You can't talk about this series without addressing the elephant in the room. Much of this series' drama and humor revolves around our three female magic students and their crush on Allen. Tina, Ellie, and Lynne constantly get jealous of each other and pretty much every other woman in Allen's vicinity. They all want a connection (both magical and metaphorical) like the one Allen has with his apparent romantic partner, Lydia.

This is never more prominent than in Tina, the duke's daughter, whom he is tutoring. Much of Tina's personal drama is centered around her inferiority complex stemming from her inability to use magic (despite the large amount of mana she possesses). When her insecurities quite literally explode and threaten her life and those around her, it is Allen who comes to her rescue—putting himself in danger to save her and get her past her magical block in the process. Afterward, Tina becomes fixated on winning Allen's heart—and in her obsession with him, even goes so far as kiss him without his consent in front of a witness so she and the witness can blackmail him into remaining her tutor after his job is done.

Yet, the even bigger issue here than the blackmail is that Tina, like Ellie and Lynne, is an underage girl while he is an adult. In fact, they are all three middle schoolers when they develop their respective crushes on him, and he is about to graduate from high school. (For most of the series, they are high school freshman while he is an academy graduate and teacher.) They constantly cling to him and even attempt to show off their bodies to him whenever the chance arises.

While an unrequited crush is not inherently a bad thing to have in a story—having crushes and moving past them when they don't work out is an important facet of growing up, after all—that's not the message the show seems to be going for. Rather, Tina, especially, is treated as a real potential rival for Allen's heart.

This is partially because Allen does little to rebuff the advances of his underage admirers. In fact, he outright encourages them—basically leading them on as a way of giving them motivation to work harder without ever technically promising anything that would cross the line. Thus, we're left with a show that comes off feeling like a skeevy harem anime where half the girls are underage—even though Alan seems to be in a monogamous relationship with Lydia (though the series never explicitly states this, nor whether he is a willing participant in whatever is going on between him and Lydia).

Beyond the lovelorn drama of the underage trio, the show follows a simple pattern. Allen meets a new girl and helps them overcome their problems—almost always with Tina or Lydia's help. This, in turn, promotes new growth in both the damsels in distress and Allen's various students.

If nothing else, each of the girls' personal issues are understandable and relatable—though most of them boil down to the pain that comes from not living up to either the expectations of your family members or those you set for yourself. For some, the resolution is to attain their goals via a different path to the one they've been walking, while for others, it's to decide on a new goal entirely. All in all, each has a decent moral for having to deal with growing up—realizing what's important and how to go about getting it.

When it comes to the visual presentation of this anime, it usually looks fine in dialogue scenes (with some obvious exceptions). However, when it comes to the action scenes, the quality noticeably drops. However, the show deserves credit for at least trying to show dynamic, exciting action rather than using various low-budget animation tricks (like an excess of still frames or cutting away at the moment of impact) to keep complex animation to a minimum. The music, on the other hand, is equally unremarkable. I can't remember a single time the soundtrack stood out in any way—be that positively or negatively—so it must have been doing its job well enough.

In the end, there's not much to Private Tutor to the Duke's Daughter beyond girls crushing on Allen as he helps them overcome their issues. There are some interesting potential plot hooks in the background, like the discrimination of commoners and the outright racism against demi-humans, but little is done with them in the series beyond Prince Gerard's hatred of Allen (which is also based on romantic jealousy) and Caren being unable to lead the student council due to her race.

As the original novels are at 21 volumes and counting, there's clearly something in this story and how it progresses that has caught the imaginations of its readers. But whatever it is, I can't help but think it has not made it into this anime adaptation.