The Fall 2022 Preview Guide

Peter Grill and the Philosopher's Time Super Extra

Between quelling a goblin incursion, improving trade negotiations with the dwarves and placating a watchful sister who might just go berserk to keep him in line, Peter has his work cut out for him. He's the most sought-after hero in the land…and that's before counting the myriad woman interested in his “other” talents. It will take every last scrap of Peter's willpower to keep his focus on heroing in another raunchy season of Peter Grill and the Philosopher's Time Super Extra.

Peter Grill and the Philosopher's Time Super Extra is the second television anime season based on Daisuke Hiyama's manga and streams on HIDIVE on Sundays.

James Beckett
Rating:

There are exactly two jokes at play in the season premiere of Peter Grill and the Philospher's Time Super Extra, none of which will be in any way surprising for folks who caught even one episode of season 1. The first joke, which is what the majority of the premiere obsessively focuses on, is that there is a roaming army of naked goblin women who are going around and raping every single human man in sight. That's the extent of the entire bit, right there. Goblin rape.

The second joke admittedly only gets, like, one or two instances of screen time, but in a ten-minute-long “comedy” that genuinely believes that the apex of comedy is a bunch of green women with goblin faces dry-humping their screaming and crying victims, well…any oasis in a desert, right? Anyways, the joke is that Peter's harem of monster women will take any and any opportunity to proposition him for sex, on account of his amazing semen and all. Peter hates this, naturally, but at least here the joke is only implied sexual coercion, which is a sentence that I hate having ever even thought of, much less typed out for others to read.

Here's the deal: Peter Grill is, has always been, and will always be low-rent trash. It knows what it is. Hell, maybe it's just HIDIVE being looser with the censoring than Crunchyroll, but the censoring light bars don't even bother to cover up the ladies' naughty bits, which makes the show's soft-core ambitions even more transparent. This is the kind of crass, shameless, and irredeemably stupid sex comedy that would have filled up the bargain bins of video stores across the planet back in the heyday of physical media. Now, we only have the show's ugly aesthetic and its limited runtime to identify it as the direct-to-video frat-house rental that it so clearly wishes to be. There's an audience out there for this stuff, I'm sure, but I'm pretty sure I aged out of the target demographic once I learned how to date real, human women. Hard pass.

If I can say one nice thing about this inexplicable sequel to Peter Grill, 2020's saddest cure for priapism, it's that the subtitle is so stupid it made me laugh in spite of myself. See the “S” and “EX” in Super Extra make up the word “sex”. Tee hee. Oh you rascals. You really sneaked that one by the censors, and it would almost be cute if Pokémon hadn't accidentally beaten you to the punch with Pokémon Masters EX a while back. On top of that, there's a couple times in this season two premiere where the subtitle team was clearly having fun with the sexual terminology. Their liberal use of terms like “baby batter” and “lay-onnaise” was the only thing that made sitting through any of the first season tolerable.

In fact, I'll be honest: I don't remember much about the first season of this show, except that there was an episode (an arc?) where Peter was blackmailed by the elf girl when she cursed his dick to explode if he didn't have sex with her. Now legally that's very obviously what we'd call rape through coercion, what with threatening grievous bodily harm to force somebody into sex and all. But because the folks responsible for this show/franchise figure rape is funny when it's a woman doing it to a man, it was just a wacky way to get Peter in the sack, and gee he sure enjoyed it afterwards and kept her around, so it's all cool, right?

It's fitting that noncon bullshit was all that stuck in my memory of season one, because season two opens with an episode-long “joke” of the same nature and level. See there's a whole army of goblins, doing what anime goblins always do, but this time it's FEMALE goblins, so it's wacky when they tackle unwilling men and strip them naked. Plus they're uuuuuuuuugly, so that's extra funny, because the only thing worse than having sex against your will is having sex against your will with somebody who isn't a traditionally attractive anime girl. That's certainly what Peter thinks, since his first thought upon being led to get dubcon'd by the Goblin Queen is that she might be another attractive addition to his harem of baby-hungry fuck buddies, only to be devastated when she's a big slobbering monster instead of a pair of lime green boobs.

So yeah, unless you just find the thought of random men being raped funny, you're not missing anything here. My opinion of Peter Grill remains the same as before: it's a very sad production that is wholly incapable of being sexy or funny. It's dated, tired comedy paired with neutered T&A, and there are million better ways to get your laughs in or your rocks off than sitting through more of this mess.