What’s it about? Sophia Reeler is the shy, awkward daughter of minor nobility and wants nothing more than to get through life without causing too much fuss—and that includes the coming-of-age ceremony in which she will be granted a “blessing” from one of the local pantheon’s animal gods. Sophia is horrified to learn she has been chosen by the gorilla god and granted superhuman strength. Even worse, the Junior Knights have heard about her new powers and want to recruit her!
The Gorilla God’s Go-To Girl and its central premise sit in an interesting spot. On one hand, this is fairly standard “refusal of the call to adventure” stuff, an archetypal moment of tension you see in basically all fantasy stories. Many recent series have built this into their whole premise, and there are plenty of overpowered protagonists (isekai’d or otherwise) who just want to live a quiet life despite the grand destiny thrust upon them. On the other hand, though, Go-To Girl is about, well, a girl, so there’s a gendered element that’s definitely worth taking a look at.
Super strength is a more masculine-coded power, after all, and the juxtaposition between timid little pink-haired Sophia and her feats of physical strength is clearly meant to be ridiculous—not to mention the contrast between Sophia’s petite character design and the hulking, massive representation of the gorilla god. It’s also clearly a big deal that Sophia is the only girl among the teens taking their knighthood entrance exams, and that this is yet another thing Sophia is wildly uncomfortable about. She wants to keep her powers on the downlow, and especially seems to want to keep them a secret from her classmates, who are so far represented by a trio of haughty, typically feminine mean girls. You can reasonably assume that the gendered aspect of it all would contribute to the bullying: look at this unladylike young lady with her manly superpowers and her big, burly patron deity! Yuck! Ohohoho!
However, while there are a couple of bits of dialogue making a point of Sophia’s gender, the narrative framing, and Sophia’s internal monologue, doesn’t really emphasize this as being part of the conflict. Sophia’s distraught at her blessing, sure, but as she tells it, her main concern is drawing attention to herself when she would rather live an unremarkable life. Some of the knight boys refer to her dismissively as “the girl,” but their fleeting teasing is directed at things like her goofy running posture rather than explicitly stemming from sexism. Maybe it implicitly stems from sexism, but the moment quickly passes when Sophia sprints across the finish line and crashes bodily through the castle wall. It’s a moment of physical comedy, but it doesn’t feel like the punchline is “look at that girl go! A girl isn’t supposed to be able to do that!”
It helps, too, that Sophia already seems much less reluctant about her gift by the end of the episode: she’s already used it to help a random citizen and a fellow examinee; and she got a great sense of freedom from discovering how fast she could run. It feels like her character arc is going to center on using her magical gorilla strength as she wants to, turning it into a vehicle for her natural compassion. That could be really sweet, and a really interesting fusion of masculine-coded and feminine-coded heroism. Whether or not that’s what will actually happen, I can’t say for sure. But this episode seems like a pretty solid set-up for adventures and misadventures as Sophia gets more confident and grows to embrace her abilities, ostentatious and un-girly though they may be.
Which then leaves me with the concern that Sophia is essentially the only girl in this episode. We have, of course, the aforementioned haughty mean girls, but otherwise the cast is entirely male characters, from the headmaster to all the knights. The promo images, too, feature Sophia standing in a lineup of pretty boys. As much as exploring Sophia’s journey as The First Female Junior Knight would be cool, it will be disappointing if that storyline isolates her as the only female character other than the token villainess.
While it could all go off a cliff, the introduction to Go-To Girl is honestly a pretty fun time. Sophia is relatively archetypal, but is solid protagonist material with a big heart and room to grow. The premise relies on the over-the-top contrast between girl and gorilla god, but the jokes don’t feel mean-spirited. Even the initial cast of pretty knight boys seem alright, or at least, not actively unpleasant to watch (which is good news, as I figure at least one of two of them are going to end up as Sophia’s love interests, because that’s the way these magical tales of reluctant yet good-natured heroines often go). It’s a small thing, but it’s also fun to see this sort of fancy-magical-academy setting in something that’s not a villainess isekai, and have Sophia’s character informed by the world around her instead of being transplanted in from the audience’s own. Novelty! I’m giving this the three-episode try at the very least, to see how its attitude to Sophia’s powers evolves or dissolves.
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