The purpose of a review, or function of criticism, I have always thought, is to help the reader appreciate a work of art; in other words, recognize its value and enjoy whatever in it is good. But how can this be accomplished for a series such as Failure Frame? By what method, with any likelihood of success, can the critic retrieve, from very near the bottom of the guilty-pleasure dumpster, a work of art, in this case a low-budget isekai fantasy adventure anime, so willfully misunderstood and so viciously misrepresented?

The reception of Failure Frame by a vocal portion of the anime-viewing public is so at odds with the actual content of the show that it might as well have been written about a different show altogether, as if people were discussing The Wrong Way to Use Healing Magic having watched Redo of Healer. Its treatment by professional anime critics has been so brutally unfair as to classify the show before ever watching it, then blame the author for not adhering more strictly to a genre the critic invented; and to rattle off a laundry list of innocuous plot points, then act as though their inclusion necessarily makes the show risible trash. Merely to repair the damage done by prejudice to the ability of such a person to enjoy a work of art, that at least he might approach it with an open mind in the hope of enjoying it, already seems exceedingly difficult, and yet the most complete success in that regard would advance the critic only as far as the starting line, with all the rest of the work of comparison and analysis still before him.

Faced with a difficult task, one should ask oneself two preliminary questions: what is the obvious right way to do it, and why don’t I just do it that way? You can often save a lot of time and energy by answering these questions straight away. When all you have is a hammer, and all you have to do is hammer something — you get the point. With that in mind, after careful consideration, I have determined that to adequately review Failure Frame, or in other words help the reader recognize its value and enjoy whatever in it is good, I will simply have to teach the anime-viewing public how to enjoy fiction, and if that means developing a comprehensive philosophical theory of art appreciation from first principles, it’s out of my hands: the editor can find space for it somewhere.

Of course it is impossible to teach anyone anything unless he already knows at least one thing, namely that there is something to know about it which he does not already know; in other words, an excellent way to never learn anything is to convince yourself you already know everything. Therefore, let the anime-viewing public be advised (and examples will follow) that there are things to know about enjoying fiction which you may not already know — and yes, I am including low-budget isekai fantasy adventure anime in that statement. It takes a certain degree of literacy to get the most out of a given work of fiction, and it varies depending on the work, no doubt being higher for Finnegans Wake than for Failure Frame, but for no work is the requisite degree literally zero. A cat can look at the screen and see the bright lights and hear the loud noises, but it can’t get much more out of anime than that. Let’s all try to do better than a cat.

To begin with, taking one step beyond bright lights and loud noises, it is impossible to appreciate a work of art without knowing its purpose. By the way, art is that which is created by man; nature is created too, but not by man; and science, or learning, is not created at all, but exists in the mind. When man equips himself with the materials of nature and the discoveries of science to create art, he does so always with a purpose.

The purpose of a toothbrush, for instance, is to brush teeth; accordingly, a toothbrush is good at being a toothbrush insofar as it is good at brushing teeth. It does not need to be good at peeling oranges. Indeed, to use a toothbrush to peel oranges would be to pervert the toothbrush, strictly speaking: to misdirect it from its intended purpose. To the extent that a toothbrush design intentionally compromises on tooth-brushing for the sake of orange-peeling as a sort of bonus feature, it fails as a dedicated toothbrush.

It is not enough that a toothbrush look good on the sink: that would make it fine art, whose purpose is served, entirely and exclusively, through the experience of the work by some sort of audience. A painting is fine art: it does not need to prop open the door to the gallery. A symphony is fine art: it does not need to scare away pigeons from the concert hall. An isekai fantasy adventure anime is fine art — and I can’t even come up with an example of something you could try to do with one, apart from experiencing it.

The purpose of a work of fiction, which is one type of fine art, was well and succinctly put by Schiller about two hundred years ago: all art is dedicated to joy, and the highest form of joy is the freedom of the mind in the living play of all its powers — and then he wrote The Robbers, which is basically the original Tarantino movie. For reference, if you have ever been tempted to describe a work of fiction as “dark,” as in “a dark take on the superhero genre” or whatever, Friedrich Schiller is the guy who invented dark, so he knew a thing or two about fiction. (I think he would have enjoyed Failure Frame.)

Fiction is supposed to be enjoyable, but that is not to say that comedy is preferable to tragedy, or that every story needs a happy ending. In the presence of the most tragic circumstances, the feeling of enjoyment may still subsist, as Matthew Arnold put it; the representation of the most utter calamity, of the liveliest anguish, is not sufficient to destroy it: the more tragic the situation, the deeper becomes the enjoyment; and the situation is more tragic in proportion as it becomes more terrible. For reference, if you have ever been tempted to describe a work of fiction as “edgy” — you get the point.

I should add that when he described the purpose of fiction, Schiller affirmed that to get the most out of it, to attain the highest form of joy, you have to engage your mind (das Gemüt). Bright lights and loud noises he knew all about, but he knew about other things as well. So if somebody told you, schalte dein Gemüt ab, he did you a disservice. You can’t shut off your brain: it regulates respiration. Even if you could shut off parts of your brain, and keep the part that regulates respiration, you shouldn’t want to: you need a whole working brain to enjoy fiction to the fullest, and the better the work of fiction, the more you stand to gain from having every part of your brain switched on.

Great fiction stimulates the audience intellectually, emotionally, and viscerally. I am not even making a normative claim here: I am merely describing what it feels like to enjoy fiction — which, again, is what fiction is for. If you know the feeling, why settle for less? Why would I watch The Asterisk War when Chivalry of a Failed Knight exists?

If you don’t know the feeling — let me say this: to accomplish its goals, a review must be accessible to the reader, which necessitates that assumptions be made about him. I assume that the reader is familiar with Japanese animated television; I assume that he knows how to read; and I assume, necessarily, albeit perhaps optimistically, that he is willing to put at least some effort into understanding what he reads, as it is impossible to teach anyone anything which he is unwilling to learn. At times, the reader may even be asked to carry out independent research. For example, you should probably watch Failure Frame before reading a Failure Frame review, so you understand the references.

With that in mind, if you actually don’t know the feeling of enjoying fiction, and that it stimulates you the audience intellectually, emotionally, and viscerally, you may need to study that on your own time, as I doubt I can adequately convey the feeling in words. There is a limit to what verbal argument is likely to accomplish for readers absolutely lacking experiential points of reference. Art appreciation has a practical component. I encourage the reader to seek out a broad range of aesthetic experiences, and generally to try to become a literate, educated, cultured person, which will serve him well when watching anime and when doing other things. Having read King Lear, he may be less tempted to disparage works of fiction for being “dark” or “edgy.” Having read Samuel Johnson’s review of King Lear, he may be less tempted to look for “plot holes” in them.

I do want to say a word about intellectually stimulating fiction specifically, in case the term sounds intimidating to the anime-viewing public. The intellect is the power of thought, the faculty of knowledge and reason; that which pertains to the intellect we call intellectual. All fiction is intellectual to some degree. A cat can look at the screen, but it can’t follow the plot, even if the plot is about mice. It is impossible to appreciate Domestic Girlfriend without keeping track of how many of his sisters Natsuo is dating at any given time. Fortunately, everyone has an intellect and is therefore capable of deriving intellectual enjoyment from fiction, as well as general interest non-fiction.

In case my first example of intellectual content in fiction was unconvincing, consider any parody of any genre — let’s say Cautious Hero. The only way to enjoy Cautious Hero as a parody of an isekai fantasy adventure, which is what it is, is to know that there is such a genre and the sort of thing that usually happens in it; to recognize those tropes and conventions in the work and thus identify it as a member of that genre; to deduce from one’s knowledge of the genre what ought to happen next in the story; and lastly to be surprised and amused when something else happens instead. Every part of that process is intellectual, since it pertains to knowledge and reason. Without knowledge and reason, one would not be enjoying the anime as a parody, but rather as a straight isekai fantasy adventure — which is probably fine, but certainly not ideal. Now, notice how easy it is to enjoy Cautious Hero. Clearly, there is no need to be intimidated by the prospect of enjoying fiction, or general interest non-fiction, on an intellectual level.

I suppose there is no use dancing around this point, since we are already well into the first principles of art appreciation, and I know some of you are thinking it anyway: the enjoyment of fiction is subjective. In other words, it exists in the mind; it belongs to the conscious life or self; it pertains to the mental operations of the subject, which is you. That which is presented to the mind, the object of perception or thought, we call objective. But the objective phenomena of fiction — the color palette, the musical key, the frame rate, the page count, and so on — are relevant to the value of the work only insofar as they contribute to your enjoyment — which is, again, subjective. It will do you no good at all to argue that a work of fiction must be excellent because the notes are all in tune or the frames are all in order: enjoyment is the only thing that counts.

Here it may be necessary to reassure the anime-viewing public that criticism can still be done, that it is possible, in general, to help the reader appreciate a work of art, in spite of the fact just mentioned that enjoyment is subjective, and your experience of Failure Frame exists in your mind, and mine exists in mine, and we are two different people. That possibility rests on two other facts well known to the critical sciences.

First, everyone is the same: all of us partake of the human condition. Even if, for some strange reason which I cannot possibly guess, you do not want to see Stella Vermillion in thigh-high stockings, even if that form of enjoyment is not open to you, surely you have wanted to see, or can imagine wanting to see, someone wearing something, like an interesting hat or a box of mangoes. That is what makes it possible to communicate with one another, and in particular to relate to someone else’s subjective experiences.

By the way, that is also what makes it possible in the first place to create works of art from which the audience can derive meaning in a way that is clearly neither random nor unconstrained. Chivalry of a Failed Knight offers a rich variety of experiences to the viewer, but it is not possible to experience it as a documentary about stockings or as a recipe for crepes, unless the viewer is, strictly speaking, perverted or insane, and in that case his opinions about art have no merit and ought to be ignored by everyone.

Second, everyone is different: no two people experience anything the same way. They see it with their own eyes, understand it with their own mind, approach it with their own history and temperament. That is what makes it valuable to communicate with one another, and in particular to get to know someone else’s perspective — in theory.

Most people are not worth listening to, their perspectives not worth getting to know. Setting aside the perverted and the insane, who ought to be ignored by everyone, most people do not really have their own perspectives: instead, they regurgitate phrases they absorb uncritically from their environment, what Schopenhauer called the vague and obscure tissue of hackneyed and fashionable expressions produced instead of ideas by ordinary commonplace minds. If I wanted to know what the newspaper says, which I don’t, I would read the newspaper, which I don’t. Why would I want to receive the same opinions secondhand? Thoreau has told us to preserve the mind’s chastity in this respect: the mind, he says, can be permanently profaned by the habit of attending to trivial things, so that all our thoughts shall be tinged with triviality — and this is my point: what Schopenhauer and Thoreau have to say to us, about newspapers and other things, is still worth listening to (though not uncritically). What Schiller and the gang knew about fiction two or even three hundred years ago is still worth getting to know. You can read it right now: it hasn’t aged a day. Certain authors have written books that will always be worth reading, as long as there are people who know how to read. There are critics who see and understand, and who articulate what they see and understand, more clearly than other people do. That is what makes criticism valuable. Everyone is different; one important difference is that some of us have good sense and good taste.

In any case, the fact that enjoyment is subjective does not make criticism impossible: it merely makes criticism subjective, like every other act of communication. The good critic, in the words of Anatole France, is the one who relates the adventures of his own soul among masterpieces: objective criticism has no more existence than has objective art, and all those who deceive themselves into the belief that they put anything but their own personalities into their work are dupes of the most fallacious of illusions.

Anyway, I was talking about the purpose of fiction, which can generally be described as the enjoyment of the audience. The purpose of a given work of fiction can often be described more specifically by one or more genres: comedy aims to provoke laughter and merriment, horror aims to frighten or unsettle, and so on. Traditional systems of classification tend to break down if we try to feed them Finnegans Wake, but we aren’t looking for a system anyway, so that’s a problem for the bookstores. Strictly speaking, we don’t need to know the genre: we need to know the purpose of the work of fiction, and to do that, we only need to approach it with an open mind as a literate, educated, cultured person with a broad range of aesthetic experiences, and we were going to do that anyway. If it does fall neatly into one or more genres, feel free to make a note of it. It’s not as though any of you objected when I called Failure Frame a fantasy adventure.

Genres can help us appreciate fiction by setting accurate expectations. For example, My Dress-Up Darling and Starship Troopers are both enjoyable, but not in the same way. Romantic comedy does not serve the purposes of science fiction, in general, and so to watch My Dress-Up Darling expecting it to explore the consequences for humanity of scientific and technological advancement would be a bit like buying a toothbrush and expecting it to peel oranges. No one is going to shoot Marin into space, or clone her and make Gojou date both copies, no matter how many hilarious misunderstandings such a development would entail. If you must have multiple Marins — I don’t know, perhaps some future season of Science Fell in Love will deliver, and until then you can watch Quintessential Quintuplets. But My Dress-Up Darling is not Darling in the FranXX.

Or imagine watching Isekai Cheat Skill expecting high-stakes fantasy fight scenes, any minute now — in other words, without noticing that it was written and directed as a light romantic comedy with fantasy elements. Oh, wait: everyone did that. Everyone, apart from me and maybe one other guy, either failed to understand the artist’s intent on a basic level, making it impossible to appreciate the work of art — just to be clear, Isekai Cheat Skill is also not a difficult series to understand — or decided that making an honest attempt to appreciate it was less important than making up stupid reasons to look down on other people for enjoying it. Whether the shortcoming is intellectual or moral, the notable result of their attempt to classify fiction is a failure to enjoy it.

I remind you, the goal is to enjoy a work of fiction — why else would I be paying for a Crunchyroll subscription? If it serves that purpose to sort your fiction into buckets, to allow tropes and conventions to guide your thoughts and feelings, by all means do so. If it serves that purpose to do the opposite — to watch That Time I Got Reincarnated as the Demon Lord’s Step-Sister’s Panties as though it were the first-ever franchise to make use of that premise, even though you know for a fact you saw the same thing last year in Re:Pantsu — again, by all means do so. But surely it serves no purpose to complain that in season two, Marin still has not been cloned, nor has she yet been to the Moon.

On the other hand, and this is equally important, she could go to the Moon. If Marin Kitagawa studies diligently in school, and she joins the Japanese space program as an astronaut, she can certainly go to the Moon, she can do a lunar cosplay shoot and sign autographs for moon-men, and it wouldn’t be a problem if she did. Fiction is allowed to surprise you! Art can be free, spontaneous, and weird. A genre is not a straitjacket. Don’t let prejudice spoil your enjoyment of moon-Marin: picture her there, bouncing around under one-sixth gravity. If Yuuya can wrestle a bear, Marin can go to the Moon.

Truthfully, the classification of fiction, even at the level of genre, is not for beginners. It is only the exceptional reader, as T. S. Eliot said, who in the course of time comes to classify and compare his experiences, to see one in the light of others; and who, as his poetic experiences multiply, will be able to understand each more accurately. I see no evidence that the anime-viewing public at large derives from classification any benefit commensurate with the danger. I see them excoriating the excellent romantic comedy Gamers for not attempting to depict the day-to-day activities of a competitive gaming club, as if Bocchi the Rock were meant to be teaching the audience guitar. I see them rejecting Cautious Hero as an isekai fantasy adventure parody for surprising them with an interesting new take on an isekai fantasy adventure, rather than repeating the same joke for three seasons like KonoSuba did. I see them still trying to enjoy Oshi no Ko as a murder mystery after three seasons of soap opera, but I can’t blame them for that one.

Amateur taxonomists will pigeonhole art till it vanishes into an infinite intersection of genres, themes, tags, and demographics. Yes, I see you there, filing Oshi no Ko next to One-Hit Kill Sister under “reincarnation/incest/redhead.” They will invent spurious new genres just to debate which works belong to them. “Did Evangelion subvert the mecha genre?” There is no mecha genre: you’re thinking of military science fiction (and you should read Starship Troopers). And in spite of all that — having ground up every work of fine art into a powder, recorded its color, measured its density, and placed it on the shelf in a labeled jar — they still won’t notice that Solo Leveling does the same thing as Isekai Cheat Skill, minus the romance, comedy, likeable protagonist, and cute girls with enormous eyes. So what was the point of labeling those jars? What did we learn here?

Yet the people crave over-classification. “I just watched Harukana Receive, and I loved it! It was way more exciting than Frieren. Please recommend me another anime about teenage girls playing small team sports on a tropical island, where the main character is self-conscious about her height.” First of all, stop breaking into my house. Second of all, you don’t want another anime that happens to match certain attributes of an anime you once enjoyed: you cannot reasonably expect it to deliver a similar experience. The attributes have no predictive value, which is why Harukana Receive came as a pleasant surprise to you. What you want, quite simply, is another good anime, and you would be better off watching anime at random until one of them pleasantly surprises you again.

I can’t blame these people. What chance did they have? To an anime-viewing public, staring vacantly at screens or second screens, absorbing bright lights and loud noises, brains firmly in the off position, the first principles of art appreciation must appear to be recondite points, esoteric doctrines: intimidating enough. How were they supposed to know better? They were never taught how to enjoy fiction. Who indeed could have taught them? Gone is our intellectual aristocracy, that mutually critical artistic elite, great writers criticizing great writers, and what has taken its place? Consider what passes for English-language anime criticism today — and I promise we have indeed been making our way towards the topic of this review; in fact, we have just arrived.

