This Week in Anime

Venture Into the Dark Underbelly of Isekai

Chris
Ah, good to see I'm already having respects paid. isekai main characters usually rely on their past accumulated gaming skills to carry them through their fantasy-RPG worlds. But while I'm hardly the strongest gamer myself, at this point I feel like if I had a fateful encounter with Truck-kun, I'd still be able to handle myself just fine thanks to all the information and knowledge I've built up from watching so dang many of these shows!

And since we're apparently on the same wavelength with our opening volley of illustrative images, we might as well go ahead and start with Black Summoner, the series that starts by asking the important questions of the gamers.

Imagine if this were in fact your first isekai anime ever and introduction to the genre. So many of these series nowadays just assume some level of familiarity with the setup (the same way earlier entries assumed some familiarity with the generic fantasy-RPG worlds their heroes were getting teleported in to exploit the rules of). So in that respect, there could be an amusing thought experiment in questioning how a complete neophyte might react to getting all this thrown at them right away.

And because with the quality of this and several of these other shows this season, you really do have to make your own fun.

In fact the sheer irony of electing to cross it off the docket first is that probably the most interesting thing about Black Summoner this season is how it feels like a mash-up of two of its other contemporaneous shows. What kind of isekai do you have around here? Both kinds: Slimes and Slavery!

Yyyyyeah, okay full disclosure: As I was watching Black Summoner, for the first couple episodes I confess I actually found myself getting into it. It's absolutely a case of critical bias, in that compared to the other couple shows it so closely resembles, its MC (his name is Kelvin, by the way) and the show along with it had just enough personality to carry it. It was nothing revolutionary, but there was at least some amusing enough banter framing the hero and the gaggle of internal voices he was accumulating.

BUT THEN the third episode rolled up to suddenly go hard on the slavery mechanic, and I side-eyed so viciously I think I went blind for a minute.

The absolute absurdity of Trojan-Horse-ing in a slave-owning subplot after lecturing your audience-insert on the importance of consent in summoning contracts.

But by all means, if you wanted to bring it up as the next one, let us move on to my assigned arch-nemesis this season and closest reminder of your days in the World's End Harem trenches: Harem in the Labyrinth of Another World.

I legit tried forever to puzzle out what that specific line was supposed to be. The gist of it from context clues is that Roxanne, main-character Michio's agency-challenged attendant-to-be doesn't come with any worries about pregnancy or STIs, but I can't begin to think of what specific censor-worthy words would be utilized there.

Combined with the fact that 'slave' is perfectly acceptable to say unbleeped by this show's standards, but 'sex slave' is apparently a bridge too far, and it starts to come off like the series Doing A Bit.

I mean, the real answer is of course so they can sell more premium uncensored cable airings and Blu-ray releases later. But then that would require Harem Labyrinth to have any compelling content of that nature, as opposed to endless scenes of Michio paging through status screens.


Riveting.

Not yet they don't! I mean, I admonished Black Summoner for how sudden its MC's swerve into enthusiastic slave-ownership was, but at least that one was willing to be decisive with it. Harem Labyrinth is nominally constructed entirely around this particular fantasy fetish, but has to spend several sequences setting up some mealy-mouthed manufacturing of consent for its otherwise doormat of a hero to consider getting into it.

Followed by Michio's development via getting freaked out by those scary, untrustworthy free sex-workers.

This lets me momentarily double-back to one of my other issues with Black Summoner, in its utterly oblivious invocation of the 'benevolent slave-owner' role.


Like dang, it would be nice if there were something else you could do for her that would open up her ability to make her own decisions, but I'll be damned if I can think of anything.

Like it's maybe too easy for me to invoke my standby favorite How NOT to Summon a Demon Lord in this context, but at least that one knew how to construct its setup to make its protag more likeable and play its premise for comedy so long as it wasn't going to be worrying about the thornier social issues of the arrangement.

Harem Labyrinth barely gets a decent laugh out of me with its otherwise-inexplicable future-flash-forward in the second episode, wherein Michio deduces that a random kid is actually his forgotten son on account of how he looks like every other isekai protagonist.

You can get the harems away from the Steve, but you can't get the Steve away from the harems.

Oh god I know. Like I guess there's something to be said for the fact that they left 'Isekai' right there in the translated title instead of going with what would have been an even duller 'My Life in Another World', but there I go having to let my mind wander and make my own fun again.

I desperately wanted to like this one more than I did. There's a decent amount of sauce on the visuals sometimes (even if the animation itself isn't amazing), the music's kinda cool in a unique, energetic, butt-rock way, there's cute slimes and a cute doofy wolf, and it hasn't even brought up any slavery apologia yet!


