The Fall 2023 Anime Preview Guide

I'm Giving the Disgraced Noble Lady I Rescued a Crash Course in Naughtiness

---

Betrayed by her betrothed and bullied by her family, a young noblewoman named Charlotte Evans flees her home and stumbles into the hands of Allen Crawford, a misanthropic wizard known as the Dark Lord who lives in a solitary mansion deep in the forest. When he hears the sad story of Charlotte's pitiful life, he discovers a new calling—giving her a crash course in all things naughty, from late-night feasts of cake and ramen to sleeping in till the afternoon, from dressing up in cute outfits to fun-filled days at the beach. Allen is determined to pamper Charlotte with every irresistible pleasure imaginable.

I'm Giving the Disgraced Noble Lady I Rescued a Crash Course in Naughtiness is based on a light novel series of the same name by Sametarō Fukada. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Wednesdays.

---

Richard Eisenbeis
Rating:
I think what we have here is one of those anime that is designed for a specific audience and anyone not in that subset of anime fans aren't really going to enjoy this one much.

I mean, I get what's going on here. This is a cute and silly story of an insanely kind and selfless girl and an evil-in-name-only Demon Lord living together in the forest. She is so beaten down that she doesn't understand that kindness can even be directed at her and he, in turn, feels so sorry for her that he's determined to make her happy—in this case by having her do all the things in life she missed out on.

This entire story is, by design, heartwarming fluff. The setup comes from any number of villainess stories and the actual story has only a single repeated plot pattern—i.e., Allen tricking/blackmailing Charlotte into enjoying life and building some self-worth. I suspect this is the kind of show that people watch when feeling exhausted by life—when you just want to see some good things happening to people who deserve it.

As you may have guessed from everything above, despite my love of villainess stories, I found this one a bore. The jokes were predictable and the characters too one-note for me to care about in any meaningful way. It's not bad. It's just not for me.

---

James Beckett
Rating:

It's never a good sign when I'm struggling to get into a show so much that my thoughts drift to issues regarding it's sound leveling and voiceover mixing, but other than the obnoxiously long title, Giving the Disgraced Noble Lady I Rescued a Crash Course in Naughtiness didn't give me much to work with at all. Seriously, though, either my sound equipment went completely haywire for just this one episode out of the many I watched today, or someone working in the sound booth needs to double-check their dials and levers. Our main leading lady, Charlotte, is already being voiced with so much hesitant wispiness and breathiness that the performance borders on parody; the fact that it sounds like her lines were ripped from recordings made on an old brick Nokia phone made a lot of the episode genuinely unpleasant to sit through, for me.

Let's assume that the productions issues were merely the result of my own aural biases and/or some messed up tech on my end. Even if the sounds flowing through my ears throughout …Disgraced Noble Lady sounded as smooth and rich as the finest silk, the actual characters, story, and jokes of this comedy are all just so bland that I wouldn't have ended up feeling any more positive about the experience. In fact, using the word “jokes” feels misleading, as it implies that there are, in fact, multiple jokes throughout this episode, and that any of them might be funny. That isn't to say that the premiere was offensive, or terrible, or worthy of scorn in any way. It just didn't make me laugh once, nor did inspire the crack of a smile, or even a slightly amused, somewhat forceful exhalation of air out of my nose.

I could maybe excuse the lack of overt laughs if the main pair of protagonists were especially cute or charming, but sadly, the show whiffs on that front, too. Charlotte's entire character is based on being so fundamentally lacking in meaningful, interesting personality traits that it requires the direct and borderline deranged intervention of a complete stranger. Allen, for his part, is the usual spooky-but-not-even-secretly-a-big-dork-softy “Dark Lord” types that we see a half-dozen carbon copies of every season. It's nice that he wants to show this impossibly naive and sheltered lass how to break such sacred rules as “Don't eat cake for dinner”, but I certainly have no interest in watching an entire television show about these two.