I have seen a review of Failure Frame by a professional anime critic, whose name shall be concealed: let’s call him George Robertson. His review is mercifully brief and may be decomposed into four parts. First, he calls it a “revenge isekai,” by which he means it satisfies a long list of specific criteria that go well beyond simply being a story about revenge that takes place in another world: the hero has to be summoned there, along with his class, by a goddess, and then rejected, by the goddess and by his class, for not being strong enough, and the list goes on; indeed a list so long, of criteria so specific, that it may not be satisfied by any existing anime; although he says it with a sigh, as if Japanese animated television were positively inundated by them. Second, he states that he does not like revenge isekai. Third, he complains that Failure Frame, by not focusing on revenge, fails to satisfy his criteria, making it not a revenge isekai after all. Finally, he concludes, having seen only three episodes, that the show is not worth watching.

Now, this review is quite bad, but it is not atypically bad: it is only about as bad as one would expect from an anime critic, which makes it instructive. This critic has failed at the level of art appreciation; that is, before he even gets the chance to fail as an anime critic, he fails as an anime viewer. Art appreciation must precede art criticism! You cannot help anyone appreciate art until you learn to appreciate it yourself — but you cannot learn anything that you think you already know. He actually begins his review with a sigh, as if he’s seen it all before, but he hasn’t seen it all before; he may have never seen anything before. I see no evidence that he knows how to watch television.

Quite literally the least he could have done to review the series is to watch it with an open mind in the hope of enjoying it, which is not too much to ask, considering that a lot of people put a lot of time and energy into making it. Simply by calling it a revenge isekai at the start, he commits what E. M. Forster called the first crime of the pseudo-scholar in the field of criticism: that he classifies books before he has understood or read them. And then he aggravates his crime when he counts his admitted failure to identify the genre, his own erroneous over-classification, as a point against the work: it didn’t do what he expected it to do, and he’s an expert, so the story must be wrong. Why couldn’t the author have adhered more strictly to the genre the critic invented?

He commits a second crime against criticism when he condemns the genre, even if it is the wrong genre or a spurious genre. He doesn’t like revenge isekai: do I have that right? Reader, if Japan’s greatest writer and its greatest director were to team up and make a revenge isekai, would you refuse to watch that show, even for a minute, with a marginally open mind? Do you think it is prudent to engage with fiction in that way? One cannot condemn tendencies in art, in the words of Clement Greenberg; one can only condemn works of art: to be categorically against a current art tendency means, in effect, to pronounce on works of art not yet created and not yet seen, and to inquire into the motives of artists instead of results, although results are all that count in art.

What was George Robertson trying to achieve when he called Failure Frame a revenge isekai? What he did achieve, as far as I can tell, is to prejudice himself and possibly his audience against Failure Frame, but one likes to think that prejudice was not the goal, and we’ll try to treat the critic more generously than he treated the topic of his review.

One likes to think the goal, for himself and for his audience, was to better understand the work of art, specifically by comparing it to at least one other work. In the interest of generosity, set aside his definition, that long list of criteria which probably excludes every existing work: we’ll chalk that up to hyperbole. He was just telling a joke! It’s the same joke he told last season, and the twenty-eight seasons before that: the joke where he acts as though Japanese animated television were inundated by indistinguishable shows. We are not here to police jokes, but there must be some truth underlying the joke, or it isn’t hyperbole: it’s just incorrect. Surely, if we expand his definition, at least one other show will qualify as a revenge isekai — and I won’t drag this out any longer, because none of you will be even slightly surprised to learn that the show is Arifureta.

If Failure Frame is indeed a revenge isekai, if the label on the jar holds any meaning at all for us, then surely the experience of watching it must be remarkably similar to that of watching Arifureta. And yet, when I watch Arifureta, which I would rather not do, I find that the experiences are remarkably dissimilar. Choosing an example at random, in episode ten of Failure Frame, we find the hero on the run, cast out by his classmates, and sharing an intimate moment with a nice elf lady. In episode ten of Arifureta, on the other hand, we find the hero not on the run, risking his life to protect his classmates, and trying to ignore an irritating dragon lady, which causes her to become aroused.

If we go looking for a similar scene from Failure Frame, the closest match is in episode seven, in which we find the hero not yet totally on the run, still very much cast out by his classmates, and trying to ignore that the same elf lady has become overstimulated due to drinking soup — which is a superficial similarity, but the plot, the characters, and the tone are all remarkably different. Certainly the hero of Arifureta did not go on to kill an unarmed woman and make it look like a robbery! There isn’t enough overlap here that we can understand Failure Frame better merely by tossing it in a bucket with Arifureta and concluding that viewers who dislike one series will also dislike the other.

Of course it makes sense to compare certain aspects and elements of Failure Frame to Arifureta, as indeed I just did in three scene analyses, which will not be the last scene analyses in this review. It makes sense to compare Isekai Cheat Skill to Solo Leveling or Lookism, or to compare Lookism to Viral Hit or True Beauty. Comparison and analysis are the chief tools of the critic, as T. S. Eliot also said, but they are indeed tools to be handled with care, and not employed in an inquiry into the number of times giraffes are mentioned in the English novel; or, with respect to Japanese animated television, who was summoned where, and by whom, and with whom, and granted what ability.

Yes, Failure Frame and Arifureta obviously share certain themes: betrayal, banishment, and revenge. They share a handful of plot points, such as being summoned to another world and being underappreciated there. I’m sure, if you go looking for them, you can find a pair of scenes with similar lines of dialogue, or a pair of characters with similar hairstyles, or a pair of medieval towns with similar layouts. Then you can arrange your similarities in a long list and make it sound like Failure Frame is indistinguishable from Arifureta — in which case either you failed to understand Failure Frame on a basic level, making it impossible to appreciate the work, notwithstanding your list, or you decided that making an honest attempt to appreciate it was less important than telling a trite, insulting joke about it. Whether your shortcoming is intellectual or moral, the fact remains that Failure Frame is not much like Arifureta: not if you sit down and watch it.

Nor is Failure Frame much like Rise of the Shield Hero, So I’m a Spider, Fruit of Evolution, Moonlit Fantasy, Instant Death Ability, Level 2 Super Cheat Powers, Level 9999 Unlimited Gacha, Roll Over and Die, Banished from the Hero’s Party, Sentenced to Be a Hero, Redo of Healer, Re:Monster, Overlord, Tanya the Evil, Campfire Cooking, or Assassin Status. Nor is it much like any other revenge-themed, betrayal-related, or banishment-style isekai or isekai-adjacent fantasy anime that I can think of, although I leave the demonstrations as exercises for the reader, except for two, which I defer until later in this review. And if Failure Frame is indeed not much like any of those other things, then really, what do we stand to gain by calling it a “revenge isekai,” with or without the ostentatious sigh?

Why the sigh? Why is that in there? No, I get the joke: indistinguishable shows and so on. I have to bring it up again because it represents such a baffling failure or refusal to engage with fiction, although it is still only about as bad as one would expect from an anime critic. Why would he act as though Failure Frame, of all things, is so similar to so many other things that he cannot help but be bored by it? First of all, Failure Frame is in many ways a bizarre series, even by the standards of Japanese animated television: as if Harry Potter escaped the Dursleys only to be sentenced to death by Dumbledore, whereupon he began garrotting Slytherin rapists in the Hogwarts dungeon. Second of all, if he doesn’t like revenge isekai, if he has never yet enjoyed a story about revenge that takes place in another world, then why would he watch or read so many of them, for so long, that countless common innocuous plot points are forever ruined for him by association with lesser works, so he cannot now watch an interesting new series, even for a minute, without pattern-matching it to Arifureta or some such thing? Why train your brain not to enjoy things? I dropped Arifureta as soon as I got bored of it, and that way, a year later, I was able to be surprised, intrigued, and delighted by Failure Frame.

It really does seem as though this critic would enjoy anime more if he watched less of it, or at least if he did not feel obligated to offer his opinion on the first three episodes of every new anime. No one should watch that much anime! Most anime are not worth watching, as anyone who watches a lot of anime ought to know. I watch almost every new isekai fantasy adventure anime, for example, and I drop almost all of them almost immediately, because I can tell that they are not worth watching. In the words of Ezra Pound, the books that a man needs to know in order to have a sound judgment of any bit of writing that may come before him are very few. Generally, a literate, educated, cultured person need not watch very much of an anime to tell if it is worth watching, provided that he is familiar with the medium, and he need not watch very many anime to achieve such a familiarity, because he knows how to appreciate a work of fiction in general; whereas for those who do not know, and especially those who will not learn because they think they already know, no volume of anime consumption will suffice. They will spend a thousand hours of their lives staring vacantly at screens or second screens, and still be unable to tell a good anime from a bad one. To watch less anime is my advice to the anime-viewing public. Certainly no one should be bored by a whole genre of imaginative fiction! Let’s all try to do better than a professional anime critic.

Since I did question this critic’s ability to watch television, I think it is only fair that I state, for the record, how I executed that essential first step in the critical process. To watch Failure Frame, I sat down, alone, in a quiet room, at a comfortable temperature, under comfortable lighting, in a comfortable chair, at a series of times when I wasn’t sick or tired or distracted or otherwise unable to focus on the story, and I played each episode in order at regular speed on a screen of reasonable size while listening to the original Japanese audio at a reasonable volume on headphones of reasonable quality. Because I watched it while it was airing, I had to wait a week between episodes, and while I was waiting, I made sure not to watch a lot of other anime, to concentrate on this one. I consider these to be essentially the minimum requirements for making an honest attempt to appreciate a low-budget seasonal isekai fantasy adventure anime.

You have to be able to appreciate a work of art before you can criticize it. You have to be able to understand a work of art in itself before you can compare and classify it. You have to be able to speak intelligently about at least one “revenge isekai” before you get to formulate an opinion about all of them simultaneously as a genre. But what we have in George Robertson, evidently, is a professional critic who skipped all three steps, and believes that he has attained the pinnacle of criticism when in fact he has fallen off the ladder. The only thing he demonstrates is how to let prejudice spoil your enjoyment of fiction. Practically the only thing he does in his review is classify, and he can’t even do it correctly, and arguably it is not even criticism. Literary criticism, as D. H. Lawrence said, can be no more than a reasoned account of the feeling produced upon the critic by the book he is criticizing, and all this pseudo-scientific classifying and analyzing of books in an imitation-botanical fashion is mere impertinence and mostly dull jargon.

I realize that asking any of the above cited authors to weigh in on the work of George Robertson is a bit like dropping napalm on a mosquito. Still, it gets the job done, and you can’t say the mosquito doesn’t deserve it. In the same omnibus review, he rejected Too Many Losing Heroines, based solely on the first episode, on the grounds that he was afraid that the show would make him feel emotions by causing him to identify with the main character, which some would argue is desirable in a romantic comedy and drama; and after receiving some gentle pushback, he rejected it a second time, based solely on the second episode, on the grounds that a romantic comedy and drama is superfluous because pornography exists. He said those things out loud, in public, to thousands of people, all of whom are now slightly stupider for having heard them. I really was not exaggerating when I said I see no evidence that he knows how to watch television. In the interest of fairness, I give him credit for making his methodology clear: his review has no other merits, but at least it has not been diluted by a lot of extraneous japing.

Speaking of which, napalm shall also be deployed against a second professional anime critic: let’s call him Michael Bartlett. He too has fallen off the ladder, only this time in a clown costume. This critic has published several reviews of Failure Frame, although they are all essentially the same review: he has exactly one trick, which he inflicts on his audience with a mind-numbing monotony that is simply astonishing. Let’s take another step beyond bright lights and loud noises by learning to recognize the trick.

The attentive reader will have noticed that I have not written a plot synopsis of Failure Frame for this review. Of course I haven’t: if you’ve seen it, you don’t need one, because you know what happens; and if you haven’t, you don’t want one, because it would tend to spoil what happens. By the way, if you really haven’t seen the show yet, you probably should, assuming you want to get the most out of this review — but, fine, let’s say you refuse to watch the show, even for a minute, until you know, from this review, whether or not it is worth your time. Even in that case, what use would a plot synopsis be? If I summarize the plot, will that tell you how enjoyable the show is to watch? As far as a plot synopsis knows, The Asterisk War and Chivalry of a Failed Knight are the same show.

Why then do so many reviewers dedicate so much space to summarizing the plot of a work of fiction? To pad the word count is the obvious reason: generally, their reviews contain very little actual criticism, on account of the reviewers having done very little actual thinking. To be clear, summarizing the plot is not criticism, although it is closer to criticism than many other things that pass for criticism. Enumerating the various persons and institutions involved in the production of the work, for instance, is even further from criticism, although it may be of minor historical interest. Explaining how production difficulties caused a drop in quality between seasons one and two is very far from criticism: again, results are all that count. To criticize, to be a critic, the one thing needful is to watch the show and then articulate how one feels about it. Adding some discussion of a recent controversy involving the director and the backlash from the fans neither expands nor elevates the criticism: rather, it dilutes and degrades it.

Unfortunately, there is another reason, more insidious than wasting the reader’s time, to summarize the plot, and that is to indulge in what Cleanth Brooks called the heresy of paraphrase: yielding to a temptation to take certain remarks made about a work for the essence of the work itself, as though the anime were a statement, expressed more or less clearly or eloquently or beautifully, but amenable, in any case, to paraphrasing.

Now, it should be sufficiently clear that a description of the plot can never capture the experience of watching an anime, or even of reading a novel, which already takes the form of a description of the plot. Adding details to your plot synopsis, making it more precise, more accurate, more nearly complete, will not get you any closer to capturing the experience of the work. And why should any critic want to be precise, accurate, or complete, anyway? I have never tried to be any of those things in any of my reviews. If I have to report what happens in an anime, I report what I remember happening, and what does it matter if what I remember happening is not what happened? Whatever it was, I certainly remember whether or not I enjoyed it. Indeed, I often find that a false statement gets at the essence of the work more directly than a true one does, which is why I feel very free to lie in my reviews — without being wrong, of course. Lies can be truer than the truth. “Garrotting Slytherin rapists in the Hogwarts dungeon” is a truer description of Failure Frame than a long, boring list of things that actually happen in it, because Failure Frame is not boring, and neither are the outrageous lies I tell about it.

And yet, despite its obvious absurdity, few notions have as firm a grip on the minds of anime critics as the argument from paraphrase. Specifically, they seem convinced that if you can paraphrase something in such a way that the paraphrase sounds stupid, you have thereby proven that the thing itself is stupid; in other words, only a stupid thing ever admits a stupid paraphrase. Accordingly, the critics invest great time and energy into writing stupid paraphrases of various things, which they call “reviews.” None of them seems to have noticed that you can paraphrase literally anything in a stupid way.

Here: by the method of paraphrase, in the style of Edmund Wilson, I will write a short review of a popular anime; see if you can guess which one. “The principal feature of the franchise is an elaborate concocted myth that assumes a race of outlandish aliens or gods who are always playing tricks with time and space and breaking through into the contemporary world, usually somewhere in Japan. One of these astonishing aliens is a great amoeba with long eyelashes that flies to Earth by flapping its hands, while another takes the form of a stately octahedron, possibly leading some to wonder if the studio blew their animation budget on the amoeba’s eyelashes. Against this grotesque menagerie, whose force fields render them immune to all conventional weaponry, the planet’s last line of defense is a small, cowardly boy, the drunk chick he’s shacking up with, her pet penguin, a clone, and a vitriolic German. Such nonsense would look very well on the covers of the shonen magazines, but it does not make good adult viewing.”

I can do this all day. “A book randomly falls out of the sky and then a guy eats potato chips while writing in the book and somehow that makes people have heart attacks so the police get involved.” No franchise is safe. “A girl gets stabbed in a closet for some reason and then a guy randomly starts getting text messages about it and he ends up melting a banana in the microwave.” Is this helping anyone? What did we learn here?

Any work of fiction can be made to sound stupid by that entirely spurious method of paraphrase, as if the critics had invented an infallible device for earthquake detection that emits a loud beep whenever there is going to be an earthquake, and also emits a loud beep whenever there is not going to be an earthquake. Their loud beeping tells us nothing about the value of the work of fiction because no plot point is inherently good or bad, as in every case it is the execution that counts, in the total context of the work, when we approach it with an open mind in the hope of enjoying it. Of course you can try to be clever about paraphrasing stupidly, maximizing ambiguity to avoid outright falsehoods, and so on, but the end result is still a stupid paraphrase, only now, instead of merely being stupid, it is also dishonest. So although the fact that a story has been paraphrased in a stupid way tells us nothing about the story, it does tell us something about the paraphrasing critic, particularly what that critic thinks about his audience.

Now let me show you the trick. Grass is never green, in the eyes of the pseudo-critic, if it grows in low-budget genre fiction: an isekai fantasy adventure anime, for example. Instead — and I apologize for this — “the very vegetation in this four-alarm dumpster fire sinks to new lows of hot garbage, as each leafy blade, or should I say ‘edge,’ which our self-insert Kirito-clone protag-kun drags his bargain-bin trench coat through on his way to a hot date with yet another interchangeable elf waifu, is the exact shade of a leprechaun’s unwashed underpants after three weeks of bad burritos” — and here the pseudo-critic would insert an image of a leprechaun eating a burrito, in case the joke was not yet sufficiently clear — “though you won’t find a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow of cringe, except of course a cauldron of power-fantasy anthrax mixed with wish-fulfillment cancer that you can guzzle down while you pray for merciful death.”

