The Spring 2025 Anime Preview Guide

Teogonia

In the harsh region known as the borderlands, humans must fight an endless battle against demi-human creatures that come at them relentlessly, intent on taking their land and their gods. A young boy named Kai, fighting to defend his village, sustains a life-threatening injury that causes him to regain memories from a past life. Kai's newfound knowledge gives him a new sense of the unfair “rule set” that governs the world around him. One thing is clear: For those without a god to serve as their guardian, life is a constant struggle for survival.

Teogonia is based on a light novel series by Tsukasa Tanimai. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Fridays.

A few weeks ago, during the ANN Trailer Watch Party, the three members of the stream poo-pooed the trailer of Teogonia when it revealed that the series would be an isekai. In the chat, I bravely took a stand and said I still thought it looked kind of interesting. Even though Jacki groaned, “Caitlin, no,” I stood by my assessment that it had potential. Now that the episode is out, have I changed my tune?

Well… yes and no. The chances of it being a truly good anime seem low. Even setting aside the isekai stigma—ZENSHU last season proved that the genre still has plenty of potential to do interesting things—the ideas in it were clunkily executed. I could tell the author of the light novel was inspired by higher-tier fantasy novels like Moribito or The Twelve Kingdoms rather than simply aping otaku media tropes. There's an anthropological toothsomeness to the world design in the characters' costumes and hairstyles that calls out to me far more than the ahistorical battle miniskirts and cleavage-baring outfits.

However, as much as the creators may ape these classics, they don't quite have the required technical skill to bring it all together. They don't want the world to be proper noun mush, which I fully respect; however, in trying to avoid that, it's more or less all one big exposition dump. There's little dialogue that doesn't seem to be deliberately written to explicate some detail about their society. By the end, I had a solid ideas of what guardian bearers and godstones were and how they figured into Lag Village's struggle against the demi-humans, but I didn't know much about Kai or his life.

But I think Teogonia's greatest potential lies elsewhere: if it ends up bad, it's almost certainly going to be bad in an interesting way. I treasure series like Magatsu Wahrheit -Zuerst-, where even if the story and animation fall to pieces by the end, I'm never bored by what's happening. I can't say exactly where that impression comes from; it's entirely vibes-based. But the idea of a low fantasy isekai that takes wild swings and misses is so much more exciting to me than a dozen rote otaku fantasies. I love, love, love to watch a fantasy narrative with big ideas disintegrate and then pore over the remains like I'm performing an autopsy.

And if all else fails, there's a young woman forbidden from fighting who chafes under gender roles. Few tropes make me happier than that one.

On one hand, I like what Teogonia is trying to do with its twist on the isekai genre. In nearly all isekai stories, our hero is fully transferred to another world either in body or soul. This means that the isekai'd person is basically a modern human. Even if their soul enters the body of an existing person, the original memories and personality are almost completely supplanted. Teogonia, on the other hand, shows an isekai on the other side of the spectrum.

Kai is very much a child of the fantasy world we see on screen. However, from time to time, he gets glimpses of his past life—of our world. There's no personality or context in the memories. He knows what onigiri is despite never seeing one. He knows about magic—and knows that it is a made up concept on Earth. However, by realizing that his current world has something akin to magic, he is able to use that knowledge to invent magic (as we imagine it) in the fantasy world. It's a creative storytelling decision that manages to make the main character special while avoiding the most egregious isekai fantasy clichés.

However, despite this, I found myself bored throughout this episode. This is largely because the action is anything but heart-pounding. Rather, it feels stilted and awkward. It lingers too long on almost every frame—makes it feel like it is almost in slow motion.

In addition to this, I didn't find the fantasy world particularly engaging. Various species of humans/demi-humans are basically trapped in a never ending war where the strong literally feed on the weak to become stronger. The nobles are mostly sexist and classist and the common man is clearly getting a raw deal. While this is objectively horrible, I didn't find myself connecting with it on an emotional level. Kai is supposed to be our bridge to the world and he has little in the way of personality beyond feeling he is meant for more. Because of all this, I don't really see myself coming back for more on this one.

Everything has an explanation, and Teogonia's first episode wants to ensure you're aware of that. In its defense, it does try not to be strictly an infodump – there is action that goes along with the explanations. But so much of it is handled clumsily that it feels like a thin attempt to animate what may well have been paragraphs of descriptive prose in the original light novel. It's not really a triumph of presentation.

That's too bad because there are some interesting elements to this story. Kai, the protagonist, is the sort of scrappy redheaded orphan we've seen before, but that's not a bad thing. He's intensely aware of the inequalities of his home village, where the nobles eat better and get the lion's share of “godstones” looted from the corpses of fallen demihuman enemies. He's reasonably sure that if he can't find a way to stand out, he'll never move up the social ladder. But he's also coping with intrusive memories of a different world, something not entirely unknown in his culture but not something he cares to share with the class. It's too early to tell if this is stealth isekai or a situation where he travels between worlds while he sleeps or something similar, but it could make a major difference in how interesting the story becomes.

It could also just be another point of confusion because Kai's otherworld is like ours but with magic. In a deviation from how the rest of the episode runs, we're not shown Kai using magic in our world, but he seems pretty sure he can, or should be able to, shoot flames from his fingertips. That appears to be a significant difference from how “divine power” works in his present reality. However, it may be a strictly semantic issue since both come from the godstone, which, it turns out, is the heart, but instead of muscle, it's a shell filled with gold liquid.

Simply put, this episode is an odd combination of over and under-explanation. Characters spout off world-building details in stilted conversations, but the really interesting bits are left out. Orgs look like the evil cousins of the Three Little Pigs, Lady Jose is sidelined because of her gender, and other boilerplate fantasy elements undercut Kai's plot, at least so far. This isn't without potential, but it needs to figure out how best to tell its story because what it's doing right now isn't working.