The Fall 2023 Anime Preview Guide

The Kingdoms of Ruin

---

Humanity long lived in harmony with witches, but an advanced scientific revolution has made the powers of a witch unnecessary. Succumbing to resentment and fear, the greatest nation in the world begins a brutal witch hunt and eliminates all witches from the land. After being forced to watch his beloved teacher die, Adonis, a witch's apprentice, swears revenge on the empire that took everything away from him.

The Kingdoms of Ruin is based on a manga of the same name by yoruhashi. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Fridays.

Content Warning: This episode contains graphic depictions of sexual assault, nudity, and violence. Viewer discretion is advised.

---

Nicholas Dupree
Rating:

You know, I was kinda vibing with this show for a good little while. Sure, the world-building was rock stupid, and the conflict was melodramatic as hell, but it had the right direction and pacing to make that work. It looked pretty good, the character designs were solid, and its vision of a Magic vs. Science war was a developed enough idea to carry it for the first half of this premiere, give or take. Then, about mid-way through, the evil emperor decided it was necessary to strip the only named woman in the show before having her brutally murdered and decapitated in front of the entire kingdom, and that was when I realized this show was too edgy for its own good.

It would have been one thing if this was just killing off Chloe to act as our grim anti-hero's symbol of vengeance. That would be hacky writing but not significantly more over-the-top than what came before it. However, this show needs to prove it's DARK and NOT KIDS' STUFF, so it's gotta throw some bare boobs in there before firing several hundred bullets through said boobs and cutting their owner's head off. By the time we skipped ahead ten years to a different woman being threatened with rape by a prison warden – himself an incongruous homophobic stereotype that fell out of a different kind of bad anime – I was pretty checked out.

I can enjoy goofy edgelord schlock when it's earnest or self-aware, but this feels like shock-jock fodder taking itself too seriously. It paints itself as a serious dark science-fantasy about vengeance, and if I were 14, I'd probably buy its pitch. When you're young, and your benchmark for being a mature story is sex, violence, and sexual violence, this kind of easy exploitation is a sure sell. However, there's nothing more quintessentially teenager than trying and failing to seem "adult," and this premiere demonstrates that with plenty of misguided zest. If I watch a story full of violence and brutality, I need it to be way more fun or to say something beyond "What if an angry guy killed a bunch of evil people?"

Maybe this will work for folks who have more patience for this kind of grimdark junk food. It's at least got the production values to sell its cheap gore and a setting rife for cool action set pieces – though there's a noticeable dip in quality in the premiere's back half. For everyone else, it's probably best to keep your distance and hold on to some antiseptic wipes, for when this show inevitably cuts itself on its own edge.

---

Richard Eisenbeis
Rating:

The Kingdoms of Ruin is an ultra-violent revenge story. This entire first episode has one purpose and one purpose only: to introduce our main character and reveal why he is so hell-bent on revenge that it becomes the meaning of his existence. The closest we get to any deeper meaning here is that humans are herd animals ruled by their pride who will normalize even the most horrible atrocities—and smartphones make everything worse.

To be clear, before we go any further, I like revenge stories. I'll watch John Wick's endless spiral of death and destruction as long as they keep making them. But creating the start of a revenge story is not easy. This is doubly true for TV shows and films. You have to make it so that the bad guys seem so horrible that you side with the revenge-driven hero no matter what they do—that you'll share in the catharsis of watching the villains get their "just" punishment regardless of the brutality on display. But at the same time, this means torturing your audience on a visceral, emotional level to get them to that point.

Here's the thing, though. People have a breaking point for what they're willing to watch. And I'm willing to bet that more than a few people are not going to be down for watching a woman be sexually assaulted and brutally murdered in front of a cheering audience as she begs for the life of the child she loves in an insanely drawn-out scene.

When it comes to anime, we're not tied down Clockwork Orange-style with our eyes pried open and forced to watch. We can turn it off at any time—decide it's not worth the nightmares or emotional pain. Well, you who are reading this can (watching this through to the end and reviewing it here is literally my job).

Or, to put it another way, if too many of your prospective audience bow out of your show before the first episode ends, you've failed at adapting the story to the animated medium. It doesn't matter what amazing stories you tell or how deep and well-thought-out your message is if people never get the chance to experience them. Not to mention, the sad truth is that as much as anime are art, they are also commodities designed to make money. No consumers, no money.

