Author’s Note: The original title for this piece was “Anime Grab Bag: My Best Friend And I Decided To Stream Anime But Suddenly We Were Both Hit By Different Trucks At The Same Time And We Woke Up In Another World Where We Were Forced to Watch Isekai?! (Ise-Cry: The Animation),” but because Reactor is a respectable publication and not an isekai, it could not stand.
Welcome to the Anime Grab Bag! In this series, we’ll dive into the depths of specific anime subgenres and hunt, perhaps futilely, for hidden gems. Each month, long-time otaku and old friends Leah and Bridget will spin a custom roulette wheel composed of qualifying anime and watch three random pilot episodes. You can find this volume’s wheel here!
While the wheel will contain most feasible titles in the subgenre, your hosts must abide by the following rules:
- Each show must be an anime that at least one host has never seen.
- Each show must be available to stream somewhere so readers can join in if they want to.
- We are forbidden from doing any research on the show before viewing it, although a simple Google search and some Wikipedia-ing during and after are fair game.
We’ll react to our selections and share our thoughts on where they fit into the anime landscape. We’ll comment on everything from music direction to character design, make comparisons to other series, and finally ask the most important question: Would we watch more of this?
Feel free to play along by watching these shows (if you dare), spinning the wheel to meet your fate, or sharing your thoughts below.
This week, after polling readers last time, we must ask you all a question: What can man do against such reckless hate?
The people chose isekai. Come. Suffer with us.
B: Are you ready to spin… that… wheeeeel?
L: Honestly… um. I hope our torture is fun torture.
B: Yeah, me too. I was telling my friend Daniel that I’m kind of really not looking forward to this. For this subgenre, I think we are each allowed one hard veto.
L: Let’s be honest, we are coming into this one with a negative bias. And though commenters say there are a few good ones, the oversaturation of terrible isekai makes the ratio work against our favor today. If this is The Hunger Games, we are not going to live.
B: I did comb the internet and put a few on there that are good, or queer at least. Hopefully we’ll get some of those. Daniel (a gamer friend) said that maybe we’ll find out we actually think it’s an alright genre. I said, “Hmm, I don’t know about that…”
L: Daniel is an optimist. Look, as a story conceit, it’s lazy, but it can work as a simple worldbuilding prompt. Like, rather than writing a character that is an established part of a fantasy world, you can pick any average, relatable guy and thrust him into a magical setting that’s just like video games and start there. It’s a shortcut that leads to easy investment and allows for infodumping because the hero is as fresh as the audience is. It’s not the worst narrative shortcut and portal fantasies are a long-established thing. But man…
B: It works better when the concept is reversed. Escaflowne is great because the characterization is good and they come to our world instead. And it has a Yoko Kanno soundtrack.
L: And Maou-Sama. Bring the freaks to our world and watch the culture shock unfold. That’s tons of fun. But the wish-fulfillment ones that objectify women? Nah.
B: I will say Daniel just texted me like, “How’s the isekai going, sport?”
L: Does he want to join us? A guest appearance from Daniel?
B: Daniel says, “Maybe catch me on shōnen or sports day.”
L: Tell Daniel he’s a coward.
First Spin: Re:Zero—Starting Life in Another World (White Fox, 2016)
B: It’s a classic. It’s Re:Zero.
L: …oh, hey. That’s a good show!
B: I never watched it.
L: Then it qualifies. Somehow, the one good thing that could happen during an isekai wheel just happened. Now, I haven’t watched it since it aired, but it was great because it uses isekai as an allegory for dealing with trauma. It’s got kind of a Groundhog Day premise where he keeps failing in the other world and getting the bad ending and watching his friends die and then wakes up and tries again.
B: What I remember is the characters’ designs were charming.
L: The key memory I have from it is a general overwhelming feeling of distress. Ahaha. But also, the characters had a lot of hidden depths.
Viewing Summary
After a long day of holing up in his room playing MMOs, teenage shut-in Subaru heads to the conbini for some snacks, and then something goes wrong with his head. He is no longer in a dark parking lot, but in the center of a bustling fantasy marketplace. Of course, as an avid gamer, he thinks he knows what’s up. He’s been isekaied, and he’s going to kick ass, become a hero, and win a girl.
But this fantasy world is not prepared to indulge his delusions. Subaru gets immediately kicked out of restaurants and attacked by thieves. He learns quickly that he has no magical powers and no standing. He’s a useless goon, basically, and no one sees him as a hero. He’s just some weird, sarcastic kid in a tracksuit who clearly doesn’t know how dangerous the world is.
B: This guy is kind of stupid. I love it.
L: Yeah, he’s read some isekai and thinks this will be easy. Our boy is in for some rude awakenings.
The fantasy world initially feels playful, too, with anthropomorphic shopkeepers populating the background, carrying about their business. Kids are buying apples from snake-headed vendors and fox-folk are conducting business in the square. Even so, there are rough edges, signs of poverty and discrimination that make the world feel a little more sinister. As Bridget remarks, “It feels like a lived-in world.”
Subaru makes contact with a beautiful girl, of course, but she is keeping secrets. She gives her name as Satella, but that’s a lie. She seems surprised he doesn’t recognize her or hate her for being a half-elf. Subaru’s ignorance of the world at this point is charming, but possibly misleading. Yes, it makes him seem like a non-judgmental, nice person, but is that a sign of goodness or ignorance? He believes he is playing a role, and he is doing his best to fill it. The show is already laying the groundwork for unexpected philosophical questions.
L: Whatever bias he is supposed to have, he doesn’t have. But he also thinks he’s playing through a script. So a lot of the show becomes about not only finding out who everyone else, but also who he is at his core.