But it is just...so boring and basic all the way through in terms of its actual content.

The rare delicacy of bone-in Slimes.

He makes just enough facial expressions throughout the next few episodes that I can't even entertainingly joke about him having only one facial expression. But apart from some allusions to his old office job explaining why he prefers to lay low and not cultivate others to rely on him too much, we really don't get much that's compelling about Yuji here.

Honestly, of all the shows that we sampled for this Isekai Charcuterie, this was the one that found me closest to nodding off as I was watching it.

Obviously, the solution is start rebalancing things. We need to return these isekai-stranded kids back to their original, natural habitat in the real world.

Like as a conceptual joke, I can absolutely appreciate the recognition that someone from our flesh-and-blood 'real' world winding up in a realm of hot JRPG anime-art characters wouldn't exactly fit in.

Though is that really appreciably different from trying to live as an ardent fan of SEGA consoles?

It's definitely the sort of thing that's 'funny' in the sense of the strength of its overall idea, even as the actual 'jokes' tend to land somewhat flatter. Like for all the isekai protags I've seen magic up miraculous advancements and powers in fantasyland in played-straight shows, there's a great counterbalance to Uncle and his nephew using his abilities for half-baked YouTube sketches that don't even pull major numbers.

Uncle's never gonna get that Play Button.

How can this series be spitting profound truths like that one second, only to turn around and deliver factual inaccuracies the next?

Takafumi insisting that K-On! codified the slice-of-life genre, and dying on that hill no matter how hard he gets ratio'd.

And honestly, I get why the author wanted to do the whole bit about tsundere and Uncle not catching on, because it is a funny idea even as the years don't actually work out. But it's also an example of Uncle From Another World dragging out one decent joke it has to where it really only winds up working as a specific kind of cringe comedy.

Like as a reverse-isekai, I feel like this series is done no favors by sharing the summer with the second season of The Devil is a Part-Timer, which has significantly more going on.

I actually did read the first volume of the manga last year, and you're absolutely right. The real-world scenes in particular carry a lot of the same framing as the manga version, though the art at least looks a little better. Though thus far they haven't brought in my favorite joke from the manga: Uncle's shock at KochiKame finally ending while he was away!

That honestly just adds one more layer to the joke in this version, having a superstar like him take a turn as a schlub who couldn't even make it as an isekai protagonist.

But fine, if taking the protags out of the fantasy worlds altogether couldn't fully mitigate the Isekai doldrums, then what is the cure? Might we have to pursue genuinely...medicinal methods?

Forget sexy slave girls or massive monster fights, this show knows what we really want: Lab equipment and chemistry!

And it's fair, as even without that invested level of expertise, I can confirm that this series was also the most interesting of the batch to me. I can't go super-hard in praising it for originality, aware as I am that even Pharmacy Isekai is already its own sub-genre, somehow. But this anime still works simply by virtue of having some concepts to drive its story beyond plopping some dude into RPG Maker and letting him wander aimlessly.

They even use it to construct a solid thematic through-line as the story goes on, as our MC's fixation on family leads him to ponder his business of effectively 'possessing' someone with familial connections in this world, and getting a chance to use his juiced-up pharmaceutical fantasy magic to cure his 'new' little sister's chicken pox.

I know thematic names are a thing in anime regardless, but I still pulled a serious spit-take when I heard that one. A lot of the core ideas in Parallel World Pharmacy will feel familiar if you've read or watched Ascendance of a Bookworm, like the main character's drive to advance the medieval-level technologies he's witness to, or the magic system that favors nobility and sees civilians freaked out when way too much of it is demonstrated. But as far as these series go, there are far, far worse isekai setups to seem similar to.

Honestly you gotta watch after that just to catch his tutor's response to his otherworldly magic powers, which is to encase herself in an entire suit of armor.

There's an embodiment of everything that's made Parallel World Pharmacy that kind of winner so far: It's got a high concept that plays off its isekai hook without making it the gimmick itself, and it's willing to have fun as it plays out its story. That way all the magic chemistry compounding doesn't become the sole, dry focus of the action like, say, My Isekai Life's snooze-inducing magical programming language.

Can confirm that this is definitely the only one of these I can see myself keeping up with consistently as well. (Well, apart from my loving obligation to Harem Labyrinth, that is.)

Sometimes I wish I could simply spit out a swill of a series I just sampled, but I can only hope that our loss is the audience's gain. Maybe if we all stop watching bland isekai, they'll actually stop making bland isekai.

On second thought, maybe we'd have better luck taking our chances with Truck-kun after all.