Picture the same level of description (contrived, overwrought, half-baked, formulaic, sophomoric, pretentious, maundering, and mendacious), delivered in the same tone (effete, smug, glib, and unctuous), for every element, no matter how innocuous, of a given work of fiction. I shouldn’t even call them jokes, because a joke is structured comedy, not rambling nonsense and a hope that it somehow becomes funny through sheer volume of words. And now picture the same review, every season, forever. I am still not exaggerating, by the way: this critic, Michael Bartlett, disparages Failure Frame for using ordinary colors, like green or mauve or burnt sienna; colors he does not seem to find risible in any other context. Ordinary colors become risible for the purpose of disparagement. It is among the most ignoble acts of pseudo-criticism I have seen yet.

At the risk of belaboring this point, in a Frieren review, the color of the grass would go unmentioned, or its subtle shade of green would be held up as an example of how the smallest details in the background art enrich the intricate world-building, or some such thing. After all, Frieren is fairly well animated, as well as remarkably safe, which, in the eyes of the pseudo-critic, makes it — and I apologize for this — the expression is likely to cause the reader physical pain — “objectively good.” Therefore, everything about it must be good, and only good things ought to be said about it, and never mind that the world-building is not intricate in the slightest. In a Failure Frame review, on the other hand, the color of the grass, along with every other aspect of the franchise, is discovered to be arsenic sprinkled with war crimes and syphilis, because Failure Frame is remarkably outrageous and the animation cuts corners, which makes it “objectively bad,” so everything about it must be bad, and only bad things ought to be said about it.

Is it dark? Call it “edgy,” as if King Lear did not exist. Light? Call it “wish fulfillment,” as if the happy ending were a recent, unwelcome development in fiction. Either way, make sure to call it “unrealistic,” as if isekai fantasy adventure anime were meant to be works of literary realism; as if One-Hit Kill Sister were a sequel to Look Back in Anger.

Does it remind you of something else? Then it’s “yet another entry in this increasingly crowded subgenre, where it seems as though each year brings us a fresh batch of the same old predictable slop.” Does it do something new? Then it’s “a bizarre choice that will leave viewers scratching their heads, puzzled as to what this convoluted mess was even trying to be.” You can actually do both at the same time, even though it makes no sense, if the title of the work is similar to an otherwise unrelated series. How often was Berserk of Gluttony tied to Berserk, as if the comparison were in some way illuminating?

Talking about the title is an excellent way in general to pad the word count and waste the reader’s time. For example, you can write out a long Japanese title in full, followed by a long English translation of the same title, then add a remark drawing the reader’s attention to how long the title is: the same pseudo-joke, every season, forever — as if Hamlet had not been printed as The Tragical History of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Make sure to throw in a lazy pun, as well. “Just from the title, you know that Failure Frame is going to be a failure.” No, you don’t, you idiot, because it’s just an English translation of a Japanese title, and the Japanese love ridiculous titles, like Neon Genesis Evangelion.

Did you have a hard time keeping track of what happened, because you weren’t paying attention, and it wasn’t spelled out for you with continual exposition and flashbacks? “The plot — if you can even call it that, considering I’ve seen more coherent narratives in a toddler’s crayon art — has more holes than Swiss cheese.” Is there more than one attractive female character, which is true of every anime ever made? “More ‘cultured’ viewers will no doubt find some redemption for this cringe-fest in its wide assortment of waifus, distinguishable only by their bust size, as their personalities could charitably be likened to different flavors of soggy cardboard.” I just saw someone write that about Isekai Cheat Skill, a show where every female character has a strong, unique, and clearly defined personality. No one could possibly mistake Kaori for Kaede or Lexia for Luna!

None of it needs to be true; none of it needs to make sense; none of it needs to be fair, and none of it ever is. Strip away the stale and repetitious drivel, “dumpster fires” and “elf waifus” and all the rest, the same every season: what’s left, insofar as it makes any meaningful claims at all, invariably falls apart under the gentlest cross-examination like toilet paper in a tropical storm. Here are some other things people have actually written about Isekai Cheat Skill, which I think is still the best case study in the anime-viewing public’s inability to watch television. “The characters are so one-dimensional, you can describe their whole personality in a single sentence.” Right, you can describe the personality of any fictional character in a single sentence: Light Yagami is a clever, ambitious killer, and so is Macbeth, for that matter. What did we learn here? “This is a show with no story, no plot: literally nothing happens.” Isekai Cheat Skill is a reasonably tightly plotted comedy, and they act as though it were Finnegans Wake. I didn’t think it was possible to fail this badly to appreciate a work of fiction, but somehow the anime-viewing public manages. I still can’t blame them, I suppose: if they have failed to see further, it is by giant clowns standing in the way and falling off the ladder onto them.

I should probably spell this out, in case any of you were curious, or did not believe me when I said I wasn’t exaggerating: what Michael Bartlett finds so risible about Failure Frame is the inclusion of a poison spell that turns the victim’s skin dark purple before he dies. The critic argues that the children’s television character Barney, the dinosaur, is also purple in color, which proves that Failure Frame is bad — or that it is similar to Barney and Friends — or that Barney is made out of poison — I’m realizing now that it may actually sound less believable when I spell it out. They’re not even the same shade of purple: Barney is magenta. He’s also a dinosaur, and by that I mean, it’s not as if the spell conjures up a fuchsia dragon, or turns its victims into lavender iguanas, either of which is conceivable in fantasy, and might be a plausible connection to Barney. Really, the only connection is that both of them are purple. There is a character in Frieren with purple hair who eats purple grapes: is she therefore also Barney-like? One could argue that she is more Barney-like. Also, Barney and Friends is not a bad television show: it is merely a children’s television show, and its use of the color purple is not what makes it unsuitable for adults, so what does it matter if Fern is Barney-like in shape and color?

You can practically see the writer of the joke deciding not to do criticism, not to tell us the truth about fiction, because he would rather be funny, although he isn’t funny. He knows where the starting line is, he walks right up to it, and then he drops his pants.

The trick works on everything, from Moby-Dick to Madoka Magica. If you learn nothing else today, learn this: you can make anything sound stupid by describing it in a stupid way. Hamlet has a ghost and a pirate ship; the Divine Comedy is a self-insert isekai. But the pseudo-critic chooses to employ the trick only against art which he has decided to disparage in exchange for ad revenue. I find this irritating because I, for one, actually enjoy anime, I do not consider it to be “trash,” and I respect its creators enough not to use incredibly dishonest tricks to disparage their work. But let me show you the trick one more time, for something marginally less preposterous than using ordinary colors.

The same critic has singled out Failure Frame as a prime example of an irredeemable, unwatchable franchise, the worst sort of garbage, asking, in effect, why anyone would sit through a single minute of it. After all, he argues, literally every fight scene is just the main character casting the same spells, over and over. What more is there to say? As you can see, he paraphrased the story in such a way that it sounds extremely stupid.

Of course, Death Note is a franchise where literally every fight scene is just the main character writing short messages in a notebook, over and over. It also uses ordinary colors, which we already know makes it risible trash. So why would anyone sit through a single minute of Death Note? What could possibly be the appeal? Let’s investigate.

Death Note is a thriller: a detective story told from the point of view of the criminal, a clever, ambitious killer armed with a single supernatural ability that obeys fairly well defined rules. A “fight scene” presents to the audience a puzzle: how the criminal can exploit the rules of his supernatural ability to achieve his goals without getting caught. Great, now we understand Death Note. Let’s apply a similar analysis to Failure Frame.

Failure Frame is a fantasy adventure, but it is also a thriller, a peculiar quality it shares with The Most Notorious Talker from the following season, although the two shows have little else in common, Failure Frame being moreover a romantic comedy and the other moreover a crime drama. In any case, as with Death Note, the hero of Failure Frame is a clever, ambitious killer armed with a handful of supernatural abilities that obey fairly well defined rules, and each of its four lengthy fight scenes indeed presents a puzzle. It’s not easy to bring down a whole squadron of Black Dragon Dragoons, you know.

According to Michael Bartlett, these fight scenes are poorly executed because at some point the hero breaks one of the rules. The critic obviously wasn’t paying attention to the plot, though, because the hero spends much of the first half of the season, leading up to his confrontation with Civit Gartland, working specifically towards overcoming that limitation on his abilities: researching magic, collecting materials, crafting items, and avoiding suspicion — not because he received a quest from the goddess, the king, the local adventurer’s guild, the student council president, the United Nations, or any other authority figure demanding that he overcome it in order to stop the demon lord from blowing up the Moon, or some other standard fantasy adventure errand to which no character can object and no viewer can relate, a conflict purely mechanical — but because the hero identified one of his own limitations and was driven to overcome it in order to achieve the goal he set for himself: to kill God. To be blunt, Touka Mimori from Failure Frame exhibits clearer motivation and greater volition than anyone from Frieren, another series where the main characters cast the same spells, over and over.

Moreover, Failure Frame also includes a second type of fight scene, in which it is quite simple for the hero to bring down his opponents, or I should say victims, because it is barely a fight: “paralyze, poison,” and drag the bodies into the bushes. Again, Michael Bartlett has nothing but derision for these scenes: in the eyes of the pseudo-critic, it is absolutely necessary that every violent confrontation last long enough for participants on all sides to use a wide variety of special moves, or it simply isn’t a good work of art. I refer him to the many hundreds of existing anime featuring relatively evenly matched opponents clanging swords together for an appropriate amount of time before the one that isn’t a main character is cleanly slain by a slash to the chest with no blood shown. He can watch those instead, and leave Failure Frame alone. It is doing something else.

No one is less interested in producing loud noises with metal implements than Touka Mimori, who doesn’t even own a sword. The man is an ambush predator, much like the crocodile: elegant, efficient, supreme in his domain. The crocodile doesn’t slash at you: one great lunge, the jaws snap shut, and he drags you down to the bottom of the river and grips you tightly in the cold and the dark while you struggle, uselessly, for a short time, and drown without fanfare. It’s beautiful, in a way. We should respect him for it.

Anyway, the point of those abbreviated fight scenes is character development: unlike Frieren and the monster of the week, we actually learn something about the hero as a person when he pokes his snout above the water and snatches another gazelle. To be blunt, Failure Frame has much better character development than Death Note, although that isn’t saying much, because Death Note has essentially no character development.

Look, we can clearly see — assuming we have been paying any attention at all to the plot — assuming we are awake, our eyes are open, and so on — that Touka Mimori is dealing with emotions that stem from killing people with magic spells. That topic is covered pretty thoroughly by the man’s internal monologue. Over time, we watch him convince himself that he is indeed a ruthless killer motivated solely by revenge. By the way, Hamlet does the same thing: “O, from this time forth, my thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!” However, we also watch him (Touka, not Hamlet) go out of his way to spend time with Seras Ashrain, an attractive young elf lady with big round breasts and magic sword powers. He keeps her around, Touka says, so he can take advantage of her magic sword powers in order to exact his revenge. She means absolutely nothing to him on a personal level, and he has no interest whatsoever in her sexy body or even her nice-smelling hair — although they do eat dinner together every night, then sit on the bed in the room they share, with the pet they jointly own, talking about the past, the future, and their feelings. Any superficial resemblance to growing emotional and physical intimacy is purely coincidental, according to Touka. However, the attentive viewer may suspect that Touka Mimori, like Tristram Shandy, is not a reliable narrator.

Was I really needed here? Be honest: is Failure Frame so difficult to understand that no one, apart from me and maybe one other guy, can see what is plainly in the text? I had thought it was among the easiest to understand. It has two types of fight scene, and in neither of them was it necessary that anyone should cast a wide variety of magic spells. To my knowledge, no one casts a magic spell in Tristram Shandy, and it turned out fine. Whatever Touka Mimori gets up to — whether he is outwitting a dangerous opponent, slaughtering a helpless miscreant, or sharing an intimate moment with a big-breasted elf — surely none of the man’s activities is rendered inherently more interesting to the audience if “paralyze, poison” becomes “paralyze, poison, lightning bolt, laser beam,” or for that matter if he does them while dual-wielding katanas. I refuse to believe that the anime-viewing public is incapable of understanding Failure Frame. I insist that you switch your brains back on. Let’s all try to do better than a professional anime critic.

I mentioned this a couple of times along the way, but here I do want to make a special, dishonorable mention of perhaps the single most degraded form of pseudo-criticism, which is also one of Michael Bartlett’s specialties, as it can easily be incorporated into paraphrastic trickery, and which he chooses to employ against Failure Frame with his trademark monotony: namely, to allege insulting motives of the author, the audience, or both using the terms “self-insert,” “power fantasy,” “wish fulfillment,” and so on.

In case it needs to be said, reviewers who use those terms, typically for the purpose of disparagement, don’t actually know anything about the author of the work and what motivated him to write it, nor about the audience and what motivated them to watch it. The critic is unqualified to tell us how anyone feels about anything, except of course how he himself feels about watching the show, and he would rather do anything else than tell us that, like summarize the plot for thirty minutes in a smarmy tone of voice.

By the way, speaking of audiences and what they expect to get out of a work of fiction, Schiller observed, and this is still about two hundred years ago, that everyone expects from the imaginative arts a certain liberation from the bounds of reality: we all want to delight in the possibilities and give free rein to our fantasies. Even he who expects the least from anime, according to Schiller, wants to forget about his job, his ordinary life, his individuality, and to feel himself in extraordinary situations, to revel in the strange combinations of chance, and moreover, if he happens to be a more serious-minded anime viewer, to find on screen a moral order to the world (moralische Weltregierung) which he does not find in real life. Clearly, the man knew a thing or two about fiction.

Now, I should point out, in the interest of fairness, since I did say he was unfunny, that Michael Bartlett does occasionally provoke laughter when he tries to analyze fiction. For example, it was comical that after he denigrated Failure Frame, he praised Assassin Status, which does the same thing, minus everything that was good about Failure Frame. Indeed, Assassin Status is so obviously a worse version of Failure Frame that accurately comparing the two series could serve as a simple qualification test for an anime critic.

Consider the setting. Clearly, Failure Frame and Assassin Status belong to isekai fantasy, because they take place in another world: an extraordinary, fantastical land, filled with magic, monsters, and elves with big round breasts. More precisely, the main character has been summoned to another world by a process that is difficult but not necessarily irreversible, whereas in many other series, he reincarnates in another world after dying in our world, and in a few series, he can go back and forth between worlds through a permanent portal. There are storytelling opportunities in every detail of that setting. For example, since the main character was summoned, he might some day choose to return to our world, or choose not to return, or be forced to return, or discover that he can’t return, or discover that it was a lie that he can’t return — you get the point. The critic should ask himself, in general, what narrative purpose the setting serves. As an exercise, one might imagine either series without isekai, without anything like isekai, a version where no one goes anywhere: no one goes abroad, or into space, or back in time; no one wakes up from a dream; even My Fair Lady is forbidden, because no one crosses over into another social class. How much of each series would thereby be lost?

In Failure Frame, there is a scene in which Touka Mimori and Seras Ashrain return to their room at night. Touka has forgotten to feed his pet, and the restaurants are closed. His only recourse is to use the magic item he received when he was summoned, which is not a sword that cuts through steel, nor a wand that shoots lightning bolts and laser beams, but a pouch that produces random foods and beverages and doubles as a lamp. In this case, it produces a cheese tart in a clear plastic bag. Seras is an elf from another world. She has never seen a clear plastic bag before and is quite enamored with it: how it shines in the candlelight; how it crinkles in her hands; the exotic lettering inscribed upon it, chiizu taruto, which of course she cannot read. Touka watches her admire the clear plastic bag, and a breeze blows in from an open window, and strands of her long golden hair blow across her face. “Maybe it seems more alluring because it’s not from your world,” he says, regarding the clear plastic bag that used to contain a cheese tart.

You know what, I’m not going to explain this scene, which is worth more than three seasons of Reborn as a Vending Machine put together: to deploy artillery of that caliber against insects of this size would be overkill even by my standards. If you really don’t get what’s happening here — why it’s funny, why it’s charming, why it’s essential that the object of admiration be mundane, why he feels conflicted, and what feelings he’s rationalizing — it might be time to admit that Failure Frame was too difficult for you.

The Tempest does the same thing, by the way. Miranda grows up on a desert island, and when she meets some isekai’d shipwreck survivors, unaware that most of them are bad people, she says: “How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, that has such people in it!” It’s a memorable line. As for the rest of The Tempest, what can I say? It has some memorable lines. It has a lot of memorable stage directions. It’s certainly fantastical. Miranda’s father, the Duke of Milan, who is also, for some reason, a wizard, manipulates her into marrying Ferdinand, one of the survivors, which isn’t difficult to do, because she’s never seen an attractive man before, and Ferdinand is so traumatized that he only cares if she’s a virgin. They get engaged immediately, then after half an hour they go on a date, where they bond over a game of chess. Miranda meets the gang, everyone sort of forgets about the villain, and the play ends there. To be blunt, Failure Frame has a much better romance than The Tempest.

I wasn’t supposed to be comparing Failure Frame to The Tempest. I was supposed to be comparing it to Assassin Status, and to be honest, I was avoiding it: I do not remember anything that happens in Assassin Status, mainly because it was excruciatingly boring, and for the same reason I do not want to rewatch any of it, although I guess I have to. If what I have to say about it does not make sense, I assure you it is not because I am trying to make it not make sense, but because it actually does not make sense. Also, I started skimming after episode four because frankly I don’t care and it doesn’t matter. With that in mind, consider how Assassin Status makes use of its otherworldly setting.