For the most part, Bridget and I don’t have to talk a lot. The show is compelling, well-animated, and contains the sort of thoughtful pauses that are a sure sign of a competent director. We both like “Satella’s” familiar, a floating, clever little cat-spirit named Puck. Shakespeare reference? Duly noted foreshadowing.
In fact, the whole pilot, which is a whopping 50 minutes long, is increasingly laden with foreshadowing. Long pauses featuring Emilia standing on a bridge, walking into the shadowy slums where kids are homeless. Subaru, still trying to convince himself he’s in a grand adventure, refuses to see the signs of being in a tragedy.
But when he and Satella attempt to apprehend a thief who stole her seal, things go terribly wrong. They walk into a bar and find the owner bleeding out in graphic fashion. All too soon, Subaru himself is gutted and dies on the floor, moments after watching Satella get killed as well.
…and then Subaru finds himself standing in the bustling market square again.
B: Okay, but now I am really interested.
While the audience realizes immediately what is happening—after all, we’ve all played games with checkpoints in them, lost to bosses and restarted a few scenes prior—Subaru does not. He, freshly shaken from the horrible death he witnessed, sets about the day as if time is not stuck in a loop. He tries to reconvene with Satella, but of course, she will have no memory of him. This time, he learns about the thief firsthand, befriending her and the bartender, and he approaches problems with new insight. Even so the day ends in bloodshed. A terrifying, beautiful villainess appears, and immediately we both clock the voice actress.
B: She sounds familiar.
L: She was Benten (The Eccentric Family), right?
B: Oh my god she was Ichigo’s mom in Aikatsu! But this lady is so brutal. I love it.
L: The villains in this show are actually scary. I remember that well.
Subaru dies again. He returns to the market again. The pattern is established.
The boy is gonna have a hard time.
Conclusions
B: That was a good pilot.
L: It has a reputation for being a diamond in the rough.
B: Yeah, people talk about it like that. “Isekai sucks… well, Re:Zero is pretty good.”
L: Because it is a clever show. If you are caught in a loop and repeating your life all the time but retaining your memories, how does that affect you psychologically? In a video game, that’s normal. But in real life that is mind-fuckery.
B: Isn’t it lucky that we did get the best isekai, though? So we won’t have to be totally negative about the genre.
L: I will say this: show makes me feel incredibly anxious. It stresses me out.
B: I love that. I feel like good anime should stress me out. It’s very much giving a Souls game, where this is the first level and it is fucking hard. It reminds me of playing Elden Ring or Dark Souls III. You get stuck for ages on some bosses.
L: See, but I can’t play games like that because I get too frustrated. I prefer something like Hades, where each time you die, you see the character grow and the story progresses in unexpected ways. I think Re:Zero nails that too, actually. The story doesn’t move on to a new arc until Subaru solves the problem and breaks the loop. And then he’s got another problem and loop to work on, and then another, and another. It’s hellish, but progress is made.
Would we watch more?
B: I really liked this. I could see it holding me for one season. I don’t know if I could watch all of it. Then again… I said the same thing about One Piece, and I have read all of One Piece.
L: I remember the seasons were spaced out, and I don’t think I ever finished it, but I definitely enjoyed the first season.
B: I was pleasantly surprised.
L: Bridget. We had an amazing appetizer, but I fear we are about to experience some whiplash. Re:Zero has the same fundamental pieces as all isekai but it does fascinating things with them. The others are going to have the same pieces and do diddly-squat with them.
B: Also, this show had a great little mascot in that floating cat. You know how I feel about mascots.*
L: I don’t love mascots as much as you do, but I love a familiar. I grew up adoring His Dark Materials and longing for a daemon.
F: Oh, familiars are different. Do you know who my favorite cat in anime is? The mean cat from the Ghost Stories dub.
L: Oh, he’s great, but come on. It’s gotta be Nyanko-sensei. Drunk old calico with wolf powers.
B: Aria Shachou.
L: Although Turbo Granny could get there, too.
B: She is high on the list.
*Famously, Bridget has cried tears of joy upon meeting a pudgy Mondo Mascot at a con.
Intermission 1
(Or, Bridget and Leah Talk About Other Random Shit to Avoid Watching Inevitably Terribly Isekai)
(synth intro starts) Tonight, on Unsolved Mysteries:
L: Hey, I know I keep talking about liminal space today, but there’s this show that I always think about that I think was a fever dream. Maybe you can help me.
B: Tell me more, what is it?
L: In college at Anime Club, probably in 2011 or something, we watched the pilot of some horror(?) anime about getting displaced in time or something. But it was these kids taking the night bus and getting stuck at a Japanese rest area at night. And everything was gray and eerie and weird.
B: That sounds familiar, but I don’t know what it is.
L: Was it real? Or was I isekaied? Is it like a Mandela Effect thing?
B: I am looking up “rest stop horror anime.” No, no. Not the reststop isekai. Nope. I know in Nurarhiyon no Mago, they do get trapped on a night bus in the season finale. Was it that?
L: No. Whatever it is, it haunts me.
B: We can go on our ADHD journey later.
Join us next time. Perhaps you may be able to help solve a mystery.
Second Spin: Arifureta: From Commonplace to World’s Strongest (asread. /White Fox, 2019)
L: Oh, this looks terrible. Let’s watch it. “The series follows a bullied high school student who is transported to another world with his classmates and his teacher.” Uh-oh.
B: Oh no. I’ve never seen this. I don’t know anything about it aside from what you just said. Although season three looks like the sort of edgy bullshit I used to love.
Viewing Summary
The opening sounds, to our amusement, like Yoko Kanno and Grimes had an elicit lovechild. Sonically, we don’t hate it, but…
L: I am already questioning the budget here.
B: What is this filter?
L: Also, you cannot give someone a robot arm and expect an instant Edward Elric, okay.
B: Unfortunately, I am not immune to white-haired, eye-patched character. I am a simple woman, and I loved Tokyo Ghoul.
