I watched The Royal Tutor and obviously need to talk about how I watch anime

The thing with living in small-ish language spaces is that getting into any foreign thing that isn't strictly mainstream means BUYING STUFF ONLINE AND IT'S HELLA EXPENSIVE. Thinking back, I'm pretty sure that the single factor of international shipping and custom fees is at least 70% responsible for the fact that my anime collection is relatively high quality, or at least made up of things I sincerely enjoy. The only anime I have bought and dropped was Eureka Seven, and my dropping it had less to do with quality and more to do with rage at certan decisions on behalf of the writers. I lived on student loans; I couldn't afford to just "check something out". If I was going to get it, then I was going to be sure it'd be worth it. I read a lot of reviews.

Having a Crunchyroll subscription presents me with problems that just never existed in my life before: At what point should I stop watching? As someone who strives to have Opinions on things, I feel obliged to at least watch it all if I'm going to whine about it afterwards. Thing is, I should be reading Good Books instead of watching trashy anime, or at least re-read good fanfic or something. It should be a hint when I need to remind myself to watch, I guess.

SO ABOUT THE ROYAL TUTUR, which obviously needed reminding:

Watch on YouTube

I don't know what it wants to be. The less funny and less emotionally engaging and completely genre-abiding version of Ouran? The grade school version of Maoyuu? Some weird, platonic student-teacher take on the Otome genre? Except the character design is a lie, and the manga at least is shounen. It obviously isn't memorable, and it's predictable AF, and clearly not interested in a frank discussion of the things royalty needs to learn in order to rule well.

TL;DR summary: In Shinyland (that's the literal translation, boys and girls!), there are five potential heirs to the throne. The four youngest live in the royal castle, and have successfully proven their lacking kingship skills by driving away all their tutors. Obviously, things change when the next tutor in line is Heine Wittgenstein, who to no-one's surprise reforms the four princes by the ideas at the fundament of modern pedagogy.

There's not a lot of plot to it. There is, in fact, like three episodes of just basic classroom leadership (get all the kids present and make them shut up and listen to you) before the tutoring even starts, and the focus isn't the content on the tutoring as much as it it watch the princes have epiphanies, learn about the true meaning of governance, ponder their true desires in life. And as said, it's... juvenile, at this point. Yeah, of course you want everyone to be happy; that's admirable, but the youngest of you is 14, so maybe we should also ponder how you're going to pay for that?

According to a friend of mine who follows the manga, there's at least more drama and succession intrigue going on there. What we're getting here is "spoiled teenagers reconsider their vision of life, gets ambitions" in an artstyle that is a weird mix of bishounen and chibi. It's fairly visible that the anime is really just the setup arc to a bigger story, but that probably isn't coming; there's an anime-original ending that is nothing else than what it of course has to be when a mysterious new teacher comes in from no-where to transform the lives of troubled childreen. Unfortunately, this anime doesn't trust its viewers enough to handle even that take on the realities of life.

More than anything, I feel that this anime was made for a younger audience than most people watching anime in the west. It's cute and it's impossible to hate, but if someone asked me why they should spend six hours watching this, I'd struggle to answer. Like... if you really really like cute teenage boys have non-problems? Because everything else in this anime has been done better elsewhere.