Alternative title: Mato Seihei no Slave
Manga Adaptation by Seven Arcs
Streaming on HIDIVE

Premise

Monsters from a parallel dimension are a thing, women (and only women) have superpowers, and some of them are part of a force to try and stop them. Some guy needs to become a slave to one of these women to become a powerful weapon against them. His payment? Sexy times.

Peter’s verdict: Anime for incels

Introducing your main character by having him complain that “guys live life on hard mode compared to girls” sure isn’t a great start to a show with “Slave” in the Japanese title, but it’s about par-for-the-course these days. Anyway, this world is a matriarchal society where girls can get superpowers and guys can’t, and this means guys can’t get jobs and are looked down on, etc etc. This world also has giant monsters inside a parallel universe called “Mato” and the two universes keep connecting in different places, so people can accidentally end up in Mato and need rescuing by the elite Demon Defense Force, who are all women of course because they need superpowers and specifically relevant superpowers to have a chance at defeating the monsters before they can make their way to our world.

Our protagonist ends up in Mato and has a bunch of monsters after him. Enter Kyouka, part of the Demon Defence Force, who has the ability to make one of the monsters a “slave” and fight for her against their own kind. She rescues protag and, as they’re trying to escape, finds a small child who also needs rescuing. She keeps complaining that these enslaved monsters are “too slow” or “not powerful enough” and then, without any real prompting, decides that she wants to try enslaving the protagonist. Then, would you believe it, he’s super powerful and saves the day while in his transformed slave version. When he transforms back, it turns out that Kyouka’s power has a side effect where she has to “give a reward to the slave as a good master should” and for all the monsters this has just been food and stuff, but because our protagonist is an incel, this means she has to fulfill sexual desires. Episode 1 is a long and deep kiss, but we already know by the fact that there’s an AT-X uncensored version and a general TV censored version that they’re going to go further than that. It is also made very clear that Kyouka cannot control her body when fulfilling the reward, and while she agrees to continue the master/slave arrangement for future battles, it sure feels like it’s going to get real rapey, real fast.

Because this show can’t just be one kind of cringe, the protagonist is then hired as caretaker of the all-girls dormitory of the 7th squad of the Demon Defense Force, which he’ll stay and work at in between doing fights. So we’ve also got the start of an old-school all-girls dorm harem where, mark my words, from episode 2 they’ll end up walking about topless or whatever cos they forget the guy is there or they don’t care about him, etc. We have the genki one who wears shorts, we have the 11-year-old, we have the androphobe (who will be “cured” at some point for sure), and some others in the end credits we haven’t met yet.

After all that, would you believe me if I said I don’t completely hate it? There’s a few good ideas here that would make a pretty good satire if that’s what it wanted to do. We’ve got our typical isekai protag who is absolutely useless and a pretty awful person on the inside, outside of occasional acts of selflessness (like putting himself in between a monster and a small child). He arrives in this other world, but unlike most other shows like this, he’s still just a regular human. No free pass for you. He’s useful only as a tool to be used by the powerful women in this world, specifically so Kyouka can become the top commander of the force. That sounds like an interesting show, and hell you could even try to work the horny stuff into being more of a “she’s sleeping her way to the top” parallel.

But this show isn’t a satire. It doesn’t really have much to say. In fact, I know manga and anime, and it’s likely that they won’t actually fully bone until right at the end of the story as a finale. So what we’ll get is plenty of panty shots, nudity, and groping, not really providing anything to affect the plot long-term. Will the other female characters get fleshed out, or just get their flesh out? They seem to have some interesting superpowers though so at least they aren’t just copies of Kyouka so the protag can fondle all of them as payment…hopefully…

After all that, how is the show on an audio/visual level? Not great. The character design of Kyouka is good, although the manga has the uniform the force wears a more interesting blue/purple design, while the anime is just pure black, presumably to make things easier. The 3D is pretty ropey and the monsters are the most generic-looking things you’ve ever seen. However, things get super detailed when we’re close up on the girls. Weird that. It’s almost like this show’s being sold on sex instead of the action. Anyway, Kyouka’s voiced by Kitō Akari, who also voices Eve in Birdie Wing, which makes sense considering the master voice she puts on, so at least the casting is fairly on point.

So yeah, not a good show based on episode 1, the Wikipedia plot summary, and flicking through a few pages of the manga dotted around the net. Morbid curiosity is making me want to watch another episode, but I don’t think it’ll survive the three-episode test.