As a great man once said, “Being a hero, it's hard. Being a hero, it's hard all the time. Superhuman powers, you'd think it's easy... But being pretty much invincible is not what it seems to be. Being a hero is hard... Because there's an unbelievably endless stream of poontang. It's like you're a tapioca factory running 24 hours a day, and even if you stop for a second to foil some kind of robbery or something, You find yourself in public wearing tights with a woodie that won't go away.” These are the lyrics to a classic heroic ballad that was NOT sung by Peter Grill, but they might as well have been, because they illustrate the story of his life. Blessed with incomparable strength, durability and combat prowess, Peter Grill is in his prime, cheered by the crowds, idolized by all, and engaged to the love of his life... But he’s also attracted the unwanted attention of four humanoid women who desire nothing more than to harvest his seed and bare the next illegitimate warrior of his bloodline. Can Peter Grill preserve his honor long enough to walk his beloved down the aisle, or will the man who lived like a tiger find himself drowning in pussy?

I hate myself so fucking much I hope you all know that. Also, in case anybody’s wondering, no, I have no idea why this anime’s title is a parody of Harry Potter. It has nothing to do with Harry Potter at even the smallest level.

Peter Grill and the Philosopher’s Time was the debut title from a production company called Wolfsbane, who were founded in 2017, but wouldn’t release this series until three years later, which is weird, because it does not look like this anime had three years of work put into it. It does, however, look like the work of struggling first timers. To be completely fair, this is a pretty good looking series, as long as two caveats are in place. First, it looks fine as long as nothing’s moving. The environment is rich, immersive and highly detailed, which is asking a lot for what would otherwise be considered a generic fantasy setting. The color palette is bright and vibrant, the non-human races are given skin tones that are easy on the eyes and stand out against their human peers without clashing with them, so there really isn’t a dull moment in this show visually speaking, you know, as long as you’re holding pause. What I’m saying is that the animation itself is bafflingly terrible. It’s not just cheap or low budget, I could handle that. It is those things, but it’s just poorly directed, especially in the early episodes. Just about every other decision made from that perspective was the wrong decision.

As for the second caveat, let’s look at the character designs. Honestly, they’re kind of awesome. It’s tempting to give all the credit for this to the manga author, but it can still be challenging to translate someone else’s work from the page to the screen, so Wolfsbane does deserve some credit for this. Peter Grill is a pretty damn cool looking hero. It’s a shame we only see him involved in one particular type of action, because if he were the protagonist in a video game, he’d be a fun avatar to adventure with. His fiance flawlessly rides the integral line between beautiful and respectable, so it’s never a stretch to believe that he’d put so much value into his own virtue for her. The non-human races look quirky and full of personality, with my personal favorite being Antonio Spartacus, the big hulking red ogre who reminds me of Vtuber Zentreya for some reason. However, here’s the second caveat... They look good as long as they’re clothed. The nudity in this show is hideous, overdrawn and indulgent to the point that I’m willing to believe they handed nude scene artwork duties over to a twelve year old boy.

There’s a phenomenon in ecchi that I like to call The Pillsbury Effect. You know when you crack open a tube of Pillsbury biscuits, and the dough starts spilling out of the sides, becoming it’s true engorged size? If that’s what happens when an anime character’s clothes come off, you have The Pillsbury Effect. C-cups become D-cups the second they’re released from their cloth prisons, and then E-cups whenever they’re shoved into the camera. The most tight, toned bodies become thicc with an extra c once the director wants to pretend he’s making porn, and hell, not even the one flat character is spared from these inconsistencies, as she constantly fluctuates between A and B. I don’t know, am I the only one who likes character proportions to remain consistent in all forms of dress? Maybe I’m the weird one on that, but it doesn’t excuse censorship that’s so inconsistent that Peter’s peter can go from blatantly being covered by a censor-cloud to humorously covered by a cartoon elephant face to horrifyingly just not being there for several awkwardly extensive scenes, sometimes in the same episode. Yeah, I’ve complained about Barbie doll bodies in the past, but this show fucking lingers on both male and female characters having bare, featureless doll crotches.

