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The anime isn't bad exactly, but it has no vitality to it. It's like tepid room-temperature water.

And I can confidently say the main problem is the protagonist. Tinasha is a Mary Sue character that is out of place in the world she lives in. She is simply an isolationist. She has no dreams (apart from 1, which isn't explained well and is concluded too quickly). She has no desires. She has no interesting history. She is basically a hikkikomori wish-fulfilment character for people to project onto. Tinasha lacking meaningful friendships and connections is just so terrible to me.

The male MC isn't much better. ... He is a Gary-Stu blessed with an OP sword. As expected of a story that leans heavily on using deus-ex machina and introducing new powers and characters to resolve conflicts, the MC is weakened or strengthened as required to deal with each plot element. None of it seems believable or consistent.

The worldbuilding is not good. We never get to learn much about the other kingdoms or powerhouses across the world. We don't even learn anything about the kingdom the story takes place in. This would not be much of a problem if the main cast were charismatic and the main plot elements were interesting and had consequences we cared about. But we're impoverished on all fronts here.

I can say that even the 'plot twist' in episode 9 didn't catch my interest. The music is mid. The character designs are mid. The magic system is terrible. None of this is bad enough that I can give up hope forevermore of it ever getting better. But it is bad enough that I can advise anyone reading this to avoid it. If, for some reason, you are in the mood for some garbage TV (I don't judge you -- I've watched Kitchen Nightmares many times over), go for it. Otherwise, watch anything else.

NB: Btw, the ending and opening themes are quite good considering the quality of everything else. Quite moody. In a better series they could even be emotional. Maybe I do recommend those. Nothing else.

Rating: 8/10

This is really good. Imagine a combination of Harry Potter, Iruma-kun and One-Punch man and you get something like Mashle. The gag is repeated often, but never gets tiring. Some of the fights are very nicely choreographed, like the one against the second fang. The animation quality in general is fairly good, though the character designs are a bit generic. The music is also surprisingly good. When Mash begins to fight, there is this sort of rap music that is played that works really well for the scene.

Now for the bad: This anime does a poor job with its female characters; to the ... point that I wish this had been set in an all-boys school instead. There are only three notable female characters. All of them are obsessed with love and relationships, and two of them decide to seduce and deceive the boys instead of fight them upfront. Even by the standards of shounen manga, this is pretty poor. All of them add next to nothing in value and could easily have been made male characters instead.

One more point of contention is the various factions in this world. I know the manga will probably explicate this in better detail, but at the moment, this series has introduced me to a primary government-led force and a secondary rebel-led force. Both are abhorrent. It is VERY hard for me to side with the government over the terrorists when many of their members casually and enthusiastically support the murder (or perhaps even genocide?). The terrorists are little better. And of course, when the MC does the Naruto trick of making friends out of his enemies, I am not convinced that this is a good thing. Have they really reformed? I doubt it.

But overall, this remains a good show. It is a great introduction to the series. It is fast-paced and has no filler content. I could recommend it on that basis alone. But beyond that, it is fun and interesting. I don't think I will remember this a few weeks from now. It doesn't really make that strong an impression on viewing. Had it had moments like that, I would have given it a 9.

I gave this manga a 3/10. But I am only writing this review to address the criticism people lob at this series for being 'racist' or 'colorist.' On the one hand, I will happily concede that the mangaka has stumbled a lot in the execution of this plot line. But in some respects I think the intentions behind it were fairly good. The mangaka has never validated the racist society that Claudia was born into. People have been behaving in a foul manner to her her whole life due to the colour of her skin. But there were also good people, like the butler, the ... prince and her close friend. In fact, when the blessing of the light spirit turns her skin white, while the behaviour of the public improves considerably, it doesn't change Claudia herself. She doesn't just take it in her stride and celebrate her new 'upgrade.' In fact, she is upset. Her parents change of heart upsets her immensely and she finds the people who truly love her for who she is -- not her looks. This is an important distinction. A racist manga would just assume by default that Claudia's lily-white skin has now fixed her 'faults.' But this manga shows that the faults were with society all along. Many people in the story come around to seeing Claudia's kindness and beauty before she even turns white.

