This year, I wanted to write more about anime, mostly because I watch a lot of it, from chill and fun shows that I eagerly await the new episode of to trashy shows to watch while I cook or eat to boring ones that make me fall asleep (although I’ve mostly been falling asleep to One Piece’s Whole Cake Island Arc lately).
There’s a lot of anime out there, and I wanna write more often about it. And to kick off the “more posts about anime”, let’s go with an absolute banger… I’d like to say… but the banger was not available yet…
So we’ll start with an absolutely terrible show that is airing this season: “妃教育から逃げたい私” or “I want to escape from Princess Lessons” is not simply animated trash… It’s toxic waste corrupting the anime landscape.
It’s a crime show that is about how the daughter of a Duke gets robbed of her bodily autonomy, mistreated and gaslit until she eventually caves in and falls for the dreamy prince who literally kidnapped her to keep her locked up until the wedding she didn’t agree to is held once she comes of age. Yup, they’re keeping her warm in a jail cell. It’s a show about a literal kidnapping in a medieval society. It’s a show about a woman who is reduced to her ability to give birth.
This show became Matt Walsh’s new favourite show, actually, which is absolutely wild to me but checks out for him.
Perhaps this one’s an acquired taste that only self-proclaimed “theocratic fascists” can truly appreciate… but as a woke blogger on the internet, I really disliked it, and as such, I wanted to use this post to partially rant about this absolute cesspool of a show and tell you why it’s as bad as it is.
Enjoy.
In this post, there are spoilers ahead for essentially the whole show, as well as screenshots from the first few episodes.
Content Warnings for…
Kidnapping, manipulative and abusive behaviours, toxic relationships, a complete disregard for personal boundaries or consent. I also mention sexual assault a fair few times and a lack of bodily autonomy but sexual assault doesn’t actually happen in the show, unless you count the various times the “dreamy” Prince sneaks into the protagonist’s room to sniff her hair or whatever.
“No” means literally nothing in this show.
“I want to escape from Princess Lessons” is a disaster of a work of fiction. Set in an alternate kinda-medieval sorta-European society, Leticia is made to take “princess lessons” for ten years after the crown prince, Clarke, falls in love with her and arranges for the two of them to get married. Consent? Not needed. He’s the future king, after all.
So, Leticia is robbed of her childhood and spends ten years of her life, from age 7 until she turns 17, learning how to become the future queen of the country, not because she wants to, but because she has to. Consent? Not needed. (Perk up, this is a pattern.)
Trained like a dog in all sorts of subjects from etiquette to politics and history to ballroom dances and more, Leticia goes from a free-spirited young lady who was a bit tomboyish at times to a docile, tamed, broken and depressed doll… the model noble lady.
And then… *gasp* Prince Clarke… he shows up with a new companion at a party, and their engagement is seemingly broken off?! Oh, no, whatever will Leticia do?
Well, Leticia regains her joy for life again. She’s overjoyed at the “bad” news and returns to the countryside, living a slow life in harmony with nature and her family’s domain’s subjects.
But then Clarke shows up again, kidnaps her, and locks her up in the castle. Confined to a singular room and isolated from her family, friends, her maid and her dog, she spends her days having to say “no” and “no way” over and over to the prince’s advances and manipulation tactics.
Holy. Shit. What the fuck is this show?
Three volumes of a light novel, six volumes of a manga, and twelve episodes of an anime television series, with about 1.2 million copies of the light novel in circulation. Why is this so successful?
Part of me wants to think that it will get better or something, but it won’t. The show is all about isolating and manipulating a person who kept saying “no” over and over and over again. It’s an illustration of the mindset of “your body, my choice”. Leticia literally lost all autonomy over her body the moment the prince decided they are to marry.
When she tries to escape, she is told that the prince won’t have an heir with anyone else other than her. Having an heir. Making babies. Having sex. That’s what this is about. It’s about ownership and power.
Leticia is only interesting to the prince because she is not like a model noble lady. He lost interest in her when she became exactly that. She’s wild and tomboyish, she is a free spirit, a bird in nature that is enjoying life as it comes. He wants to own her, take away her (bodily) autonomy, and keep her to himself. Consent? Not needed.
After she refuses to marry the prince, he just decides to lock her up in a room until the wedding ceremony.
Think about that for a bit.
The show also showcases not just manipulation and gaslighting strategies but also the double standard of society. A model noble lady in this world is supposed to be docile, submissive and quiet. She can’t show emotions openly. She can’t speak her mind. She’s just supposed to look pretty and make babies. Meanwhile, the prince can do as he pleases. He can be irresponsible, irrational, a crybaby, and act in a matter that neither befits his age nor status.
He can literally tell everyone at a social event that Leticia is no longer his companion, and then he can cast away the girl he cheated with, claiming that he wanted to make Leticia jealous, and then go back on his word to force her to marry him. He can speak his mind because of his status and privilege.
Nobody can disagree with him because he’s not just “a royal” but actually “THE royal”. He can proclaim his love with all the creepiness in the world – and it’s seen as charming. He can encroach on and step over Leticia’s boundaries without anybody getting upset at him.
So, be it fascination or perhaps actual love or perhaps just his desire to put his cock into Leticia’s body to make an heir, there is nothing romantic about this show. Nothing here screams romance or cuteness or shoujo to me.
This is just a glorified rape fantasy.
Leticia is led to believe that SHE is the bad person for refusing to marry a man she doesn’t like. She doesn’t hate him, she says, but she also doesn’t see him as a man or anything. How’s she supposed to know what love is? She was locked up for ten years.
The opposite of love is disinterest. That’s what this is.
She has nothing in terms of feelings for him. When he says embarrassing things and when he touches her and when he sniffs her hair and when he gets super close all of a sudden, she blushes and is embarrassed. Duh. The show wants us to believe that Leticia is unreasonable and just playing “hard-to-get” but in reality, this is just not okay. It’s creepy. It’s disgusting.
What can Leticia do in this situation? She has no power to say “no” due to her status in a class-based hierarchy with Clarke being on top of everyone, except for his father, I guess. Even if she says “no”, it gets ignored, and she’s locked up.
The only option for her to attain freedom is to either kill herself or to murder Clarke (which would then, in turn, get her executed). Death is the only option for her to attain happiness. Isn’t that bleak? But the show doesn’t go there. Sadly. In fact, she’s kidnapped at one point in time and tries to make a deal to live anonymously in a foreign country but is then returned. When a ghost seemingly haunts the castle, she receives a map from the Queen of all the escape routes that Clarke doesn’t know about, so that she can “entertain him some more”.
Think about that. Clarke’s mother realises that Clarke is only truly happy when he chases after what he cannot and shouldn’t attain.
I guess the only saving grace of the show is that Leticia didn’t get sexually assaulted by the prince… yet. She’s only gotten gaslit, kidnapped, sexually harassed, molested, imprisoned, lied to, manipulated and and and and and and and…
The issue is, though, that even if Clarke were to sexually assault (or rape or whatever you wanna call it) Leticia, he wouldn’t go to jail or anything. He’s the guy who makes the laws after all. There’d be no repercussions. He can literally pull a Trump on himself and pardon anything and everything. Not to mention that even in our relatively progressive society, people still don’t persecute date rape or sexual assault amongst married couples ernestly enough. It doesn’t get taken seriously.
“What did you wear?”, “Why did you accept a drink?”, “Why did you go on a date in the first place?”, “You should have known better”, “Why did you marry him if you didn’t wanna become his living fleshlight?”, etc. — *puke*
Leticia literally has nothing left of what once resembled her choice or freedom or autonomy. She has no rights. She’s there to produce an heir for the prince who claims to have fallen in love with her. She finds him creepy. He likes how she refuses him, so he tries to convince her after isolating and imprisoning her.
Again, what the actual fuck?
In terms of other stuff, the show is okay. The animation is average for a show produced in 2024/2025. The music is okay, though nothing stands out. The voice acting conveys very well how creeped out Leticia is, whereas the other characters all sound indifferent to the situation.
The show tries to be funny by having Leticia break the fourth wall at times to talk to us, the viewers, to comment on what’s happening and to make light of the situation but the timing is off for it to actually be funny. A lot of the time, the commentary doesn’t really do more than just repeat what just happened or tell us exactly what we would expect her to think. It’s weird.
Besides that, though, it’s an average show with a terrible plot that is written by an (apparently) female author. Its pacing is slow and rather than seeing the prince amend his ways and seeing the two create rules, boundaries, and some way of making it work (since she has no choice, you know), the show is all about how Leticia eventually ends up actually falling in love with the Prince, all along.
There is an episode where Clarke actually takes his side chic and pretends to want to marry her after all. Leticia is overjoyed again. The hoax is revealed. Leticia is heartbroken. The girl he cheated with and he is now using yet again has no relevance to the plot besides being a plot device. She doesn’t have any memorable lines, doesn’t make much of an impression, and it’s terrible in a way that she gets utilized like that but she is totally fine with it or rather doesn’t appear to express her views on the matter whatsoever.
Anyway, Clarke realises at that point in time that Leticia is only happy when… *drum rolls*… she’s not entrapped. As a result, however, nothing changes. Oh well.
In another episode, it’s revealed that Clarke has a secret bedroom behind a bookshelf in Leticia’s room. Yuck. When she finds out, she’s obviously very upset at the lack of privacy. She talks to her brother about it who then suggest that she should say no. WHAT DO YOU MEAN, “SAY NO”?!?!?!?! She literally has done so way too often and everyone just ignores it. No isn’t in the vocabulary of high society.
Anyway, her brother then tells her that she needs to manipulate the Prince by saying that if he doesn’t announce his visits and if he doesn’t leave her the privacy that she deserves, she won’t call him by his name anymore. Clarke is heartbroken and as such agrees.
Oh, it’s a compromise and progress, too. I know it’s fucked up that it took this much to get to this point, but hey, that sounds like a start to a healthy relationsh- PSYCH! He “fixes” the problem that the compromise and boundary poses by announcing ahead of time that he will visit her EVERY NIGHT from now on. “Take that, Leticia. I owe you. Your body, my choice. Thought you could pull one over me? Not like that.”, Clarke thinks to himself. Now, roll the end credits song!
Wow.
Think of the children… literally.
This reminds me of “Wolf Girl and Black Prince” which has a very young impressionable target audience and is all about this high school girl who has “friends” that have boyfriends and sleep around and in order to stay friends with them, she needs to make up this fake boyfriend she has, even though she never has had one. When they ask her for a picture, she snaps a pic of a random dude on the street, and pretends that that’s her guy – and as it turns out, he’s the most popular dude in all of their high school (yet she didn’t know, I guess?).
So, she asks the guy to pretend to be her boyfriend so that she can keep her terrible friends, and he agrees to it under the condition that she becomes his dog. Like, she literally has to bark for him and stuff.
Anyway, that manga series and show is all about how he treats her terribly, like actually being abusive at times, letting her fall for other (arguably worse but not really) guys only for him to then save the day by being kind of nice but not really to her. The show makes him treating her like a normal human being seem like the super romantic parts even though he’s not even being romantic there… he’s just being normal.
That show is terrible because of how it glorifies and romanticizes toxic and incredibly abusive relationships… and “I want to escape from Princess Lessons” is all about that, too.
It’s played for laughs that Leticia doesn’t want to become the Prince’s baby maker. She’s the dumb one for not thinking of the various loop holes that the Prince could think of to go against her consent, as per usual. The way in which the Prince acts is never questioned. Everyone around her tells that she’s in the wrong, so why wouldn’t a young impressionable audience that this show is aimed at also think so?
It’s weird. And like, it doesn’t get better. There are side plots here and there where Leticia gets jealous because Clarke invites women on dates and to his bedroom chambers… but it doesn’t seem like jealousy. She’s just upset that she’s entrapped while he’s cheating. Duh. So she stalks him (rather than confronting him) and it turns out he was meeting with men who were dressed as women for no reason whatsoever, and then they go on a date and everyone was apparently in on it and cheer her on because now everything is fine.
In another episode, she plays with the baby brother of Clarke and Clarke gets jealous. His brother is literally a baby. He gets jealous. He’s jealous that she calls his brother, who is a baby and incapable of speech let alone anything else, adorable.
And then various other stuff, including a variety of plots, and eventually Leticia falling in love with the Prince who treats her horrible and takes away all the things she loves, and all the people she cares about, and all her rights from her.
So, yeah, not recommended. Duh.
This post was originally written by Dan Dicere from Indiecator.
If you see this article anywhere other than Indiecator.org then this article has been scraped. Please let me know about this via E-Mail.
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