How to Watch Don’t Hurt Me, My Healer

Don’t hurt me Healer is a modest anime. No frills, no creative leaps, and nothing much to write about with regard to production. At least there wasn’t anything wrong with it. Like the art never got so inconsistent that characters don’t quite look like themselves. I can name a couple of anime guilty of that. And the backgrounds, although pretty plain, had a nice evocative feel. It was alright.

Now the voice acting was great, but I’m actually going to go into that a bit later.

As I said, Don’t Hurt Me, My Healer is a goofball comedy. Sure, there are little fantasy adventures that Karla and Alvin go on but they aren’t all that important. It’s a vehicle for more or less nonstop jokes. And of course, if the humour doesn’t work for you, it’s going to be very difficult to get through Don’t Hurt Me, My Healer.

And this is where I think I’ve discovered something. I started watching Don’t Hurt Me, My Healer very soon after the original run was over. Not all the episodes were available dubbed yet. At this point, the show had a pretty bad rating on popular anime aggregator sites and I was expecting to drop it after a few episodes. The only reason I gave it a chance at all was that the synopsis had originally piqued my interest and a reader mentioned it in the comments in a more positive way. So I wanted to see for myself.

Like I said, this was quite soon after the original run and that’s important because all those raitings on AniList and MAL were, for the most part, coming from American and US viewers who had watched the Japanese version of Don’t Hurt Me, My Healer.

I’m about to say something I don’t think I have ever said before, and I never thought I would: You should watch this anime dubbed.

I don’t have any side in the dub vs sub debate. As far as I,m concerned, for 99.9% of shows I think you should watch whatever way you enjoy most. But in this particular case, I have to make an exception.

You see, the humour in Don’t Hurt Me, My Healer hinges a lot on subversive responses and delivery. It’s not exactly jokes per se but characters react or say things that you wouldn’t expect given the situation or the way they say things is what is supposed to be funny. I tried both the subbed and dubbed versions and I have to say, it’s the type of humour you need to hear. It just doesn’t work at all when it’s written down. Without the exact timing and intonation, it pretty much all falls flat, every time. Personally, I found the difference staggering.

I enjoyed Don’t Hurt Me, My Healer, I giggled at it quite a bit and found it a pleasant time waster. I like comedy more than most but still, my experience was drastically different from people giving it 1/10 or calling it unwatchable. However, I’m pretty sure I would have been bored to death if I had watched it subbed. You need to watch it in a language you understand.

Now I’m not saying that everyone who dropped it originally should go back and watch it dubbed. It’s not a completely different show or anything, but it makes more of a difference here than it would in another show. At least in any other show that I have watched. And I do honestly think that at least part of the audience who were less than thrilled with Don’t Hurt Me, My Healer would have enjoyed it more dubbed.

That’s my two cents.

You like nonsense fantasy comedies.

Oomunekuma – I want to have dinner with her!