Obviously, with the politics of the real world, this was a whole minefield that the author chose to walk into. It could have been handled with more grace, but I don't think this is some racist mangaka out to sell white-supremacy. In fact, many other fantasy stories can be more racist than this totally unintentionally. For example, by creating an entire universe filled with people and aliens, but not showing any people of colour. As an Indian, I've noticed that most Star Trek and Star Wars productions feature more aliens than they do Indians. Considering we make up 1/7th of humanity, that is quite the achievement!

This is still, however, a bad story. It is filled with tired cliches and one-dimensional characters. I am only up to chapter 13, but an entire story arc has concluded, and I don't feel like I know any of the characters well. More time should have been given to flesh out their characters and intentions. The world-building is also piss-poor. I don't really understand the importance of the spirits or their abilities. I don't know why this nation alone enjoys the power of the spirits. I don't know how this continent and the various powers in it balance each other. It's just an empty world in which one boring story arc plays out.

This was a pretty weird show. The first 9 episodes are tonally very different from the last 3. The first arc feels like some sort of slapstick comedy with an adventure component like the Seven Deadly Sins. Meanwhile the last 3 episodes feels like some magical girl anime like cardcaptor Sakura.

I wish they had developed the story better so that this dissonance did not exist. I would have appreciated seeing Anis and Euphie's feelings towards each other bloom slowly. The show also distracts away from the great sacrifice involved in contracting a spirit by immediately cutting to the 'Happily Ever After' script. I think ... this was way too sudden. They needed to give that sacrifice sufficient time in the plot to make it seem as weighty and troubling as it is. They rush through many important plot points, including Anis confessing about her past life and Euphie learning to be comfortable in her own skin. These are all crucial character development! Please show us instead of skipping by while giving an entire episode to each fight. I can remember at least 3 whole episodes wasted in a fight that can be boiled down to flashing lights and loud sounds.

To continue the point above, this is because the show veers into trouble regarding power scaling. I still cannot tell you how powerful Anis is supposed to be. Euphie also seems to have very different powers depending on the situation. I know this is not the point. A nice romance does not need mathematically accurate damage numbers and logic. It would detract from it. But I need to know something about the magic system. Otherwise everything just seems like its being yanked around according to the author's whims to suit whatever he is writing.

And lastly, a very interesting part of the show is the challenge this couple poses to the social mores of the times. This kingdom has never had a female leader. It worships magic and the nobles try to monopolize it. Same-sex relationships seem to be frowned upon. A little bit of time is spent showing us this. But the resolution to these problems is just kicked down the road and reduced to a blurb at the end where the narrator says Queen Euphie led the kingdom to a new age where tradition is destroyed. Thanks, I guess. But I would really have enjoyed seeing this for myself!

All in all, it seems unremarkable and forgettable. I appreciated the lesbian romance -- and that is precisely (and regrettably) the part that is given the least attention. The show spends too much time on fight scenes instead of dialogue and character development.

Overall rating; 3/10

The problem is that this story makes no sense, and the mangaka goes to great efforts to contort the logic of the story to make it make sense. The idea that the top graduates of magic school are needed to become receptionists is absurd. It breaks my suspension of disbelief. This is not a slight on receptionists. I'm just saying the amount of linkages between these receptionists and knights is unbelievable. The receptionists basically seem just as strong as the knights, but relegated to secretarial work. Who would accept such an allocation of resources? And what of their pay? So I have a ... lot of difficulty relating to the MC and her 'dream.'

The tension in the story -- and just in case this wasn't immediately obvious to you, spoiler alert -- is that the Duke's son is in love with this clueless commoner. If you like sitting through chapters of this 'will they? won't they?' dynamic, you're in for a treat. If not, it gets old fast.

I've read 16 chapters so far. Admittedly there is now finally some proper story arc being developed. But my hope for this series is still low.