Okay, so we’re in a cave. There are gems on the wall. There’s a brown-haired boy in distress, and there appear to be ribs in the walls above him? Is he in a whale? A dragon? Is he catching cave-dwelling Pokémon? A rabbit monster with killer hips appears, and another monster eats that one, and our boy uses transmutation powers to make a sad little wall thing. Even so, the monster mauls him and he loses an arm just like that.
L: Wait, what? Who is he? Where is he?
B: I am sure this trauma will have great payoff.
L: He should cauterize that. Transmute it or something!
We have no idea what’s happening or why, but suddenly the show flashes back to a school setting. Text onscreen reads “10 days before.” Here we see our nameless brown-haired boy getting teased by preppy classmates or something.
B: So he’s a loser? That’s what we are establishing?
L: If the story started 10 days before, then start the show there too. Come on!
And now we have flashed back to him in the caves, but it must be some time before his initial amputation, because he’s not alone. He’s standing among some classmates maybe in armor and the girls have shiny shoulders and boobs but the boys are not shiny. It is so dark that no one should be shiny but okay. Like the low-budget animation, and the incoherent exposition itself, the pacing is really, really off.
L: At least the crystals on the cave walls are nicely drawn.
B: Someone credit that crystal artist.
L: Cards on the table, I don’t know what the hell is going on. Why are a bunch of kids in a cave? Why are the monsters attacking? Why is the CGI animation being used for all the monsters? Is this a game? Are they dungeon-crawling? What is this?
B: I have no reason to care about this. Are we sure this is the pilot? Did we start on the wrong episode?
Hurriedly, we check, and double-check again, and discover: this indecipherable mess is in fact the series pilot. Oh, man.
A monster appears on a bridge, à la the Balrog of Morgoth.
B: That thing looks like the first kaiju played by a female actress.
L: What?
B: Rie Ota, the first actress to play a kaiju. She played Barugan.
L: …wait, are you talking about Godzilla?
B: Yeah.
L: Bridget, context. This is already confusing enough, oh my god.
B: Sorry, but pause? Is this even an isekai? It seems like they were already in a fantasy world?
L: But it said they were transported to another world.
B: Why didn’t we see them transport to this world? Is this really the first episode?
It is. It’s just a mess. As if in protest, my browser crashes. Nevertheless, we persist.
The randos fight the monster, and our dumb hero runs forward as a sacrifice and gets thrown off the Bridge of Khazad-Dumb into the depths, and now we are back to the scene we started at, with the bland boy getting mangled by the monster.
Now we watch the art team try to salvage this debacle by going full sketch as our boy fades out of consciousness:
L: Take…. on… mee!
(both sing synth intro)
L, Verse 1:
Monsters everywhere,
We don’t know why the boy is he-ere
Why is this boy
Fighting CGI-ee Balrog?
I don’t care
But we’re watching this anyway-ay
B, Chorus:
He’s…. gonna get…!
(An eyepatch!)
He’s gonna get…!
(A robot arm!)
His hair will be white…!
In at least an episode or twoooooooooo!
L, Verse 2:
Boobs are shiny,
We don’t know why, but it doesn’t matter
Something bad is gonna happen to you out of order!
B (abruptly): Why is his ass so flat?
And while he’s bleeding out or whatever and we are losing it entirely, the show flashes back to his terrible time in school again or something and—
L: TELL IT IN ORDER TELL IT IN ORDER TELL IT. IN. ORDER! One, my classmates are rude to me; two, they sacrifice me because they don’t see my worth; I go on a mission and they leave me for dead; I prove myself and prove them wrong. To make up for the lack of any interesting elements they change up the linearity but that doesn’t do a thing to help.
B: This show is nothing.
L: I don’t care if no one rescues him. He sucks.
B: “Is this really the first episode?” I say again, desperately.
Because by now we feel a bit like Subaru, trapped in a treacherous loop. Or maybe, like this awful protagonist in the hopeless pit of a cave (but at least his has crystals). And now our boy opens his eyes and says, with true shonen abandon, “I’ll kill!” So who cares if his arm is gone and he should be dead already? He jumps out of the cave and kills and eats the monster and then suddenly the show zooms way, way in, so that we can see how eating raw monster meat impacts a dumbass on a cellular level.
L: This reminds me of watching videos in biology class. The CGI platelets!
B: It reminds me of Osmosis Jones.
L: Wait, that’s another Bill Murray movie. Groundhog Day, now Osmosis Jones. What will our next isekai Bill Murray connection be?
As predicted, devouring monster tartare levels our boy up to a full-on man, the white-haired edgelord from the opening credits. And also, he now has grand powers of intellect! He can survive the depths now.
L: Eating nasty flesh to become powerful is not character development…
More and more green illuminated numbers keep appearing on the screen, pointless statistics as he’s leveling up. He is becoming more intelligent by gorging on gross shit! But if Dungeon Meshi makes eating monsters fun and creative, this show does not.
Our protagonist grabs a rock and declares, “I can tell what this rock is just from holding it!”
L: So can I! It’s a rock!
B: I hate all the numbers so much. But at least there’s jazz flute. I will never say no to a jazz flute.
L: Hmm. Neither could Jethro Tull.
Everything and nothing is happening all at once and in one episode and we have no idea what we’re supposed to feel. The guy is no more likable now that he’s leveled up. But then the episode closes on a naked girl tied to something, for some reason.
B: Yikes.
Conclusions
B. The trouble is, deep down I really love edgy bullshit that’s terrible. But this? This is not good.
L: Well, even edgy losers should at least have some personality.
B: I can see the ingredients they were cooking with. And then they did not make a good meal. You know, it’s like Bofuri.
L: Never seen it.
B: Bofuri …nuts.
L: …
B: I’m sorry.
