This review contain spoilers.

This season featured three different edgelord anime, which is kinda uncommon. Berserk Gulattony ended up being far too generic from the start, while Ragna Crimson gave us an hour long first episode that was kinda weak. The third on our list, Kingdoms of Ruin, delievered a very impactful first episode that took everyones attention. But the hype made people overlook what was apparent in the very first episode: the show would rely on shock value to make you overlook everything else wrong with it.

This anime follows a particular writing style i've seen popping for a while now in all kinds of media. It is the style of "Make EVERY episode memorable". You probably know this, as Jojo's Bizarre Adventure author Araki clearly said in his book that you should make every chapter end in a cliff hanger, so that the reader will be eager to know what happens next. This is not a bad philosophy per se, as Jojo's Bizarre Adventure is still one of the most succesful and memorable mangas (and anime) of all time. But i'd say you need to have talent in order to write a good story that manages to pace itself well while getting the reader's attention on every issue.

Kingdoms of Ruin attempts this by creating the famous "impossible situation, oh my god, how will they solve this now?" type of cliffhanger. It is very bold, but still not bad, if you know what you are doing. What is bad is when you don't know how to pace everything, making your plot all over the place. The secret to good writing is a good balance between tension and relief. But Kingdoms of Ruin only thinks about stopping for a bit to breathe by half of its episodes. We go from "okay, our Main Character Adonis has seen his master being killed because of witch racism, now he wants revenge on the empire" to "mc hates every single being in this planet, the empire, its civillians, people who sufer by the hand of the empire and even the witches, and will kill every single one of them" in FOUR episodes.

Yes, plot twist, the witches were alive, but, plot twist, they are also bad, but, plot twist, MC already knew that and decided to kill them all. Oh, and remember that the empire took over control of the WHOLE WORLD with its amazing scientific technology that emancipated humanity from those (b)Wiches? Forget that. There are other kingdoms. It is not a plot hole if you call it a plot twist, is it? The first half of this anime is plot twist after plot twist after plot twist, to the point that you don't believe in nothing you see anymore. You don't even know the MC's goal anymore. You just know that our angry boy will keep on bullying the pacifist girl that decided to follow him, the killing machine boy.

Which leads us to the elephant in the room. One of the things that also was hinted on the first episode was how sexist this anime would be. I did say MC's master was killed in front of him, right. I didn't say though that she was humiliated with her powers blocked, stripped naked in front of thousands of people, and then killed. There is a common trope well documented by feminists called Women in the Refrigerator. It is a recurring trope in western comic books, named after what happened in a Green Lantern comic, in which the hero finds his girlfriend dead in the refrigerator, killed by the main villain. This serves as the ignition to his character growth in the comic. This theme happens all the time in media, with Barbara Gordon being shot on Killer Joke, or with Uncle Ben's death in Spyder Man, or even when Bruce Wayne's parents were killed. But feminists noticed the majority of cases are with the suffering - and sometimes sexual suffering - of women. Some times, the main purpose of the woman in the story was to be tortured, sexually abused and/or killed, all so the main character would go through this traumatic events and begin his growth in the story. In Kingdoms of Ruin, this is what Chloe's character is all about. We know almost nothing about her. Only that she was kind, charming, and a mother figure (or crush, it alternates between these two) to Adonis. There was no need to strip her naked before brutally killing her, but all of this suffering make a very strong reasoning for the MC's bloodlust, right. The same trope is used later in the show, though i won't spoil.

The thing is... character growth isn't always the reasoning behind woman suffering in this show. Most of the time, is out of sheer shock value. There is a part where the witches are fighting some soldiers. This scene is a bloodbath on both sides, but while the women are visually cut in half, impaled, shot and every thing else, the soldiers (which are all man) are clad in armor, so their deaths, while also visually gory, feel like "ok, recruit B, C, and D just died". Yes, there is a lot of violence in the show, but it wants you to pay attention specifically on the violence towards women.

Overall, kingdoms of ruin felt like it was written by a teenager incel that really hates women. But this teenager incel knows nothing about quality writing, so if you managed to finish it, you will still be asking yourself what is the plot about. Revenge? World Genocide? Clashing Kingdoms? Class Struggle? Multiverse? The plot is so much all over the place, it literally doesnt matter. It can be whatever the author wants it to, so long as a lot of woman are abused, enslaved and brutally killed. You don't have to notice how dogshit the animation looks sometimes, no. Instead look, the women here were enslaved because they created sentient sex robots that are so horny, this city can sell all of its women now, because that was the ONLY purpose of women here. You don't need to worry about the awlful pacing, direction, writing and plot holes, instead look at the plot twist of how those Kunoichi you hyped were killed off screen by the psychopath villain you thought was weak. It tries desperately keep you from noticing how bad it is. But honestly, it fails miserably. By the end, you can't help but wonder what you just watched, what was the point, what this is all about. BUT LOOK, SEASON FINALE CLIFFHANGER PLOT TWIST, YOU WON'T BELIVE WHAT WE ARE COOKING FOR THE SEASON 2