Overall rating: 6/10

TL;DR: This deeply flawed manga has a strangely alluring mood that grips you, but the lack of a coherent story arc for any of the main characters makes it seem like a meandering stream of consciousness text that eventually feels smothering.

This manga is not for the faint of heart. It's dramatis personae includes an abusive father, a peadophile grooming teacher, a peadophile writer, an emotionally manipulative mother, a bulimic girl with body issues and several teens who seem fascinated with joint suicide. It goes without saying that none of these heavy topics are handled with tact. In fact, for much of ... the 77 chapters I read, the main driving force of the plot was 'the lover's suicide,' a highly romanticized view on suicide taken from some folktale. It's irresponsible to draw a children's story like this. I genuinely have no clue where in the story we are. It could end in the next 10 chapters, or keep going for another 100. Of course, the fact that I read 77 chapters in a matter of hours will tell you that, despite all these flaws, the manga does have its draws.

I guess the main theme of this manga is the suffocating feeling of being trapped and having nowhere to go in life. Many of the main characters in this manga are trapped in some way, either by their family circumstances, financial situations, poor decisions in the past or obligations to others. The one outlier is this is the idol girl, Nagi Aoe, who the manga describes as being empty inside. This girl is a true mystery. For a while I thought she was basically a figment of Reiji, the MCs, imagination, his mind trying to cope with his immense stress and giving vent to his suicidal tendencies. But no, the girl (and yes, she's just 17) is very much alive. For some reason, she's hollow inside and obeys anyone's orders without thinking about it, because she just does not care what happens to her. This character honestly makes no sense to me. I would genuinely like her more had she had been imaginary.

The other characters are dumpster fires in their own right. They're all trapping each other in this small town for their own reasons. Even the one character who I had high hopes for escaping this trap, Chako, got stuck in it. The characters are hurting in their own life, and when they see someone else who is hurting and who can provide them some momentary feeling of superiority or satisfaction, they plunge in and hurt them to take it. Nobody in this manga are angels. They're like caricatures of the dark feelings many of us might feel sometimes.

This leaves the question: What is the central message of this manga? What is it building towards? Because the manga does an excellent job grasping a certain mood that some young people feel, a certain despair at that crossroads of life when your choices should seem endless, but reality and time forcefully trim away your options. It shows us characters who never managed to grow up, who simply continue existing in some sort of juvenile angst. I can see this and I can admire it, the same way I can admire the mood from a Haruki Murakami novel. Sometimes you just can't look away from someone about to do something catastrophic, and you watch in horrified transfixed fascination at the event unfolding before you. You feel powerless and caught in the sway. For a moment, you want to understand what would drive someone to live like this. That's what I mean by alluring. But while this mood can attract readers, it has to eventually build up to something. There has to be more substance. Many of Murakami's MCs are likewise apathetic to their own futures and go through life having sex with weird women. But Murakami has a plot in mind. Even when its open-ended, the story has at least one arc. This manga needs to find its story arc. I feel it has something to do between Nagi Aoe and Reiji. If this is the case, it needs to get there faster. This is the main impediment to my rating this story higher.

Overall rating: 7/10

Let's get the obvious out of the way first. This is an ero-manga, and it doesn't try to hide it. I quite liked this because it means I could enjoy the hentai scenes without a heavy plot or gore in the background. If you are coming here looking for an isekai with mature themes and overarching motifs, you're setting yourself up for disappointment. This is not Mushoku Tensei. This is mindless fun. And it delivers what it promises fairly well.

There's a broad range of sexual activity and fetishes covered here. Most of the scenes have enthusiastic consent, save 2, which I think are ... dubious consent. There are implications of worse stuff in the background, but it is not done by the main cast. Some of the situations are a bit too contrived, breaking the immersion in the world and reminding you of how silly the whole premise is. But on the whole the plot is light-hearted.