In Assassin Status, the protagonist, Akira, after being summoned to another world, is granted assassin abilities because, in our world, he was a quiet student and none of his classmates noticed him — just like an assassin! But he wasn’t just like an assassin, or even much like an assassin, for which his classmates should be grateful. Arguably, he was more like a librarian, and we even see that he enjoys reading alone, so where are his librarian abilities? His most important ability summons magic shadows, which is not obviously related to being a quiet student. Granted, he can also turn invisible and climb sheer walls to come and go unnoticed, which does have something in common with his school life, but more often he fights in open fields in broad daylight, or walks undisguised down crowded streets with his attention-grabbing companions, and his name and face are widely known because he often inserts himself into public events. And it’s not as though being granted assassin abilities was a ruse by the antagonists to manipulate him into becoming an assassin, because firstly, as far as I can tell, none of the antagonists demands that he assassinate anyone; secondly, he has little difficulty abstaining from assassinating anyone; and thirdly, he does assassinate someone in the opening scene of the first episode, and it doesn’t seem like he was falling for any ruse.

In short, the connections between Akira’s formal title, his actions or role in the story, his supernatural abilities, and his personality or school life are fairly tenuous. Reader, if you wanted to write a story about a quiet student who acquires supernatural abilities based on his personality or school life, wouldn’t you put at least a little bit of work into following through on that idea? Just commit to the premise: look at The Wrong Way to Use Healing Magic. Suppose Akira slipped away in episode one (which happens), and he was never seen again (instead of immediately being seen again), but he intervened in secret at critical moments to help the designated hero’s obligatory adventuring party carry out their standard fantasy adventure errand. Or maybe one other character would know that Akira exists, and she could be a big-breasted elf. In any case, that could be an interesting new perspective on a fantasy adventure, with a novel set of challenges: picture Akira stowing away on the hero’s ship before the party sails north to fight the demon lord. His classmates become the antagonists in a sense, with weaknesses to be exploited: picture Akira using a cheering crowd as a distraction while he sneaks on board, or counting on the hero not to remember the crew’s faces. No, really: picture Akira in a chef’s hat and a false moustache, serving the hero clam chowder while the hero hits on the one elf girl who knows who the ship’s new cook is. Isn’t that slightly more interesting than what we got? And it would give Akira’s classmates a reason to exist in the story. I may be belaboring this point, but it’s difficult to discuss Assassin Status without rewriting it scene by scene because it does practically everything wrong.

In Failure Frame, of course, from Touka’s point of view, his classmates do very much become the antagonists in a sense — that being the bound-and-gagged-in-the-trunk-of-his-car, shallow-grave-in-the-woods sense — and we get more than one interesting new perspective on a fantasy adventure. Touka has been cast out by an unjust system, while some of his classmates conform to that system enthusiastically, some of them conform to it reluctantly, some of them try to fix it from the inside, and some of them get dragged along by more assertive classmates. It commits to the premise: a group of students has been dropped into an extraordinary situation, which is bringing out the best and the worst in them. It’s an evergreen theme, more about exploring the human condition than about casting a wide variety of magic spells. To my knowledge, no one casts a magic spell in Lord of the Flies. The way Failure Frame introduces his classmates and sets up conflicts by making everyone violently hate one another is admirably clear, direct, and vigorous, without a single wasted scene; and every classmate has a strong, unique, clearly defined, and one might even say dramatically heightened personality.

For comparison, in Assassin Status, there is a scene in which Akira’s classmates visit a copy of Japan that for some reason exists in the fantasy world. They admire traditional Japanese architecture, wear traditional Japanese clothing, soak in traditional Japanese hot springs, and eat traditional Japanese food. Technically, this would not be possible were they not in another world: although they are exclusively doing things that they would be doing anyway at home, they are doing those things with a mild feeling of relief because they had thought those things would be unavailable in a fantasy world. On the other hand, the scene appears to serve no purpose whatsoever. It might have been interesting if some of them had become upset at the sight of pseudo-Japan, as a reminder of being trapped in another world. Instead, they act like tourists: no conflict, no character development. They don’t even seem interested in the bizarre coincidence that a copy of Japan somehow exists in another world, and no one brings it up again.

Now, are these unfair comparisons? No, not really: I could have chosen practically any scene from Failure Frame, taken any aspect of that scene except perhaps the animation quality, and compared it to practically any scene from Assassin Status, and the results would have been the same. Indeed, because essentially every aspect of Assassin Status is bad enough to illustrate my point, and because, naturally, I do not want to study a bad show any longer than is necessary, I have intentionally chosen to highlight a problem, namely its failure to commit to the premise, that seemed amenable to a brief analysis, meaning it isn’t even close to the most baffling and nonsensical thing about the show.

I wanted to say a word about the romance in Assassin Status, since I already brought up the cheese tart. Unfortunately, the plan fell through, because I was never able to find a romance in Assassin Status. I’m told there is one, and I think at one point they even get engaged, but having tried more than once now to watch the show, I still can’t tell when or why they get together, and frankly, at this point, forcing Amelia Rosequartz to stand next to Seras Ashrain and her cheese tart would feel a bit like shooting the prisoners.

For his part, Michael Bartlett has insisted, over several reviews, that Assassin Status is refreshing and thoughtful, with great characters and amazing action, a prime example of how good isekai fantasy can be, one of the best shows of 2025 — but none of those things is true, which anyone can see in the simplest and most direct way by watching Assassin Status. Most likely, this professional anime critic saw the fairly well animated fight scene in the first episode, responded strongly to its bright lights and loud noises, rushed out his ill-conceived opinion for the sake of ad revenue, realized on some level that he had made the same mistake he makes every season, and with slight regard for the truth elected to double down on it; much like the year before, when he denigrated every aspect of Failure Frame, down to the color palette, based on his first impression of the animation budget. His shortcomings are intellectual and moral. His criticism is obsolete before it airs. He finds himself in the position of arguing that an obviously bad anime is among the best, and an obviously better one than that among the worst.

To be clear, it is not merely that Failure Frame is obviously better than an obviously bad anime to which it is superficially similar: I was only proposing a simple qualification test for anime critics, which I knew none of them would be able to pass. Failure Frame is actually a pretty good anime, and I can say that with certainty because I watched it more than once, which I certainly would not have done were it not at least pretty good.

Once again, I have no interest in watching bad anime and the baffling and nonsensical things they do, although I sometimes have to watch them for the sake of my review. If an anime proves to be bad, I will drop it instantly. I have dropped anime in the middle of the first episode, and I have dropped them in the middle of the seventeenth episode. I dropped Oshi no Ko during the opening credits of season three, episode one, when I realized that there is a limit to how much one can overproduce every single moment in the lives of attractive teenage celebrities living in the world’s safest country before the whole thing becomes slightly embarrassing. I dropped Code Geass at some point after the episode with the cat (which was pretty good), when I realized that, however heroic the viewer’s efforts to suspend his disbelief, there is a limit to how idiotically the main character can behave before it becomes impossible to see him as a brilliant strategist. I dropped Assassin Status in episode four, as I said. I dropped Arifureta in episode four of season two, which was generous of me. And I watched Failure Frame more than once.

For the record, most Japanese animated television series are bad. Most works of fiction are bad. Most works of fine art are bad. At all times, in all places, from ancient Rome to modern Tokyo, most of them are just plain bad. I do not mean that there is nothing good about them: there is always something good about them. Isekai Cheat Magician is practically unwatchable, but I would never claim the voice acting wasn’t convincing or the girls weren’t cute. The voice acting is always convincing; the girls are always cute. Indeed, as we have already explored in some detail, one of the pseudo-critic’s favorite tricks, which is one of his worst crimes against criticism and against art in general, is unconditional, indiscriminate derision. These people will even attack the voice actors.

When I say that a work of art is bad, I only mean that the bad in it so far outweighs the good that the good is not worth the time and energy required to extract it. Most books are not worth reading, with all the world’s books to choose from, and limited time and energy to read them with: one never runs out of better books, especially considering that a good book can be read more than once. Why indeed would I watch The Asterisk War when Chivalry of a Failed Knight exists? Yes, I know I’ve seen it four times already: this will be the fifth. Or maybe I won’t watch it again, because I can just remember the story and enjoy it that way. No, I haven’t seen the new season of Frieren, although I did find the time to rewatch all of Goblin Slayer, and of course Failure Frame, and for that matter One-Hit Kill Sister. I assume there is something good about the new season of Frieren, and about Code Geass, and about Isekai Cheat Magician, but I will never know, for the same reason that I will not pick up nickels off the floors of public restrooms.

And when a book is not worth reading or an anime is not worth watching, what other word than “bad” should one apply to it? All that ought to be said about most things is that they are bad and not worth one’s time — although undoubtedly some industrious pseudo-critic is even now preparing a review of great length, mostly plot synopsis, of some anime deserving no review longer than this one: it’s bad and not worth watching.

Certainly most isekai fantasy adventure anime are bad and not worth watching: a true statement of no interest to the critic. In every medium, in every genre, most works of art are bad — but some of them are good, and they deserve our recognition. The ratio of good to bad is no concern of ours: criticism is not to be carried out statistically. Had there never yet been a good isekai fantasy adventure anime in the whole history of the universe — if we all pretend that Trapped in a Dating Sim does not exist, or that it is not much better written than Frieren — there could still be a good one next season. Would you refuse to watch that show, even for a minute? Would you paraphrase it in a stupid way? It is the critic’s first duty to welcome everything that is good, as Matthew Arnold also said. The pseudo-critics believe otherwise, apparently, because their treatment of certain genres in the medium of Japanese animated television has been brutally unfair, as if they had discovered an infallible method for not enjoying fiction. Of course I have in mind that less-than-beloved class of low-budget genre fiction, fantasy adventures and death game thrillers and step-sibling romances alike, consigned at the start of each season to the guilty-pleasure dumpster, to be formulaically vilified for all time.

Failure Frame, as I said before, is one of those series whose reception is so at odds with the actual content of the show that people might as well be talking about a different show altogether. To some, the first episode of Goblin Slayer is one long uninterrupted sex crime, and the rest of the series is Bocchi the Rock. To me, the first episode appears to be a remarkably well balanced dark fantasy adventure, perfectly setting the tone and the stakes for the rest of the series, which for two seasons now has been a remarkably consistent dark fantasy adventure. I find it difficult to account for such a disparity in a charitable way, because anyone with eyes, a brain, and a Crunchyroll subscription can watch Goblin Slayer and see that I am right and everyone else is wrong. Was it unclear to them what threat the goblins pose because it was shown explicitly only once? The same threat is clearly implied and referenced in every arc, if not every episode. Were they disappointed because they hoped it would be shown in every episode, a different girl victimized each week? That would be redundant, self-indulgent, and distasteful, although, to be fair, the same terms apply to most critics. Are they making up stupid reasons not to like the show so they can feel smart? Oh, wait: that one isn’t charitable.

Other series are misrepresented to their advantage. The Eminence in Shadow is an over-the-top parody of an isekai fantasy adventure anime that takes all the tropes and turns them up to eleven — according to some critics. Actually, The Eminence in Shadow is an isekai fantasy adventure comedy that takes several tropes and turns them up to six or possibly seven. It has never been the most outrageous show even in its own season, as it aired alongside Akiba Maid War and then Ragna Crimson. But I already reviewed that series, and attempted to puncture a critical consensus so over-inflated, so untethered to the facts, it had floated free of the Earth and was drifting somewhere nearer to the Moon. And now I find myself plunging into oceanic depths to dredge up Failure Frame.

I was going to explain how I was able to tell that Failure Frame is a pretty good anime, or in other words what it was that made me keep watching it, and then even made me rewatch it; or equivalently to explain how I am able to tell that other anime are bad, or in other words what it is that makes me drop them and then never look at them again.

That is a question that is remarkably easy to answer incorrectly; for example, by citing popularity. It will do you no good at all to argue that something must be good because it is popular or bad because it is unpopular, as it should be sufficiently clear that many popular things are bad, and many good things are unpopular. If Robinson Jeffers and William Blake and Walt Whitman agree that Survival Game Club is good, and a billion idiots agree that it is bad, then the score, as far as thinking persons are concerned, is not a billion to three, but rather three to zero, because an idiot’s opinion about art is worth nothing, and a billion times nothing is still nothing. Again, most people are not worth listening to, and neither are the people earning ad revenue from those people. Neither the judgment nor the instincts of the uneducated can ever come to have more than the very slightest value in the determination of what is true or false in art, said Arthur Symons: the democracy of intellect is impossible; there we must always find an aristocracy; there the stultifying dead-weight of equality must forever be spared to us.

Another way to fail to explain why a work of fiction is good is by listing various good things about it. Again, there is always something good about it: anime girls are always cute. However, a twelve-episode season of television, four hours of screen time, does not rise to the level of watchability merely by the inclusion of cute girls. Cute girls are not to be examined till the whole anime has been surveyed, as Samuel Johnson said.

Indeed, one of the pseudo-critic’s favorite tricks when he is called upon to praise bad fiction, such as when doubling down on one of his mistakes, or even when he is called upon to praise good fiction that he simply cannot be bothered to review properly, is to list various purportedly good things about the work, some of which probably are good, all of which put together cannot possibly make the work as a whole good, but with the implication that the work is so good that time and space will not permit the critic to list everything good about it, and accordingly the reader will have to make do with a random sample. “Before I get to the amazing characters, can I just briefly rave about the kerning on the end credit font, the understated xylophone during the sex scenes, and of course the color of the grass?” He will never get to the “amazing characters.”

“The premise is intriguing!” A premise is worth nothing: the difficult thing is to follow through. How often have we seen a new series attract an audience with an “intriguing” premise and a “promising” first episode, amounting to some exciting new object to be reincarnated into, and perhaps a fairly well animated fight scene; exhaust its creative impulse almost immediately; and coast, on the strength of a premise, and an audience that won’t cut their losses, for eleven more progressively less “promising” episodes?

“But the fight scenes are really well animated!” A lot of bad shows have well animated fight scenes. A lot of bad shows have badly animated fight scenes that, despite lacking any consistent relationship to physical reality that might create tension for the viewer by conveying danger to the characters, move just fast enough, with just enough detail, that the inattentive viewer may be tempted to call them well animated: Wind Breaker, for example, in which I saw the main character get his spine snapped in half by a knee strike in one frame, and then stand upright, apparently unharmed, three frames later.

“It has a great soundtrack!” Fine, I’ll listen to the soundtrack. I don’t have to watch the show, right? “But the opening credits” — Let me stop you there: this is beneath me. A lot of bad shows, truly dire shows, practically unwatchable shows, feature an excellent song, typically during the credits; they do not thereby rise to the level of watchability.

If I wanted to list various good things about Failure Frame, I certainly could. I already talked about the romance, which is excellent. The fight scene puzzles are suspenseful enough, particularly the confrontation with Civit Gartland. The summoning goddess is delightfully evil, theatrically malevolent, like something out of a German fairy tale. Really, all the villains are wonderfully loathsome: a first-rate rogues’ gallery. The Holy Watchers, essentially throwaway thugs, are far more memorable, and far more fun to hate, than the primary antagonists of Clevatess and Wistoria put together, and I can say that without even watching Wistoria. Also, each of those things is consistently funny.

Seras Ashrain is funny the way a cat is funny: elegant, deadly, and intermittently silly. Eve Speed actually is a cat, and her hobby appears to be baiting Seras into doing silly things. Apart from those two goofballs, it’s funny when the villains die three seconds after introducing themselves: “paralyze, poison.” Thankfully, the goddess is immune to “paralyze, poison” and lives on, comically evil. Funny too are those seemingly random sprinklings of Japanglish, as in the wonderful phrase assault accel — which is probably unintentional, but Japanese audiences seem to enjoy such things, so it is only fair that we foreign audiences should get to enjoy them too, albeit not exactly in the same way.

However, although all of those things are indeed good — and although it might follow that a superficially similar series which fails to deliver on the same things is therefore not good — none of them is strictly necessary to make Failure Frame good. Indeed, the show was good right from episode one, and only one of those things is in that episode, and while I do adore her, the goddess on her own isn’t enough to get the job done, for the same reason that one does not attack with the queen before developing the minor pieces: even best girl Vicius couldn’t salvage Assassin Status, for example. Rather, all of those things, the romance, the fight scenes, the villains, and even the comedy, insofar as it is intentional comedy, along with a few other good things about the show, express conflict, compelling conflict: a quality present in Failure Frame, and for that matter in Isekai Cheat Skill and Trapped in a Dating Sim, as obviously as it is absent from Assassin Status, and for that matter from Isekai Cheat Magician and Reborn as a Vending Machine.

I understand that all of those are isekai fantasy adventure anime, and a vocal portion of the anime-viewing public is convinced that all or almost all of them can accordingly be dismissed, probably without even watching them, as about equally bad, on the grounds that all or almost all of them are about equally “generic,” meaning superficially similar to one another. Just look at this list I’ve prepared, of characters with similar hairstyles and medieval towns with similar layouts. What more is there to say? Another Japanese teenager summoned to a European-style fantasy world with elves: clearly generic, and therefore bad. If only a Vietnamese pensioner had ridden a surfboard to an underwater world with sea-elves: that would have been much less generic, and therefore superior.

Yes, it turns out we have another excellent way to utterly fail to differentiate between good and bad works of fiction. If you have ever been tempted to describe something as “generic,” bear in mind these two additional facts well known to the critical sciences.

