So, Dragon Quest: The Adventure of Dai is, get this, about a boy named Dai who adventures. Is there a quest in which dragons are involved? Oh, you bet your ass there is!

Dai was raised by monsters on an isolated island, and never encountered any other humans prior to the start of the series

there's an island of friendly monsters because about fifteen years ago, a legendary hero defeated the Dark Lord, freeing the monsters from his evil influence, and Dai's monster grandpa, Brass, has instilled in him a lot of respect for The Hero

which is important because the first humans Dai ever meets are a group faking at being the hero's party when they're actually here to kidnap Dai's rare slime BFF

the second group of humans Dai ever meets are a princess and her retinue coming to the island to perform a sacred ceremony as part of the princess's coming of age, and while the princess is legit and fantastic, the advisor with her actually set this whole thing up as a scheme to kill her and frame the monsters

for it so he could become next in line for the throne

So those are the kind of expectations we're primed with for visitors to monster island as we head into episode three

things are getting weird! There's spooky dark clouds overhead and all the monsters are going berserk and starting to fight each other! Dai goes to Brass for guidance and Brass, fighting desperately to hold onto lucidity, explains that this all must mean that the Dark Lord has somehow returned and the monsters

are once again falling under his evil influence

which means that monster island is no longer a safe place for Dai to be! Brass takes Dai down to the beach to get him to leave, Dai protesting all along the way, but when they reach the beach, they are surprised to encounter a couple of humans!

one is This Fucking Guy:

the other is a teenage boy who was the one rowing the dinky little rowboat they came here on

This Fucking Guy declares that he'll handle this, sticks the end of his scabbard in the sand, and then takes off running with it while yelling like a total weirdo

I really wish I had a clip of this bit that I could share because it is such a strong impression and words absolutely do not do it justice

we get like thirty solid seconds of this guy booking it around the entire island yelling the whole time, ok, it's so bizarre, trust me on this

until finally he returns to the beach, chants a spell, and we see that he just drew a magic circle across the entire island, and this spell protects the island from evil influence, so all themonsters return to normal

now that the immediate emergency has passed, he introduces himself as Avan de Zinuar the Third, Hero Tutor, complete with a little ad poster he rolls out to show Dai, bragging of his many years in the business

something I want to make sure I point out here: Avan is the only character in the entire series to introduce himself with a last name

that princess and her retinue the previous episode? not a single last name

the boy with him is Popp, his student, learning to be a mage

Avan explains that he was hired by the father of that princess from before to train Dai into a hero, because, as previously established, the Dark Lord has returned

he's going to give Dai the Special Hard Course, which will make him a proper hero in just one week!

further exposition is interrupted by the arrival of a couple of gargoyle scouts from the dark army, which Avan tells Popp to take care of. Why? Because he just cast Glimmer and he is very, very tired

Popp takes one of the gargoyles out with a surprisingly strong spell, Brass is like, wow, this guy's the real deal! looks back at Avan, who is scratching his nose like this is the most boring thing in the world

Popp gets (the Dragon Quest equivalent of) silenced before he can take out the second gargoyle, so Avan gives Dai a sword so he can fight it instead

It's an ancient legendary sword, he tells Dai

Actually, I just bought it for 10 gold from a pawn shop on the way here, he thinks

if you're thinking this guy has some, like, scam artist vibes or something, then, yeah, so did I!

but the training seems to be legit! by the end of the first day, Dai has learned how to cut a boulder in half with a blade with a technique Avan so creatively calls Earth Slash, and by the end of the second, Dai manages to force Avan into using both hands while they're practice sparring

as a reward, Avan demonstrates for Dai his ultimate sword technique, the Avan Strash, and then happily natters away about Dai's progress to Brass while also bustling around the kitchen cooking dinner

and on day three of training, in order to teach Dai his next technique, the Wave Slash, he takes Dai to an isolated part of the island and then magically turns into a dragon and starts breathing fire at him

the dragon still has Avan's stupid nerdy glasses on

Popp freaks out about how obviously dangerous it is to make Dai fight an entire fucking dragon, but Dai does manage to master the Wave Slash, cutting through the flames with such speed and power that the force of his cut even reaches the dragon's snout

Avan promptly untransforms, whining like a huge baby about how much the little scratch on his nose hurts

the group has a good laugh about these shenanigans, until suddenly, Avan notices something and his expression turns serious, so much show that we can actually see his eyes through his glasses

and in that very instant, Avan suddenly transforms from a wacky joke about tutorial characters to a serious character with a fully realized history, as the earth trembles because something evil is forcing its way through Avan's magic barrier

It's the Dark Lord, of course

he's here to take revenge on Avan for fifteen years ago

and suddenly Brass remembers that, yeah, that's why Avan's name sounded familiar to him, the guy who killed the Dark Lord fifteen years ago was named Avan the Hero!