L: It’s fine. I think one episode of shitty isekai has already broken our brains.
Would we watch more?
L: Hell no. I would say it would be impossible to go from a better isekai to a worse isekai… but I shouldn’t jinx us like that.
B: I genuinely am having fun because that was so nothing.
L: The fact that we even had to question whether it was the pilot. That was a mess. I don’t want to think about it anymore. Bridget, would you watch more of that?
B: Absolutely not. But hey, why is Lelouch from Code Geass still the most looked-up character on My Anime List? What the hell?
Intermission 2 (THERAPY?!)
We go on a rant about how much we dislike Code Geass and how much we love director Takahiro Omori, and how Kuragehime has endless rewatch value, but these days we don’t rewatch anything anyhow. And are we avoiding more isekai? No, no. We just really need to talk about CLAMP character designs and the inconsistent art in XXXholic and the weird proportions of Watanuki and how much I kind of guiltily like it because I was obsessed with Jack Skellington as a kid, and then Bridget googles “clamp” in image search and laughs because a bunch of pictures of actual clamps on automobiles turn up rather than pictures of lanky teens drawn by a renowned studio of female mangaka. Fucking weebs, man.
B: We could do a CLAMP wheel.
L: Why would we do that? Neither of us are CLAMP girls. All due respect.
B: Wait, here’s an idea, and you will never let me do it. Why don’t we do a wheel that’s all random Zatch Bell episodes?
L: Bridget. Zatch Bell is not a genre! Put it on a t-shirt! Zatch Bell is not a genre!
B: I’m losing my mind.
L: I wish we’d gotten the gay old isekai where the boy gets flushed down a toilet.
Third Spin: Problem Children Are Coming From Another World, Aren’t They? (Diomedéa, 2013)
B: It will come as a great surprise that I have never seen this.
L: Shocking! Neither have I. You know, most weeks we have to spin the wheel so many times. Like half the article content is usually “Shows we couldn’t watch and why” and this week? That’s not happening. We have no excuses because we haven’t seen these shows at all.
B: Maybe we should watch a fourth show to get a little more of the genre?
L: Yeah, let’s do that. The animation looks terrible on this one, by the way.
B: I know, that’s why I don’t want to watch it!
L: And that’s why we must.
Viewing Summary
So the premise ain’t awful, at least not to dorks like us. Psychic kids who are bored of life get sucked into another dimension where they have to compete in games to save the world? I mean, we are suckers for psychic children stories.
B: How do you think it’s connected to Bill Murray?
L: I dunno, Lost in Translation probably.
We open in Japan along a riverside, so yes, this is our world and if they leave it, it will be an isekai. One psychic delinquent boy has yellow hair and headphones; the other two psychic kids are a rich girl who can control people through her words and a girl who can talk to animals. They all get sucked into the sky and spat out in another world, landing in a lake in a forest. A calico cat comes with them, which is nice at least.
B: This is how early fanfiction on fanfiction.net would establish characters. Like shitty Naruto fanfic I read back in 2008. Just throw them all into a lake together for no reason.
But what’s this? A bunny girl has appeared in the forest and is spying on them! She has recruited these rude psychic kids for a purpose, which she will now relay!
L: I’m happy she has only one set of ears. I hate when bunny girls have ears on top and the sides.
B: I’m not bothered by that.
Bunny Girl gathers the delinquents around and tells them all about the games they must play to earn, um, wealth and fame in the new society they’ve landed in. Why they should do this is unclear. Why the first game she demonstrates is a boring casino-esque card game is also unclear. Honestly, we are clinging to threads of coherence.
B: I’m not really understanding what’s happening. I’m just fixated on her (Bunny Girl’s) costume but it doesn’t make sense. It couldn’t exist in the real world. There should be four panels in that skirt, not three. No garment would balance like that with that design.
L: Okay, why are these kids being presented with a casino craps table? Is it based on a mobile card game or something? Or did this anime have a partnership with a pachinko chain?
Anyhow, Bunny Girl continues to explain things, and the clever smug boy tricks her, and then the girls go to town, and the boy runs off into the woods. But mostly, it has dawned on Bridget and I that this is another brain-deadening waste of time. And damn it, what self-respecting writer lets moody psychic kids go to waste?
Isekai writers. That’s who.
In town, there are children everywhere for some reason, and anthros. The girls sit down for tea because sure, who needs urgency or purpose? Who knows how these girls feel about being thrown into another world? The point is entirely garbled.
L: What motivated them to come here? Why did they?
B: That’s a chronic problem in the genre. Characters are here just because they need to be here! There’s no good reason for it.
L: You could play it like this was a utopia, but then this evil casino came to town and took advantage of people, so let’s beat them at their own game! But they aren’t doing anything with it.
B: Seems to be an isekai staple. Just wasting characters and plot points.
L: I am tired.
Elsewhere, the boy fights a dragon for some reason and …you know what, none of it matters. Our eyes cling to the cute calico so that we can tolerate the tedium and poor writing. Nothing happens, and the points don’t matter.
Conclusions
B: No emotional payoff. No reason to care.
L: I don’t think they knew what their hook was. Was it worse than the other one we watched?
B: The other one was a mess, but we laughed more.
L: …what’s the point. We are comparing cat shit to dog shit. The next one can’t be worse at least?
B: Leah. Stop doing that.
L: Oh god, when will I ever learn?
Would we watch more?
Fourth Spin: Do You Love Your Mom and Her Two-Hit Multi-Target Attacks? (J.C.Staff, 2019)
L: Fucking hell.
B: Do you think it’s going to be a “I wanna date my mom” show or just a goofy comedy?
L: At this point, if it has a clear plot and actual characters, it is somehow a step up.
Viewing Summary
Based on the credits alone, we are in for a sleazy time. Yes, this kid almost definitely will want to bang his mom. The two are pitted together like a couple in a rom-com throughout the opening, and holding hands by the end.
