This is my place.

This is a harem done right.

Yuuji Kazami is not your standard harem fill-in-yourself protagonist. He isn’t stupid.  He isn’t nondescript. There are feelings inside him even if he presents a very business like affect. A close similarity can be found with James Bond. Every woman wants him and every man wants to be him. Most men would, however, not want to go thru what he has to get there.

There are three seasons. The first season has him entering a school populated by a hand full of wayward rich girls, girls that have essentially been discarded by their parents as inconvenient. You don’t learn his full back story until much, much later. So understand, I am not telling you things in episode order but rather in chronological order.

Spoilers!

As a very young child, Yuuji lived with his parents and older sister Kazuki in a dysfuctional family unit.  (More than a little incest here.) Kazuki is a phenominally good artist and they can live comportably on her work. Daddy is an a**hole who loves nothing but easy living and money. Kazuki apparently dies in a freak bus accident. Without the easy money Daddy goes nuts and and things happen. Yuuji ends up a ward of the state and is acquired by Heath Oslo.

Heath Oslo is an international terrorist out to create an army of young supersoldiers for rent. Yuuji looks like he has the right stuff. Starting out as Heath’s pet, he progresses into a “trap” who pretends to be a helpless little girl (looking just like his sister) to get his targets to lower their defenses, and then into a cruel boot camp environment.

Yuuji is rescued in a raid by Asako Kusakabe and then taken under her wing. She works under Yuria Harudera, aka “JB” from her earlier American name. JB has official custody and is his caseworker while he lives with Asako. He has been shot twice. serious knife wound scars and has multiple healed broken bones. Living with Asako, Yuuji learns to become human again even as she teaches him the secrets to her deadly trade, assassination. This period in his life is one where he is the happiest, despite some sad moments. The saddest of all is when the older woman, who is now his lover, dies of complications from an old war wound.

Yuuji needs some time to think. So he is off on a motorcycle journey, a stint as JB’s lover and finally decides to go to school and capture a sliver of the youth he’s been denied. There is only one school he will be allowed to attend, Mihama Academy. It is a special boarding school for wayward rich kids with a former agency woman as the principle. The attendees are five girls, all of whom have serious emotional issues caused by uncaring absentee parents.

Hijinks follow as Yuuji helps each girl in turn overcome her emotional problems, often in unorthodox ways. Despite offers, he doesn’t bed any of them, even as they grow to love him. Later, when Heath Oslo comes to claim his lost property, it is the newly liberated girls who must save Yuuji.

You know, James Bond would never bed a young girl either. He was only interested in fully adult women.

Lots of fan service. Some of it is of the usual stupid panty shot variety. Lowers the show’s marks there. Some of it… well Yuuji himself has a fair amount of nudity at one point. It doesn’t come across as fan service, it is a natural nudity of the kind one would expect of a guy simply doing things in his own room. Brownie points here. Would have had even more brownie points if the scars on his body were more vivid. They tell an important story.

There is material some people will want to avoid. Spousal rape, for example. Suicide. Some really obvious loli-shouto incest. Adult-minor sexual relations. Grown-up incest. Implied molestation. If this sort of thing triggers you, don’t watch. I personally don’t find it disturbing but then I’m a strange bird. It is a rare thing for anything in movies or literature to annoy me enough to affect the overall sense I get from a work. (Well, other than simply poor writing, drawing or acting.)

I don’t ask a story to adhere to my own sense of morality. As long as it does not appear to actively endorse nonconsensuality, it probably doesn’t even conflict with it. In this case, all of what I consider to be truly evil was done by the “bad guys” and shown as being evil.