As a great man once said Being a hero its hard. Being a hero its hard all the time. Superhuman powers youd think its easy... But being pretty much invincible is not what it seems to be. Being a hero is hard... Because theres an unbelievably endless stream of poontang. Its like youre 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 wont 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 hes 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 anybodys wondering no I have no idea why this animes title is a parody of Harry Potter. It has nothing to do with Harry Potter at even the smallest level. Peter Grill and the Philosophers Time was the debut title from a production company called Wolfsbane who were founded in 2017 but wouldnt 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 nothings 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 nonhuman 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 isnt a dull moment in this show visually speaking you know as long as youre holding pause. What Im saying is that the animation itself is bafflingly terrible. Its not just cheap or low budget I could handle that. It is those things but its 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 lets look at the character designs. Honestly theyre kind of awesome. Its tempting to give all the credit for this to the manga author but it can still be challenging to translate someone elses work from the page to the screen so Wolfsbane does deserve some credit for this. Peter Grill is a pretty damn cool looking hero. Its a shame we only see him involved in one particular type of action because if he were the protagonist in a video game hed be a fun avatar to adventure with. His fiance flawlessly rides the integral line between beautiful and respectable so its never a stretch to believe that hed put so much value into his own virtue for her. The nonhuman 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 heres the second caveat... They look good as long as theyre clothed. The nudity in this show is hideous overdrawn and indulgent to the point that Im willing to believe they handed nude scene artwork duties over to a twelve year old boy. Theres 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 its true engorged size? If thats what happens when an anime characters clothes come off you have The Pillsbury Effect. Ccups become Dcups the second theyre released from their cloth prisons and then Ecups whenever theyre shoved into the camera. The most tight toned bodies become thicc with an extra c once the director wants to pretend hes making porn and hell not even the one flat character is spared from these inconsistencies as she constantly fluctuates between A and B. I dont know am I the only one who likes character proportions to remain consistent in all forms of dress? Maybe Im the weird one on that but it doesnt excuse censorship thats so inconsistent that Peters peter can go from blatantly being covered by a censorcloud 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 Ive 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 its one of their newest projects Ill be honest I dont 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 dont even have their own wikipedia page yet. Dont get me wrong this doesnt result in any poor performances in fact its quite the opposite it sounds like they all showed up at work looking to pull out their Agame to try and take full advantage of this opportunity with a project Im assuming most of the studios 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 upandcoomers still say all their lines with gusto. It is a surprisingly good dub one thats well worth the recommendation but youre not missing anything worldchanging if youre 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. Its 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 theres nothing wrong with that and I dont 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 dont enjoy it on the same level as you that doesnt mean I shouldnt 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 elses 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 lets start with an easy one The entire plot is inherently flawed. If youre 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 characters 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 doesnt exist. True there are physical and psychological traits that can be hereditary but to the specific degree that its presented in Peter Grill? It doesnt matter how strong or weak you are it wont 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 its usually easy to ignore because other anime dont dwell on it as much as this one does. Like its hinted in Battle Athletes Victory that Akari should be a better athlete because she possesses her legendary mothers genes but its 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 Peters spunk and theyll leave him alone when they get pregnant and Im like theyre 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 isnt even taking miscarriages or deformation into account. It doesnt sound like any thought went into this outside of reason for the fucking. Hell if thats all youre here for you dont even get that they cut away from every single sexual encounter before it can happen on screen Its also worth mentioning the surprising amount of times that a characters decisions make no sense whatsoever. Im not sure how I feel about Luvellias 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 doesnt 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 Ive seen the same joke done so much better... Fucking Drawn Together knew how to pull this off whats your excuse? They push it so far that it strains believability. Then again theres a scene early on where the two ogre girls are sexually assaulting Peter they get his pants off and he hides them under the tableYou know instead of yelling for help over the fact that hes 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 were supposed to believe he is which allows his harem to gain more and more control over him and heres 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 cant 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 dudes gotta point. The problem is over the course of the series Peter does manage to become more and more sympathetic but its in the worst way possible. Im sorry I know Im probably about to get dragged for bringing politics into it but it doesnt take long for Peters situation to become skincrawlingly 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. Dont 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. Ive made no secret of the fact that Im asexual Ive mentioned it in several of my reviews before but I didnt 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 Ill spare you the gory details but I know what its like to have a lot of sex that you didnt want to have. I know what its 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 wellbeing 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 standup 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 Philosophers Time is available from Sentai Filmworks. The original manga is available from Seven Seas entertainment. I would again like to state that if youre into cheating fantasies power dynamic fantasies giant boobs no matter how badly theyre drawn or any other fetish this anime employs theres 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 its 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 Philosophers Time a 2/10.