Review of Shadows House

Im not sure why a lot of people.like this anime, or say its a hidden gem, but lets summarize my toughts (I wont even be talking about the last three episodes being anime original, so thats not what made the score worse) Lets start with arguably one of the strongest, in my opinion weakest elements: Story/message/mystery Basically, this work is supposed to be a kind of mirror on classism, slavery and oppression vs freedom of tought. The problem is, we never actually see these play out, we see in some characters and their development, that they are more freedom leaning, than into the oppressing system, but thats it,thats what we get. We never get anything related to changing the situation, we dont even get answers about if it should be changed, just some mediocre character development and thats it.
Disappointing at best
The mysteries are a varied bunch, some solved mysteries are actually quiet entertaining, some are solvable by 5 year olds, and some are never answered yet (usually the bigger, more interesting ones, like how and why this whole system originated, who is the mysterious Lord Grandfather and what he wants and so)

The art and music is, well, interesting.
Its good sometimes, but most of the times you can see that the studio really took the cheap approach with a lot of directing techniques (minute long shots of characters talking and panning over the mansion with still shots) and generally just lackluster animation (shadows as silhouettes are a big part of the story and are generally easier to draw, yet the studio still cheaped out on those silhouettes too).
The music is in my opinion either too much, or just does not belong. In serious emotional/high stake scenes sometimes you have some battle rock music, then at funny moments you almost think of Benny Hill with the music (why did they do that tho).

So all in all, some people would like this anime (and apparently the manga), but dont expect much, maybe if you are an east india company men from 1700s or I dont know what this anime was supposed to be about.
Maybe enjoying slavery can be good?
I have no idea