B: Is he gonna fuck his mom? Or is it…
L: He’ll at least get a boner. Why…
B: … okay. It’s…
L: We can’t even finish sentences during isekai.
So this kid is terrible to his mom, but his mom seems like a really, ridiculously nice person. She doesn’t seem like a mom, which is maybe a blessing in disguise after the sickening opening credits. She kindly serves his dinner, and he complains.
And then, when a strange woman shows up on the doorstep and teleports her son into a video game console for some sort of bizarre beta testing, he is so happy to be escaping his mother—but wait! She’s coming with him!
They land in a fantasy world and he is just so pissed that his mom is there, too. To be fair, as Bridget notes, she is a bit smothering.
B: Just be nice to your mom. It doesn’t take a whole adventure.
L: I’m just really appreciating how well-written Subaru was right now.
To our general shock, the animation is clean, and the art style is decent. This show has an actual budget. It tries to be funny, but not a single joke lands, mostly because they are wink-wink nod-nods about isekai and how annoying moms are. When this kid and his mom are placed in front of the king, he infodumps the whole damn premise in a scene that goes on for way too long. During this scene, Mom is supposed to be the ignorant butt of lame-ass gamer jokes.
And hey, when the scene finally ends and they get to choose weapons, our boy pulls a sword from the stone and feels proud until—gasp—his mom pulls two swords at once from the stones! Man, Mom is just the worst!
L: She’s gonna keep outdoing him and he’s going to be mad and she’s going to be “but I just wanna be a good mom.”
B: I have beef with the way she was designed. She doesn’t feel like a Mom.
L: Because she’s a fetish, not a mom. And they call… me… mother!
The dynamic is strange and unrealistic throughout, and when Mom shows a natural talent for using the swords in battle, the kid starts telling her he wants to disown her. More shit happens and it is not even worth talking about.
Conclusions
L: … Someone wrote this. Someone adapted it. A studio animated it. Someone paid for it. I am so upset. It deserves none of this. It is such a waste of someone’s talent somewhere.
B: It’s weird. And it’s not a parent-child relationship.
L: Even if it had been like a weird Munchausen’s show…
B: Why can’t it be Mom picking up the game because she’s trying to understand her teenage son and help him work through the death of dad or whatever and wants to relate to him?
L: Why are all these shows so fucking broken?
B: Thank god it’s almost over. I can’t even get my thoughts out.
L: We can’t get this day back.
B: So here’s the thing. A few years ago, my dad bought a PS4 at a garage sale, and now he plays games, and he’s become a gamer in retirement and has played all of the Assassin’s Creed games. It’s the first time in my life that I have shared a hobby with my dad. In the past, I would have said I would never play games with my dad, but recently I asked him to play Marvel Rivals with me.
L: Aw, that’s awesome. It’s such a better story, too. And if that’s where they are trying to take this they are failing.
Would we watch more?
B: The wheel was very kind, and then it was very unkind.
L: Re:Zero gave us a little strength to push through.
B: We got it over with. We tore it off like a Band-Aid.
L: If you spun that wheel again, we’d probably get another piece of shit about banging your sister. In another world. I am mad about it. Who the fuck are these braindead people these appeal to?
B: It is hard for us to understand because, from either a queer or neurodivergent or women’s perspective, the idea of wish fulfillment is so different. Like, being overpowered in another world would not improve our lives at all.
L: Exactly! This is the straight average guy fantasy for straight average guys who wish they’d gotten more from life just because they are straight average guys. Their default? It’s what other people and minorities aspire to in society: a comfortable life without huge challenges and access to a computer and games and time, and the ability to play them. But a society that is already made for you, I guess, is not fulfilling. So if it’s wish fulfillment, it’s also privileged as hell. Basic–ass milquetoast dudes getting to be awesome with no effort.
B: Yeah. This idea that there’s nothing special about me and I don’t want to work to be something special, but I get to be special anyhow.
L: You are a mean kid who hates your mom but also you can still be a hero for no reason. It’s actually really damn toxic. This is also why Re:Zero works, though. Subaru isn’t awesome. He’s average, and a bit of a mess, and he fails and fails and fails. It subverts the crap. And other characters are not pawns but people who he has to see as people.
B: I think this is also why reverse isekai sometimes works. Because people are coming from these more supernatural experiences and faced with the mundane—I was a demon lord and now I have to work at McDonald’s. We can all relate to a letdown. And I can relate to someone who gets dropped in a fantasy world and doesn’t think, “I am going to be such a badass.” Instead, it’s like, “Ooh, time to start gardening.”
L: Exactly. Let’s figure out how to make a living.
B: I can’t imagine that thinking “I’ll somehow conquer the world!” would ever be my response to being isekaied. This whole genre just puts me on edge a bit.
L: Yeah, I am exhausted by it.
Bridget and I thought Isekai Week would be bad because all the shows would be the same—not because they’d all be so damn chaotic and foul-spirited. The problems we foresaw are not the problems we ended up facing.
B: I was hoping we’d get a cozy one, like The Savior’s Book Café Story in Another World.
L: Or at least a genderbender. I feel like we need a rainbow chaser or something
B: Can we watch the BL where he gets flushed down the toilet?
L: I don’t know that that’s going to help us.
B: Theres a Hallmark movie where a woman gets sucked into a drier.
L: Again, how does this help? You’re making me ise-cry.
B: *manic laughter*
Here is our advice: DO NOT WATCH these shows apart from Re:Zero.
Next time, we need rehab. We are doing an absurdism wheel. And we are defining that loosely and happily, because this week was a lot. Also, please tell us what Bill Murray movie the last show is related to, because we can no longer make connections between things. Is there a movie where Bill Murray wants to bone his mom?
