really enjoyable. at the start it feels like it's just going to be a silly novelty gag story, but pretty quickly opens up into something smart and meaningful. what feels like generic fantasy choices actually become very compelling worldbuilding, and the gimmick food stuff turns out to be so thematically important and well integrated. by the end the manga's got proper some grimdark elements (the kind that are themselves becoming typical fantasy traits (no shade)): there's blood, there's necromancy, there's horrible decisions, but - and perhaps most impressive of all - it actually never stops being funny. the art style's lush, too. just consistently awesome to look at.

i like how it's got some of the restoration element of lotr, which again, are a fantasy trope, but they're flipped almost exactly on their heads. yeah, broad strokes the king is back, the land's returned. but in lotr everything is back in its rightful place except the people who died. in this, no one's dead, but everything's tangled. the king is new, the land is essentially new to everyone alive, and things have been learnt so that people don't just divide up into their separate enclaves.

comedy fantasy unbeaten when it comes to disrupting tropes and providing a really mature, reflexive response to a rather messy genre.