---

Nicholas Dupree
Rating:

Much like its title, this episode feels like a long walk to get to a basic punchline. It's not bad, but it's a straightforward bit of reverse innuendo that could easily be established in two minutes rather than 20. This sheltered and modest young lady has been taken in by a reclusive “Demon Lord” who will teach her all the naughtiest things in life! But, like, naughty by the standards of a particularly strict Sunday School classroom. He'll let her eat junk food, stay up late, and watch PG-13 movies – even the ones that have swears in them! I bet you thought he meant something else, didn't you? Well, hahaha, joke's on you!

It's a bait-and-switch good for a chuckle or two but not something you can build a series around. That's presumably why this episode spends so much time building up to it, choosing to establish both Charlotte and Allen's personalities and dynamic before leading into all the ironically tame naughtiness. If this premise will work for more than 10 minutes, it needs to have good chemistry between the leads and a sharp sense of humor. We make it roughly halfway there. Our leads are charming, all told. Allen putting on the conniving demon lord shtick is suitable for a laugh or too – as are Charlotte's scandalized reactions. There's a solid idea here of giving somebody deprived of the simple pleasures in life a chance to let their hair down and indulge for their own sake. Unfortunately, it's not enough to make these jokes land, nor is the dialogue strong enough to carry a given scene on character interactions alone. So you end up with the whole episode just sliding by, occasionally eliciting a smile or giggle but never leaving much of an impression.

The visuals are about the same. They look fine: warm and bright to complement the lightly comedic tone. The designs feel pretty generic but are cleanly rendered and plenty expressive. The fantasy setting is about as stock as they come, but at least there's no video game jargon in the mix. It all amounts to a perfectly inoffensive time, and if you're in the mood for something mildly sweet and a few empty calories, I think this'll do you just fine. It's not my bag – I'd prefer it to be either more sugary or more audacious with its humor – but it's not a bad time either.

---

Rebecca Silverman
Rating:
This one works better on paper for me. I mean that in a pretty literal sense – I preferred the manga version I read for the Manga Preview Guide last month in large part because, as much as I usually enjoy both Saori Hayami and Tomokazu Sugita's work, they didn't mesh with this episode for me. I'm not even entirely sure why, although the particular pitch of Hayami's breathy delivery as Charlotte is part of the issue; it grated across my eardrums. But this also doesn't feel like it's paced correctly – plot points feel more checked off than explored. It may well be a necessity of adaptation, but then I have to question why someone thought it necessary to rearrange plot elements in the first place. (Though I shouldn't complain about my least favorite character's entrance being held back for a week.)

Those complaints aside, this is a decent introduction to the series. Charlotte and Allen are refugees from stereotypical stories: Charlotte is an escapee villainess, and Allen is the wronged member of an RPG-style party. Their respective genre trends have ill-used both of them, and the implication is that both were at the mercy of genuinely terrible people. Allen's erstwhile party used him like Shiori's party in Housekeeping Mage From Another World. At the same time, the glimpse of an evil, self-satisfied grin on the face of Charlotte's former fiancé indicates that he knew perfectly well that she never plotted against anyone and was just looking for a way to break the engagement. Right now, he looks a little more sinister because, unlike Allen's party, he had to suspect that Charlotte had zero recourse once he publicly accused her of treason. Allen's magical skills offered his enemies the excuse that he might be able to survive on his own; Charlotte comes across as the sort of person who saves mosquitoes from spiderwebs.

Allen almost immediately recognizes this about her, and while his methods of convincing her to work for him – “I've put a death curse on myself! I'll die if you disagree!” – are, shall we say, less than scrupulous, his heart's in the right place. He sees himself as someone who doesn't enjoy being social, but it looks a lot more like he's been a misanthrope for so long that he's gotten out of the habit of being nice to anyone. In his way, he's just as innocent as she is, with his fourth-grade-level idea of what “naughtiness” means. That's one of my favorite parts of the story: to Allen, being naughty means eating cake for dinner, and it's nice to see people so badly used by fiction to prove that they're still untouched underneath all of the hurt.

At this point, I'd still suggest reading the manga (novels are unreleased as ebooks as of this writing, although J-Novel Club has them) over watching the anime. The pacing is better, and the characters are better drawn. Either way, it's a cute story, so if that's what you're looking for, it's worth at least checking out.