What’s it about? Allen has just failed the court sorcerer exam, and, in need of spare cash, takes a tutoring gig to help prepare a duke’s daughter for magic school. Once Allen arrives at the mansion, however, he learns that Lady Tina is a rare case: she has no magic aptitude at all.
The frustrating thing is, I feel like there’s a fun, if tropey, fantasy story in here. Tina has potential as a character: she loves plants and has been cultivating a whole greenhouse, she’s shy but determined to prove her father wrong and live up to the family legacy, and she wants to study magic to pursue the dreams instilled by her late mother. She’s technically great at magic but her spells never work, and figuring out why that’s happening to her could be a cool magical mystery that ties into her character development. But this isn’t Tina’s story, it’s Allen’s. Any character growth must happen through the lens of him helping her, and any interesting elements are mushed down by the conventions of the fantasy harem genre that the series is awkwardly fitting itself into.
Contrivances begin as soon as Allen arrives in the duchy. Tina has come to meet him, badly disguised as a maid; he sees through the ruse immediately and everyone tells him how clever he is when he explains how he clocked her as an obvious rich girl. Before that, though, we’re treated to a bizarre sequence where the butler encourages Tina to sit on Allen’s lap for the car ride home. Now, I’ve never been a butler, but I would presume that shoving your house’s young lady into silly fan service situations isn’t usually part of the job. Dare I say you’d even try to avoid such moments of indiscretion! But not so for this guy. So Allen gets to sit with his new pupil perched awkwardly on his knees while they travel through the countryside.
Allen at least isn’t weird about this—and the scene certainly isn’t as skeezy as it could be—but honestly that just makes it even stranger, in a way. Why do this? What does it add? It doesn’t do anything to move the dial on the relationship between the two leads, so I guess this moment of intimacy was just to embarrass Tina and, I don’t know, take away her basic agency and put her on the back foot? It almost feels like it’s happening because the writers scratched their head and said, “Well, we’re setting up a fantasy harem, so I guess we should smush them into forced proximity?”
Honestly, a lot of the episode feels like it’s going through the motions like this. The audience meets the real maid, Ellie, when she trips and falls into Allen’s arms. She’s cute and clumsy and her maid uniform shows full cleavage, because of course. The end of the episode introduces a fire-themed, possessive childhood friend tsundere character, because of course. Allen magic-splains worldbuilding that logically the girls already know (a very basic elemental affinity system, because of course) and I slide slowly off my seat like melted cheese.
Private Tutor’s playing a well-known tune, you know? Everyone is color-coded and tropey and twee in ways that fit marketable archetypes. The character designs make it difficult to tell how old these people are supposed to be, and Tina and Ellie’s tiny stature, huge eyes, and wibbly-wobbly blushy shyness makes them feel especially childlike. Not a bad thing on its own, but when they’re clearly being set up as love interests for Allen, it’s uncomfortable. Again, this episode avoids any overt sexual imagery and out-and-out fan service, but there’s a sticky layer of expectation over the whole thing.
Archetypally, Allen is one of those Nice Young Men who falls headfirst into harem shenanigans and sighs his way through it, just trying to be Nice and not cause too much trouble. Better than a protagonist who’s actively a creep, sure, but it gives the storytelling this dumb “plausible deniability” where fan service can happen to him and girls can fawn over him without him seeking it out, which means hey, it’s fine, right?
In short, this episode is one long, deep sigh—not because it does anything outright nasty or off-putting, but because it’s painting by numbers to create something we’ve seen before, and something that isn’t that great to begin with. There’s a potentially interesting story here with Tina’s magical conundrum, but I can’t be bothered to sift through the layers of awkward romantic set-up and magic school goings-on to get to it.
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