Content Warning: incest, age-gap romance
What’s it about? Jill Cervel spent her whole life fighting battles for her fiancé the crown prince, Gerald der Kratos, only to be betrayed when she finds out he’s in an incestuous relationship with his sister. Before she plummets to her death, she’s somehow sent back in time and hastily proposes to the closest person she’s standing next to who happens to be the arch nemesis, Emperor Hadis. Despite the oddity of her situation, Jill is determined to change her fate along with her new fiancé.
This premiere really didn’t hold back in terms of giving me content to write about for this review. There’s incest! Betrayal! Time rewinding! Age-gap romance! Honestly, you can’t help but feel sorry that Jill is stuck in the middle of all that nonsense. If discovering her “beloved” fiancé was an incestuous jerk wasn’t enough to make her go down the path of villainy then proposing to her old nemesis might as well be her breaking point. Despite maintaining her sanity it’s truly unsettling that her only choice to break her engagement was to propose to someone who’s way too excited that she’s 10 years old.
Even though she’s mentally in her mid 20s, it’s just plain creepy to watch two older “men” (15 and 19 years old) attempt to win her hand in marriage. Thankfully, the show acknowledges how disturbing the whole thing is and Jill basically voices all our complaints to her new betrothed. Truthfully, I don’t think this series needed the added element of an age-gap romance since there’s already so many things happening in the story. Jill doesn’t truly get to process the betrayal or even understand how she went back in time. Plus, there’s also the fact she’s engaged to someone that had no hesitation ordering the murder of innocent civilians during a war. For Jill, it’s clearly difficult to reconcile the Hadis she knew versus the one who clearly wants to pamper her.
That’s a lot to unpack, and frankly I’m not too confident the series will handle the power imbalance between Hadis and Jill’s relationship well. If the dramatic opening was an indicator of anything it’s a shame the animation production has obviously limited resources for the action sequences, which looked either stiff or nonexistent. I know I should expect the bare minimum for anything with women protagonists, but would it kill anyone if they were allowed to look as cool and intimidating as the edgelord guys? Even the most basic isekai male leads usually get a decent baseline for physical battles, and THAT makes me extremely mad. The tone is also all over the place between being cute and fluffy to gritty and horrific, which doesn’t mesh well.
Don’t get me started on Gerald!! Everything about him is GROSS with a capital G. I MEAN, SLEEPING WITH YOUR OWN SISTER AND WANTING TO HAVE CHILDREN WITH HER?!?! Did this dude think no one was going to notice? Especially, since he mentioned Jill was mostly a cover for his secret affair. I mean seriously what were the logistics? At some point folks were going to notice Jill isn’t pregnant and his sister was. MAKE IT MAKE SENSE!
At least the incest is just there to make Gerald seem more evil. The age-gap is a lot harder to deal with, since it seems like we’re probably supposed to root for Jill and Hadis to end up together eventually. Did I mention he’s 19 and she’s TEN? Jill deserves a lot better than that, but the production isn’t strong enough to make me want to stick around and root for her. This is a strong nope for me, folks!
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