I loved the story! It has the potential to be another Attack on Titan. Compared to your run-of-the-mill isekai, this has depth. It has complex dynamics at work and we get to see how that affects the world. The world-building is also top-notch. Even the initial scenes, I love how this started, with the character who we thought would be the protag getting brutally murdered out of nowhere. Now that’s some chilling Game of Thrones S1 levels of storytelling right there.
What I’m trying to get at here is that this show has the depth to be a story that fans would literally make lore-filled wikis about. That’s the kind of premise this show is built upon. This could have very well been the next Overlord or Mother of Learning in that sense.
What angers me the most is how the author goes so close to hitting the target through every story beat but reels back in before the climax. It’s frustrating. I wouldn’t have been this interested in this if it wasn’t for the general path the story was going. It was perfect. But it all felt silly. Just like the Overlord anime, this got the animefication treatment, dumbing down the story. But in this case, there wasn’t anything to dumb down, the source material itself was dumb.
However, the bane of this show is the writer. I’m not saying that they suck in terms of writing quality, but they just suck at building up a great idea into a vast universe. They don’t have what it takes to take a great premise and build it up into a great story.
I can only imagine what this story could have been if the author had been willing to go all in and had the talent to do so. Imagine a story where Menou is forced to grapple with the moral implications of her job, not through cliche anime tropes, but through implications of the killings that she had done throughout her life. The show just tells us that she’s killed people and ends it there, we don’t feel that when she’s with Akari. what we see is a conflicted person who doesn’t even show the work ethic to be an executioner put in that role. Not at all what they’re supposed to be. It’s these kinds of conflicts and inconsistencies that kill the story.
That’s the story that I wanted to see. But instead, we got what we got. A mediocre anime that could have been so much more.