There is certainly a lot to like about this show, the main characters are instantly recognizable and memorable to me even though I remembered no story details from my first watching. Chisato and Takina are just undeniably cool, cute, attractive, likable but... The Lycoris are CHILD SOLDIERS ok? And the show somehow frames this as a good thing, which is morally fucked up. It's supposed to be about this fun light hearted slice of life thing but we just saw like a dozen schoolgirls get buried alive didn't we? And NOBODY CARES?

am I the only one around here who thinks it's horrible this 16yo girl is getting murdered on-camera? Am I supposed to be enjoying this?

To be fair child soldiers are not uncommon in Anime, there's a lot of those in Gundam, the main guys in AOT are also child soldiers, high school students are just very common in many shounen stories however. Firstly many of these shows have some kind of safety net, people don't just die they get "defeated". If that's not an option then we would usually be looking at some kind of an anti-war narrative where this child soldier situation is framed as negative and an act of desperation. Neither of this is the case for Lycoris Recoil, the unnamed lycoris school girls get murdered all the time, they go out on missions to murder people all the time, and the show 100% frames this as good, fun, and should continue to operate.

There is a huge clash between the tone of the show, the things it wants to show, and the level of realism it aims for. Like for example here Takina just mowed down a bunch of people with a machine gun, yea these bad guys are dead as shit, that's a very serious and realistic showing of what guns do. However, you see all those buildings out the window? This is Tokyo and there are people living in those buildings, civilians, women and kids, and Takina has just sprayed hundreds of rifle bullets, which can kill people from kilometers away, into those buildings. Again this is just fucked up and not the same as a school girl "defeating" some bad guys with her super power. Clearly the most serious issue here is failing to consider where you're shooting at, if a real police officer did this they would probably get life in prison. Takina just gets a slap on the wrist. One of the gimmicks here is Chisato does not kill people so she shoots rubber bullets, rubber bullets that can go clean through a car door, and also knock people out through bullet proof vest, yet totally safe and non-lethal... yea sure... Is there not even a concern she might hit someone in the eye when it's clearly shown these rubber bullets are inaccurate? Or are the bullets still super safe even when hitting someone in the eye?

I'm not trying to be pedantic here but they usually try to make things realistic in these cute girl doing cute things kind of show don't they? The music instruments in K-on, the process of going to the south pole, the camping equipment, the tanks on aircraft carrier schools? But also nobody fucking dies in any of these other shows?

The Lycoris are female, yes female-specific for some reason, CHILD SOLDIERS employed to murder criminals without trial, yep they're judge jury and executioner, all in the hands of teenage girls. I don't want to be thinking this deep about any of this, but the show really just begs to because it actively brings them up. And then it concludes this is all fine and great in fact.

This whole thing is also top secret and covered up by the government, except every single police officer in the country knows about them so they won't interfere. How exactly would that work? Again the show actively brings this up to remind you to question it, and concludes that this is not only possible but super easy, you just need to tell everyone it was CGI, it was a movie, and none of the hundreds of thousands of police officers will ever blow a whistle.

While I really like these characters I have to say there is no such thing as character arcs in this show, maybe there is one for one side character but everyone else end the season the same way they started. We already mentioned how Takina got a slap on the wrist for going against orders, guess what happens in the end of the show? They argue Takina was 100% correct in the beginning, and she will continue to ignore orders, do whatever she pleases and again end up being 100% correct. I'm not saying Takina is annoying, she really isn't but it is boring that she's already perfect just the way she was all along. Same thing goes with Chisato really, she's already the way she is now even in her flashback, all the same powers, all the same goals and same beliefs. I feel like this material would be decent as a feature length movie that just covers the last arc of the show. But as 12 episodes of TV anime it does start to drag since the characters have nowhere to grow. This show is very good looking with top tier (for TV, excluding Kyoto) animation, lots of frames with very high quality line work. The story doesn't make a whole lot of sense, for example Chisao has safehouses that just looks like an empty apartment, when the bad guys come looking for her they can't find her. But then she voluntarily jumps out to fight the bad guys and confirms this is where her safehouse is, why? A number of silly things like this happen throughout the show, you really have to turn off your brain, same as with the CHILD SOLDIER stuff. I guess sometimes character design can just hard carry everything else. Best example I can think of is Atelier, supposedly Ryza's thighs absolutely saved the series...