Now for the big question: will I be back for episode 2? Maybe, but I doubt it. Morbid curiosity makes me wonder if there is some worthwhile payoff to what I sat through. However, in a season filled with anime I want to watch, it's hard to see a future where I choose to watch this instead of one of those.

---

Rebecca Silverman
Rating:


If I may quote my review of the first volume of the manga this is based on, "[The Kingdoms of Ruin] can't seem to decide between being a story about the atrocities done to a group of people and being a revenge story that also has some atrocities in it." This first episode may not be as visceral as the manga (yet), but it's still very much setting up to continue the problem.

A large part of the issue is present in twenty-odd very uncomfortable minutes: the violence is entirely focused on women. Yes, this is another one of those stories that happily defies history to proclaim that only women can be witches, blissfully charging ahead with that as a thinly veiled excuse for a misogynist plot. It's not enough to obliterate Chloe's body with machine gun fire and cut off her head; she obviously needs to be stripped half-naked first so the ravenous crowds can leer at her bare breasts and take pictures with their anachronistic smartphones. It's not enough to keep witches (women) in "internment camps" ten years later; they also have to pay their keep by being raped by prison workers. And Adonis, the male hero who's also been in the camp since his de facto mom Chloe was killed? No such sexual punishment is inflicted on him; sexual violence is strictly a girl problem.

Adonis is, of course, kept in isolation in a giant iron maiden, or at least that's where he is after the time skip. That's undoubtedly horrible, too, but it's still striking how his treatment differs from the women's. Now that Doroka has managed to get him out, along with all of the other prisoners, thanks to her stellar imitation of the warden's voice (and he's a gross okama stereotype, just to make sure all bases are covered), he's almost certainly about to begin to seek revenge for Chloe's murder. But then we still have the problem of this being one of those stories where men do, and women are done to. Awful things happened to Doroka and her fellow female prisoners, too, but she's already painted as someone who only rebels when it's a sure thing. Does that take away from the fact that she bites the warden and then frees everyone? Not at all. It's just a striking difference in how agency is shown between her and Adonis, who we know fought tooth and nail before being captured.

Am I devoting far too much thought to how this episode is set up? Probably. The Kingdoms of Ruin doesn't want to be more than a schlocky science fiction versus fantasy story with lines drawn largely by gender. It's not unique in this, even in its most distasteful moments. It also does a decent job following the plot of the manga's first couple of chapters and capturing the original art's feel. But it's still upsetting to watch on a couple of levels, and if sexualized violence is your button, I'd give this one a pass.

---

James Beckett
Rating:

I got clued into the, er, rough content in this first episode of Kingdoms of Ruin in advance, which was definitely a good thing. There's nothing like a bout of unexpected (and unnecessary) assault in your anime to put a blotch on an otherwise solid premiere. Granted, the way that the modern-looking, picture-snapping mob of humans is juxtaposed with the fantastical nature of Chloe and Adonis does serve as effective world-building, but the point stands that we could have easily gotten through this whole episode and communicated basically the same exact mood and story details without the numerous allusions to sexual abuse and trafficking. That's what makes the material come across as rather shallow and exploitative, and I can see a lot of folks giving up on Kingdoms of Ruin because of it.

That would be a shame, too, because there's honestly a lot going for this show, at least based on this premiere. The production values and direction of the show are generally quite good, and I love the fantasy-futurist design of the setting. I'm one of those Final Fantasy fans who prefer games that lean more sci-fi over traditional swords-and-sorcery, so the vibe that Kingdoms of Ruin is going for with its world is my jam.

The story also hooked me enough to get me interested in checking out the next few episodes, too. The crass treatment of the female characters isn't great, to be sure, but given how much time I've spent digging into old grindhouse horror flicks and the like, Kingdoms of Ruin falls just within the bounds of bad-but-not-revolting taste that I'm willing to see where it's going next, at least for now. This is yet another Edgelord McCoolkid anime that would be right at home sitting in the folder of burned DVDs that a bunch of young weebs dig through for their weekly Mountain Dew-fueled all-night anime marathons, but I think it might also be the best of the bunch that we've gotten so far this season. I'd rather watch this over Ragna Crimson or Berserk of Gluttony, that's for sure.