The Fall 2021 anime season is shaping up to be quite a good one, with lots of memorable series for fans to enjoy. I’m especially happy to have the second cour of Mushoku Tensei, aka Jobless Reincarnation: I Will Seriously Try If I Go To Another World, back, giving us more adventures of Rudeus Greyrat, his magic teacher Roxy, the fiery Eris, sexy swordmaster Ghislaine, and all the rest. It’s pretty much become my favorite isekai anime ever, so let’s look at why the show is so good!
Why is Mushoku Tensei the Best Isekai Anime?
There are several methods of getting isekai’ed, if you’d like to try it someday. These include:
- Being magically summoned (Zero no Tsukaima, The Rising of the Shield Hero).
- Discovering a doorway to another world (Gate, Outbreak Company).
- Entering some kind of virtual reality video game-type world* (Overlord, Sword Art Online, Okaa-san Online).
- A random unexplained accident (an interdimensional explosion in Super Dimension Century Orguss, being hit on the head in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court).
- Being killed by a random person with a knife, or by our good friend Truck-kun, and being reincarnated in a fantasy world with special powers (That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, The Saga of Tanya the Evil).
(Many fans wouldn’t include shows about characters entering a video game to be a true isekai story, but these series do share many of the same elements.)
Jobless Reincarnation is the story of an ugly bastard a tragic man who was abused as a boy and has become a hikikomori, unable to function socially. He gets hit by a truck and wakes up as a baby in a fantasy world where magic and fantastic creatures exist. In his new life, he decides to apply himself properly this time, overcoming his personal demons and becoming a powerful young mage. After a mysterious event teleports him and Eris to a faraway land, he must find a way home, while having various adventures along the way. Eventually, he learns that the “magical catastrophe” didn’t just affect him, but his entire country, and now everyone he loves is lost, randomly teleported to different lands.
Curious to see what the best isekai and worst isekai are, according to 100,000+ MAL ratings? We’ve got blog posts for you!
Jobless Reincarnation Features Flawed Characters
One criticism often leveled at the “trapped in another world” genre is that the main characters are nearly always super-powerful, able to use their knowledge from our world to kick butt and defeat any enemy with ease. While I understand this argument, it’s also true that it’s oddly pleasant to watch how Rimuru-sama uses his “god mode” powers to reshape his world into a perfect land of equality among magical creatures, or thrill as Kumoko builds her skills in each episode of So I’m a Spider, So What? But at a certain point it’s nice to see characters who are less than perfect, too.
And that’s what you get with this show. A perverted main character who’s got so many flaws it’s hard to feel sympathy for him at first. His father, a hero who can’t keep it in his pants. A selfish girl who somehow becomes the best red-headed tsundere since Asuka. More than any other show I can think of, the characters change and evolve into better and stronger versions of themselves as the story progresses, which I love watching.
And having legendary voice actor Tomokazu Sugita, who voiced Kyon in The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, serve as the internal tsukkomi voice of Rudeus, makes every episode a great one.
Mushoku Tensei has a Great Structure
While the long and intense story arcs of Tensei Shitara Slime Datta Ken or Kumo Desu Ga, Nani Ka? are enjoyable, dripping with intense technical and geographical details about the world the story is set in — this appears to be a hallmark of these stories, the idea presumably being that once fans have built up a storehouse of knowledge about a fictional world, they’ll remain fans of it for longer — I appreciate the approach Jobless Reincarnation has done, too. It’s much more character-driven, with emotional relationships I find myself caring a lot about.
It’s also refreshing that the creator has made a very original story, substituting the usual elves, dwarves and orcs that are the staple of fantasy-kei anime with new and original races for us to get to know. Also, the episodes in Mushoku Tensei don’t follow any specific pattern and try to bring the characters in new directions every week.
It’s the Best Narou-kei Story I’ve Found
The Internet has changed all our lives, hopefully for the better, though social media makes me wonder sometimes. In a lot of cases, it has managed to turn amateur writers into professional novelists, thanks to the website Syosetuka ni Narou!, a site where new writers can perfect their skills and eventually go pro. The basic pattern is that the website helps new writers build a base of fans, and when their story becomes popular enough, the work will get acquired by a major company like ASCII Media Works or Kadokawa, and published in a proper book form. The majority of fantasy series in recent years, from My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! to Redo of Healer and even Konosuba and Re:Zero, got their start as “Narou-kei” works of fanfiction amateur web novels before being signed by proper publishers.
(When you’re a language otaku like me, even small things like how words are transliterated can become something your eyes notice. The official spelling of shosetsu (novel) on the Let’s Become a Novelist! website is Syosetu, which is a valid way to represent 小説 in the Roman alphabet…if you’re living in 1885 and don’t care how Japanese words are actually pronounced. The spelling syosetu is part of the Nippon-Shiki transliteration system which dates from the Meiji Period. I much prefer the Revised Hepburn method, which is closest to how words are actually pronounced: shosetsu, or shousetsu if you’re a stickler for representing Japanese long vowels properly in English, which I’m not.)
Another Reason to Watch: China Hates It
While googling around about the show for this post, I happened to see that Jobless Reincarnation got pulled from the Bilibili video platform in China after being criticized for “violating mainstream values” for daring to have sexy visual fanservice. As we all become more nervous about possible future censorship of our beloved anime, whether by Sony, Disney or due to the increasing financial participation of Chinese companies in the Anime Production Committee system, I can’t think of a better reason to watch anime than because conservative elements in China think it should not exist.
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