hardly their fault that they weren't big or strong enough to catch him as he fell off the cliff. And if the Legend Leaf is worth as many points as it is said to be, there probably won't be much of an issue with splitting those points three ways and still letting the Misfit Class come out on top.

It took its sweet time getting here, but Welcome to Demon School, Iruma-kun's third season feels like it finally has its feet under it. The Misfit Class isn't out of the woods yet, but I'm looking forward to seeing them somehow beat Orobas in the end game.

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Welcome to Demon School, Iruma-kun Season 3 is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.