Whether you find The Demon King's Daughter Is Too Kind!! adorable or irritating is going to come down to your feelings about artificially cute kids. Doux, who appears to be somewhere between three and five years old, is a squeaky-voiced moppet with a tendency to shriek “waiii” at every opportunity. She lisps, she giggles, and she makes up songs. She's largely a picture of “childhood” drawn by someone who hasn't necessarily spent a lot of time around children. If this is your button, you can safely skip this show, because in all likelihood, the jokes will leave you cold and you'll just end up annoyed.

And now that that's taken care of, if you don't find Doux irritating, this is a charming little series. Doux, which is French for “gentle,” is the daughter of Ahriman, fearsome king of the Demon Realm. Ahriman has just finished waging war on humans and Heaven alike, and he's ready to spend some quality time ruling. There's just one problem: his daughter and heir, Doux, is nothing like a proper demon should be. Unsure that this is okay, he enlists Jahi, one of his subordinates, to whip the little girl into proper demonic shape.

Doux, as the title suggests, will not be whipped. She's a bouncy little ball of resilient sunshine, and while she does do her best to follow Jahi's dictates, she always interprets things in the best way possible. In the first episode, Doux masters a puppet spell, but instead of using it to control humans, she brings comfort to a lonely old woman by animating her lost grandchild's toys. She helps human slave children write letters to Santa. She accidentally defeats bad guys by feeding them the poison apples intended for humans. Everything Doux touches turns to good, much to Jahi's despair.

Probably the most interesting aspect of this show is the disconnect between what Ahriman says he wants and what he actually wants for his daughter. It's immensely clear that he adores Doux, no matter what she's like. In fact, he loves her to the point where viewers have to question whether or not he's really all that evil himself. He is, obviously, because he keeps slaves and returns from a successful war of conquest, but he's not solely evil – he's also a devoted, doting daddy. Ahriman's characterization opens the door for more of the characters to be something besides basic stereotypes. They're all a mix of bad and good (Doux excepted, and we do learn why that is in episode eleven), and while no one really gets a lot of development, the simple fact that the series can trade in even mild shades of grey helps it to succeed.

That said, it really does have only one joke: Jahi tries to make Doux bad, Doux does good instead. For the most part, the series seems very comfortable with its basic structure. Each episode also includes a song Doux makes up and sings while she goes about her day, and while I could understand finding them grating, to me that actually feels like one of the moments where the show gets little kids right; my sisters and I came up with many songs in the course of our days, with “Potato Cheese at Night” being, of course, our greatest hit. (By which I mean “most annoying.”) But still, the songs as a joke do get a bit stale as the series goes on, and it does feel like there's only so much that the plot can come up with in terms of assigning Doux tasks to screw up.

There's greater success in Jahi's increasing understanding of Doux. Over the course of the series, she goes from being militant about Doux becoming evil to accepting that Doux is just going to be Doux no matter what, and that journey does feel fairly organic. Jahi has to relearn what demons are and can be; like Ahriman, she's been raised to believe that they're only capable of evil. And maybe that was the case before Doux, whose origins do suggest that demons routinely suppressed their good sides. Her existence gives the other demons and demonic beings the chance to be something more. Ahriman doesn't realize that he's being undemonlike himself in doting on his daughter, but Jahi has to both realize that and come to accept it the more time she spends with the little girl. Her process is necessarily one of recognition and reconciliation, because if she can't come to terms with her own kinder side, she won't be able to live with herself and her failure to do as her king bid her.

Visually, this isn't anything special. Doux is cute enough, though I loathe the little flesh fang she has (is it so hard to draw an actual tooth?), and there is a nice consistency throughout the series, with it rarely being off model. The animation isn't spectacular, but it's more than serviceable, and the theme songs are catchy enough. There's real effort to come up with interesting character designs for the various races, too, which does make things a bit more engaging, particularly during the section of the ending theme where the background characters change to reflect who Doux interacted with in the episode.

The Demon King's Daughter Is Too Kind!! is, in a word, harmless. It's cute, fluffy, fun, and a pretty decent way to just turn your brain off and forget about the world for a bit. It does end on an obnoxious cliffhanger, but with the manga licensed (though not yet out as of this writing), we at least have the possibility of finding out what happens going forward.