The color palette alone separates this from everything else on air in 2008, but what actually breaks you is watching a sixteen-year-old mediator become a father figure to a seven-year-old girl he's supposed to protect. The show lurches between domestic tenderness and genuine violence without apology, and that tonal chaos is the point: this is what it costs to care about someone smaller than yourself. A teenager learning to be someone's anchor. That's the whole story, and it's enough.

Sixteen-year-old Kurenai Shinkurou is a student by day, but he also works as a professional mediator who settles disputes and is trained in a strange martial art. When he asks his employer and role model, Benika Juuzawa, for a harder job, she makes him bodyguard to Murasaki Kuhouin, a seven-year-old girl from a rich and powerful family. The danger is that the people he must shield her from are her own relatives. Moving in with Shinkurou, Murasaki finds ordinary life strange, but through her neighbors she slowly adapts, sheds her snobbish ways and grows attached to him. Many details of the job stay unclear, including what truly threatens her. The mix of action, comedy and drama sets Shinkurou's protective resolve against the secrets surrounding his young charge.