First, every work of fiction is the same: from Gulliver’s Travels to Sword Art Online, all of them do the same thing — except the avant-garde, which do something else, and must be dealt with separately, which we don’t need to do today, because Failure Frame is not Finnegans Wake. How are they the same? Something happens: that’s a story. It causes something else to happen: that’s a plot. It affects someone: that’s a character — who, for all we know, might even be an attractive young elf lady with big round breasts. “I just watched an anime with a story, a plot, and one or more characters, and I loved it! Please recommend me another work of fiction where something happens to someone.”

Second, every work of fiction is different: it offers a unique aesthetic experience. That Time I Got Reincarnated as the Demon Lord’s Step-Sister’s Panties, for example, features an attractive young elf lady with big round breasts and long green hair, whereas Re:Pantsu features an attractive young elf lady with big round breasts and long silver hair: a clear point of difference. Also, they have different names and they say different lines. “I just had a unique aesthetic experience, and I loved it! Please recommend me another” — you get the point. Come to think of it, watching either series a second time, knowing what happens, would provide the viewer with another unique aesthetic experience.

If you zoom in close enough, the relevant distinctions get lost in random noise; if you zoom out far enough, no distinctions are possible. Everything is generic, everything is individual. The ideal in literature, as Coleridge observed, consists in the happy balance of the generic with the individual: the former makes the character representative and symbolical, therefore instructive, because it is applicable to whole classes of men; the latter gives it living interest, for nothing lives or is real but as definite and individual. For reference, Samuel Taylor Coleridge is the guy who invented the willing suspension of disbelief, and in the very same book, for that matter. Notice that Coleridge got the answers exactly right two hundred years ago, and no one has improved on them since.

I did say I would try to stop using heavy artillery as pest control, and it really should go without saying, and without dropping Biographia Literaria on anyone, that a list of any number of superficial similarities in the story, the plot, the characters, the setting, the size of an elf’s breasts, or any other aspect of fiction one could mention will not prove that two works deliver essentially similar experiences, making one of them redundant.

It should also be sufficiently clear that endless new works of fiction can still be written about Japanese teenagers summoned to European-style fantasy worlds, and all of them can be interesting, with or without elves, or even “sea-elves.” For God’s sake, the word “European” encompasses thousands of years of history and millions of square miles of territory, from the Greek Dark Ages to the Dutch East India Company, and in the time between, speaking of “generic,” thirty-seven armies laid siege to Constantinople. How lacking in creativity must authors and critics be to feel intolerably constrained by the continent of Europe? Not that fantasy fiction belongs to any particular place: rather, it belongs to what Swinburne called the same impossible age of an imaginary world, and to what Grote called a past which never was a present, a region essentially mythical.

But whether the fiction be fantasy or not, a similarity to existing fiction, the presence of yet another elf or siege of Constantinople, by itself will not make it bad. Nor will its absence by itself make it good: no facile novelty, no random walk through the space of fiction, no school of sea-elves, that is, no superficial dissimilarity from some existing work, or from every existing work, will prove that some new work is worth one’s time. Many things can be interesting, it may be difficult to come up with things that cannot be interesting, but nothing is inherently interesting — not even dual-wielding katanas.

Is Evil Lord of an Intergalactic Empire better than most isekai fantasy adventure anime? Certainly. Is it better because the hero is an adult who was sent to a futuristic world, rather than a teenager who was sent to a medieval world? No, it is better because it is better written: the setting and the premise were well chosen to suit the story, the plot, the characters, the themes, and so on, and all of those things were well chosen to suit the setting and the premise, and it all comes together nicely. Now, does it make sense that the hero is fighting pirates in space with a sword in a robot? Sure, because all of those things are entertaining, and we already heard what Swinburne and Grote had to say about them. Would it make more sense if it had fewer pirates, or fewer robots, or fewer pirates and more robots, or if it took place in sixteenth-century Indonesia with the Dutch East India Company? I trust that, by this point in the review, the attentive reader understands the first principles of art appreciation well enough to answer these questions himself, or better yet to ignore them entirely. Meanwhile, Demon Lord 2099 also puts an adult in a futuristic world, but that series is not well written, so what does it matter how old the hero is, or where he is, or what type of elves he encounters there?

Certainly the reason most isekai fantasy adventure anime are bad cannot be that they present no new ideas, because all of them present at least one new idea, even if it is a sea-elf or an exciting new object to be reincarnated into; and most of them run out of things to do with their idea by the middle of season one, having thoroughly exhausted their creative impulse, and having nothing left to do apart from expanding the hero’s video game skill tree or harem, thus making them unwatchable, notwithstanding the “intriguing” premise and a list of any number of astonishing first-episode novelties.

George Robertson — yes, I’m digging him up to hang his corpse — has insisted that Reincarnated as a Sword was one of the best shows of 2022, on the grounds that one of the characters was likeable. I pull up episode one. A man has been reincarnated as an inanimate object. Five minutes later, he acquires a new skill, granting him the power of flight, making him no longer inanimate. I skip to episode six. The flying sword has acquired another new skill, a surprisingly powerful one: it’s a skill that lets him steal other people’s skills. Now he can steal all the skills! I turn off Reincarnated as a Sword.

Some of these shows earn a higher rating for having a likeable character or including a fairly well animated fight scene in the first episode — as if either of those things could make four hours of television worth watching after it runs out of things to do. Some of them earn a grudging respect for having a premise so inane, “it knows exactly what it’s doing” and “it never takes itself seriously” — as if either of those phrases expressed an idea about art or pointed to something real in the world. If Reborn as a Vending Machine “knows exactly what it’s doing,” then what it’s doing must be to produce uninteresting scenes. I heard someone say that Keijo, or possibly Akiba Maid War, “never takes itself seriously,” which is exactly the opposite of what both of those excellent series do. No wonder they were so impressed by The Eminence in Shadow: after all, “it knows exactly what it’s doing,” and “it takes all the tropes and turns them up to eleven,” and “it’s bad on purpose,” not to mention “so bad it’s good,” and other ways to fail to do criticism.

This analysis is by no means exclusive to isekai fantasy adventure. Every new romantic comedy has its one new idea, even if it is an exciting new combination of a hobby and a hair color for the female lead: the pink-haired girl who raises bees, the green-haired girl who juggles knives, the blue-haired girl who loves to eat — no, I’m only joking: Anna Yanami is absolutely delightful. Unfortunately, most shows which Anna Yanami does not appear in run out of things to do with their idea by the middle of season one.

To be clear, by “things to do” I mean compelling conflicts. Someone wants to achieve something, and we know why; that is, we relate to them emotionally: we can imagine, through the power of empathy and the human condition, being that person, or being ourselves in their position, and wanting the same thing or something similar. Even if you do not want to see Stella Vermillion in thigh-high stockings — you get the point. But something is standing in their way, and we know how; that is, we understand the problem and the kind of approach that is likely to solve it, or at least we recognize the logic of the solution once the author has revealed it to us. And thus we get invested in watching that character, to whom we relate, working towards their goal in a way we understand, possibly suffering setbacks, ultimately either succeeding or failing. When the obstacle is another character, and we relate to them too, and we understand both sides of the conflict, often a fairly high level of emotional complexity can be attained.

Bear in mind, conflict is not necessarily violent, nor is violent conflict inherently more interesting than non-violent conflict: the critical sciences know of no law that requires the intensity of feeling to scale with the kill count. To my knowledge, only snacks die at Anna Yanami’s hands. It’s less about special moves than about relatable characters with comprehensible motivations and goals bouncing off the world and one another.

Nor is conflict limited to season-length conflict: it can be the length of a scene, or the length of a line of dialogue — although that line can express the central conflict of the series. If Clausewitz conceives of war as a duel on a larger scale, made up of countless duels, conceive of fiction as a conflict on a larger scale, made up of countless conflicts. A boy wants to impress a girl, and he hears she likes baseball, so he tells her how good he is at baseball, but his friend overhears him and makes him join the baseball team, and now he has to win the championship, and it turns out the girl actually likes tennis, but along the way he falls for the girl who plays shortstop for the rival team. To count, scene by scene, every conflict, large and small, internal and external, from talking to a girl to choosing a girl to winning a baseball game, would be an act of pseudo-criticism.

It is not enough that the characters be likeable, that they be good people, that we enjoy having them around, because a twelve-episode season of television does not rise to the level of watchability merely by the inclusion of likeable characters. “What about slice of life? What about cute girls doing cute things?” Fine, I have just pulled up a random scene from a random episode of Yuru Camp. Naturally, girls are going camping. One of the girls is asked about the dinner, the special camping dinner, that she plans to make for them that night, but she refuses to answer, except the other girls can easily deduce that it’s curry, although they won’t admit they know, to spare her feelings. Another girl tries to impress the other girls by offering to carry the heavy camping gear uphill, but the plan falls through, as we cut to her exhausted, sweaty face. Notice how many times I used the words “but,” “except,” and “although” to denote opposition in this one brief scene of a “slice of life.” Now, the girls are indeed cute, sweaty or otherwise — I would never claim the Yuru Camp girls stop being cute when they get sweaty — but the girls are also trying to achieve things and coming into conflict with other cute, sweaty girls.

I remember an experience I had not very long after I started watching seasonal anime, which for me proved instructive, and for the reader may prove relatable: an experience, at first, of intense boredom. I was watching Shikimori’s Not Just a Cutie, episode seven, the cultural festival, trying to squeeze one drop of enjoyment from it. At around the six minute mark, according to my Crunchyroll watch history, I gave up — forever, in fact: I have never finished the episode — and put on My First Girlfriend Is a Gal instead, the special episode, coincidentally also a cultural festival, which I hadn’t seen before. And the feeling of relief, which I vividly remember still, was immediate and overwhelming, because finally I was watching a romantic comedy that actually tries to deliver on the core appeal of its genre by constructing scenes of comedy around romantic conflict.

(I leave those scene analyses as exercises for the reader; neither is very demanding. By the way, I appreciate the reader’s patience and diligence thus far, since this review has covered a number of subjects of possibly less-than-obvious relevance. I assure you, all of this material is essential to a full understanding and appreciation of Failure Frame.)

There comes a point in many series, probably in most, at which attentive viewers will ask themselves a question: what is this about? To be clear, it is not a question that can be answered by a plot synopsis, or a list of interesting facts about the “magic system,” and who was summoned where, and by whom, and with whom, or an argument that the pink-haired girl is likeable, or that her apiary is realistic: the question pertains to conflict. If no answer is forthcoming, the conflict either does not exist, has not been made clear to the attentive viewer, or does not matter much to him, probably because the characters are unrelatable or the obstacles incomprehensible; which is a problem, because compelling conflict is the primary quality that serves to differentiate between good and bad, between watchable and unwatchable, for fantasy adventures and death game thrillers and step-sibling romances alike, indeed for all but the most avant-garde or experimental works of fiction — and Shikimori’s Not Just a Cutie is not Naked Lunch.

Rise of the Shield Hero, for example, begins with a Japanese teenager being summoned to a European-style fantasy world, which of course is standard; and then, what is very much not standard, he is falsely accused of a terrible crime for political reasons, exiled from the city, and forced to buy a slave merely to fill the ranks of his party, because all of his “shield hero” abilities are purely defensive, and someone has to hit things with a sword. Now, all of those things, I don’t mind telling you, were rather interesting to me. I was ready to get invested in the shield hero: to watch him struggling to survive in the wilderness with only a shield and a sexy raccoon-girl slave to protect him; resisting, for a while at least, her attempts to seduce him, as she waggles her bushy raccoon tail — I swear this is in the show — at least, I don’t think I dreamed it; — gradually uncovering the truth about the various competing political and religious factions in the kingdom; some day possibly getting revenge against his accusers, or choosing not to get revenge, or maybe the raccoon would get revenge — you get the point. Notice what all of these interesting or at least potentially interesting things have in common, and I don’t mean Raphtalia, although the sexy raccoon-girl slave certainly spices things up, because you can’t eat a bowl of spice for dinner, can you? No, the quality I have in mind is conflict.

And yet, by around the middle of season one, in what I can only call an act of betrayal by the author, as if I had been reincarnated as an anime critic, then banished from the kingdom of compelling conflicts by an exceptionally cruel and wicked goddess, I found myself watching the shield hero party face off against some sort of armored dinosaur, a mindless monster with no motivation other than hunger, a problem that can be solved by hitting it with a sword or a magic spell, a conflict purely mechanical. To be fair, that dinosaur did look pretty cool. Frieren fought some dumb plant, which is way less cool. On the other hand, do I care about a cool-looking dinosaur? No, not really. I was ready to get invested in several things, especially that sexy raccoon-girl slave he bought, but I didn’t really get much of any of those things, so I lost interest and dropped the show.

Now compare Isekai Cheat Skill to Reborn as a Vending Machine. Obviously, both of them are low-budget isekai fantasy adventure anime from 2023. Both of them spend the first episode introducing the hero and establishing the setting and the premise by moving him from our world to a fantasy world — all of which is perfectly fine and standard for the genre. It is in episode two that we get to find out what each show is actually about.

In Reborn as a Vending Machine, if I recall correctly — and no, I am not going to check, because I don’t care and it doesn’t matter — the mayor asks the vending machine and his friend to help defeat an ogre or some other mindless monster which is threatening the town, which of course both of them agree to do immediately, free of charge. There is a brief moment in which the vending machine, in his internal monologue, expresses uncertainty as to his ability to defeat an ogre, but the feeling doesn’t last and it doesn’t lead anywhere. So what is this even about? What is it doing, or trying to do? Why am I watching it? The answer appears to be: we get to see a vending machine fight an ogre.

In Isekai Cheat Skill, there is a scene — an exceptionally easy one to analyze, assuming we are awake, our eyes are open, and so on — in which Kaori visits Yuuya at school to invite him to attend her elite private academy. Yuuya demurs, arguing that he does not deserve it. Yuuya’s siblings try to steal his spot, but Kaori shoots them down instantly. Finally, her butler suggests that she continue the conversation elsewhere. This scene, which is all of three minutes long, exhibits no fewer than five conflicts: Kaori against Yuuya, Yuuya against himself, the siblings against Yuuya, Kaori against the siblings, and the butler against Kaori. One of them is resolved immediately, as Kaori agrees to leave; one of them is resolved later in the episode, when Yuuya agrees to go to Kaori’s school; two of them are resolved later in the season, when Yuuya’s siblings try to get revenge on Kaori; and Yuuya against himself is the central conflict of the series. The show achieves in three minutes what Vending Machine fails to achieve in three seasons.

Failure Frame is filled with conflict, and for that reason it is never dull. Touka hides his identity from Seras, and Seras hides her identity from Touka, and Touka discovers her identity, and tricks her into revealing it. Class president Ayaka negotiates with Vicius to protect the class, and the goddess torments her, and abuses a cat-girl, and makes the cat-girl train the class, and the class looks down on Ayaka. Holy Watchers with heroic blood hunt an elf princess, humanity’s strongest champion searches for someone who can challenge him, summoned heroes conform to the will of the goddess, and a curse cult is on the rise — but never mind that now: how is it that some random guy named “Mad Emperor Falkendotzine,” who appears in one scene, which is only three minutes long, is so interesting that I remember him vividly when all memories of a shield hero have faded? Well, because Falkendotzine spends his scene exchanging barbed remarks with an evil goddess, thus sandbagging a vital strategic conference: in a word, conflict.

While its conflicts proliferate, the plot of Failure Frame remains mercifully coherent: no armored dinosaurs, no magic tournaments — none of the hallmarks of a slavishly faithful adaptation of source material that was written one chapter or issue at a time and not planned out; just four arcs of three episodes each, each one featuring a fight scene puzzle, with occasional “Mad Emperors” and other amusing detours. Both the structure and the pacing of the season are similar to Goblin Slayer, and both series are noticeably well structured and well paced, in the sense that neither of those aspects is noticeable at all, leaving nothing to complain about: nothing rushed, nothing stalled.

I do have one complaint that is perhaps worth mentioning: the seemingly random use of three-dimensional animation, not necessarily for the fantasy monsters, which are at least consistently drawn that way, and arguably look appropriately monstrous against the two-dimensional style; but certainly for scenes of dialogue, where it is always very distracting. How heavily should this complaint be weighed? As I said, it is impossible to prove that a work of art is good by listing various good things in it, and similarly it is impossible to prove that a work of art is bad by listing various good things which could have been in it but aren’t. Ultimately, I don’t much care that Failure Frame is not well animated, because I can just close my eyes and imagine it being well animated. I don’t need lavish animation to enjoy fiction: I learned that from reading books. I only need to bring the story to life inside my own imagination; to do that, I only need the raw materials; and the story, plot, characters, setting, and conflict all look fine to me.

Do I have only the one complaint? Only the one worth mentioning. Yes, to call Failure Frame a masterpiece would surely overstate the case. As a single season, I would not say it equals either Trapped in a Dating Sim or Let This Grieving Soul Retire, although of course they all do fairly different things. As a franchise, we haven’t seen how it ends yet (although that hasn’t stopped me calling Chivalry of a Failed Knight a masterpiece).

But to say that Failure Frame exemplifies why Japanese animated television, or some of it, is worth watching, why it is interesting, is extremely justifiable, in my opinion. The series is frequently surprising; frequently bizarre; frequently awkward and clunky too, but I forgive it that, because where else can you find anything like it? Who would even attempt to produce a live-action Failure Frame for mainstream Western television? For one thing, the special effects would probably cost ten million dollars an episode, while the budget for the anime fits comfortably on a gift card. And what would a mainstream Western television adaptation do with Seras Ashrain, with Civit Gartland, or with best girl Vicius? I refuse to even attempt to picture the casting. No, this had to be an anime.