that was a long time ago, Avan says

but he's glad that the Dark Lord-Hadlar, his name is, because of course Avan knows his name-came to find him, because that means he can put an end to this right here and now

Hadlar explains that he came back thanks to a bigger badder evil guy because of course he did

and then they face off, and it ends in a draw, because while Avan's Avan Strash hit its mark, he also went into this having very recently spent most of his energy, y'know, turning into a fucking dragon, and that Strash took just about all he had left in the tank

crucial problem here: Hadlar has a healing factor, and the Avan Strash wasn't enough to fully kill him

Dai tries to intervene, only to be deflected by a single finger, and at first Hadlar says that he's not interested in wasting his time on trash, once he notices that Dai actually managed to draw blood he decides that, nah, he is going to kill Avan's students actually

of course, when he tries to blast the kids with an explosion spell, Avan jumps in and takes it for them

Avan then casts a spell on them that both makes them impervious to all harm and completely immobile, tells them that he'll take care of Hadlar here but he's counting on them to take care of the bigger badder guy, gives them a pendant each to mark their formal graduation, and a few more encouraging words before he

thanks Hadlar for waiting so patiently

Hadlar mocks him for wasting the last of his magic power on trash and Avan scolds him for calling children trash and anyway he doesn't need MP to finish this, because he's got one last spell up his sleeve, one that needs barely any magic at all, because it takes the user's life force and detonates it

let's go to the afterlife together, Hadlar

(of course, Hadlar survives this because Dai needs to be able to Avenge His Master later, but this ain't about that)

you'd think with Avan gone, that would be the end of this plurk, but no! Dai and Popp were not his only students!

shortly after leaving monster island, Dai and Popp meet Maam. Maam's parents were part of the party that Avan defeated Hadlar with, and while her dad has since passed on himself, her mom is right here, asking how Avan's doing

he's as lively as ever! the boys say, lying

They're twelve and fifteen and the wound is so fresh, they're not prepared to break the news

Maam talks to them about how Avan came and visited their family about four or five years ago, and while he was there, he took her on as a student. she has her father's strength and her mother's healing spells, but she can't cast any offensive magic, so when she graduated, he gave her a gift:

a magic gun, with bullets that can be loaded with spells

young Maam freaked out when she saw it, not wanting such a terrifying weapon, so he gently explained: just as strength without justice is useless, so too is justice without strength. the weapon is just a tool, and he knows that in her kind hands, it will never become strength without justice

Maam later overhears the boys telling the village elder the truth about Avan, so when they leave town, she goes with them

if anybody ever tells her mom, it doesn't happen on screen. It's fine, probably.

I like to hear about him. Just think he's neat

he's so neat!!!

up next is talking about Hyunkel but I have to leave in less than thirty minutes and I'm not confident I could cover that whole mess in that amount of time

Avan is in like, three episodes before he explodes and haunts the narrative so hard he's one of the most important characters

and he spends like half of those three episodes being too wacky to take seriously!

using his glasses to keep his eyes obscured until shit gets real is such fucking masterful visual storytelling, I'm so mad

eyes are the most humanizing element of a design, so keeping them hidden really primes you to not expect much depth from him until they pull the rug out from under you and it turns out that oops it's depth all the way down

OK, so, Hyunkel! Our little party has by this point defeated one of Hadlar's six evil generals, establishing themselves as a credible threat in the eyes of the bad guys. they move on to the country of the princess from the second episode, only to find that it has been thoroughly wrecked by Hadlar's Undead Legion

they are menaced by skeletons, but a mysterious swordsman comes to their aid! This is Hyunkel, Avan's very first student!

they inform him that Avan's dead, but it turns out Hyunkel already knew! He was pretty sad about it... because he wanted to kill Avan himself

Hyunkel, it turns out, is the evil general in charge of the Undead Legion!

naturally, the party is shocked by this, because how could a student of Avan's ever side with evil and want him dead, but Hyunkel insists that Avan deserved to die, and goes on to explain his tragic backstory

the hell knight, Bartos, was a skeletal warrior in Hadlar's army fifteen years ago, the best swordsman in the entire army, and one day, during a raid on a human village, he found an abandoned baby and took it home with him and raised it as his own

This baby being Hyunkel, of course. Hyunkel knew of nothing outside Hadlar's underground castle, but he was a happy little kid, and loved his skeleton dad and monster friends very much

until the day came that Avan and his party launched their fateful assault on Hadlar's castle

Bartos took little Hyunkel to a room far out of the way and locked him in so he'd be safe, explaining that while he would most likely die that day, as the appointed guardian of the gate to Hadlar's personal chambers, but Hyunkel needed to live

and Hyunkel stayed in that little room, listening to the terrible sounds of battle outside until they stopped, and the sound of Hadlar's death scream rang through the castle