The english dub was a Sentai Filmworks effort, and as it’s one of their newest projects, I’ll be honest, I don’t recognize most of the names attached to it. There are a few industry veterans in the mix, but none of them got more than two episodes without picking up multiple characters, and almost every single lead role went to someone so new that they don’t even have their own wikipedia page yet. Don’t get me wrong, this doesn’t result in any poor performances, in fact it’s quite the opposite, it sounds like they all showed up at work looking to pull out their A-game to try and take full advantage of this opportunity, with a project I’m assuming most of the studio’s biggest stars said no too, and I wish them all the best of luck for trying to make this opportunity count. Kyle Colby Jones throws a lot of wild translations in there, like all of his colorful euphemisms for sperm, and these up-and-coomers still say all their lines with gusto. It is a surprisingly good dub, one that’s well worth the recommendation, but you’re not missing anything world-changing if you’re a hardcore sub fan.

So before we go any further, I need to clear up a few things. This show was not made for me. It’s an ecchi series that was very clearly designed to cater to a small handful of fetishes, none of which I personally have in even the smallest amount. There are a few kinks I will shame people for, but none of them are in this particular show, and fanservice is meant to offer service to fans in the form of specific fantasies, so if this show touches you in a way I would prefer not to be touched, there’s nothing wrong with that, and I don’t want you to think for a second that I have anything against you personally. On the other hand, I would like you to recognize that just because I don’t enjoy it on the same level as you, that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t have the right to review it. It was not made for me, but I still wanted to write about it, for a couple of reasons. First of all, I had thoughts about it, and when I feel compelled to write down my thoughts, I will make it everyone else’s problem. And second, my last nine reviews have failed to hit 10 upvotes each, and I figure if I review a recent ecchi title and fill it with sex jokes, more than four people might actually find my crap worth reading.

With that out of the way, I have a few issues with this show, so let’s start with an easy one; The entire plot is inherently flawed. If you’re just tuning in, the premise of Peter Grill is that the main character is the strongest warrior in the land, and his harem wants to bang him so they can get pregnant and bare equally powerful warrior children. Now, ignoring the fact that using pregnancy as a female character’s primary motivation is just disgusting as hell... Existing for the sake of her future offspring is an even shittier narrative purpose than existing for the sake of a love interest... None of that really matters, because that kind of genetic superiority doesn’t exist. True, there are physical and psychological traits that can be hereditary, but to the specific degree that it’s presented in Peter Grill? It doesn’t matter how strong or weak you are, it won’t be inherently reflected in your children. This sort of idea kinda reeks of eugenics, by far the most stupid and detrimental field of study in human history, and historically speaking, the backbone of racism and bigotry. So yeah, this whole premise is fucking stupid.

True, this idea has popped up in other anime, but it’s usually easy to ignore because other anime don’t dwell on it as much as this one does. Like, it’s hinted in Battle Athletes Victory that Akari should be a better athlete because she possesses her legendary mother’s genes, but it’s never explicitly stated to work that way, and Akari improves throughout the story by her own efforts, both physically and mentally. I keep thinking about these ogres saying they want Peter’s spunk, and they’ll leave him alone when they get pregnant, and I’m like, they’re not going to know how powerful a warrior that child is going to be upon birth. What if they get back with their fresh pregnancies, give birth, and raise their children to be the next big warriors, only for them to gravitate towards literary or artistic pursuits? What if they turn out to be lazy? Spoiled? Are their mothers going to come back for round two? This isn’t even taking miscarriages or deformation into account. It doesn’t sound like any thought went into this outside of “reason for the fucking.” Hell, if that’s all you’re here for, you don’t even get that, they cut away from every single sexual encounter before it can happen on screen!

It’s also worth mentioning the surprising amount of times that a character’s decisions make no sense whatsoever. I’m not sure how I feel about Luvellia’s Dad being so overprotective of her that he raised her to be completely naive to how procreation happens, or the fact that his standards are so high that he doesn’t even want the strongest warrior in his kingdom to marry her... On the one hand there is a potentially funny joke there about fathers who are unnaturally obsessed with their daughters, but I’ve seen the same joke done so much better... Fucking Drawn Together knew how to pull this off, what’s your excuse? They push it so far that it strains believability. Then again, there’s a scene early on where the two ogre girls are sexually assaulting Peter, they get his pants off, and he hides them under the table(You know, instead of yelling for help over the fact that he’s being assaulted) and he sits down to conceal his lack of pants... WHICH ANYONE COULD EASILY TELL BY LOOKING AT HIM FROM MOST ANGLES. Hell, the King has a full on conversation with him standing right next to him, plainly able to see the side of his naked ass.