In This Article:
- Re:Zero—Starting Life in Another World (White Fox) Available on Crunchyroll, Prime, and Hulu.
- Arifureta: From Commonplace to World’s Strongest (Asread/White Fox) Available on Crunchyroll and Amazon Prime.
- Problem Children Are Coming From Another World, Aren’t They? (Diomedéa) Available on Crunchyroll.
- Do You Love Your Mom and Her Two-Hit Multi-Target Attacks? (J.C.Staff) Available on Crunchyroll and Amazon Prime.
Here are my own personal isekai picks. Oddly enough, all three feature a character named Rose. Though the name is the only thing they have in common.
Combatants Will Be Dispatched: A tokusatsu-style Evil Organization of Evil heavily based on Shocker from the Kamen Rider franchise is nearly done conquering the world, with just a few pesky heroes left to quash. So they build an interplanetary teleporter which they use to send one of their minions to scout out a new world to conquer, with hilarity ensuing. A word of warning, this one is amazingly crass and will probably be something of a turn-off for many of you.
The Eminence in Shadow: This one takes the reincarnation path courtesy of our old pal Truck-kun. The elevator pitch is take the basic structure of Walter Gibson’s The Shadow pulp novels and make it more like Inspector Gadget, with the caveat that neither the Penny or Dr. Claw analogue realize that the title character is an oblivious dipstick.
The Wrong Way to Use Healing Magic: This one goes the hero summoning path, with an Ordinary High School Student getting caught in the dimensional backwash and dragged along with the actual heroes. Bucking the popular trend, he is not ostracized upon arrival and when tested reveals the ability to use healing magic and is recruited as a field medic. The initial Wrong Way he uses it is by buffing himself to be stronger and faster.
They each soune like they take on a unique perspective. Thanks for the recommendations!
What a balanced sample
You have
You’re right about this pattern but our brains were far too fried by the end to see any patterns at all, ahaha.
Omg yes! You hit it on the nose! Some of these were cooking, just not what I wanna eat!
Could your mystery anime be Lost Village?
Wait, nope, that’s definitely it! Thank you for solving this mystery! But why did I think I watched it in college?
Memory is a very strange thing…
Oh man, I had my hopes up, but it had to be something at least 4 years older than that!
I hate the common attitude that isekai is a dirty word except for Re: Zero. It reminds of of the “Romance? Ugh. That’s trash that’s all the same with crappy writing because the couples always end up together with a happy ending!” Or “You read fantasy? Why not grow up and read stories about real people? Fantasy is trash!” It’s an ignorant attitude.
I see complaints in this column about bad stories and tropes THAT COMMONLY APPEAR IN ALL OTHER ANIME. But no, people see them and say that it’s isekai that’s the problem.
I love isekai. Yeah, there are horrible ones. There are horrible shounen and shoujo (OMG the one last season that gaslit the heroine and made her marry the horrible prince was awful) and there are shows in all the anime genres that have weird fetishes and incoherent stories.
That doesn’t make the sub-genre bad. It means that lazy writers with all their lack of skills are bad. And it means that anime studios rarely put money into something most people look down upon. One show this season that has a great story was completely butchered this year by poor anime writing and, well, everything. People see that and likely say that of course it’s bad, it’s an isekai, when the cause was a terrible anime team.
But every season, I try each isekai because I’ll always find some that are delightful and maybe a jewel or two that is special. I never don’t watch one though because it’s “ewww isekai”.
I think there are a couple things at play. The big one is Sturgeon’s Law. Most isekai is low quality because most entertainment is low quality.
What follows is from the perspective of a western anime fan.
For me, isekai feels really over-represented in the shonen market right now. But every decade has their glut of derivative content that the boardroom thinks will sell, whether it be giant robots, or cyberpunk, or ninjas (I’m totally guessing at this point. I have a fandom gap following cyberpunk).
Another issue (in the west) is availability. I think as recently as 15 years ago someone could watch all the anime broadcast in the US if they really wanted to. Now it’s a firehose. If Crunchyroll was around in the 1970’s people who hold isekai in low regard today would probably feel the same about giant robot anime.
So I think some of the isekai hate is due to there simply being more anime in the west than ever before, much of which is isekai because that’s the hotness this decade, and Sturgeon’s Law requiring the majority of stuff be crap independent of genre.
I was thinking the same! Isekai does vaguely look like it’s dying down a bit now though – not everything is a Sword Art Online copy anymore. And options like Frieren and Dungeon Meshi show there’s more interested in organic fantasy anime that doesn’t require transportation to another world
There were actually a few isekai I was really hoping we’d get! I think our primary worry throughout the watch period was more about the randomness. It’s a well tread genre, I’m sure I left lots off the wheel. Through pure statistics it’s harder to get to the kinds we would consider gems. I will also say, I personally am not a fan of the writing cadence of light novel adaptations, which often colors how I feel about the genre.
I’m an idol fan at the end of the day, I get it. I used to get a lot of shit sometimes for being an idol anime fan! It’s really hard to convince people to watch your favorite 180 episode children’s idol anime (Aikatsu), often harder than convincing people to read all of one piece. But the genre pulls me every time! I think there are aspects of genre that are always going to fascinate some people and irk others. It wasn’t mentioned in the vampire column, but I breathed a sigh of relief when we didn’t get too many fan servicey shows. I very much think there are good isekai out there besides re:zero, we just weren’t allowed to watch them 😂
It’s a worry and opinion born from the weird way we have decided to watch pilots. 😂 we worry about it every time just this one was more central bc we then did roll some real duds.