I forgive it all its flaws. I already forgave the cheap animation. I don’t mind that a cute romantic comedy moment shares an episode with the murder of an unarmed woman. I don’t mind anything about Failure Frame. I happen to think it’s hilarious that one of the classmates announces the name of his special move, Draconic Buster, while the words “Draconic Buster” appear on the screen. It has the unmistakable courage to commit: it has ideas and it runs with them, so it never needs to subject us to an armored dinosaur or a magic tournament. One could argue that some of its ideas are imprudent — but I won’t do that here. I, for one, will absolutely take another season of “paralyze, poison” over lavishly animated, critically acclaimed timidity; anime you can watch on the train.

I heard someone who calls himself a professional anime critic state — I can’t even say “admit,” because apparently he saw nothing wrong with it — that he often watches the anime he reviews at double speed, fast-forwarding through them; and after receiving some gentle pushback, he defended that practice, which might be the equivalent of a restaurant critic running a meal through a blender before tasting it, on the practical grounds that as a professional anime critic — that is, someone who earns his living by reviewing anime — he had so many new anime to review in any given season that to sit down and watch each episode at regular speed would take up too much of his time.

There are several things I could say about this, and apart from the unprintable ones, probably the most obvious is that whatever else such a person may be doing with his time, certainly he is not “reviewing” anime, any more than a restaurant critic can be said to “review” a steak and a glass of wine when he gulps them down in puree form.

Imagine not knowing how to watch television: how to get art into your brain through your eyes and ears. Imagine fast-forwarding through a thousand hours of it, all bright lights and loud noises, neither understanding nor enjoying it. Imagine being forced at gunpoint to watch every new anime and turn it into a labored, unfunny screed about dumpster fires and elf waifus. I think I just described one of the Nine Circles of Hell. Reader, save yourself from the suffocating slime, the boiling pitch, and the lake of ice!

Criticism, according to Matthew Arnold, is an endeavor, in all branches of knowledge, to see things as they really are. The critic obeys an instinct to try to discover the best that has been known and thought and said in the world, and to value all knowledge and thought and speech as it approaches the best. In turn, by propagating the best, criticism tends to create an intellectual environment in which, because the best ideas prevail, the creative power can flourish. Finally, the best spiritual work of criticism is to keep us from self-satisfaction, to lead us towards perfection, by making our minds dwell upon what is excellent in itself, and the absolute beauty and fitness of things. And that pursuit of perfection by means of getting to know the best he calls culture.

I bring this up — and it was going to be the starting point for my review, except other things got in the way — because, in spite of everything, I remain optimistic that there is, apart from me, maybe one other guy or girl out there, one attentive reader, to whom this notion of the nature and function of criticism will speak, and who might thereby gain some new appreciation for one less-than-beloved isekai fantasy adventure anime. As I said before, I refuse to believe that the anime-viewing public is wholly incapable of understanding Failure Frame. Probably nine out of ten, perhaps ninety-nine out of a hundred, are so incapable, but surely one in a hundred of you has eyes that see, a mind that understands, and a Crunchyroll subscription with the age restriction switched off. To such a reader I address my review, which is now, in spite of difficulties, coming to a close. I hope you enjoyed some part of it; I remind you that Failure Frame should not be a difficult series to understand; I urge you to do better than a cat; and I wish you luck!

Probably the simplest way to show that a work of fiction is not a masterpiece is to find another work of fiction that does the same thing substantially better. For example, we know The Eminence in Shadow is not a masterpiece because Let This Grieving Soul Retire also exists. The shows differ in too many ways to mention; they still do the same thing, and it is not the same thing as Bocchi the Rock or Big Order or Bikini Warriors. It doesn’t matter that one of them has a higher budget. It doesn’t matter that one of them is an isekai and the other isn’t: anything can be an isekai; the Divine Comedy is an isekai. And it doesn’t matter that one of them has an overpowered main character and the other doesn’t — except insofar as including that trope to the detriment of the story is one of the ways in which The Eminence in Shadow is worse at doing the same thing.

So what does Frieren do? Our goal, for the moment, is simply to describe the show, not to praise it or condemn it, and once again I am not looking for a plot synopsis or a list of Frieren facts. It makes no difference, for our purposes, whether Frieren be an elf, a robot, a vampire, or some other weird thing. Failure Frame also has an elf: that doesn’t make it similar to Frieren. Himmel can be a reincarnated Japanese high school student for all I care: what we need to know is what the work of fiction is trying to accomplish.

The show belongs to the fantasy adventure genre, with a quasi-medieval setting. The tone is relatively serious, but with regular moments of levity. The main characters are conventionally heroic: they’re good people, and they’re good at what they do, which is mostly fighting monsters. They experience internal conflict, regretting the past and feeling uncertain about the future, or about their own feelings, which they may be unwilling or unable to communicate. There are long, quiet scenes depicting daily life in a fantasy world, as well as elaborate action sequences depicting fantasy battles. Finally, the scale of the story is small in relation to the backstory: many years ago, a great hero saved the world, is what a character might say while gathering firewood.

As a neutral description of Frieren, the above should suffice. It’s tempting to add some information about the antagonists: they’re irredeemably evil; not everyone appreciates the threat they pose; the main character specializes in slaying them — famously so, and for personal reasons. It’s not terribly clear that these interesting Frieren facts are essential to what the work is trying to accomplish, but we can still keep them in mind.

With that understanding, the better version of Frieren is obviously Goblin Slayer. It is clear that Goblin Slayer does the same thing, meaning it matches that description; it remains only to show that Goblin Slayer does it substantially better, and we are in no danger of running out of examples, because Goblin Slayer is better than Frieren in every way that counts, from world-building to romance. I’ll give you an example so cut and dried, you could teach it in a writing class, and I’ll be attacking where the enemy is strongest: never mind fight scenes and fan service, this goes directly to dialogue and character development — I’m driving this panzer right through Frieren’s front line.

In Goblin Slayer, after Priestess loses something important, there is a scene in which Sword Maiden visits Goblin Slayer in his room at night. She sits on the bed, smiles, and tells him that crying girls want someone to comfort them. Goblin Slayer tells her he already knows that. Sword Maiden, no longer smiling, gets up and walks toward the door. Goblin Slayer brings up an unrelated anecdote about losing something as a child. Sword Maiden smiles again, sits back down, and touches him lightly before leaving.

This scene, which is two minutes long, exhibits appropriate depth and complexity, being neither superficial nor inaccessible. Granted, as Albert Jay Nock said, there are ranges of intellectual experience that are open to some and not to all. Nevertheless, I am confident that any mentally normal, emotionally mature adult can appreciate this scene. Who among us hasn’t had such a conversation, and then lost their virginity?

The scene is roughly ninety percent subtext; let me spell it out so even Frieren can understand. Sword Maiden’s remark has a double meaning: she’s referring to herself. But Goblin Slayer won’t give her intimacy, his reply alluding to trauma well known to the viewer, and she feels rejected. But he doesn’t want to drive her away, so he tries opening up to her, which he can only do in his awkward Goblin Slayer way — I mean, he spends the entire scene sharpening a knife and never once removes his helmet. But Sword Maiden gets it: she appreciates that he’s making an effort for her; it’s progress.

Bear in mind, this is an action scene. It’s not a fight scene: just to be clear, if Sword Maiden is visiting Goblin Slayer in his room at night, and you hear fabric tearing and furniture breaking — that’s not fighting. But it is an action scene: you can tell by how many times I used the word “but” to denote opposition while describing the subtext. Action scenes are about conflict, they are not necessarily violent, and violence without conflict is just spectacle: another pointless tournament arc or monster of the week.

In short, Goblin Slayer succinctly expresses conflict between well developed, relatable characters through actions, including speech, with appropriately complex subtext. I happened to remember one particular scene, but the show is full of that sort of thing.

For comparison, in Frieren, there is a scene in which a man is fighting a giant wasp or something, and he has to get Frieren to fight it for him. All of a sudden — I swear this is in the show — at least, I don’t think I dreamed it — he says to himself: “Oh no! I won’t be able to explain to Frieren how to defeat this giant wasp, because we never established trust through mutual understanding!” But then he thinks back to a time, many years ago, when a wise old sage told him: “By the way, if you ever find yourself fighting any sort of large winged insect, it isn’t necessary to establish trust through mutual understanding. After all, Frieren — have you met Frieren? Frieren the elf? Well, anyway, if Frieren happens to be around, she can defeat winged insects of all sizes very easily! I only bring it up because it might be relevant someday.” And the flashback gives him the courage to fetch Frieren, who easily defeats the giant wasp.

Now, is this an unfair comparison? Probably. Am I misremembering one or two minor details? Definitely! Sorry, it wasn’t a wasp: it was a bumblebee. Look, when you drive a panzer through the front line, you get a few dents in the fender; you end up hosing a few elves out of the treads. I only brought it up because I remember watching it and thinking: someone should really track down the author and teach them the Japanese word for subtext — which I guess is just sabutekisuto. Then I rewatched Goblin Slayer, because Frieren reminded me how much I enjoy not having things spelled out for me.

To be fair, the Frieren scene also includes a fairly well animated fantasy battle: lots of animation frames, camera movement, bright lights, loud noises — that sort of thing. It’s not as good as My One-Hit Kill Sister, but it’s fine. The climax, when Frieren turned herself into an F-16 and fired air-to-air missiles at the giant bumblebee, was a pretty cool moment, I guess. To me, however, the scene is notable mainly for other reasons.

First, the dialogue is astonishingly superficial: I trust this is sufficiently clear. Second, Frieren’s travel companions are in no way endangered or even inconvenienced by her unwillingness or inability to communicate her thoughts and feelings; if they were, it might compel someone to change in some way, driving character development. Third, no sooner is a conflict introduced than we are told how it will be resolved, and then it is resolved in that way. Each of those is a flaw on its own; when you combine all three in one scene, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the scene serves no purpose apart from spectacle: a fairly well animated battle against the monster of the week.

“But what about the part where Frieren stares into the distance with a look of quiet contemplation? Surely that scene is positively oozing with subtext! We can really feel the character development as she grapples with internal conflict.” Okay, first of all, which scene? Frieren has twenty-eight episodes, and as far as I remember all twenty-eight of them include that exact scene. Whatever juices it may have been oozing in episode one, surely by episode twelve that particular grape had been squeezed dry.

Frieren is remarkably repetitive. It’s not enough that we learn that Frieren the Slayer’s favorite spell summons a purple iguana or some other quirky thing that doesn’t slay anyone, implying depth to her character: no, that would be Goblin Slayer storytelling, where every scene is unique, and you have to engage your brain. Instead, we need to be told, through a series of flashbacks, that it was also her boyfriend’s favorite spell, and before that it was her favorite teacher’s favorite spell, and Frieren once used the spell to save a child from drowning in a well. Not everything has to be related to one spell! We are well past the point of diminishing returns on implied depth, and surely there must have been a more effective way to rescue a drowning child than summoning a purple iguana. Any one or two of those would have been fine: her favorite spell can be a random spell her boyfriend liked; it implies he changed her. As it stands, we get — her boyfriend liked her favorite teacher’s spell because it saved a drowning child?

Second of all, what subtext? What character development? What internal conflict? Be specific: when Frieren stares into the distance with a look of quiet contemplation, or whatever else she does, what can one deduce about her inner life? I know what I’m supposed to be deducing: after all, Frieren is a poignant tale of loss and regret — it told me so explicitly in episode one. It’s not enough that we see Frieren crying at a funeral because she regrets losing Himmel: she has to say, out loud, “I regret losing Himmel,” and then get his name tattooed on her thigh. But I already talked about the exposition, which is at least clear: exposition aside, relating to this weird elf is singularly difficult.

Frieren is essentially someone who doesn’t feel emotions strongly. It’s not really that the events of a decade hold less significance for her because they make up a smaller fraction of her lifespan: people assign great significance to brief moments, whereas Frieren doesn’t even seem to care if she’s about to die violently. What can one deduce about such a person from a look of quiet contemplation? Are you sure she isn’t just looking at stuff? Is it possible that in the moment when she cried at the funeral, she also completed her character arc? If not, what choice does she make in the last episode that she could not have made in the first? What facial expression does she make? I can easily answer these questions for Goblin Slayer, or Failure Frame, or Isekai Cheat Skill.

A character undergoing meaningful change is probably too much of a risk for Frieren, whose business is generating issue-length fantasy vignettes in a vaguely wistful mood. At least, it seems as though the series went out of its way not to stimulate or challenge the audience; as though the outcome of every conflict, the outcome of Fern’s bake sale raffle, has to be announced in advance, most often through flashbacks. Paradoxically, Frieren often spends half an episode setting up a reveal, but the reveals are generally anticlimactic, with no relevance beyond that segment of the story. You thought a spell was dangerous? It’s not. You thought an artifact was important? It’s not. Don’t worry about it. Generally, the big surprise is that Frieren’s party is even more overpowered than you thought. Obviously, this was a deliberate choice, but it’s also a questionable choice. I had no idea what was going to happen at the end of Failure Frame, and I quite enjoyed finding out. To be blunt, Failure Frame has a much better story than Frieren.

A story, as E. M. Forster said, is the simplest form of fiction: a series of events, one thing after another. When you add causation, you get a plot. A story demands of the audience one of the simplest of human emotions, namely curiosity: it has to make us want to know what happens next. To the extent that it does, it succeeds as a story.

Every episode of Failure Frame made me want to know what happens next. For God’s sake, every episode of Harukana Receive, a less-than-beloved franchise about teenage girls playing beach volleyball in Okinawa, made me want to know what happens next. This should not be an onerous requirement for a work of fiction! Something is going to happen: the author is going to write some sort of interesting turn of events. Seras Ashrain is going to fall in a puddle of magic liquid that dissolves her underwear. The junior beach volleyball tournament is going to be delayed due to inclement weather.

Frieren rarely made me want to know what happens next. For much of it, I knew more or less what happens next: Frieren and friends are going to walk to another generic quasi-medieval village, where they will perform menial tasks for several months while they wait for the mountain pass to thaw, and the payoff is finding out that the reason Frieren knows a seemingly useless spell for recreating the exact odor of an elf girl’s feet is that many years ago, when she was traveling with the legendary hero’s party, he always used to — well, at this point, neither of us wants to know what happens next.

Was I supposed to be excited to find out what’s in store for Frieren and friends? None of them seem to care: judging by their expressions, a fight to the death might as well be a household chore, and their motivations remain vague even after they say them out loud. Forget Fern and Stark, they’re just along for the ride: Frieren’s goals are to travel north, to collect spells, to fight monsters, and to find out more about people. When you put it all together, Frieren, conveniently, is about equally motivated to do whatever the plot requires, which is to say, she isn’t really motivated to do anything. She can stay in one place for a long time, looking for a purple iguana, or she can fight the monster of the week and leave as quickly as possible: neither is surprising, neither is informative. Goblin Slayer’s goal is to slay goblins, so when he chooses to do anything apart from slaying goblins, that tells us something about him: it’s character development. When Frieren, on her way north, chooses to fight a lengthy series of battles in order to apply for a passport, that tells us something about the plot: it’s time for a tournament arc.

As long as we’re both taking this writing class, let’s try an exercise together. Imagine you’re writing a new fantasy adventure anime, and your goal is to recreate the core appeal of Frieren as promised in episode one: a poignant tale of loss and regret, a love doomed by the passage of time — that sort of thing. Assume Frieren itself does not exist in this timeline, so you can copy it as much as you like, down to the last detail.

With that understanding, suppose your editor drops by while you’re putting the final touches on episode twenty-eight, the season finale. Last episode, Stark was gravely injured by demons — I’m making this up, you can change the plot — and Fern insists on nursing him back to health in a quiet village. Frieren faces a decision: to press on, leaving them behind, or to stay, knowing the mountain pass will soon be blocked by a winter storm, delaying her journey. How does Frieren feel about that? What do Fern and Stark mean to her? Does she need them? Do they need her? Do they even want her around? Who is she to them: a mentor, a party leader, an eccentric aunt, a third wheel?

Or maybe Fern — who in this version would not be wildly overpowered — has to pass an arduous written test: the fifth-class mage exam. She studies for weeks. Frieren is there to help her out, and Stark is there to cheer her on. Fern passes the test and gives Frieren a big hug. The examiner asks Frieren to step into his office; she emerges ten minutes later wearing — a first-class mage medallion. Fern is not amused. “I don’t know, dear, they said they had a special award for me.” Somehow Frieren’s medallion already has a chocolate stain. Later, she drops it in a duck pond by mistake. Remember, we are only trying to recreate the core appeal of Frieren as promised in episode one.

Anyway, your editor suggests that, instead of all that, the last eleven episodes of the season, representing forty percent of the runtime, should be a magic tournament. This is definitely the way to deliver on the promise of episode one: poignant tale, passage of time, dead boyfriend — all that stuff. Make up a reason why there has to be a magic tournament right now. It doesn’t have to be a good reason: by order of the wizard high council, the kingdom has passed a new law, and everyone has to fight in a tournament to decide who gets to ride the purple iguana. It’ll be great! No, Frieren doesn’t need to care about the outcome of the tournament. No, Fern shouldn’t care either. By the way, Stark won’t be participating at all: he can take just a nap for the last eleven episodes.

Okay, how do you feel about the structure and pacing of your anime after these helpful suggestions? (And you thought the comic book writer in Oshi no Ko had it rough.)

