ASSASSINS PRIDE

Introduction:
This show is bad, and by bad, I mean REALLY bad. But, it’s for that precise reason that this show is good. Assassins Pride clearly wasn't supposed to be a comedy, but I've never laughed so much at an anime before. It feels like it was written and produced by a group of angsty pre-teen redditors, and that's why I couldn’t bring myself to look away.

Dialogue:
Just watch the first 5 minutes of the show and you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. There’s this scene where the main character arrives at the campus by train and he runs into a female colleague and I swear I felt like I was watching the reenactment of some shitty matchmaker forum RP.

MALE AND FEMALE CHARACTERS SAY SAME THING AT SAME TIME

“Oh my, we said the same thing.”
“Yes, what a coincidence.”
MALE WALKS UP TO FEMALE
“Take my hand, milady.”
“Wow, what a gentleman.”
“It’s only natural to show a little courtesy. I wish I could escort you to your destination.”

YOU SEE?! You see what I’m talking about here? I hate to break it to you writers, but unless you’re performing in an high school play, that’s NOT how people talk to each other. It doesn’t just stop there either. This show has cringe-worthy dialogue down to the letter. It’s as if the writing staff were trying to make a character-driven story, but have zero real-life experience associating with other human beings, and this abomination to social interaction was the end result.

Plot:
The story follows Kufa Vampyr, and I bet you’ve already guessed that he’s secretly a vampire. You’d be correct, as it should be blindly obvious, even for blind people, but somehow this revelation is still a complete shock to everybody in the series.

Anyway, so Kufa is an assassin who’s sent on a mission under the guise of tutoring the other main character, a magicless girl named Milada Angel. Get it? It’s Milada, as in “Milady”, and Angel, because she’s supposed to be the angel that changes the course of his life or something. Like I said, this show is super on the nose when it comes to naming its characters, and just about everything else really. Milada is noblewoman born from a house famous for breeding powerful magicians called Paladins, except she was born with no mana and is considered a disgrace to the family name. Kufa’s mission is to determine whether or not she has magic power and to assassinate her if it turns out she doesn’t.

However, bad boy main character Kufa simps over Milada and decides he'd rather not kill her. So, Kufa ends up to giving her some of his own magic power, which involves making out with her I might add. Unfortunately, this means Milada won’t be able to become a Paladin, since she automatically inherits Kufa’s attribute, Samurai. Apparently, Samurais are an assassination subclass in this universe, because of course an anime has to use an RPG system for combat. Welcome to 2020, ladies and gentlemen. Anyway, a noble having an assassination attribute is kind of sketchy and if anybody finds out, they’ll both be done for, so they both have to hide that information from everyone else if they want to survive.

And just in case it didn’t already feel like this was the final manifesto of some sad teenager, the first thing Milida does with her newfound power is use them to beat the shit out of her high school bully.
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Harem:
Kufa Vampyr is one of the most blatant male audience self-insert Gary Stu characters I’ve ever seen. It literally couldn’t be more obvious that he only exists for some loser to live vicariously through his actions. When you consider that in addition to being a badass dark swordsman, he’s also surrounded by a harem of women at a school for teenage girls, it becomes clear that this character is basically a Kirito archetype, and I’m sorry SAO fans, but that’s NOT a good thing.

Laqua Madia - This girl was the first real villain of the show that eventually devolved into a tsundere side character for Kufa’s harem. She was an assassin from his guild who only speaks with fire, not because she’s mute but because she gets off on trolling her targets. She also has complicated feelings for Kufa, which ultimately lead her to stop trying to kill Milida and become a teacher at the school to be closer to him.

Rosetti Prickett – Madia isn’t the only teacher that falls for Kufa of course. Rosetti happens to be the girl Kufa was chatting with in the train scene I was talking about in the dialogue section of this review. She’s a magically-gifted former commoner who’s the youngest person to ever join the legendary Crest Legion guild. Rosetti is the personal tutor of a member of Milida’s family, Elise. She also happens to be Kufa’s adopted sister but doesn’t remember Kufa because of magic amnesia or something. This makes it slightly weird that she’s head-over-heels in love with him.

Milida Angel - Unfortunately for the other two women, Kufa Vampyr only has eyes for one girl in particular, and she’s 13-years-old. Despite being highly unethical, they have a borderline romantic relationship. In fact, Milida actually makes him pledge to wait until she’s old enough to marry him by the THIRD EPISODE. Yeah, I mean, what kind of show did you think this was?

Miscellaneous - Of course there are other girls that try make a pass at Kufa, but I don’t have the time to write about all of them. Plus, I doubt that’d be very interesting to read. Just assume every female character that enters Kufa’s orbit wants the D and you’d probably be right.
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Conclusion:
Let me make this crystal clear, I actually WANT you to watch this mess of a show. It’s so divorced from reality that’s it’s really fun to watch. People come down on it pretty hard, and for good reason I might add, but to the writers’ credit, they actually did a pretty good job making the show at least watchable. I mean, we all love a good dumpster fire every now and then.