The Winter 2024 Anime Preview Guide

Chained Soldier

Otherworldly spaces known as "demon cities" appeared in various parts of Japan, and those who partook in the "peaches" growing there gained unique abilities—but only if they're girls. One day, a down-in-the-dumps high school boy named Yuuki Wagura suddenly gets lost at the entrance of a demon city. There, he meets Kyoka Uzen, the beautiful leader of the seven programs of the "Magical Defense Corps," who orders him to become her slave.

Chained Soldier is based on a manga of the same name by Takahiro and Yōhei Takemura. The anime series is streaming on HIDIVE on Thursdays.

Chained Soldier provides a perfect lesson in the difference between smut and sleaze. To me, at least, a work of smut, the be-all, end-all goal is to get its audience's rocks off, and any other elements of humor, narrative, or uneroticized entertainment are incidental. There's nothing wrong with smut, of course, but one of its inherent flaws is that it lives and dies on sex appeal. If it doesn't make you horny, then it isn't worth your time. Simple as that.

(There's another show that dropped this week that is a great example of what I mean, and I'm sure you can guess what it is.)

Sleaze, on the other hand, does not exist purely to service your debased and debauched fantasies. Oh, sure, it can (and probably should) be chock full of copious amounts of boobies, booties, bulges, and whatever other crude elements it fancies, but those elements are just part of a complete package. Good sleaze doesn't just wet your whistle; it gives you something neat to look at while your whistle is getting wet, and it maybe puts on some mood music while its at it.

If I may continue with this silly analogy, watching even a good smutty anime is the viewing equivalent of a down-and-dirty one-night stand, where you're probably not going to bother sticking around for pancakes and small-talk when the deed is done—even if you plan on diving back into the bedsheets on a weekly basis. A good sleazy anime, though, is the kind of show that you hang around with to stay up late and watch bad horror movies, and maybe you even take a weekend drive up to Tacoma to see if you can get tickets to the latest Rob Zombie show. Are you going to take this sleazy anime home to meet Gram-Gram anytime soon? Not if you value your invitations to Thanksgiving dinner, no, but who the hell needs Thanksgiving, anyway? You're an adult, and you've got this sexy anime to hang out with, and you can even eat dessert before dinner because ain't nobody gonna tell you—

Oh, right, the preview! The point is, Chained Soldier seems to be the good kind of sleazy anime, where it's out and proud with all of its kinks on full display, but it also wants to tell a decent story and give us some cool action scenes, to boot. I'm not going to pretend that all of the worldbuilding about the mysterious realm of Mato and the “Peach” powers that apparently only effect women is, like, “great writing”, or anything, but it does the job of setting up why our hapless hero Yuuki winds up as the finger- slurping, tongue-gurgling slave of Kyouka “Will Almost Certainly Become a Sleeper Cosplay Hit” Uzen. It also gives the show an excuse to marry it's decently executed monster battles with a bunch of super shameless make-out scenes—which I can only assume will become even more brazen and lewd as more amped-up Peach gals join the cast.

Is Chained Soldier great art? No, and I'm not personally all that into the whole boot-licking, “Step On Me, Cartoon Mommy” angle, but I still had a fun time watching it, and I wouldn't mind sticking around for a few more episodes to see if it can keep escalating its absurdity without absolutely blowing its pacing or production values.

I have an odd relationship with Chained Soldier's creator Takahiro. While I have never met the man, never attempted to contact him in any way, there is some small corner of the internet that believe that I am his good personal friend—or that I actually am him. Every so often over the past decade, I have gotten mails and tweets about his previous work Akame ga KILL!—begging for a sequel (or for the ending to be re-written). This strange misunderstanding makes me feel some kind of connection with the man—and makes me feel bad that I didn't really enjoy Chained Soldier as much as I would have liked.

Sure, the animation is good enough, the setting creative, and the characters varied. And I'll be the first to admit that the issue I have here is likely a “me problem”—in that part of the core concept just rubs me the wrong way.

Basically, we have a woman out to save the world—literally saving lives on a daily basis. However, to perform these altruistic actions to the best of her ability, she is magically compelled to give up her body sexually to appease a man after the fact. Oh sure, Yuuki doesn't “demand” Kyouka do these things—the magic is reacting to his subconscious desires. But that doesn't change the fact that Kyouka does not want to do these things with him—even if she is willing to do so for the greater good.

The whole thing just leaves me with a bit of an icky feeling. And as it is a core component of the story, I'm sure that such scenes will become a regular thing moving forward. So with that in mind, I think I'll probably have to pass on this one.