In case the point of this exercise is not yet sufficiently clear, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that either Frieren is not actually about what it promised in episode one, or it is singularly wasteful in delivering on that promise. For no good reason, by order of the wizard high council, it turns into a different show — and it sort of interested me! I liked the new characters: they seemed to be motivated to participate in the story; for a while, the structure of the tournament brought them into conflict with one another; and they all used different types of magic. Suddenly there were cute girls: four of them! The girl with the hair buns started dating some old guy with a beard, which was funny.

Unfortunately, it didn’t last: one thing Frieren despises more than subtext is character conflict polluting its fairly well animated fight scenes. Accordingly, the great magic tournament, whose rules never made sense to begin with, soon degenerates into an interminable series of skirmishes against magically animated suits of armor or some other equally uninteresting video game enemy. It reminded me a bit of Solo Leveling. It’s actually insulting that Frieren has a character say, out loud, “we were allies in the first round, but we might be enemies in the second,” and then does nothing with that.

The passport application arc is Frieren, the fantasy adventure, at its most conventional, which makes it, in some ways, the most enjoyable part, and yet still disappointing. On the positive side, as I said, we have a new cast of characters with mildly interesting motivations, relationships, and conflicts. Moreover, the arc lasts just long enough to exhibit noticeably greater complexity in its plot and structure: it’s basically the junior beach volleyball tournament from Harukana Receive. On the negative side, the arc still isn’t good, and its existence makes it impossible to justify the slow, boring, repetitive parts when the show was pretending to be a series of vaguely wistful fantasy vignettes.

While it was airing, I stopped watching Frieren about halfway through the season. I didn’t decide to drop it: I just never got around to watching the next episode. It had failed as a story to that extent. I’d rather rewatch Failure Frame — and I did. Now, do I lack the patience for Frieren? Certainly: if patience is a capacity for allowing things to waste one’s time without becoming irritated by those things, I have none at all. On the other hand, a lack of patience is not an obstacle to enjoying art. I’m currently reading a book: it’s a history of early modern England in twelve volumes, around seven thousand pages long. In doing so, am I exercising patience? Not really: the only reason I would be reading the book is that all or almost all of its seven thousand pages are interesting.

Frieren wandering from town to town was quite uninteresting, as I said, but did you know that in the actual middle ages, vagrancy in England carried the death penalty? Very interesting! Imagine if we put Henry Tudor in charge of San Francisco: I’d watch that anime. Imaginative fiction should be imaginative, should it not? It should be at least as imaginative as a daydream I once had about Lancastrian heavy cavalry riding down homeless junkie Democrats with lances. I mean, Gate was pretty imaginative.

Yes, the time has come to discuss Frieren as a fantasy adventure. Forget any medieval history you know: we are here for heroic legends; we are dealing, as Grote said, with a past that never was a present, a region essentially mythical. The knight, the wizard, the fire-breathing dragon, the magic sword, the treasure chest, the chain mail bikini, and the busty feral cat-girl it mostly fails to cover: every trope, meaning artistic tradition, by its longevity alone has earned our respect. The tropes would not be here if they did not have a truth in them, reverse-isekai’d here from the mythical-imaginative region.

The history of fantasy adventure — the line of descent from Teutonic mythology to Japanese animation, through Conan the Cimmerian and Gandalf the Grey, and then on to Krai Andrey and Leon Fou Bartfort — is too well known to merit discussion here. I happen to enjoy the genre, tropes and all. Of course fantasy has its well documented foibles: it has been two centuries since Carlyle admonished the ordinary poet, forever seeking in external circumstances, in some past, distant, conventional heroic world, the help which can be found only in himself. Nevertheless, I refuse to quibble with the myth that violence is more romantic when it is carried out using medieval technology.

Fantasy adventure is not a problem in need of solving. However, it must be admitted, after so many generations of imitation and refinement, and due in part to the intrusion of fantasy game mechanics, many tropes are now notoriously stale or even ossified. The Elben were magical creatures once, before they were assigned ability scores, but everyone now knows what an elf is: long ears, silver hair, lives in a tree, bonus to archery. Game mechanics are mechanical, game systems are systematic: two things magic can never be, or it ceases to be magical. If magic means nothing more than casting fireball — well, anyone can pick up a can of gasoline and a book of matches and “cast fireball” at the lawn, though the neighbors may not appreciate it. Fantasy used to be magical; it used to be fantastical. Lovecraft understood that slaying orcs with a sword is no more inherently fantastical than shooting the neighbor’s dog with a handgun. The Odyssey is fantastical, and so is Beowulf, and so is Macbeth, and so is The Lord of the Rings, but fireballs are not. Rarely is the modern wizard a magical creature.

Therefore, with the tropes very nearly if not actually ossified, thoughtful persons who happen to enjoy fantasy adventure must welcome thoughtful subversions of the genre. Unfortunately, not all subversions are thoughtful. There are three types of subversion: look at this trope; look at me not do this trope; and look at this wonderful living world. In the first type of subversion, an author who is aware of the genre’s existence draws our attention to one of its tropes: this is not nearly as clever as the author would like us to believe. In the second type of subversion, an author who despises the genre does the opposite of one of its tropes: this is universally stupid and obnoxious. In the third type of subversion, which can be considered thoughtful, an author who loves the genre endeavors to bring it to life, tropes and all, cat-girls included, in a world that feels real.

I assume you know what’s coming: Goblin Slayer is a textbook example of a thoughtful subversion that elevates the raw material of modern fantasy adventure. What sort of person decides to become an adventurer? What’s it like to hand out quests for a living? While the legendary heroes are off fighting world-ending threats, who protects the starting zone from a pack of level one monsters? The entire series is built around the answers to such questions: not only the setting, but characters, conflicts, and themes.

The isekai subgenre of fantasy adventure is full of thoughtful subversions: Cautious Hero, told from the point of view of a hero-summoning goddess; Trapped in a Dating Sim, whose world-building is comically inconsistent on purpose; The Dungeon of Black Company, where getting rich is more important than fighting demons; I’m Standing on a Million Lives, making strange and creative use of game mechanics; Grimgar, for a less romantic take on Japanese high school students conscripted into medieval warfare.

Frieren, on the other hand, features just about every standard fantasy adventure trope you can name, it even draws our attention to them, but it never takes them seriously, never brings them to life. Here we have the obligatory adventuring party, with a well balanced mix of races and classes: elf wizard, dwarf fighter, human cleric — hey, wait a minute: why would any of those things be true? Faced with a world-ending threat, who thought it would be a good idea to deploy a random band of mercenaries on a ten-year expedition, on foot, without military support of any kind? I guess Himmel came up with that idea on his own, and started calling himself a “hero” as a way of explaining why he was going to kill a foreign head of state — but why would he stop to explore a bunch of dungeons along the way? What even is a dungeon? Who is digging all these dungeons, littering them with treasure chests, and populating them with monsters?

At the risk of belaboring this point, in The Lord of the Rings, the actual Fellowship of the Ring makes sense in light of the plot: it has a reason to include various races; it even has a reason to visit an underground complex filled with monsters on its way to address a world-ending threat. It is not yet the obligatory adventuring party; it may indeed be the original adventuring party. Decades later, those tropes are thoroughly ossified, but in Goblin Slayer, the party again has a reason to include various races, although it is less about uniting against a world-ending threat than about shunting goblin-slaying responsibilities onto a random band of mercenaries. Again, the party has a reason to visit an underground complex filled with monsters: it has no relevance to the world-ending threat that someone else is dealing with off-screen, but it has a lot of relevance to the people nearby who don’t want to get eaten by goblins, which is refreshingly straightforward. Meanwhile, in Frieren, the adventuring party and the demon lord and the dungeon crawl exist, as expected, and our attention is drawn to their expected existence, and that seems to be about as far as the world-building goes.

Maybe some of that was explained in the manga. Maybe some of it was explained in the anime, and I wasn’t paying attention, because the story was boring, the characters static, the dialogue shallow, and so on. Either way, it doesn’t matter: I don’t need an explanation or a list of Frieren facts. Spare me your encyclopedic world-building: this is not about formulating arguments that made-up facts explain made-up events. I simply want to feel as though the world is real, and the characters really live in it, so if you introduce a conspicuous trope, or any idea, really, then you have to put in the work to bring it to life. Otherwise, I might as well be watching someone else play a video game.

The antagonists, the demons, are said to be mindless monsters that merely imitate speech to deceive humans — which is clearly not true: they use language exactly like humans do, to communicate thoughts and feelings. They do it more consistently than Frieren does! Demons are remarkably forthright, and more emotional than the main characters. A dying demon comes clean about trying to deceive humans, which is the last thing a mindless monster that imitates speech to deceive humans would do. A spying demon asks another demon, in private, to explain how families work, thereby expressing curiosity, requesting information, and deceiving no humans in the process.

What the spying demon should have asked is — nothing. Instead, we should have seen her attempting to deceive a human by offering to let him eat her family, or sleep with her family, or soak her family in sour cream, or build her family a new gazebo: that would have accurately conveyed the notion that demons imitate speech without understanding it. In the hands of a good science fiction writer, like Philip K. Dick, it would have been appropriately unsettling. Maybe the demons have figured out how to imitate humans in every respect except our familial relationships, and the one thing saving humanity from being infiltrated by replicants — I mean, demons — is a fantasy Turing test. “True or false: would you like to kiss your sister?” Maybe the demons try to brute-force the Frieren test by memorizing family-related behavior, and the humans respond by concealing their behavior or changing it at random. So Frieren comes to a village where everyone kisses their sister to confuse the demons: I’d watch that anime!

I really think it is a useful exercise to reverse-engineer a work of fiction in this way. If you wanted to write about loss and regret, would you include a magic tournament? If you wanted to write about a lonely elf getting to know people and trying to empathize with them, would you give the antagonists human-like thoughts and feelings, and then call them mindless monsters that no one should get to know or try to empathize with? If you wanted to write the antagonists as mindless monsters, wouldn’t you put at least a little bit of work into following through on that idea? The Wrong Way to Use Healing Magic deals with loss and regret, and it has demons, and it has none of those problems.

Frieren wasn’t written with enough care to justify a detailed analysis of its plot or its setting. Notice how often it uses flashbacks, how rarely it uses foreshadowing. Notice how the first demon looks and acts nothing like the later, human-deceiving demons. In general, the anime exhibits all the hallmarks of a slavishly faithful adaptation of a manga that was written one issue at a time and not planned out. That’s probably why it seems so reluctant to follow through on its own ideas and deliver on its own promises, as if committing to an overarching plot and moving it forward in a well defined setting is too difficult or too risky: let’s just fight video game enemies for a couple of volumes.

It’s not unusual for a manga to attract an audience with a strong first volume, exhaust its creative impulse almost immediately, then coast; and the animated adaptation will peak around episode one. After one episode, Spy Family was widely acclaimed as “the perfect blend of action, comedy, and spy thriller,” and then it kept airing, and it turned out to be a mildly amusing family-friendly sitcom. After one extra-long episode, Oshi no Ko was widely acclaimed as “a supernatural murder mystery uncovering the dark side of the entertainment industry,” and then it kept airing, and it turned out to be a fairly entertaining soap opera. After one episode, Zom 100 — do I need to say it? That one turned out to be laughably bad. At some point, you have to stop falling for the same trick, which gives us a new mediocre anime of the decade at least twice a year.

To be fair, some of the writing mistakes in Frieren are easily overlooked because, as I said, the show simply isn’t engaging enough that I was invested in the plot or paying close attention to the setting: it’s rare to see noticeably boring background art, but somehow Frieren manages. Now, Goblin Slayer certainly isn’t flawless, but at least it’s consistently interesting and exciting and adventurous and fantastical. When I think about what happened in the story, I almost always remember more than what occurred on-screen, which is a valuable quality in a work of fiction. Frieren, on the other hand, was thought-provoking only to the extent that I rewrote it in my head to make it more fun. The more I think about it, the less sense it makes: the demons don’t make sense; the hero party’s ten-year journey doesn’t make sense; the passport application process especially doesn’t make sense. As far as I can tell, apart from a vaguely wistful mood, Frieren is an empty shell. One could argue it delivers on the concept of demons better than the demons do, because it imitates long-form storytelling to deceive the viewer.

Frieren’s goal is to retrace the hero party’s journey — that is, until a dwarf gives her a flashback, and then her goal is to reach a specific location, which happens to be at the end of that journey, but never mind that now. It seems like nothing about the original journey exists until it becomes relevant to the current episode, at which point it pops into existence in a standalone flashback, disconnected in time and space from the rest of the journey, almost like a series of issue-length vignettes with no overarching plot. As a result, after twenty-eight episodes of flashbacks to the hero’s party, I still don’t know what it was like being in the hero’s party — wistful? I guess it was wistful. How was your ten-year expedition, Himmel? “Wistful! I explored some dungeons, smiled at some children, and killed a foreign head of state.” I wonder if Himmel slept with any women over the course of ten years. No, of course not: he just gazed at them wistfully.

For a fantasy adventure, Frieren is remarkably safe, and I don’t mean safe for Frieren: after all, it’s full of demons and other monsters of the week. Rather, Frieren is safe for the viewer: it’s rare to see a fantasy adventure anime with a target demographic of high school guidance counselors. Of course Himmel doesn’t sleep with girls! The man is far too busy gazing wistfully at a field of spring flowers, or sharing a cordial yet respectful handshake with his colleague Frieren. It’s even difficult to imagine Frieren coming across a village where the humans fear elves: that would be prejudice, which is wrong. Surely everyone is pleased to see a non-human mercenary wander into town one day, armed with overwhelming firepower. It’s not that Frieren needed prejudice, or slavery, or even incest comedy: it’s just that the show might as well be set in San Francisco.

Consider religion in the world of Frieren, where an ancient elf, a holy priest, and other purportedly quasi-medieval characters seem less alien in their outlook than our own ancestors, and in some cases, our own neighbors. The dwarf doesn’t believe in heaven: when you die, you turn to dust. The elf, Frieren, argues that heaven can’t be proven or disproven, since we can’t observe the soul. To Himmel, it doesn’t matter either way. The priest also doesn’t care, but he thinks it would be convenient if heaven existed as a nice little reward for us, and everyone seems to be on board with that. I know very little about religion in Japan, but it seems to me that Frieren has put the same tepid post-Christian skepticism in the mouths of four superficially different characters. As expected, Himmel’s take reflects the least thought, and I don’t just mean among the four of them: it reflects the least thought humanly possible. I don’t need religion in a fantasy adventure anime, but this feels like eating children’s vitamins for dinner.

Religion is awful and terrible — that is, religion is awesome and terrific — that is, religion inspires awe and terror: suitable material, perhaps, for heroic adventures or meditations on immortality. A man’s religion is the chief fact with regard to him, as Carlyle said, religion meaning not the church-creed that a man professes, but the thing a man does practically lay to heart, and know for certain, concerning his vital relations to this mysterious universe, and his duty and destiny there. He said that two centuries ago, in a lecture series that used to be well known. Note the title: On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History. I wouldn’t necessarily call it reasonable to look for a literate, educated, cultured perspective on religion and heroism from a fantasy adventure anime, but if Frieren wanted to be mature, and not merely safe, it should have dug a little deeper than not at all into the vast copyright-free quarry of mankind’s literary heritage — not that it needed to be mature! Again, I enjoyed Failure Frame.

Critics who treat maturity as a term of approval, according to C. S. Lewis, cannot be mature themselves: to be concerned about being grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish, are the marks of childhood and adolescence; and to carry on even into early adulthood this concern about being grown up is a mark of arrested development.

In that respect, Frieren is an adolescent franchise. It is the perfect anime for people who are embarrassed about enjoying anime. You can watch it in the living room, in class, or on the train — and if anyone walks into the room, or boards the train, and catches you watching a Japanese animated television show, and says, “This must be one of those Japanese animated television shows that are corrupting the youth of today with hot naked girls,” you can tell him no, there are no hot girls in Frieren, and if there were, they would be fully clothed! I swear, I would never look at a woman’s sexy body!

Fan service? Not on my watch! Nothing ruins a work of art quite like women’s breasts: their big, round, bouncy breasts. Honestly, if I have to see one more pair of big round breasts, bouncing and jiggling right in front of my face, I am going to cry, and then scream, and then shoot myself. Go ahead, show me them: I dare you, I double dog dare you! I have had it up to here with women’s breasts in Japanese animated television.

In all seriousness, I’ve been to the Louvre: it’s full of fan service — by which I mean, there are many famous paintings and sculptures depicting, yes, women’s sexy bodies. I think some of that art predates written language: ancient urns with big round breasts. If that embarrasses you, don’t go to the Louvre, and don’t watch anime on the train.

I said I would drive a panzer through Frieren’s front line, and I have done that — the encirclement is complete, elven forces are surrendering — but I feel as though Frieren still has not learned her lesson properly, so it’s time to shoot some prisoners: Goblin Slayer is indeed better in every way that counts — absolutely including the fan service.

In Goblin Slayer, there is a scene in which Farm Girl, an attractive young lady with big round breasts, wakes up in a state of undress, goes to the window, and greets Goblin Slayer, who is outside the farmhouse checking for goblins. Later, they walk into town, where Farm Girl, who is now fully clothed, overhears some people disparaging Goblin Slayer because he looks weird, smells bad, and spends all of his time slaying goblins.

