Preface this by saying that I have no idea if this is genius, trash, or genius trash. One of those things that defies taste. This is not a recommendation nor an unrecommendation.
The Executioner and her Way of Life (Shokei Shoujo no Virgin Road) is about a murder-priestess tasked with eliminating isekai'd Japanese teenagers before their unchecked magical power can destroy the high fantasy world she lives in... until she meets an isekai'd Japanese teenager whose unchecked magical power makes her impossible to kill.
From this description, would you guess this show is a:
- Moe odd-couple romantic comedy
- High fantasy political thriller
- Shonen-adjacent battle series
- Gory, ultraviolent body horror show
Yes the answer is 'all of the above.' It ping-pongs between tones and genre modes like it doesn't even really understand that there's any particular tonal gap between "making a cute hair band for my friend" and "self-mutilation as a form of ritual magic." Somehow because it's so blithely unaware of genre boundaries, it all kind of works. This is like what Lycoris Recoil is trying to do but in five dimensions and better.
This is the kind of show where there's heavy exposition about the deep backstory of the setting grounded in taking a genre trope extremely seriously. This is also the kind of show where the entire plot is driven by one girl's very specific lesbian yearning. And the kind of show where there's a muscular princess with a giant sword who just shows up every episode to beat someone up for no particular reason other than the pure-hearted enjoyment of violence.
I give it 8i+5 out of 10 stars
i've been meaning to write something similar about the unclassifiable derangement of Akanesasu Shōjo
aka The Girl in Twilight, i happened to watch this because it came out in 2018, when there was nothing good airing except for A Place Further than the Universe. i'm so glad i did, because it's insane. the elevator pitch is that a group of girls use a cassette player to travel to other dimensions and get into character-building and occasionally homoerotic Situations with their doppelgängers. highlights include:
- the above images
- the main character, asuka, forming a religion around fish cakes
- asuka's best friend being too much of a coward to admit she's in love with her until her outrageously horny alternate-universe self seduces asuka into robbing a bank
- the obligatory beach episode getting derailed into a treatise on how we're being mind-controlled by amazon
- a bizarrely experimental final episode with one of the most textually lesbian endings in anime not explicitly marketed as yuri.
- the horse turns into a gun