I'll give Takahiro this much: the man knows where his bread is buttered, and it's on the bottom of an anime woman's patent leather boot. He saw how many people marked out for Esdeath in Akame ga KILL! and decided "Hey, why not make an entire new manga about a hapless everyman getting down on his knees and bowing his head to a domineering girl in military uniform?" I admire the hustle, even if Chained Soldier's first episode left me mostly unimpressed.

A big part of that is the production values. This is attempting to be a combo of a shonen action and sleazy smut, but only really has the resources to deliver on one of those. So the scenes of our male lead licking his new domme's fingers and playing tonsil hockey are lovingly rendered, but the lengthy action sequences are just barely passable when grading on a generous curve. That's not great, since the setup for this whole goofy D/s Digimon setup requires a lot of fighting before our hero – and the presumed audience – get their "reward." So if you're here for scenes of sneering anime girls literally yanking a dude's chain, you'll have to sit through a lot of mediocre action with questionable CG and a ton of cut corners. The character designs look nice, at least, but they only really look right in isolated close-ups.

At the very least, I appreciate that the show leans into its absurdity rather than taking itself too seriously. The manga infamously starts with narration about how girls being the only ones with superpowers made "the concept of gender equality disappear from this world" – a rock stupid idea that added a really bizarre and vestigial bent of bitterness to what is otherwise a harem action-fantasy story. The anime smartly cuts that out, along with most of the half-hearted attempts at showing Yuuki's struggles under the dreaded matriarchy, and centers his story on wanting to make a difference even without superpowers. That's a reasonably generic motivation, but it removes the bitter edge to his personality and leaves him a lot more suitable as the unwitting sub to a dorm full of girls, and as an audience insert. It also makes the "reward" half of his slave contract feel less vengeful – though it's still very much Kyouka being magically compelled to get down and dirty with him – and allows this ridiculous fetish farm to avoid a lot of friction.

Granted, the weak production values and overall simplicity of this whole setup probably won't compel anyone to watch it if they're not here for the bootlicking. However, when you watch enough of these shows, you learn to appreciate when they have a sense of humor about themselves. I'm not interested in seeing any more – nothing Takahiro has been the original creator for has been worth it to me – but I've sat through much worse, and this one is just competent enough for its own good.

I don't know if this is a me thing, but I can safely say that when someone extends their hand to me, I never have the urge to lick it. Not so for our protagonist – when the main heroine Kyouka holds out her hand to him, he says he feels the "instinctive urge" to touch it with his tongue. Presumably, this is part of her power, which allows her to make anyone her "slave" temporarily, but the way he (or the subtitles) phrase it is so bizarre that it completely took me out of the moment. But hey, later on, we see that tongues are clearly a big part of their relationship, since Yuuki's reward for his good work is to have her stir her tongue around in his mouth in what looks like a very unappealing kiss, so there's that.

HIDIVE has said that their stream of Chained Soldier will be uncensored, something I applaud, so, if you're looking for fanservice without magic glowy steam, black bars, or other more creative censoring methods, you'll find it here. The end of the episode finds Yuuki being given a job as the caretaker of a dorm for the all-female Demon Defense Force, which is something that early scenes did do a decent job of setting up. In Chained Soldier's world, women can benefit from peaches that grow in Mato, the pocket hellscapes that pop up around Japan. The fruit gives them powers: Kyouka's ability to make fighting slaves is one, and we see that another girl can become a giant, while a third appears to have precognition. Men can't get powers from peaches (a sentence I feel is a double-entendre, probably intended by the use of that particular fruit as a catalyst in the first place), so they've taken on the more traditional female roles in life – cooking, cleaning, sewing, etc. Yuuki's particularly good at them, but he's also thrilled to get the chance to be something more, even if that comes with the title of "slave."

The majority of this premiere, though, is just sort of okay. There's a lot of action, which is good, but it's not shown as well as it could be, with a lot of it obscured by clouds of disintegrating monsters, and all the characters feel very pat, with the girls even coming in the expected colors of blue, yellow, pink, and silver. Yuuki is Harem Potato Brown, and both he and Kyouka come with the requisite childhood trauma that shapes their present-day actions. I'm really very middle-of-the-road with this one. Honestly, I enjoyed the action elements even if other parts didn't work for me, mostly Kyouka and Yuuki as characters, because I didn't find them interesting or compelling. But this may be a safe bet for less creepy fanservice (at least so far), and it's worth a glance to see how it strikes you.