Isekai "Quartet" #3: Kono-Saga
Greetings to all four of you!
Let's get the shif out of the way first. Saga Of Tanya the Evil explores religion and faith in an interesting way, but that "interesting way" is what makes the series unwatchable. First off, our "hero" is a god-hating corporate slavemaster who attracts the attention of God (a.k.a. "Being X"), who "punishes" him by reincarnating him as a short Nazi girl with broken magical powers. Yep. Last week, it was zombified Nazi supersoldiers, and this week, it's magical Nazis. And the Nazis are the good guys in this anime! Granted, they aren't explicitly stated to be Nazis, for obvious legal reasons. But the names are Germanic, the uniforms are green with red armbands and goose-stepper boots, and the setting is basically "what if Imperial Germany found magic;" if the allegory were any more blatant, they'd be HYDRA from Marvel Comics. Or the cast of JoJo Rabbit. Or "Springtime For Hitler." Or Heil Honey, I'm Home. Or actual Nazis. Don't make your protagonists Nazis! I need to stop saying the word "Nazis." This series (or the two and one sixteenth episodes I trudged my way through for the sake of critical integrity) is a shifload of uck, damnit!
KonoSuba: God's Blessing On This Wonderful World! is the anti-Tanya of isekai anime. When Kazuma Sato, a teenage shut-in, dies of a panic attack while needlessly rescuing a girl from being hit by a slow-moving tractor, he meets and gets ridiculed by a low-level water goddess named Aqua, who has been assigned to reincarnate him into an RPG-inspired fantasy world. To spite her for making fun of him, Kazuma chooses Aqua as his "one item" to bring with him to the new world, and hilarity ensues. In addition to Aqua, who is a crybaby and only knows harmless party tricks, Kazuma's party soon grows to include Megumin, a chunibyo (Peter Pan syndrome character trope with eyepatch who speaks in an overly elaborate fashion and claims to be secretly overpowered) fire mage whose only attack is a single-use-per-day nuclear explosion that makes her fall asleep afterward (gender-flipped male puberty allegory?), and Darkness, a female defensive knight with disturbing masochistic tendencies. Kazuya, on the other hand, has a thievery skill that makes him randomly steal perverted things. While KonoSuba at least makes an attempt at having a plot and character development amid the (admittedly brilliant, sometimes) comedy--defeat the Demon Lord, figure out ways to make use of useless characters and skills, etc.--the first season does what a lot of isekai, and anime in general, tend to do: it finds numerous ways to keep its main cast from going anywhere that doesn't involve a pointless side-quest. Yes, I realize that this is KonoSuba's way of leaning hard into genre-parody, but that doesn't make the results any less infuriating. What's more, a good number of these side-quests are born of what feel like "I hope you've been reading the manga" tactics. Now, I haven't read the KonoSuba manga to verify whether these events are manga exclusive or it's just KonoSuba being KonoSuba, but a lot of the side-characters who send our main quartet on these quests are introduced as follows: "This is Character You've Never Seen Before #n. We met him/her while saving them from something that sounds infinitely more awesome than what you've been watching this entire time. They've asked us to do or retrieve something lame because we befriended them offscreen. Watch our mildly hilarious but ultimately meaningless fetch-quest now, okay?" The comedy is tolerable, and hits hard when it really needs to, and the character dynamics are sufficiently entertaining, such that I would probably try to catch back up with the second season and the movie at some point. But until then, there are far better anime coming out on a nigh-overwhelming basis. As for you guys, watch, or watch not; there is no try.
That's supposed to be a quartet joke, but if I'm being honest, it's also backhanded and unbelievably generous. Based on the fact that barely anyone ever likes my posts and I deleted my only comment because it was from a bot that "speaks" terrible English, the only stable readership I have anymore consists of Blogger itself, and me. Where the other two-to-twenty-five passing glances come from is a mystery.
But has that stopped me from doing what I claim to love? Should it stop me? Why do I bother asking questions that no one is going to answer because they aren't bothering to read this far? Guilt. Guilt. Guilt. Shame. Of course, I did throw away tens of thousands of dollars on mobile games and nerd memorabilia over the past decade, destroyed my family's trust and crippled my own future, so I have no right to complain, and the only guilt and shame at play here should be mine.
Did that get your attention?
It's true, but did it get your attention?
Now that we're all down here at the bottom of the barrel, let's get back to talk of quartets. Specifically, this week's issue of Isekai "Quartet", which focuses on the two worst series to be selected for its crossover/spin-off: KonoSuba, and Saga Of Tanya the Evil, both of which are available subbed and dubbed on VRV under the CrunchyRoll banner.
I don't know why I'm bothering to tell you, but click those social media buttons down below and leave a comment in the comments section of this post, NOT JUST FACEBOOK AND TWITTER!!! Oh, and SPOILER Warning! for those of you who give a shifudamn.
If you want an alternate history that possibly sounds even more ridiculous than Saga Of Tanya the Evil, I recently learned from an old Game Theory video on Pokemon and racism that the swastika was originally a religious symbol of prosperity and good luck. So imagine a world where Hitler blamed all of Germany's problems on the Irish, and instead opted to culturally appropriate the shamrock. You're welcome. Before moving on to a marginally better, more watchable series, I must note here that it was not my intent to diminish or dismiss the impact of Hitler's Germany on the actual history of the world in general, and on the Jewish population specifically.
The casts of both of the above series are put to better use in Isekai Quartet, so at least give the first season of that vignette series a look (also on CrunchyVRV).
Stay tuned, as next week, I continue my coverage of the Isekai "Quartet" anime collection with a look at The Rising Of the Shield Hero, and provide more Loki coverage on Timely Thorsday. If you haven't yet, hit those social media buttons and leave your opinions down below. Or not. It's not like we know each other well enough offscreen for me to send you on such trivial quests, after all.
As always, here's the list of links if you want to check out what these services have to offer:
And here's my list of anime that I'm watching and/or plan to review in the future, which I am probably including entirely for my own benefit:
* Tower Of God, God Of High School, and Noblesse
* Tower Of God, God Of High School, and Noblesse
(Anime-BAW, WebToon/Crunchyroll Originals)
* DanMachi/Is It Wrong To Try To Pick Up Girls In A Dungeon? franchise (Anime Spotlight)
* Single-entry (maybe) Anime Spotlight reviews:
- Jujutsu Kaisen
- Black Clover
- Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation
- What If A Kid From the Last Dungeon Boonies Moved to A Starter Town?
- Fire Force
- Attack On Titan
- So I'm A Spider, So What?
- Dr. Stone
- Kaguya-Sama: Love Is War
- I've Been Killing Slimes For 300 Years And Maxed Out My Level
- To Your Eternity
- Tokyo Revengers
- Wonder Egg Priority
- Eighty-Six 86
- Vivy: Fluorite Eyes' Song
AniMeister,
Out.
Out.
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