It goes without saying that the Gary Stu MC barely has to break a sweat in the world. He basically adds a goddess to his harem by beating her in battle, so don't look for character development here. The women are all madly in love with the MC, or seem to exist to sexually satisfy some male character. Even competent women,like the kingdom's spy, serve as a sexual tool as well. So far there is only one female character (an angel) who has agency and motivations of her own that do not revolve around a male character, and I have a sinking feeling that this too will change when her story arc gets developed. So the characterization in this series is very bad. This is therefore one thing that's missing in this series. Sex scenes between well-fleshed out characters with deep emotional bonds can be very rewarding. The interactions in this book ring hollow and are quite forgettable. There are ero-manga that are unforgettable. This likely will never be one of them.

This puts a reviewer in a difficult spot. I personally don't subscribe to the kind of reviewing that puts Infinite Stratos 2 and a Shakespearean masterpiece on opposite ends of a scale so that the reviewer can place this series at some position between the two. If so, this work would score quite low. Possibly a 3 like the reviewer before me awarded. But classics professors won't be flocking to read this, so it's only fair to score this for the use of the demographic it does attract. And for those (mostly) gentlemen I would say this scores a 7. It's a quick read with some satisfaction guaranteed.

Overall rating: 7/10

This manga really has me conflicted. On the one hand, it does an excellent job building dramatic tension and stakes, while fleshing out a world where magic and robots coexist. So far so good. But the pacing of this manga, and the quality of its characters leaves a lot to be desired. I genuinely feel that this could have been great as a 2 volume novel. But as a manga that is published weekly? It falls a bit flat since the long wait for the plot to inch along to a resolution is enough to have people drop the series, even if they ... are genuinely invested in the story. Some series like One Piece or Naruto can pull this off, but you have to really care about the main characters and the world they live in. And this manga did not take the effort to build up that relationship with the readers.

Lets start with Eru, the MC. His backstory as a programmer on Earth with an intense hobby of assembling robots is nice. It helps us understand his motivation to some extent. But we as readers need to see maturity, growth or some kind of change inspired by the plot in the MC. This MC seems very oddly fixed. In fact, to me he felt like he was at a distance from everyone else, like he alone was playing a video game while the rest were leading their lives seriously. This is why I sad a novel might have been preferable. We need a windows into his mind because the manga fails to provide one. The other characters are kind of bland or cliche. Nobody really seems to matter much emotionally, except Di. The MCs closest friends are nice, but we never really get to see their insights into the MC or why they support him so avidly. Some lazy attempt was made to show them coming from troubled noble homes as illegitimate children. But it was never explained.

Part of the problem with the pacing is that so much time is relegated to explain the technology. This would be a great idea, were it not for the fact that we have no reason to be invested in this. New tech seems to exist right around the corner and the MCs invaluable contribution to the engineering in this world appears to be the introduction of coaxial cables and biomimetics. It's honestly hardly to fathom that the engineers of this world could not come to a similar idea over a millennia of robotics. They even have demon beasts to emulate for sheer strength. Any other technological leap is just alien to us readers, and they might as well have just saved the time. The 'training arc' where the students build a new robot was also sort of pointless. I mean I understand that it was momentous in the case of this world, but time skips exist for a reason. It all seems rather pointless anyway because the MC builds himself a cheat suit that seems to escape all the rules the manga took so many pains to build and establishes him as the OP person in this world. Why bother explaining limits to only exceed them so easily?

Then there's the fact that the manga pivots -- with barely any warning -- to a near 60 chapter arc of endless war. Considering I did read through this all the way, you can be sure the events were thrilling. At some points, I was deeply invested in the arc. But it is still way too long. So many chapters in, we still have no explanation for why this war happened, save for something that sounds a lot like an isekai 'lebensraum.' And even so, they need to explain some of that history to us readers first! I won't just accept and build up some history of my own to justify the enemy's aggression.

