I’m glad to say that the anime version of Saigo ni Hitotsu dake Onegai shitemo Yoroshii deshou ka / May I Ask for One Final Thing is as good as I hoped.
That was a very satisfying premiere. The anime was smart enough to keep what worked in the manga version and having two episodes meant we could deal with both the setup and start the actual story in one fell swoop. Starting with the denouncement, before going into an extended flashback that shows Scarlet immense patience in dealing with her shithead fiancee, before coming back for the well deserved catharsis of the beatdown she delivers to him and his cronies, worked very well here. It’s a structure you see more often in villainess anime or manga, but rarely as well handled as this. The second episode being able to move onto the bigger plot, with the prince revealed to be no more than a figureheard for a coalition of corrupt nobles engaging in slavery, helps move the story along. A lot of villainess stories tend to spin their wheels between the big banishment scene and the inevitable redemption through romance, not so this series. There’s romance with the other prince on the horizon, but the manga hasn’t really gotten to it yet so I don’t expect the anime to get there either.
All in all this is an almost perfect adaptation, with my only minor quibble being that the big fight scenes were a bit static. Not every production can have the budget or staff that a CloverWorks or Science Saru can bring to a project, sadly. Direction and mise en scene makes up for a lot here. All of leaves me free with something that irritated me when reading the ANN reviews of these first tow episodes, viz Rebecca Silverman’s remarks about its worldbuilding:
It also stumbles in its worldbuilding; if it’s not proper for Scarlet to show her legs, why does her school uniform skirt come to mid-thigh? If slavery is illegal, why is it so easy to find the slave traders in the capital? And how credulous is Scarlet that she thinks a rock is a precious ore even though she’s clearly not stupid? Moments like that took me right out of the story.
This feels like a case of overthinking reviewer’s brain. The remark that it’s not proper to show her legs is made when Scarlet does a flying drop kick at a ruffian who tried to rob her and is clearly a joke. In any case the school uniforms do include a stout pair of stockings, so hardly improper even if the skirts are on the shorter side. That Scarlet thinks she’s been sold mithril is because of her sheltered upbringing, not her lack of intelligence. And, since she later remarks she has to go back to buy another as she broke it, it may even be that she very well understood it was fake, she just wanted to help the boy selling it.
These are minor things, but Silverman’s objection to how easily Scarlet and co found a slave trader goes directly to the heart of the story. It’s not just that it’s naive to think illegal things cannot be found easily for those who go looking — or nobody in Wall Street would be addicted to coke — but that it means you haven’t really understood what you just watched. As these two episodes have been at pain to make clear is that while slavery is illegal, it has the support of powerful people, from Scarlet’s ex-fiancee, the second prince, to the group of nobles he’s involved with to the prime minister. Just like corruption under Trump is still illegal but widely practised, so too is slavery here. Because these powerful people are involved, slavers can operate semi-openly. Even so, it takes some effort for Scarlet et all to track them down and they did have the help of an insider.
That’s the Watsonian explanation. The Doylian of course is that the series isn’t interested in doing a police proceduralesque investigation into the slave trade and wants to move on to the real meat of the story. The slave trader is easy to find because it isn’t interested in spinning the investigation out more than it needs to to get to the next set piece, where Scarlet will get to punch some more deserving bastards.
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