Hyunkel finally broke out of the room then, racing through the halls dotted with monster corpses, until he found his father, or, more accurately, what was left of him

Bartos lay shattered in pieces, half his skull missing, with barely enough strength to thank Hyunkel for the memories before crumbling into ash

and as Hyunkel lay there weeping into his father's remains, down the stairs from Hadlar's chambers came the first human Hyunkel ever met, Avan the Hero. the man responsible for his father's death

Hyunkel hated him instantly, of course, but obviously a six-year-old could not hope to kill the legendary hero who just defeated the Dark Lord, so when Avan took what was obviously a young prisoner of the dark army home with him, Hyunkel went along with it

he asked Avan to teach him the sword, and on the day Avan declared him graduated, Hyunkel attacked him

Avan instinctively defended himself, knocking Hyunkel off a cliff into a raging river below, and while he immediately dove in after his young charge, he never found him

Mystvearn, another one of Hadlar's evil generals, did

Mystvearn raised Hyunkel into adulthood and taught him all sorts of fun evil tricks, and that's where we are now!

Hyunkel fights the party, and him being really fucking strong and having this magic armor that repels all spell attacks would be bad enough, but Dai also cannot bring himself to fight the guy at full power on account of also being raised by monsters and knowing full well that if some hero went and killed

all his monster buddies, he would also absolutely not be chill with it

the boys are forced to escape by the last evil general they beat coming to their rescue-Crocodine rules but this ain't about him-but Crocodine's bird pal can only carry two people, so Maam is left behind

It's fine, Hyunkel doesn't kill women, Bartos raised him better than that(?), so Hyunkel just takes Maam to his base, which is, of course, Hadlar's old underground castle, where he was raised

Maam escapes her dungeon cell, and while she's crawling around the air vents, she discovers a hidden room with a treasure chest in it

the boys are fighting Hyunkel again by this point, and Maam interrupts the fight to show Hyunkel what she found in that treasure chest: a Soul Shell, a magic conch shell which stores a person's final thoughts. This one is Bartos's, of course

for the first time in fifteen years, Hyunkel hears his father's voice, and it explains what truly happened on that fateful day

Bartos and Avan fought, and Avan won, that much is true. but after Avan disarmed Bartos and had him at swordpoint, he stopped, and sheathed his sword. Bartos was confused and insulted, until Avan pointed out a toy medal hanging around Bartos's neck, a gift from Hyunkel

it was obviously made by a child, Avan reasoned. as strange as it might seem to him, this skeleton monster had a family, and as soon as he realized that, there was no way he could ever kill him

the only person he's actually here to kill is Hadlar, so could Bartos please open the door and let him through

Bartos, crushed by the realization that not only had Avan bested him in strength of arms, but in strength of heart as well, fell to his hands and knees and begged of the hero a favor

as an undead creature created by Hadlar's forbidden magic, he would die when Hadlar did, even if Avan spared him in this moment. So he told Avan about the human boy he'd adopted and begged him to take him in and raise him with real human warmth, which, as we know, Avan agreed to

but of course, Bartos's memory does not end there

he opened the door and let Avan through, and a short time later, Hadlar's death scream rang throughout the castle. Bartos braced himself for the end... but it didn't come

after all, as we know, Hadlar was saved from his ultimate demise by the bigger badder evil guy, and it's Hadlar and not Avan who came back down those stairs first

Bartos was shocked and relieved to see his master still alive, but Hadlar sure wasn't happy to see Bartos. he explained how the bigger badder guy saved him and how he was going to disappear for a while to recover, but before he did, there was one last thing he wanted to take care of:

executing Bartos for the crime of letting Avan through that door

with a single punch, Hadlar destroyed half of Bartos's skull and shattered the rest of his body, leaving him in the sorry state Hyunkel would find him in, and then Hadlar left

Bartos no longer had the strength to tell Hyunkel the truth when the boy found him, so his soul went to the shell

the shell's message ends with Bartos entreating Hyunkel to not hate humanity or Avan, but instead the skeleton foolish enough to want to raise a human child, and once again, thanks for the memories

Hyunkel ends up switching sides to the good guys after this, obviously

there's more I can talk about, with the prologue manga and later examples of his influence but idk this is already 100 comments and I think it's already pretty clear why I might become absolutely obsessed with this guy

here's something about Bartos that the main series doesn't explicitly point out but the prologue manga does: Avan has a technique that he didn't manage to teach Dai called the Air Slash, which strikes directly at evil energies, like, say, the type that keeps skeleton monsters alive

Avan could have obliterated Bartos instantly, and it would have been the strategically smart thing to do so he could face Hadlar as fresh as possible, but as soon as he noticed that little medal, that option was off the table

what makes Avan dangerous is his smarts but what makes him the Hero is that he's soft as hell

he cares as much as he thinks, and he is always always thinking

This is why I ultimately decided on red more than white for his soul color