This is the good and bad thing about the manga. It checks some of the boxes to appeal to people, but fails to build on it to satisfy them. It's an isekai with a world that feels shallow. It's a mecha series where the MCs lack a powerful nemesis that push them to their limits. It's a shounen manga without a tournament arc. I can't say this manga was bad. Honestly I might even come back to continue reading it once more chapters are released. But I also can't say it is great as it is. I hope the next arc deals with something different and introduces us to a race or enemy that can force the MC to embrace his world and life in a more genuine manner. Because until he does so, not all the flashy bombs and lights of the fights can make us readers care about his story like it is our own.

Rating: 10/10, SPOILERS BELOW

TL;DR: This is a seriously good movie and you should watch it. I was tempted to give this a 9 initially, because the movie is rather centred around just one theme, to the point that it can get monotonous. But if you like the manga or the anime, this movie does justice to the content.

Well, let's be clear about one thing: This movie is an ode to Kyojuro, the pillar of fire. From the very first notes of Kyojuro's theme, we know what will happen. The theme is at once heroic and mournful. It gives the listener the sensation of ... someone struggling at a Sisyphean task, one that they may never overcome. Even without reading the manga beforehand, I could have predicted what would happen to Rengoku. Despite this, the movie does justice to his character development, starting with the old woman who was once helped by his father and ending with his parting words. Everything about Kyojuro screams a fiery personality, like a person who lives his life as if he's 'burning the candle at both ends.' Akaza hammers this in even more with his repeated attempts to bring Kyojuro to the demons' side, and even tells him that in just 2 years or so he could have refined his skills further. We watch a heroic young person stand for his ideals, and that always leaves a lasting impression on people.

This can, however, leave a bad taste in the mouths of some people. We expect hard work and struggle to be rewarded. Despite his immense sacrifice, Kyojuro loses the battle because Akaza flees the scene after mortally wounding him. I felt as frustrated as Tanjiro watching the fleeing demon. If you're a fan of the manga, you know why this has to happen. You can fit this in the wider context of the struggle between humanity and demons and you appreciate the work the team put into this single arc. If you don't take a wider perspective of the plot though, this whole movie feels like an amazing build up to a war that never materializes. I think some of the reviewers who point out a hollow feeling upon watching this movie may be struggling with this. But this arc is very impactful and important in the wider context of things. People will just have to be patient.

This movie has other things going for it. The dream world sequences and the fight against Enmu were thrilling. We see a bit more of the Breath of the Sun move set, and I was excited by it. Enmu is an interesting nemesis. His blood art is terrifying and Inosuke and Tanjiro have to come up with smart ways to overcome them. The fight scenes and music are excellent. Akaza's theme felt slightly off-putting, but not to the point that it ruined the experience.

So, yes, there are some flaws with the movie. It can be a dealbreaker for some people. But remember that this is a shonen anime and approach the movie with that mindset. If you do that, this movie will not disappoint. It feels a lot like the Marineford arc in One piece, or Avengers: Infinity War. For sticking to it's themes so faithfully and executing it to the best of its ability, I think it surely deserves a 10.

Overall: 5/10

This show has plenty to hook the viewer straight away. You can't help but want to cheer for the young Duke and his love. His curse is truly horrifying and the loneliness he is forced to endure at his age makes me want to watch him find happiness in the end.

But that interest can only sustain me for so long. I realized very early on that this seems to be based off of a gag manga where the running gag is that the busty maid teases the young Duke by playing on his sexual attraction and budding love towards her. Had I enjoyed ... this gimmick, perhaps I could have kept watching. But I felt that this got tiring real fast. I may have accepted it had this been only 12 episodes long, but when I checked the manga and saw that there are over 190 chapters, I was overwhelmed. I don't think I can sit through multiple seasons of this same tired gag. When the Duke failed to make much headway in solving his case the first time he met the witches', I had to stop watching.

I was only watching to see the love story succeed. An entire saga about the two of them stuck at the same stage of their relationship seems like empty filler content to me. This si the same reason I stopped reading Nisekoi in the middle. Maybe if there had been some interesting variations to the gag, the way Kaguya-sama does it, I could have kept watching.

It's a shame because the music and animation are pretty good. The CG especially is much better than I'd have expected.