Born in the city of the dead, Will is raised by three undead ‘monsters’: the mummy priestess Mary, the skeleton warrior Blood and the ghost wizard Augustus. The only human in a city filled with the undead, Will is raised with love and care by his three parents, who each in turn teach him the skills they had when they were still alive. As Will grows older, questions about who he is and where he came from naturally start to enter his thoughts, as do questions about Mary, Blood and Gus. It becomes clear that at some point when he’s old enough and skilled enough Will has to leave his home to find other humans…
What sets Saihate no Paladin is the slow and deliberate pace with which it unfolds its story. It takes will almost half the series to leave his parents and move beyond the City of the Undead into the wider world. Which means we get the opportunity to see him grow up and spent time with his family before he gets thrown into adventure. It also means we see him actually train and improve himself, unlike your typical isekai hero who gets their overpowered cheat skills in episode 1 and never has any difficulty using them. It’s in these first five episodes that we get to know Will and get to know why when he sets out from his home, he does so as a paladin of the goddess Gracefeel. Again, an interesting choice that sets him apart from almost every other modern fantasy anime hero. A series that actually takes religion seriously and a goddess as more than just a source of a convenient power up. The goddess Gracefeel herself used to be one of the major gods at the time when Mary, Blood and Gus were alive, but as Will discovers, is barely known in the outside world.
Said outside world turns out to be surprisingly empty at first. It takes Will many days of traveling to the north before he meets his first person, an elven archer called Menel. From him he learns that were he came from is considered the wilderness, with only the northern most parts of the continent having been resettled from across the seas. The world that Mary, Blood and Gus knew and told Will about was destroyed in the demon wars that turned them into undead and is only barely recovering from its wounds. It’s a dangerous place filled with monsters, a world that needs civilising. And Will, paladin of Gracefeel, might just the person to tame this wild frontier, bringing light to the darkness. A conservative, perhaps reactionary worldview, even for a fantasy series, but the way it is done makes it palatable. It helps that Will is clearly such a good boy.
Saihate no Paladin is one of those isekai series where you learn in the first episode that the protagonist was reincarnated in this world only for it never to matter afterwards. The same story could’ve been told without it. As a series, this is clearly only the first part of a longer story, ending as it does with Will having reached the outside world and taken on the task of promoting Gracefeel through his actions. In an anime landscape where there are three or four different fantasy series each season, Saihate no Paladin was a cut above the rest with regards to animation quality and character design. One of the few shows of Autumn 2021 I kept watching week by week.
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