[sasuke706]

Originally Posted by aohige

Whoa, hold up. What even gave you that impression?
The protagonist is NOT intelligent, he is a fool. This was established in the story from early on, and never once was it suggested otherwise. He even knows he's a fool. Everyone knows he's a fool. Heck, he's even been pointed out as a fool numerous times in the story by other characters.

Subaru states at a couple points he leans more toward the intellectual type, and everyone relies on him for his knowledge (gained through his Return by Death) than his nonexistent fighting prowess. That said, for someone who's died like over 20 or so times, he gets shocked by the most trifling things that he honestly could and should have figured out on his own at many points.

Originally Posted by aohige

Again, huh??

Spoiler:

The black magic cloud he gets served him very well, got him out of many situations before him losing his gate.
The Invisible God hand continues to be Subaru's sole ability to use offensive, and has been useful all the way to current chapters.
The Dragon blood infection is a curse, has barely been introduced, and as of yet we don't know what consequences it has.

Only thing I can think of that applies is his contract with Beatrice, which was only useful once as of yet.

Spoiler for :

The dark spell gets him out of like 2 situations and bought time for like 1 other, and was useless like 2 others at critical points. Which it should be useless, since he started out being unable to move after using it once and it barely got better before getting worse. This however leads to him breaking his gate, leading to the whole problem where he can't provide Beatrice mana for shit, not to mention using the dark spell to be even worse of an idea than it was already. And for the record, the dark spell helped him more after breaking his gate. He wasn't even able to pretend to be able to use magic for long before it got nerfed.
The invisible hand has helped him like what, twice? With Tigerboy and Greed, and it didn't even change anything with Greed and only made Wrath want to do questionable things to him. And each time Subaru notes that it's not something he should be using since it's an evil influence to him or something cryptic and greatly mentally fatigues him right after one swing. Which compared to its original owner, where each hand had far more power than Subaru's and the guy could summon over 99 more than Subaru's 1, it's a pretty shitty power up.
I didn't even bring up dragon blood, nor do I really care about it at the moment.
And Subaru spends a year learning how to use a whip and do parkour to essentially show he can beat a few nameless thugs and pretend to be Indiana Jones, and otherwise still be useless in a real fight.