About a month ago, I was sitting in my room listening to music and Islamic nasheeds on YouTube when I saw clips from a recent anime series called Blood of Zeus on YouTube shorts. Judging by the clips, I decided to give this show a chance, given how similar it looked to my favorite anime shows, many of which were released during the late 2000s to the early 2010s, especially with its abundance of beautiful women. However, when I watched the first episode, I found there to be multiple problematic elements and tropes in the series, particularly during the show’s first season, many of which were also present in my favorite 2000s and 2010s anime shows.

In the show’s pilot episode, we are introduced to Heron, a young man living near an unnamed Greek city-state who lives with his mother, Electra, and an “elderly man” named Elias. One night, while Herron is out collecting iron ore, he encounters an Amazon named Alexia who is hunting for demons as an army of demons is preparing to invade from the East before they encounter some of these demons who order them to convert or die as they demons descend on the city-state. Elias tells Heron about the war between the Gods and the Titans before the last Titan cursed the Gods, thus birthing the giant and causing another savage war to occur, but Zeus introduces a compromise before planning one last attack as Hermes gathered the souls of the giants and hid them in the ocean with the remains of the last Titan.

As the first season progresses, we are introduced to Seraphim, the leader of the demons who ate of the flesh of the last Titan and encouraged his followers to do the same, along with a host of other characters such as Hera, Apollo, Ares, King Perdiander the tyrant of Corinth, and a host of others, but it is revealed that Heron is the bastard son of Zeus, that Elias is one of Zeus’s human disguises, and that Seraphim is Heron’s half-brother. A jealous Hera uses Seraphim to destroy Heron’s hometown before Heron, Alexia, and Electra, are confronted by Seraphim and his demons after Heron and Alexia just got done fighting Cerberus, the three-headed hellhound, before Heron tries to save his mother and fails, resulting in her death at the hands of Seraphim. The show’s first season ends with war breaking out between the Gods of Olympus and the Gods of the Underworld, along with their giant allies.

At the beginning of the second season, we see that Seraphim begins a series of trials to try and redeem himself, but he is haunted by how he lost his chance to marry the love of his life, the priestess Gorgo and as Seraphim faces his trials, Hades tells him the story of his lost love, Persephone. Hades mentions how he fell in love with Persephone at first sight and that he couldn’t be with her because she lived on Mount Olympus and he lived in the underworld, but Hades convinces Persephone to go to the underworld with him by encouraging her to eat these pomegranate seeds, which she does. Her mother, Demeter, is not only very angry and upset, but she tells all the other Olympian Gods and Goddesses that Hades kidnapped Persephone.

Later in the second season, the war between the Gods of Olympus and the Gods of the Underworld continues, but Heron soon has a vision of his impending death and learns that he will be able to use it to his advantage. Meanwhile, Zeus is judged in the underworld and sentenced to an unspecified time in Tartarus until his good deeds can redeem him, while Heron faces trials of his own, but Heron realizes that his worst fear is not dying well and that his parents would still be alive, and his city would be intact if he killed Seraphim when he had the chance. The second season ends with the different factions of Gods fighting over the Eleusinian Stone, with Heron getting killed by Hades for his speech on forgiveness, and with the Titans returning.

I must say that overall, I did enjoy this series as it felt like a flashback to some of my favorite anime shows from the late 2000s to early 2010s, such as Avatar: The Last Airbender, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Dante’s Inferno: An Animated Epic, Sekirei, Queen’s Blade, Ikki Tousen, High School DxD, Maria: The Virgin Witch, Claymore, and others that I can’t remember off the top of my head. However, the show was not without its problematic elements, as the demon’s catchphrase is “convert or die,” which has been stereotypically associated with Islam and continues an old Hollywood tradition of randomly inserting anti-Islamic and/or anti-Arab tropes in programming that has nothing to do with the Middle East. Another problematic trope I found in this show is that there seems to be a lot of colorism as Seraphim and the demons are all dark-skinned with red eyes and white hair, while the Gods are either white or light-skinned, not to mention there’s only one black character in the cast named Kofi, and he is a former slave.

When viewing this show from an Islamic perspective, I can tell you now that there is a lot of idolatry, child abuse, domestic violence, and implied sexual intercourse, both consensual and nonconsensual, not to mention some mild nudity here and there. Many conservative Islamic clerics would advise against watching shows like this at all, but based on my understanding of the Qur’an and Sunnah, I believe that it is permissible to watch these kinds of shows, as long as you’re capable of accepting that the series is a work of fiction and that none of the people and places in this story are real. I also believe that this series is completely inappropriate for children, though I would let a high schooler watch this with an adult, preferably a parent or a teacher so that the teenager could get help understanding the context and the references.

At the end of the day, Blood of Zeus is a good show and a throwback to some of my favorite anime shows as someone who grew up in the 2000s and came of age in 2013, but it is not for everyone and certainly not suitable for children. As of now, the show’s creators have five seasons total planned, including seasons one and two, though I’m not sure how they’re able to do this since the main character got killed off. I’m greatly looking forward to the next season, although it might be a while since season one premiered in 2020 and season two in 2024, and I can’t wait to see how the war for Olympus ends.