Forum - View topicEP. REVIEW: Harem in the Labyrinth of Another World
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Shay Guy
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At that point, you start drifting towards the realm of any way of lambasting a popular work of fiction being an "attack" on its fans for having bad taste. And yeah, I've known Discourse to end up going that way -- "lol, imagine thinking this is good" or "you NEED to realize that not only is this author a thoughtless bigot, she has never done anything good at all and nobody should ever think she has or like anything about her works". But I think it needs to be possible to separate "you are being scammed" from "you are gullible". And looking at that review, its gist is definitely "you are being scammed" -- the bits about "contempt for its presumed audience" and "A sucker, a mark, a human resource" are explicitly about how the show regards its viewers, not the reviewer. (It's far from the first time I've seen a review describe something as having contempt for the audience -- Jurassic World comes to mind.) The message is clearly that whether you're looking for kinky sexytimes or crunchy game-system wank, with no judgment for either desire, there are other shows that make far more honest efforts to actually deliver and respect the viewers' time. In short: "You want dubcon porn? Cool. You deserve better dubcon porn than this. You want videogamey power fantasies? Cool. You deserve better videogamey power fantasies than this." (And I see when the episode 6 review revisits this point, it uses that same phrasing of "deserving better".) |
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sirdano1
Posts: 303 |
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Well just off the top of my head, there's Redo of Healer, that one with the smartphone and Isekai Cheat Magician, which I only remember because when MAL recommended the OVA to me last year I couldn't even remember watching it. |
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borderliner
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What, no call out for that "hilarious" Hoe gag...
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Changeman
Posts: 220 |
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A doubt, why doesn't crunchyroll release an uncensored version? Don't they plan to work with R-18 anime in the future?
It's complicated when you stop to think that anime is still treated as something exclusively for children. |
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Blood-
 Bargain Hunter Posts: 24124 |
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Nine episodes into a show with the word "Harem" in the title and the MC is just NOW thinking about enlarging his party. My soul has a clammy feeling that this must be a 2-cours show and I'm committed to hate watching it to the very end. I'm a masochist - sorry, you wouldn't understand (unless, of course, you're a masochist, too).
Has anybody figured out why this dumb show insists on using huge onscreen titles to announce locations when we already know the location without them? Is this just part of the fiendish plot to irritate me even more than I already am? |
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MFrontier
Posts: 13581 |
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Michio and Roxanne have really settled into domestic bliss. And bath sex.
Welp, time to bring in a new party/Harem member so we can make this a proper threesome! |
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Hiroki not Takuya
 Posts: 2656 |
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If I were to stretch, I'd posit that they are all a very obtuse attempt at humor. Like Mr. Ferris said, the show doesn't seem to understand what makes RPG shows interesting and I'd say the same goes for humor and fanservice. I could be wrong though, as deliberately making a fanservice show a parody of RPGs is antithetical. Of course, the team could just be that incompetent... |
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Blood-
Bargain Hunter Posts: 24124 |
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@ Hiroki not Takuya - I know you consider making a fanservice show a parody of RPGs to be antithetical, but I wonder if the the anime is meant to be a parody of isekai shows that are adapted from RPGs? If you view the show through that lens then things - if you squint - start to make more "sense." For example, as you point out, the frequent and unnecessary location titles might be part of the parody. The fact that a show with the word harem in the title goes 9 episodes without a harem might be a gag, too. The great attention and length of time given to mundane things like securing a bathtub (which normally is not the sort of thing that an anime RPG adaptation would bother with) might be part of the piss taking, too.
Ladies and gentleman: are we in the presence of a genuinely bad show... or a show that is making fun of genuinely bad shows? Or am I overthinking things? |
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Gamen
Posts: 254 |
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I think you're overthinking things; it's quite faithful to the original novels except for the addition of sex scenes (hair washing and baths is all you get in the novels), and the condensing necessary for an anime adaptation And the web novel (started on 2011-04-12) predates many other notable (read: I remember them) isekai web novels adapted into anime like Re:Zero, KonoSuba, Mushoku Tensei (Jobless Reincarnation), Arifureta, Death March, Honzuki no Gekokujou (Ascendance of the Bookworm), Tate no Yuusha (Shield Hero), Kumo desu ga (So I'm a Spider), Tensei Shitara Slime (Reincarnated as a Slime), Seirei Gensouki (Spirit Chronicles), etc. ...Of the sample of ones I checked, Log Horizon was published before it by a whole year (minus a day). And Knights & Magic by about four months. In fact, if you look back at this ANN article from last year, you'll notice that the author of Mushoku Tensei reportedly took inspiration from Harem in the Labyrinth of Another World. My theory would be instead that everyone looked at it and said "Hey, I can do it better!" (and faster) |
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Blood-
Bargain Hunter Posts: 24124 |
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@ Gamen - thank you for the insight and context. Yep, seems like I was overthinking. Good, I can go back to guilt-free hate watching as opposed to having the uneasy feeling that I just don't get the joke.
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Shay Guy
Posts: 2288 |
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Pretty much my thoughts. I wish this forum supported signatures so I could put a link to my big Narou anime spreadsheet in mine. Maybe if the phpBB3 upgrade ever happens? |
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Hiroki not Takuya
Posts: 2656 |
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Spike Terra
Subscriber Posts: 361 Location: Maryland |
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As a fellow masochist, this has been hard to hate watch, as it goes out of its way to be as boring as possible. There's nothing fun about this to latch onto for it to be anywhere near enjoyable. The main duo feel like Sims as they just live to keep their routine of have sex and do dungeoneering. Every new action that they do is in pursuit of those two objectives. Neither of which are portrayed interestingly enough for me to care. The dungeons are just grey hallways that lead to grey rooms, where you fight goofy looking enemies. The fights are quick affairs that are dull to witness. Like the best one happens in the shows opening and it all goes down from there. Every time it feels like their in danger, I blink and the matter is fully resolved. The sex is also dull and I don't think it's just because of the censures. The relationship of the main duo is stuck in the master/slave dynamic. I've seen people comment that the couple seems like newlyweds but everything Roxanne does is to benefit Michio. She's made like one request to him and that was to save an old lady. Which he did comply with in the most half assed way possible. So their relationship is unbalanced and that poisons most of their interactions. It doesn't help that I feel like Michio looks at every other character as a tool to help him have more fun. I do find it interesting to find out how old the original web novel was. I guess the prose was really engaging for past readers or like with what @Gamen was saying and everyone just wanted to write this style of story better. |
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Blood-
Bargain Hunter Posts: 24124 |
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@ Spike Terra - your characterization of the main duo's mundane activities as Sims-like is bang on the money, but oddly enough it is exactly one of the non-hate watching factors that I kind of dig. The French have a phrase, belle laide, which roughly translates into beautiful ugly and it refers to a woman who is attractive despite not being conventionally beautiful. I find the Sims stuff boringly interesting if that makes any sense. Part of it is kind of disbelief... are we really going to spend a big chunk of an episode pursuing the purchase of a bathtub? But there is also part of me that enjoys in a non-negative way that kind of mundane thing in a fantasy setting. Please don't make me attempt to explain why, though.
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Key
Moderator
 Posts: 18422 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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Redo is one of the most tasteless and cringe-worthy anime series I've ever seen, but it at least wasn't boring. Cheat Magician was certainly generic but at least better than this one. Can't comment as much on Smartphone, since I gave up on that one after two episodes, but a series would have to try very hard to have weaker dungeon exploration scenes than this one does. |
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