#yurius

Boys love anime notoriously get really crap budgets and based on a number of the previews, this was going to be no exception, and yeah... yeah it kind of is (not by far the worst I've seen but ouch the corner-cutting...). There are a lot of moments with like... really not great art. But generally the character designs are really good, environments look decent, and Aresh principally is pretty. Even Rhoda looks nicer than in the manga. Camile looks okay, too! Helmut's cute! Yurius... he's fine. In moments. Generally, overall, it does look nice. It's just... hands in particular suffer, and a lot of characters change how they look drastically between frames (and I'm not slowing down or anything to check: Camile looks wildly different in different shots at the meeting). But still, generally, it looks pretty decent. Maybe they'll fix things for the physical release. At least as of yet they're not doing the freeze frame thing that Twilight Out of Focus did, so I'm holding out hope.

Seiichirou is such a good guy! Decent human being, anyway. Trying to help a stranger while most would ignore that.

Norbert looks like a manga/anime protagonist lol (Like he's just Arthur from Fate/strange Fake). Alas, Norbert, you are, as you wish, sidelined by the true protagonist, the tired Japanese accountant in his 30s. I'm just going to pretend this is Len's moment in an anime.

Literally all the budget went to Aresh shots, you can't convince me otherwise (and he looks gorgeous).

It certainly did not go to the ED/new OP(?), which is nice enough (love when they hold hands), but... still kind of not great.

I get obviously this is boys love, there was no chance Seiichirou was ever going to be interested in Yua for a variety of reasons, but it is fun to think about how, in other stories (including this one, given Yurius), Seiichirou and Yua would be like... given shippy vibe moments. And that's not what happens. Seiichirou has zero interest and the show does not pretend to put them there. Seiichirou is trying to be a generally supportive adult to a child who is stuck at the whims of a mysterious magic nation. Meanwhile, Yua's in love with Aresh. And Yurius is well... himself, as usual.

This shot of Yurius was very handsome, though:

I feel so bad for Seiichirou T-T He has such a tragic backstory with becoming a corporate drone, slave to capitalism T-T You can break free, Seiichirou! A certain purple knight will help!

Camile is going to devour this accountant. Honestly if I love anything this episode, it's how they don't shy away from how besotted Camile is with Seiichirou. He only gets much worse down the line, so I'm glad XD

This, minus the flirting, is something upper management totally always does when they sense potential middle managers in the water. It's terrifying. I hate it. Been in Seiichirou's shoes (minus the pink fox prime minister and grabby hands flirting at me while purple fire blooms behind me). Do not want. But also I love how well Yatsuki Wakatsu (the novel author) translated modern capitalism onto this pre-industrial society.

I wondered if we were going to end in the alleyway, and they did :D So next episode will start with... The Scenes. It'll be interesting to see how much of it they censor. The novel kind of cuts the scene short and the manga is generally similar, though it gives more in visual implication. Non-hentai m/m anime tend to scale it back, though, so I suspect some cutting will occur. But Twilight Out of Focus, one of the more recent BL anime adaptations, didn't cut everything (they just turned scenes into multiple still shots), so we'll have to see. This seems to have less budget than that did.

I love how the ED (I assume this is the new OP and we'll get the true ED next week) has this shot of Seiichirou reaching out for and grabbing Aresh's hand. It's really cute. And them walking together T-T

Though they seem to be really confident they'll get pretty far in the story judging by this section in the OP...

Siegvold, Selio, and the related storyline doesn't appear until Volume 2 of the light novel, and Siegvold only first appears in Volume 4, Chapter 22 of the manga. And there's at least one decently large plotline to get to before that. Not to mention how big the one involving Siegvold + co is, especially for just 12 episodes and an OVA. Hypothetically you could squish those plotlines into that much time, but... it would be really tight, and based on the cutting that was done for episode 1, I'm not really optimistic... But I guess maybe volume 3 would be its own cour or season? Who knows...

Generally, though, a great start, even with the, well... animation art problems. Looking forward to next week!

Other thoughts:

Episode 1 (you are here), Episode 2, Episode 3, Episode 4, Episode 5, Episode 6, Episode 7, Episode 8, Episode 9, Episode 10, Episode 11, Episode 12, Episode 13/OVA

Read the novel in English. Listen to it as an audiobook. A fourth Bean light novel was announced: 国境治安再構築計画, to be released 1 April 2026 in Japanese.

Read the manga adaptation in English

If you’d like some Aresh/Seiichirou fanfics

If you're looking for more isekai BL recommendations, too, there are a lot, though if you want one that's near-identical from Japan, and complete at two volumes, My Younger Knight Takes Care of Me in Another World is pretty decent: