Let’s just get this out of the way first: Our Friendly Concubine sounds nothing like Frieren. Not that Our Medicinal Heroine sounds anything like Tanya Degurechaff, of course.

This one’s an odd duck. Between the animation budget and the avoidance of the currently-trendy anime tropes, it feels more like one of those NHK big-budget historial dramas than a weekly anime. I haven’t read any of the source material (10+ light novels & manga volumes), and I don’t generally do court dramas set in a serial-numbers-filed-off Imperial China, so I have no idea where it’s going or what to expect.

Verdict: a little slow, but entertaining so far. And it doesn’t take itself completely seriously, but also doesn’t assume shouting is humor.

Here’s another oddity: nearly 3,000 pieces of fan-art on Pixiv for the books, and less than 150 of them porn; that’s a ratio you don’t see very often.

(unrelated flat-chested girl who’s good with poison, because I didn’t say the fan-art was good)

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