I'll criticise this anime pretty harshly so if you're a fan or you just can't take criticism in general (even if it doesn't concern you), don't even bother hate-reading and feel free to abuse that dislike button in order to assert dominance.
In all seriosity, this was way worse than I expected since the original show seemed to be relatively decent but then again it's 2024 and shows are probably supposed to be bad these days.
Let's start with the positive things about this anime: the music, or at least part of it. Now that we're done with that, we can talk about the bad part of SaW.
The show takes place in a historical fantasy setting (with an emphasis on historical rather than fantasy) but make no mistake: It's an anime so the historical "research" was probably done in five minutes and it would be a wild understatement to say that they took as much "creative liberty" as they could. It's not like any anime fan in the world seems to be interested in historical accuracy anyway.
The problem, however, is that this show has some kind of obsessive and weird anti-religious undertone and when I say "anti-religious", I obviously mean anti-christian. No anime or non-anime show ever criticised Judaism, Islam, Shintoism or any kind of religion or sect, nor will they ever do that. SaW explicitly criticises christianity which wouldn't be a problem per se (especially for me as an atheist) but the superficial and self-satisfied way they do it is what makes this so bad.
Other than that, there is not much to say about SaW since the story is often times pretty much non-existent and most characters besides the 2 mc's aren't that important anyway and just act as plot devices or mirrors for the mc's insecurities and problems.
And this is where we get to the main problem of the show: The main characters. You would expect them to be interesting/sympathetic/deep in a show that is so focused on just two characters and their "romance" over the course of many episode. But nope, they are terrible.
This is one of the many many MANY anime (and non-anime) where the male mc is basically a socially awkward, bland, lame and weak guy who can never stand his ground and has terrible communication skills for a man whose job it is to communicate.
The female mc, on the other hand, is mostly careless, smug, self-condescending, kinda mean and basically everything every normal person hate about tsunderes.
As so many anime (and non-anime), the people who are in charge of this seem to have a very toxic and childish view on romance in which one person has to dominate the other one constantly (but it's okay bro, it's the woman anyway, so it's cool!!!!!111) and people can't be allowed to like each other from the beginning.
They first have to go through endless episodes of senseless teasing and unnecessary arguing before they actually recognize that they "love" each other.
I'm anything but a romance fan and if I happen to watch "romance", I don't expect everything to go well throughout the show without the characters having any kind of development but let me tell you something groundbreaking: Having characters bitch around all the time and then having them falling in love at last is anything but smooth and elegant character development.
To summ it up: This show smells like 2020's and it stinks. Not that the original anime was great by any means (or even good) but it's another one of so many proves as to why modern reboots of anything in the world shouldn't be allowed.
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