YMMV / Reign of the Seven Spellblades

• Accidental Innuendo: After Oliver's duel with Tullio Rossi in volume 2/manga chapter 21/episode 8, Teresa Carste compares him to a naked blade and offers to become his whetstone, while blushing furiously. This did not go unnoticed in the Crunchyroll comments. (In context she was misguidedly offering to let him kill her if it would bring back the Oliver who tortured Darius Grenville to the point of begging for death.)
• Base-Breaking Character: Judging by Crunchyroll comments, the anime viewership had mixed reactions to Pete Reston: due to being a Mage Born of Muggles who, unlike Nanao, lacks real-world combat experience, he's kind of The Load in the Sword Roses' freshman year, and others thought his personality was annoying. Others, especially those who had read the later novels where he matures, were willing to cut him more slack given that same Fish out of Water status, and some took a perverse pleasure from the way the reversi subplot annoyed the transphobes in the audience.
• Complete Monster: Vol. 10: The Patriarch of the Sherwood Clan is the grandfather of Chloe Halford and great-grandfather of Gwyn and Shannon Sherwood and Oliver Horn. Only present in an extended flashback sequence, Mr. Sherwood took in Chloe's widower Edgar Groves and their young son Oliver after her murder, dismissing Edgar as a "stud horse" and used Oliver to play back the Ghost Memory of his mother's Rasputinian Death, forcing him to relive the agony in first person. Sherwood then pushed Edgar to repeatedly train his son to the point of death in order to enable him to perform a Merger of Souls to get the power to avenge his mother, but really only wanted to see how far one could take the Sherwoods' family magic before dying of it. When Oliver hit puberty, in order to keep the soul merge magic "in the family", Sherwood commanded Oliver to sire a child with Shannon, and when Oliver refused, immediately injected him with a near-lethal dose of psychoactive drugs and unleashed him on his cousin to impregnate her by force; when the pregnancy ended in stillbirth, Sherwood jovially promised to keep trying until she carried one to term. A controlling sociopath who ruled over his family with an iron fist, Sherwood went to his grave convinced that everything he'd done had been for the good of the family, heedless of the lasting harm he'd done to his own flesh and blood well into the series' present day.
• Creepy Cute: Milihand is a disembodied hand with an eyeball in its palm, that nonetheless manages to be quite endearing with its benign and even helpful behavior.
• Fan Nickname: "GOATfrey" for Alvin Godfrey, for being the series' de facto Big Good and the sheer lengths he went to in his attempts to keep Ophelia sane.
• Genius Bonus: Carlos Whitrow is noted for their Beautiful Singing Voice and is referred to in volume 3 as a "Castrato" who has had their testicles removed. Historically, castrati were male classical singers who were castrated as young boys to preserve the youthful high pitch of their singing voices. They are first recorded in Italy in the mid-16th century; correspondingly, the year 1 books are set in the year 1532 of the Great Calendar.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The occasional flirting from Chela towards Oliver becomes extremely funny in volume 9 when we find out that her father once dated his mother.
• Nightmare Fuel: Volume 10. Oliver, aged roughly 12 or 13, is drugged into a hyper-aggressive state by his Gruesome Grandparent and unleashed on his cousin Shannon—a girl we've gotten to know as one of the kindest, gentlest people in the entire series (complicity in multiple revenge murders notwithstanding). The resulting rape is horrifying to read and is a massive Break the Cutie moment for them both: Oliver is shown cutting himself and refusing to eat out of guilt for weeks afterwards.
• Spiritual Successor: Bokuto Uno has noted Harry Potter as an inspiration for the setting, which features a Fantastic Caste System of mages, Muggles, and sapient nonhumans, albeit taking place in a Constructed World with such things happening in the open rather than behind The Masquerade in a Like Reality, Unless Noted world. Its core six characters, the self-proclaimed Sword Roses, also map fairly well as Decomposite Characters of HP's Power Trio of Harry, Ron, and Hermione, and many of the teachers are identifiable as modified versions of various Hogwarts faculty.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The series is very much Four Lines, All Waiting in structure and takes its time building its various storylines, which led to some criticism from anime-onlys for seemingly focusing so little on the "main" plot of Oliver's revenge—which in the original novels is much more the Myth Arc than an actual A-plot.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: The series features a lot of extremely brutal violence as well as some very frank discussion of consensual teenage sexuality, Teen Pregnancy, and sex abuse of minors, not to mention a positively racy Intimate Healing scene between Chela and Oliver in volume 4. The manga is marketed in the Shōnen Demographic, and Yen Press rated its translation T for Teen (with a Content Warning for Language, Nudity, and Violence).
• Woolseyism:
  • A small one, but still relevant. The tír gods, and the dead god of the protagonists' world, are normally referred to as 神, "kami", the term used for the many major and minor deities in Shintoism, and, as we have done here, are referred to in lowercase in the English version. However, after Katie tries to communicate with the god of Uranischegar in volume 9, she instead uses 神様, "Kami-sama", normally used in prayer or to refer to the Abrahamic God specifically, and the translator accordingly renders it uppercase as "God". In both versions, Oliver is appropriately terrified at this development.
  • The translator renders an insult leveled at Miligan by her combat league opponent Deschamps in volume 10 as "What a cunt." The original Japanese wording was あばずれおんな abazure onna, literally "tiger-woman"—roughly meaning "bitch", "minx" or "tease" in context. The word 'cunt' and its equivalents are generally considered somewhat less insulting in Europe (the series takes place in Fantasy-England) than in the United States, so this is a fairly clever choice.

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