Tears To Tiara Episodes 1 & 2

I’m going to be so pissed off if this show turns into a harem love fest, is all I can say.

Tears to Tiara is apparently based on what was at one point an ero-game but is now just your average RPG - that just happens to feature several female characters that become your wives, from a quick glance at Wikipedia. Oh, Japan, you and your crazy wish fulfilment stories. I sure know I’ve always wanted to be a demonic bigamist!

Anyhoo, I’m going to try and cast this out of my mind because without the foreknowledge that things could get annoying the first couple of episodes of Tears to Tiara are pretty entertaining. It’s not the kind of show where you really want to engage your brain very far, and that’s not to say there aren’t things about it that annoy me, but it’s a pleasant little watch for a fantasy show.

I think my biggest gripe, unsurprisingly, is with Rhiannon. I actually quite liked her in the first episode; she stood her ground until the stupid children showed up, didn’t really whine all that much, and then spent the rest of the episode completely zombie-fied which may have helped. However, then the dictations of ero-games are such that in the second episode her voice goes up about an octave and for almost no reason she declares that she’s going to marry a scary demon because she saw him crying bloody tears from within his soul. I hope the length of that sentence adequately conveys my annoyance with her - especially as she goes on to just stand in the midsts of a horde of dodgy CG skeletons looking panicky whilst the Manly Men beat them up, but hey ho.

Speaking of the Manly Men, on the flipside the three male characters we’ve really been introduced to are surprisingly interesting. Arthur veers close to the milquetoast lead but actually seems a pretty decent bloke; Arawn is surprisingly amusing for a tortured demon, and Ogam is appropriately jolly (although why no whizzy spells in the second episode? Whoever’s animating this clearly pays their effects animators well, there’s some very nifty pillars of light in the first episode…)

So I’m hopeful that Tears to Tiara will turn out to be more entertaining in the long run than I’m perhaps expecting it to be. Fantasy anime are a big weakness of mine, although I didn’t even make it to halfway through Tales of the Abyss last year (not sure why, I was quite enjoying it) so based on the first two episodes I’m willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.

The minute some mewling cutesy brat gets “married” to Arawn, though, my estimation of this show will plummet.

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