Isekai as a genre as weird – it’s become so common that it’s tropes have tropes and I’ve seen shows and manga where the entire plotlines of other isekai series are used as shorthand building blocks burned through inside of the first fifteen minutes of screen time so the creators can go on a tear without having to worry about worldbuilding or explaining the stuff they don’t care about.* The results can be wild and it sometimes has the unrestrained, fearless anarchy of fandom and fan fic writ large. And other times, well ~gestures to the above~ It’s fertile narrative soil for experimentation but sometimes it can be a weed garden.
That said, I’m fond of the deconstructions and the play-it-straights in the genre. Grimgar of Fantasy & Ash is a watercolor soaked, bloody valentine to the losers in the genre, the non chosen chaff struggling to live in a new world and forced to fight for life just like the things they hunt (seriously – the first encounter that nearly wipes the party is a single goblin. It’s not some dungeon generated NPC, it’s a thing of flesh and blood and sweat and tears and it wants to live just as much as out heroes do. The fight is brutal, desperate and sad and ends with all the grace of a back-alley murder because, in the end, despite the sunlight on the leaves and the warm fantasy landscape that’s exactly what it is.) Far-Away Paladin uses the genre and takes away the question of “what is the moral weight of receiving a second chance? What does it mean to know you can be better?” And then there’s Konosuba which is a profane, irreverent tear-apart of the genre that knows exactly what it is and revels in the absurdity of it. When Isekai thinks about iskeai, magic can happen.
And then of course there’s the WFT stuff like Reincarnated as a Vending Machine which is worth a half hour of your life just sit with and try and figure out what spark of madness or Faustian bargain must have been made for such a thing to exist.
*”if we have isekai’d father, it is by standing on the shoulders of
waifusgiants.” etc.I watched Magic Knight Rayearth for the first time as an adult and it broke my heart. The sequel is not as good, but definitely good.
For those who haven’t seen it, there are two main plots. The first is, What if I met some really cool girls my age on a school trip and we all fell into a brightly colored magical world and became heroes?!!!?!!! :) :) :) The second is, So in this world, magic is a function of individual will. The greater your will, the greater your magic. And this world exists because of magic. What exactly does that mean?
Bridget mentioned “threads of coherence” and I think that’d be a terrific title for this column.
There’s this common thing in early comic books where art and dialogue would be absurdly redundant. You’d get exchanges like:
“I am going to punch you now, villain!”
“Ah, I’ve been punched and might fall off this bridge!”
“Zounds! My punch has knocked him close to the edge!”
“Curses! I am falling from the bridge now! Aaaaah!”
All of which was of course clearly shown in the art. Likely a consequence of the artist and writer working independently.
Arifureta was like this the whole episode. I think the only time he stopped talking was during the flashback to the bridge battle and then it was only to give the other characters time to narrate the action. It felt like a masterclass in how not to do visual storytelling. Also, since episode one completely covers the plot described by “From Commonplace to World’s Strongest” what are they going to spend the rest of the series on? I’ll never know but I’m going to put my money on more exposition and boobs.
I’ve been able to find and watch about 2/3 of the grab bag shows so far and Arifureta is the current bottom of the pile. Man, this show pissed me off.
Speaking of exposition and boobs: Problem Children. I don’t know if Arifureta just broke my brain but Problem Children felt like 20 minutes of dense exposition that somehow failed to explain anything. If asked, I honestly could not describe what the show was about even though I just sat through an entire episode that was 90% laboriously explaining the details.
However! Problem Children included not only a cat but cat-delivered mail and so is superior to Arifureta in every way. Even if it is otherwise not something I’d ever watch or recommend.
I thought the basic conceit of “Do You Love Your Mom” was really solid and I found the episode leagues more entertaining than the previous two (not a high bar, I know). Not an anime I’d watch but there were bits and pieces that I thought worked really well and if they’d made some different (ahem) choices during development I think there was decent anime to be had here.
I almost immediately recognised the mom’s voice actress, Ai Kayano, who plays a virtually identical character in the far superior reverse isekai The Great Jahy will not be Defeated! (I think science is coming down on the side of reverse isekai being better for reasons.)
I was also surprised at how varied the individual shows were. I don’t know what wildly popular trope codifier kicked off the current isekai boom. A Reddit thread and two dozen AI-generated listicles suggest it is a show called Sword Art Online but I’d be curious to hear opinions. But I expected cookie cutter knockoffs of some ur-example and there was more diversity than that.
The more I recovered from Isekai week, the more furious I felt at Arifureta especially. I am sorry that you too had to sit through that pilot but also I salute you.
And yes, the cute calico kitten really helped us find enjoyment in whatever Problem Children was all about.
Absolutely, imo, SAO kicked off the oversaturation of isekai as we see it today. When SAO first began it had a lot of fans and it felt almost fresh, although an immediate criticism was how much the protagonist, Kirito, was an absolute Gary Stu. SAO dropped the ball real quick (literally he had to to rescue a helpless princess from a tower, if I remember right?), but the fans remained devoted and apologetic even when the second season was a crappy rehash of the first but with elf ears and incest, and that’s about where it lost me.
Ha! It’s all in good fun.
After Cybersnark’s mention of Shousetsuka ni Narou, I saw Arifureta was on the list of properties first published there.
When I hear a book is being adapted into a western movie or TV show I assume that adaptation will come with a slew of changes (for reasons good, bad, and mercenary. YMMV). But if I pick up a manga of an anime I’m not surprised if it ends up matching pretty much line for line and shot for shot. It’s not always the case but it’s something I’ve noticed in titles I’ve read.
I wonder if I were to compare Arifureta the novel with the anime it would all click into place. That Arifureta the anime is overly talky because someone got handed a book and told “don’t bother changing the dialogue here, just use it as is and animate around it.”
It doesn’t change my opinion of Arifureta (its sins in my eyes are many). But it got me reflecting on the process of adapting a property into an anime and how much leeway the production staff are actually given.
I respect your commitment of always watching the shows with us! Especially this time when we got some real duds.