Peter makes every single idiotic decision he can, to the point that listing them off sounds exhausting, but rest assured, there are so many easy ways he could have escaped the demands of his harem if he had a single brain cell to spare, and because of that, he starts out the series from a place of extreme unlikeability, as he not only crumbles under the pressure of his harem, but when the prospect of his fiancee finding out about it comes up, he prioritizes lying and covering it up over being the honest man we’re supposed to believe he is, which allows his harem to gain more and more control over him, and here’s where my biggest issue with this series comes in... This show is supposed to be either sexy or funny at any given time, and I can’t muster up either of those reactions, because this show is fucking disturbing.

I mentioned before that Peter begins the series unlikeable. He is also unsympathetic, because every time the King threatens or demeans him, well, WE know as the audience that he has cheated on Luvellia multiple times, so yeah, dude’s gotta point. The problem is, over the course of the series, Peter does manage to become more and more sympathetic, but it’s in the worst way possible. I’m sorry, I know I’m probably about to get dragged for “bringing politics into it,” but it doesn’t take long for Peter’s situation to become skin-crawlingly horrible, as every time he agrees to cheat on his fiancee, he gives the other woman blackmail material to use against him, and he very quickly begins to lose his agency in the story. Don’t get me wrong, there were elements of pressure and manipulation right from the start, but eventually Peter winds up being coerced into sex so hard that you could make a legitimate argument for lack of consent, and his abusers possess the empathy of fucking paralysis demons. If the genders were swapped, this show would get canceled faster than a Rooster Teeth First account.

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I’m asexual, I’ve mentioned it in several of my reviews before, but I didn’t know I was like this until I was about 28, and I went through a lot of confusion up to that point. I had a serious girlfriend from the age of about 19 to 25, she was an older woman, and it was pretty obvious that she had more of a libido than I did, and I’ll spare you the gory details, but I know what it’s like to have a lot of sex that you didn’t want to have. I know what it’s like to be pressured and coerced, and to be stuck in that situation with seemingly no way out, so when I see just how casually these women blackmail Peter into fucking them whenever they damn well please with no concern for his well-being, it legitimately makes my skin crawl. Like, if even one of those women had threatened to commit suicide to keep him under control, it may have actually triggered me. This is really bad. This is an exceptionally terrible anime. The only thing I really liked about it was the character Antonio Spartacus, who seemed like a really stand-up dude, and who actually had a really charming and satisfying ending, which is nice, because nothing else in this shitpile had an ending. No resolutions, just the introduction of disgusting looking goblin waifus for the second season. Hurray.

Peter Grill and the Philosopher’s Time is available from Sentai Filmworks. The original manga is available from Seven Seas entertainment.

I would again like to state that if you’re into cheating fantasies, power dynamic fantasies, giant boobs no matter how badly they’re drawn, or any other fetish this anime employs, there’s nothing wrong with you enjoying it and ignoring every single point that I just brought up... Although I do think you deserve better, of course. For me, this anime was insufferable. Honestly, as a side effect of writing reviews of terrible anime for as long as I have been, it’s hard to not look at something as putrid as this and try to figure out how it could have been savaged, and I actually have an answer for that. All they needed to do to make this show palatable was to never allow Peter to actually cheat. Everything else could have remained the same, all the seduction attempts, all the fanservice, everything, all that would need to change is that instead of every situation ending with Peter cheating, they would end with him finding clever and creative tricks to avoid it, which could be a genuinely funny running gag while also preserving the stakes of the story. That would be the smart way to tell this story, but in the words of Robin Williams, “God gave men a penis and a brain, and only enough blood to run one at a time.”

I give Peter Grill and the Philosopher’s Time a 2/10.