The animation is great, and the story has bits that could be interesting, but there’s too much to hate here.

The obvious is, of course, the adult women lusting after a 10yo boy, which is not great but I did expect (based on the promo images). What I was not expecting was the camera constantly focusing on said 10yo’s hips and thighs, nor the blushy come-hither-style faces the animators keep zooming in on. For me, that sort of thing goes beyond uncomfortable and into gross.

All of that aside, we also start out with the canonical and provable fact that nobles are inherently better than commoners, as we see a newborn royal baby perform magic orders of magnitude stronger than a grown peasant man who had been studying for presumably years. A better anime would look at the murder of a commoner for daring to try to learn magic and say “wow, that’s messed up. the nobles seem evil.” and maybe the story will get there, but for now it seem to just accept that yes, commoners are a lesser people and they deserve less, and doesn’t telegraph any future change. It might get better, but I’m not willing to stomach any more prepubescant thigh shots to find out.

I think Lloyd’s characterization is very strong, as I’m a big fan of weird little guys. The comparisons I’ve seen to Maomao from Apothecary Diaries are definitely on point and that’s very much a good thing. The animation is also fantastic and I expect the fight scenes will be great.

However, the strong points are not enough to get this any more than a 2/5 from me.

So, for those that aren’t familiar with the source for this series at all, here are some tidbits to help you set expectations properly:

• The story is ok at best, incomprehensible at worst.
• Everybody gets lewded, even the prince MC
• Yes, the MC is actually male, even though he is ambiguously depicted a lot
• No, nothing ever poses any kind of challenge for the MC. He is broken OP and, like is shown in this episode, often ends up just playing with the antagonists, trying to get them to teach him new things.

I previously wrote about this series back when some visuals were released. One of the most interesting things about the manga for this series is how much the art style changed as it went. It started as decent, but then more and more showcase, full-color panels would get introduced. Then it was full feature pages and spreads. Then, the whole series became fully colored. Then, the artist decided to make every chapter a showcase.

Honestly, if this story was in the hands of a lesser artist, I would have dropped the manga super fast. I stopped trying to follow the story and just kept browsing chapters while ignoring the text altogether. I am not sure I am going to want to continue this series in anime form going forward, but it looks like they have tried to channel the art style present in later portions of the manga.

To be frank, I kind of just want to consume this anime like I did the manga; just tune out the story and take in the visuals. However, let’s see if the rest of the season can live up to the visuals from the source.

As for a screenshot this episode, I wasn’t really sure, but I think I will nominate this one @rikka@ani.social :

I’m not sure what unholy collection of fetishes this show is designed for and I don’t want to know.

If you have not read the source manga, the artist is absolutely insane, churning out multiple gorgeous color pages at the same pace as other mangakas drawing monochrome pages. It is one which reading on the web (in color) is better than buying the collected volumes (monochrome, although it got popular enough that the publisher is releasing alternate, partially colored volumes from the beginning again at a slower pace).

Ep 1 seems to be a satisfying adaptation of the manga as far as I can remember it, need to catch up on reading. It captures the art style of the manga pretty well. The animation studio seems pretty new and I hope they can keep up the quality.