The Demon King’s Daughter is Too Kind!! – Episodes 1-2

What’s it about? The great Demon King has bent demonkind to his will, but his plans to expand his conquest to the human world and the heavens have hit a snag—his only daughter, Doux, doesn’t have a cruel bone in her body. Making her a proper demon might be too great a task even for Jahi, the king’s greatest general.

“What if demons aren’t all that threatening, actually” has been popular fodder for comedies lately, some of which I’ve enjoyed quite a lot. The Demon King’s Daughter isn’t shaking up the mold, but it is a solidly executed affair steered by the reteamed series composer and director duo from both Himouto! Umaru-chan and My Deer Friend Nokotan. It’s a series of shorts that’s not pretending to be anything else, but it clips along without feeling choppy.

The main draw is that Doux is pwecious, the kind of fictional child who only ever misbehaves in ways that are winsome and charming to the audience. And charmed I was, to be fair, particularly when Doux broke out not once but twice into musical montages that reminded me of that time Gohan sang about his dad. I am not immune to cute anime kids when they’ve got personality and motivation beyond being a mawkish accessory for a burned out 30-something. But it does always feel a little icky that this is the overwhelmingly common depiction of little girls in particular. I don’t think it’s a sexual predation thing for the majority who enjoy the Kannas of the world, I really don’t, but it’s a little unconsciously dehumanizing to consistently portray young girl children as dispensers of good vibes for their caretakers.

Likewise, I could note that there’s a lot of incidental gendered implications about Jahi, the brutal war commander, being tapped to do childcare duties—that women are assumed to be nurturing, and that she’s constantly set in the role of “mean parent” (not that she succeeds at it, of course) because the king grouses about Doux not being evil enough and then caves immediately to dote on her even if she’s been out doing good deeds. Like with Doux, I don’t get the feeling that the show is thinking about that. It’s more that patterns crop up across media, and when they’re widespread they say things about unconscious collective assumptions. It’s the stuff of analytical essays, not an immediate impediment to enjoying the show.

The only part that feels actively weird is the writing’s attempt to juggle its lighthearted tone with making the demons sporadically capable of legitimately heinous acts. It’s clear that Doux’s kindness will eventually dismantle her father’s regime, but in the meantime we end up with Doux visiting a mining site full of enslaved humans and….making a snow day for them with her new ice magic. It’s perfectly sweet for the character, but in the context of the narrative I’m left uncomfortably wondering about their living conditions after Doux leaves for the day. If the show wants me to employ the MST3K mantra, it probably shouldn’t have led with an enslaved man’s backstory in which his family is slaughtered by demons.

Episode 1 ends with a touching story about a widow, but it also has wacky shenanigans in which Jahi eats some salt that takes away her free will. Both of these things are gone by the next episode, which is a relief on the one hand and a worrying sign for any attempts at dramatic momentum on the other. I have a dozen minor quibbles with the show, but at the end of it all I come back to the fact that both episodes flew by and felt like a warm blanket. Sometimes, I guess that’s enough.