The new year has only just gotten started, but we've already got two strong contenders for
MOST TOXIC ANIME OF 2018!!
First off, there's the hot new isekai series:
Rising of the Shield Hero, about a mild-mannered otaku who is sucked into a fantasy world and must fight to save it from an encroaching evil. Unfortunately, he is promptly accused of rape by an evil seductress! Also, it turns out that she only did that to score points with one of the other heroes, a cool hottie. Now, that alone would be enough to nab the trophy in a normal year, but this is 2019, baybee! Since the entire kingdom hates his guts, he is forced to buy a slave girl to be in his party and fight for him. Except that it's okay, because it turns out that he's nice to her and protects her. The hero eventually gets called out for this, but the budding love between a 20-something otaku and his beast-girl slave eventually wins out. Everyone learns a lesson about how slavery actually isn't that bad and also sex-obsessed sloots are not to be trusted.
That brings us to next in a long line of magical girl sad-em-ups:
Magical Girl Spec-Ops: Asuka. Several years ago, Asuka lead a group of magical girls in their quest to save the world from killer plush animals, but now she must come out of retirement to face a new thread:
INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM! Things get started off right by having terrorist blindly fire into a group of civilians in order to cover for the escape of their captured leader. Fortunately, Asuka [still dealing with PTSD, but also up for kicking some butt] happens to be in the area and slaughters the whole lot of them, except for the leader who just gets his legs chopped off. He gets turned over to the police, who promptly get to work on him at a CIA blacksite. I could bore you with all the "blah blah blah power of friendship" and whatever that happens for a while, but anyway, eventually, one of the main non-magical girls gets kidnapped. Episode 4 spends about a third of its time on the various ways in which she is brutally tortured [it's also implied that they intend to cannibalize her later, just so you know how evil these guys are], forcing the good guys to torture some information out of the terrorist leader they capture in episode 1 [this is presented as a good and necessary thing, of course]. Also, it has magical Russian mercenaries. That doesn't really have anything to do with it being toxic, but I thought I'd bring it up.
Both series are currently streaming on
Crunchyroll