I've heard very good things about the manga, but this didn't really hook me. I'll give it some more time, but it feels like it's not really delivering on the horror or the drama yet. I give the premiere a 3/5 but hopefully it'll find its footing and finish strong.
glilimith
joined 2 years ago
This was perfectly fine, all around. It's cute and it works and if you need your shoujo fix this will do it. It's a little unfortunate that this is coming on the heels of Too-Perfect Saint, which executes a very similar idea in a much better way, but that's not really this anime's fault. I give the premiere a 3/5.
I won't be watching more, but before I go, a prediction: the sister faked her death and will turn back up disguised as a man.
I really like this so far. Monica is a little bit of a weak main character at the moment, but the dynamic of autistic wallflower being forcibly adopted by theater kids works really well (and was my own high school experience, lol). The action even looks good, too. I give the premiere a 4/5.
Also, it's nice to see that Jinshi and Maomao are having a nice married life in this fantasy world, lol
It's cute, but the story so far is just so boring and there were a lot of strange choices in the writing like skipping the entire conversation with the dragon. It felt like we got to know very little about the main character or the world he's in, and we didn't even dig that deep into the nature of magic and what makes someone good at it. I give the premiere a 2/5.
ETA: I forgot to mention, the boy doesn't know how ice works, molecularly. I'm glad his visualization worked for him, but I'm curious if his ice is truly denser than water like he tried to make it.
Pretty bland, but serviceable, and it gets some goodwill for (I've heard) being more wholesome than harem. If this is your genre then I'm sure you'll have a good time. For the rest of us, I feel like it's unlikely to provide anything we haven't seen before. 2/5.
Also, I'm really tired of slavery in anime being treated as morally neutral (or only bad if the master is bad). At least this time MC freed the slave he bought, but I hate that he put quite a lot of money into the pocket of a slave trader. Especially since I don't think the story would be very different if she was a homeless kid instead. Like, she could be sitting dead-eyed in an alleyway and he could see her and be like "i can't help everyone" but then feel guilty as he's sitting down to eat dinner and show up back in the alleyway with a plate of food for her and she just follows him home from there.
The story really didn't grab me and something about the storyboarding in the action scenes made them really hard to follow sometimes. It's not terrible, but it doesn't really have anything going for it either. I give the premiere a 2/5.
MC, please, TELL YOUR MOM. She would likely believe you and you can probably trust her with that information, especially since she'll have all kinds of magical insights.
I had a lot of issues with the tell-don't-show worldbuilding in this first episode, but despite that I found the story really engaging and definitely want to see more. I'm sort of a sucker for main character bait-and-switch type shows (which is why i try to go into shows blind) and this pulled it off very well... except when they added the fake main character back in later, boo. Overall, I give the premiere a mixed 3/5, but it has plenty of room to grow.
Also, I find the fluffy-haired barbarian sidekick character's eyes very suspicious and I wonder if Clevatess' plan of "become an advisor to a puppet monarch" has already been executed by a different beast lord.
Masculinity is in a bit of a crisis right now. Cis men are trying to (or refusing to) figure out how to excise the toxic elements and make a culture better for them and those around them.
This puts trans men in a weird position. We can cling to the old ways, hurting ourselves and others, and in doing so scrape together enough acceptance to pass, or we can risk being called fakers by living in a healthier way.
Personally, I think we're in a good position to lead by example. We are the self-made men and we can decide to leave out the pieces of masculinity that don't benefit us to make for ourselves and others a model of what being a man can and should look like.
Unfortunately, this does nothing to help the passing problem, and tbh I wouldn't be someone to ask. But imo you shouldn't have to give up things you enjoy just because society says things like "men don't use emojis".
Unfortunately a lot of their money comes from adult men who already gamble on real horse racing (at least that's what I've heard)
Oof, that episode was a LOT. The writing, direction, and animation are all on-point, but this is going to be tough to get through. Takopi's upbeat, cartoony reactions to real, serious problems were painful to watch, but I think it's only going to get worse as he learns more and more what kind of suffering exists in this world. I definitely want to keep watching this, but I'm going to need to make emotional space for it, because jeez.
Normally I'm pretty open to the idea that something has dogwhistles. I saw someone post about your blog negatively and was ready to side with you over it, but looking at your actual blogpost, I feel like you're just seeing what you want to see.
To be fair, I'll agree with you on the black-coded villain - that sort of villain design that evokes black people is a staple of the era the anime is trying to emulate and carrying that racism forward into the modern day is not a good look.
Everything else you point out, though, seems like a huge reach. For example, "children are the future" is a pretty common sentiment, and there's a reason references to the fourteen words need to stick to a pretty specific sentence structure to be understood as such. Similarly, the idea that a reference to Amaterasu is code for antisemitism because of the connection to historical to race science ignores the many many other cultural connotations Japanese viewers will have about their country's creation mythology. Would you think the same about a reference in western media to Zeus just because white nationalists always evoke Greek and Roman mythology?
Anime has a lot of problems - racism, sexism, queerphobia, apologia for war crimes, you name it - in the fandoms, in the creative staff, in the works themselves sometimes. But this really isn't the Nazi-coded anime you seem to think it is.
IDK what it was, but this episode just fully didn't hit for me at all. I found it hard to get invested in any of the characters and the jokes just didn't really land. I hope other people have fun with it, but for me the premiere is a 1/5.