Like the other commenters said, the subgenre has been around for a while, but definitely the game-ified isekai was popularized by SAO. I watched and read the manga up until gun gale but my heart wasn’t in it by the end. I actually think SAO and a lot of isekais have some great lore and stuff to work with, they just often have a hard time sticking the landing. SAO’s biggest issue for me was how it treated its female characters and the repetitive nature of the arcs.
While they don’t really count as isekai, some of my all time favorite shows do involve being transported into a new place. What I found in making the wheel is that there’s also a sort of subgenre of purgatory and post-death isekai settings. Shows like Angel beats, death parade, and Haibane Renmei fit into that group but would not really be considered isekai. But in general this one really opened my mind of what the genre could be. While I don’t think we got good ones, I can see how these elements could make a show I could really like!
Also you’re so right on the writer and animator thing! I never thought about it but that’s EXACTLY what bothers me about light novel adaptations.
I’d argue that Sword Art Online and a few others (I think .Hack preceded it by a bit?) kicked off specifically the current trend of gamified isekai. I.e. Isekai based on D&D and JRPG style mechanics and fantasy worlds. Isekai was certainly present in anime prior (El Hazard, Escaflowne, Magic Knight Rayearth which got the lovely shout out above) but the codification of these specific tropes and arguably the spine of the whole litRPG genre happened around the same time.
What’s interesting is the extent to which those conventions have bled into non-portal fantasy: at times it seems like the whole fantasy genre is now in direct dialogue to videogames and ttrpgs. There’s whole spates of non-iskeai fantasy anime which otherwise ticks all the isekai tropes except for the protag’s truck-kun origin at this point.
. . thinking about Magic Knight Ray Earth tho has me thinking: before Truck-Kun barreled onto the scene as the preferred protag portaling machine I could’ve sworn that the favored portal device was Tokyo Tower. For a while it felt like if you were reading or watching something and a highschooler ended up on a fieldtrip there you were just counting down the minutes or pages to fantasy shenanigans.
OMG I forgot about the Tokyo Tower portal trope. What a blast from the past! I remember watching Starlight Revue a couple years ago and feeling so nostalgic about the plot and arena scenery sort of revolving around Tokyo tower, it’s totally because of that.
The consensus in anime spaces tends to blame it on Shousetsuka ni Narou, a self-publishing website where aspiring writers can post their original content. Then publishers started trawling the site to license light novels and manga, which then get turned into anime.
Trouble is that Narou has no editors, and a lot of these writers are teenagers (whose experience of the genre is mainly video games and light novels), so a lot of what gets posted/upvoted/published/produced is both heavily derivative and driven by teenage angst and hormones.
The main driving impetus is the same as always: it’s cheap and marketable.
This reminds me of authors who started out on Wattpad and later found publication. Made for a weird pocket of YA fiction for a while.
I can’t tell from Wikipedia what year Sword Art Online became a bit hit–there’s a lot of media listed. But I’ll pick 2010. It’s almost too terrifying for me to contemplate but that means a big chunk of the shonen population were not even alive in a pre-isekai world. So if someone were to tell me isekai has set a default of what “fantasy” is supposed to look like for a whole generation I’d believe it.
SAO exploded in popularity when the anime released, so mid to late 2012
To be honest, I only skimmed this article – which seems like I’m not the demograhic, but I’m a long time anime watcher and manga reader and the vibes here were not really a great intro to get non-anime/manga people who subscribe to Reactor TO watch or read a series (and I’m clicking none of those random YouTube links, sorry). This whole article feels just so out of place.
That being said, there’s great isekai among the muck (Rayearth, Escaflowne, The Other World’s Books Depend on the Bean Counter – which is getting an anime I guess??) but perhaps a good article would be something like comps or non-anime that are also isekai (Peter Pan, Narnia, basically any portal fantasy or some way of getting into another world, reborn or not).
Yeah, you’re probably not the demographic for Grab Bag, and that’s fine. And this is definitely not intended to be an introduction to anime subgenres, but more a pair of longtime otaku friends taking a fun plunge and reacting. Bridget and I are the reacters, not reactor, here.
Every other week I write articles about anime and its place in the speculative fiction landscape. Those would probably be more to your taste. Or possibly not, because you might skim those too. I love writing columns for Reactor because they welcome a wide range of interpretations and voices. In general, the consensus has been that Grab Bag is a good time, and we are excited to keep this feature going!
Some of the best isekai, IMO, are the ones where the protag’s real super-power is treating people decently. That’s the game. By treating the outgroups and downtrodden just like normal people instead of treating them like things, the protag is the lone light in an institutionally evil world, and that is what will save everyone, even the assholes.
I am definitely always interested in stories that champion human goodness, especially given the modern world’s woes and the proliferation of grimdark content. I wonder if Konosuba fits in here — I remember enjoying that one!
I spit my coffee out at your title! Spot on!
I’m new to anime and probably considered an old geezer in anime years at 62. I tolerated Arifureta but I didn’t sit down and watch it. I just let it play while working around the house. It doesn’t get better but small doses are fine.
Anime is for everyone, no matter what your age is, welcome to the fandom! I’m sorry you watched arifureta! Thank you for your sacrifice. If you liked the general vibe of the fantasy and the isekai part, I’d check out Escaflowne or honestly anything out commenters have reccomended, they all have great taste. Hope you can find a great show to balance out the bad taste arifureta left ( I watched some delicious in dungeon to right the wrong 😂)
Since all the titles spun out this month were more traditional isekai, perhaps we could have an installment devoted to reverse isekai/urban fantasy.
And on the subject of future AGBs, I’m guessing at some point you’ll have one on anime with ghosts. The question is should it be August (because apparently telling ghost stories is a summer thing in Japan), October (because Halloween), or December (because ghost stories at Christmas is a tradition)?