Back to gredorial's Profile gredorial's Profile

I won't be the only one struggling to rate this anime, for several reasons that can be summed up to two things:

- The art, animation (9), music (8) are all genuinely pretty great in spite of lazy charadesign and characterization (4). Careful attention was given to the details; there is none of that awful CG or if there is it's blended enough as to be unoticeable (as it should). Everything flows together in such a way that you'll notice how sweet it is yet will also drag you into the story. The fight scenes and some of the backgrounds scream medieval fantasy action-adventure tale enough ... to wonder if you're really watching an isekai, which usually lack any kind of realism.

- Crude pedophilic sentiment. And I don't mean random perverted lust for the occasional loli, I mean actual internal monologuing from a 40+ year-old man stuck in a 10 year old body on how he should stay friends with some cute 7yo because she'll grow up fuckable, or wondering whether he should take advantage of child after fondling her sleeping body. You don't/can't expect much respect for women from a harem story, or from most anime aimed at a straight male audience - I say this as a lesbian. Fanservice is unrelated to making your characters behave like one-dimensional imbeciles. Fanservice that sexualizes a 6yo girl with bdsm cuffs on her wrists is aimed at a specific audience.

This all bores down to the treatement of relationships in a story that is trope-worthy bland: there is no difference between children and adults. Children are randomly treated as irresponsible babies, then later asked to make decisions and bear the consequences as though they've always been adults. Adults behave as such, until suddenly showing less agency and emotional complexity than animals. A good example of this is S01E11:


** spoilers **


Our protagonist, his 12yo cousin / sexual fantasy and their self-styled demon protector are temporarily working as a party of adventurers to earn some money that will allow the children to get back home. Who is the leader of the party? Our 40 going on 10yo protag.
Another party of very young adventurers happens to have taken the same job and rushes into what we'll call Bad-News-Forest. The demon protector refuses to let them go without help because it's irresponsible to let these children go to their death. The protagonist dithers long enough, on purpose, for one of the other children to get killed in a brutal way. Enraged, their guardian confronts him "you let a child die just for this?! [to get them in a position of power]" which prompts the leader of the rescued party to intervene "it's our own fault", because as independent adventurers they should have known better. The warrior's answer says it all "children can't be blamed, this is our problem". People calm down, everything is solved, our protag has recruited new allies less likely to confront him about his behaviour. The dead child is still a bloody corpse in the background.


** spoilers **

So, enjoyment 1/10 and 2/10 overall because you *could* actually cut out many scenes and make it palatable.