As usual, the writing exhibits appropriate depth and complexity, expecting the viewer not only to deduce the subtext of each scene, but to keep track of the plot: to interpret new scenes in light of old ones, and to reinterpret old scenes in light of new ones. This is neither a recondite point nor an esoteric doctrine: it is the definition of a plot. This is how setups and payoffs work; this is why foreshadowing is more difficult to write than flashbacks but ultimately more satisfying to the viewer. Before I spell it out for you, watch up to episode two of Goblin Slayer and ask yourself: why is Farm Girl naked when she wakes up? Call it the pons asinorum of anime criticism. I’ll give you a minute.

Clearly, Farm Girl feels safe at the farmhouse. Is she unaware of the threat of goblins? Is she about to suffer the same fate as the overconfident adventurers in episode one? No, because Goblin Slayer is there to keep her safe: the fan service, meaning innocence and beauty in this world, depends upon a man who crawls around in cold, dark holes, covered in mud, blood, and slime, crushing goblin skulls for a handful of copper coins. Goblin Slayer is indeed not well liked, his appearance is ghastly, but Farm Girl, the person who likely knows him best, trusts him so completely that he gets to see her pantsu. By the way, all of this foreshadows important developments that I won’t spoil.

Imagine watching all of that, getting nothing more out of it than “fan service.” These people exist, and I bet they adore Frieren. Really, if you find subtext as intimidating as a woman’s naked body, you might be more comfortable with Frieren-style storytelling, where every little thing is spelled out for you every single time, and you never once have to engage your brain. “Oh no! I won’t be able to explain to Farm Girl why goblins are dangerous, because we never established trust through mutual understanding!”

I’m beginning to feel a little bit guilty about shooting the prisoners, so we’ll move on. In case the point is not yet abundantly clear, I have no problem with anime depicting women’s sexy bodies, also known as fan service. Refusing to depict them is not more mature than depicting them; being sexless is not more mature than being sexy. If an anime happens to depict them in an obnoxious way, it is not that women’s bodies are inherently obnoxious: it is that some particular anime is being obnoxious about them.

To be fair, anime is sometimes obnoxious. If you enjoy anime, and you happen to be a mentally normal, emotionally mature adult, then actually sitting down and watching a new anime is a paradoxical pursuit, because you do want to watch an anime, but you also want to enjoy a well written work of fiction. The paradox lies in the observation that certain anime tropes are obnoxious to the point that no one can tolerate them for longer than eight seconds, and the mere avoidance of one of them is counted by many as a major plus. “Sure, the plot makes no sense, the jokes aren’t funny, the animators forgot to draw the legs, and the all-kazoo soundtrack is grating — but at least there’s no harem. I’m definitely coming back for season four!” As for me, I am definitely not coming back for season four, but I can appreciate the sentiment: the sexless harem, yelling-as-comedy, and assorted shonen slop will get no quarter from this reviewer.

Therefore, although I give Frieren no credit whatsoever for sparing some adolescent train passengers some embarrassment by not depicting women’s bodies, the series has also avoided certain actually obnoxious tropes: “at least there’s no harem.” This too may come as a relief to some train passengers, but avoiding certain obnoxious tropes does not by itself make a work of fiction excellent, and going out of one’s way to avoid anything potentially outrageous risks infuriating viewers who actually enjoy anime.

Poetry, said Dryden, must generally please, but it is not to be understood that all parts of it must please every man. Tragedy is not to be judged by a witty man whose taste is confined to comedy. Nor is every man who loves tragedy a sufficient judge of it: he must understand its excellencies too, or he will only prove a blind admirer, not a critic.

Anime ought to be judged by someone who loves it and understands its excellencies. Anime is frequently outrageous, ridiculous, nonsensical, and delightful. It isn’t aimed at high school guidance counselors; don’t watch it on the train. Chivalry of a Failed Knight, for example, is a masterpiece: essentially a perfect season of anime. It should have been called Anime: Just the Good Parts. Yes, it is one long magical sword-fighting tournament with thigh-high stockings and incest comedy: if you don’t like anime, you won’t like it with anime on top and a side of anime. I trust this is sufficiently clear.

Frieren, the safety scissors of Japanese animated television, has thrown out much that was outrageous and ridiculous and just plain fun, and it hasn’t even thrown out all of the obnoxious stuff. Stark belongs in My Hero Academia. Between Fern and Himmel, it is difficult to decide who is more annoying. Certainly Fern is given more scenes to inflict her bad behavior on us: “Stark! Stark! What did you do, Stark? Did you drink juice after bedtime, Stark? Do I need to put you in the cage again, Stark?” Himmel, though, is stamped more clearly with the author’s approval: “What makes me a hero? Well, Frieren, I smile at children and fight video game enemies. You know, at the end of the day, the real heroes are the guidance counselors.” As I said of women’s bodies, it is not that characters with obnoxious personalities are inherently obnoxious: it is not annoying to watch Kuroki Tomoko be annoying. The problem is the tone, as if the viewer is expected not to notice that the cute, feisty wizard girl is an unbearable brat, and the wise and noble hero an empty-headed, feckless buffoon. Truthfully, I liked the demons better than the main characters. I liked Ubel’s armpits better than Himmel’s stupid, smug face — but not even Ubel’s armpits will bring me back for season two.

Yes, these are my own personal thoughts and feelings about Frieren. As far as I can tell, there is only one legitimate reason to write a review, and that is to express oneself: that soul might in some articulate utterance unfold itself to soul, as Carlyle said. Do you really need a recommendation? My answer is the same in every case: sure, watch a few episodes, see if you like it. Watch Goblin Slayer, too. Watch Fight Club. Read King Lear. Listen to Abbey Road. Carlyle reviewed Voltaire: he didn’t need to “recommend” him.

Perhaps I didn’t need to shoot the prisoners. Standing here, beside a smoking panzer, it’s easy to second-guess a few rhetorical war crimes. Certainly Frieren is beloved by many. It’s a high-budget streaming series for a general audience, in a popular genre, in a popular art style: it’s not difficult to account for its popularity, considering that The Lord of the Rings already exists. It really was not my intention to antagonize its fans, discourage new viewers, or injure the sale of the anime and manga: motives ignoble and degrading to the critic. Probably Frieren is not quite as irritating as I have made it sound, and I quite like the fan art. If my words appear ill-mannered, consider this: as the civilest man in the company is commonly the dullest, said Dryden, an author, who is afraid to make you laugh or cry, out of pure good manners makes you sleep. I only endeavor to be more interesting than Frieren, an anime you can watch on the train.

This review was banned from MAL. If you have ever visited MAL and read what passes for a review there, then you have some understanding of how ridiculous that is.

Notice how easy it is, in that example, to identify the genre: it’s clear in the first ten minutes of the show — which is normal. It’s not science fiction, so it doesn’t put Marin on the moon; it’s not a mystery, so it doesn’t put her at the scene of a crime.

I bring this up because Oshi no Ko has made it singularly difficult to understand what the artist was trying to accomplish. It is a toothbrush shaped exactly like an orange peeler, sold in the produce aisle, and marketed as having citrus-piercing bristles. No one ever actually told you to peel oranges with it, but you could be forgiven for trying.

Oshi no Ko spent the first eighty minutes setting up a murder mystery, although it isn’t one; or if it is still trying to be one now, it isn’t trying very hard. Chinatown is a murder mystery; Oshi no Ko is a soap opera. It may be filed under melodrama. Its purpose is to contrive scenarios in which sexy teenagers can slap, kiss, and yell at one another. The closest recent match is probably True Beauty, which is slightly more grounded and delivers about as much social commentary. You can also watch Melrose Place.

With that understanding, Oshi no Ko is fairly enjoyable. It does a decent job of contriving scenarios in which beautiful young celebrities living in the world’s safest country can slap, kiss, and yell at one another. I can’t imagine taking any of it seriously, but it’s difficult to beat for sentimentality and sensationalism. Coming up next on Melrose Place, a beautiful young actress throws herself off a bridge during a typhoon after she was harassed by online bullies for assaulting her co-star, but her life is saved by a handsome doctor with a troubled past who was reincarnated after being murdered before he could deliver the secret twin babies of a teenage pop idol he obsessed over while treating a young girl for cancer — and you’ll never guess what happens next.

The teen suicide arc in season one is when Oshi no Ko really takes off, precisely because it has become impossible to take seriously. Right up until the moment when discount Light Yagami defeats online bullying through the power of friendship, and yandere Nancy Drew rewards him with a sexy cosplay of his mother, it was barely possible to believe that Oshi no Ko is a story about a man investigating a murder, and not about long-lost twins in love triangles with coma patients, but no longer.

For comparison, if Oshi no Ko were a murder mystery about uncovering the dark side of the entertainment industry, then Aqua’s plan to help Akane, by making a director feel guilty about her jumping off a bridge, would not have worked until Aqua revealed the photos he took of the director with an underage girl — or boy — or Ruby, for that matter. It’s not difficult to spot the difference: Melrose Place is not Chinatown.

To be clear, I enjoyed the arc. It’s not particularly outrageous stuff — Aqua could have slept with Akane, for instance, on set, still in her cosplay, while Kana was doing coke in the bathroom with Mem-Cho — Degrassi High would have done it — anyway, it did enough. Yandere Nancy Drew is delightfully nutty. Most of all, I appreciate the clarity, because continued misidentification of the genre invites continued disappointment.

Unfortunately, shortly after the series takes off, it crashes into a mountain called Tokyo Blade. Okay, that was unfair: I’ll say it lost an engine. Oshi no Ko is not a great soap opera, and a murder mystery that mostly goes nowhere and three hours of Tokyo Blade are examples of a general problem: it tries to do too many things; it’s cluttered.

For comparison, there is another franchise where the main character gets involved in the entertainment industry to solve a supernatural murder mystery and avenge the death of his parent: it’s called Hamlet, and you can watch the whole thing in about four hours. Brevity is the soul of wit. Oshi no Ko is like Hamlet if Hamlet put on five plays to catch six killers, he was dating three Ophelias, and one of them was his sister.

Tokyo Blade already featured Aqua, Akane, and Kana, and I assume they were getting up to all sorts of slapping, kissing, and yelling, but I can’t be certain, because so much screen time was dedicated to fight scenes from the show within the show — some godawful shonen nonsense — not to mention the lengthy and rather dry lectures on the business of putting on plays, how a comic book may be adapted into a play, the difficulties that may arise when adapting comic books into plays, recent advances in theater technology, etc. The first episode of season one ends on the main character plotting his revenge; the first episode of season two ends on a comic book writer being unhappy with a script — and you’ll never guess what happens next: she edits it.

Okay, that was unfair: I mildly enjoyed the arc. The comic book writer is fine. Almost everything in Oshi no Ko is fine. Two writers struggling to adapt a story; two former child stars competing on and off the stage; a pop group aspiring to one day perform at a top venue; a supernatural murder mystery — oh, wait: one of those doesn’t fit.

It’s not just that any given thing would stand out more in less cluttered surroundings. Another problem is that some of those things, such as murder, suicide, revenge, and reincarnation, are inherently more ostentatious than others, such as a songwriter we just met feeling inspired to write a new song because he got an encouraging email; but in the adaptation, each of those things is given comparably lavish treatment. Oshi no Ko is wildly overproduced. Ai’s star quality just doesn’t seem as impressive after it’s been attributed to every single performance in Tokyo Blade. Aqua, being so cunning and manipulative, has a cunning plan to manipulate everyone to save Akane, but he also has a cunning plan to manipulate everyone to save the finale of a television show.

Speaking of manipulation, if Oshi no Ko has a theme, then its theme must be deception or dishonesty. It’s a fine theme, but the consequences of lying would have been clearer in a more focused, less cluttered story. When Hamlet deceived Ophelia, when Iago deceived Othello, the consequences were clear and relevant to the plot. When Aqua pretended to be in love with Akane, she found out immediately and played along for two seasons. When Kana pretended not to be in love with Aqua, everyone found out immediately, literally everyone, including undiscovered tribes in the highlands of New Guinea, and they all played along for two seasons. When baby Aqua pretended to be a god for two minutes — no, I didn’t forget about that one, which goes exactly nowhere.

Let’s get back to Aqua and his cunning plans to manipulate everyone. Okay, “discount Light Yagami” was probably unfair — unfairly generous to Light Yagami — but the character is clearly meant to be cunning and manipulative — isn’t he? At least twice an episode, the man is manipulating someone into doing something, whether he’s manipulating a lousy actor into giving a decent performance, or manipulating Ruby into wearing panties around the house for once in her life, for God’s sake, Ruby.

But why is Aqua cunning and manipulative? Why should he insist on playing three-dimensional checkers? Before he died, he was kind, earnest, and slightly awkward. Did reincarnation make him cunning and manipulative? Either commit to writing him as a cunning, manipulative teenage celebrity, or leave him the way he was and make it clear that he’s in over his head when it comes to revenge and murder. As it stands, after two seasons, I still do not really understand who Aqua is, or even how many people he is.

To be clear, there are plenty of things to like about Oshi no Ko. I wish it spent more time on them. Yandere Nancy Drew, for instance, that delightful nut: put her in every scene. She pairs well with Aqua, of course, who pairs surprisingly well with comedy, although that might be the one element of the show that is actually underproduced.

For example, Aqua, who excels academically (because he was reincarnated), enrolls in a school known only for its performance curriculum (to keep an eye on Ruby), but not as a performance major, although he does end up being one of its most accomplished performers. He floors the admissions committee by claiming to have been won over by school spirit — which is pretty funny. It’s a comical series of contradictions. Why is it never brought up again? Love Is War would have shown us the admissions committee once more after Tokyo Blade, patting themselves on the back for having snagged the hot new talent as a general education major. “I raised that boy,” says Chika Fujiwara.

It’s easy to miss a few small details when you’re putting on five separate plays to catch six different killers. It’s hard to focus on what matters when you’re lavishly animating every encouraging email. The show is not at all bad: it’s cluttered, unfocused, and overproduced, but I understood what it was trying to do eventually, and That Time I Got Reincarnated as My Cancer Patient’s Favorite Singer’s Baby does a decent job of contriving scenarios in which sexy teenagers can slap, kiss, and breastfeed one another. It was all very watchable, except when it made me watch Tokyo Blade.

Picture Classroom of the Elite — okay, look: I don’t have a problem with Classroom of the Elite. It’s fine, except when it tries to play chess. But it’s going to take some collateral damage today, because this is the analogy I landed on. Picture Classroom of the Elite, except instead of being told that the main character is an impossible genius who trivializes every challenge because of a plan he came up with offscreen that works perfectly every time, and because he trained really hard in his backstory and casually mastered every field of human endeavor from ornithology to badminton, and that he did all that despite not caring at all about any of it — right, instead of that, we’re shown that the main character is a relatable guy with relatable problems; that he comes up with actual plans that sort of make sense and never work perfectly; that he trains really hard to get a little bit better at just one thing; and that he did all that for relatable reasons, like pride and money and teenage Korean girls, which is why it means something when he comes out on top once in a while. It means something without trying to seem important. I wanted to see what Hobin would do next, I wanted him to succeed, I laughed when he screwed it up, and I was glad to see him try again.

Action, as I have said before, is about conflict; it is not necessarily violent. Violence without conflict is just spectacle: another pointless tournament arc. Well, there are no tournament arcs in Viral Hit: just an unrelenting series of conflicts, most of which happen to be violent. Although its violence is tempered with comedy and the overall tone is fairly light, watching it does feel somewhat like waiting to get punched in the face, and you won’t have to wait long. The plot moves fast: there are no beach episodes in Viral Hit either, and if there were, someone would have to wrestle an octopus. It really is non-stop conflict: in the span of an episode, Hobin will fight a bully, which attracts a bigger bully, and while he’s fighting the bigger bully, he forgets to buy his girlfriend a birthday present, and when he goes to apologize to her, he falls in the octopus tank at the Lotte World Aquarium, and — well, you see where this is going.

Notice how much gets done in a season of Viral Hit, because everything that happens is relevant to the plot. Notice how little gets done in a season of Wind Breaker, a superficially similar and much more popular show that doesn’t have a plot because it replaced it with tournament arcs. Wasn’t there an entire episode of that show where they decided to have a tournament, and then another entire episode where they walked to where the tournament would be held? Or did I dream that? I might have fallen asleep during one of its interminable mid-fight flashbacks to yet another tragic backstory. Since action is about conflict, it’s generally preferable to know who the characters are before they start punching each other, rather than finding out mid-punch. For example, you can do what Viral Hit does: establish the characters before the fight and allow them to learn and grow in unexpected ways after the fight. Notice also that one of these shows — the one no one watched — has a main character with a clearly defined goal who drives the story forward, and the other has a main character with a clearly defined hairstyle. Look, I tried to finish Wind Breaker — I just couldn’t be bothered. I will say, it gets better when you play the Viral Hit soundtrack over it.

Anyway, you don’t need to be a fan of combat sports to enjoy Viral Hit. You can enjoy Rocky without being a boxing fan. You can enjoy Keijo! without being a fan of that sport, although I don’t see why you wouldn’t be. Granted, Viral Hit is more about the fighting than either of those franchises, so let me say a few words about fight scenes.

What makes a good fight scene is not a mystery: Jackie Chan directed about a hundred of them. A good fight scene creates tension for the audience by conveying danger to the characters, and danger, meaning the risk of harm, depends on something more fundamental than choreography or cinematography: it depends on cause and effect. If Jackie Chan is in the Bronx, and he has to jump from one fire escape to another, what happens if he misses? He falls to the ground, he gets hurt, and the villain gets away with the suitcase full of diamonds or whatever. We hope Jackie Chan doesn’t fall off the fire escape because we understand cause and effect. Or maybe he does fall, but he lands on a flatbed truck full of stuffed animals: that’s fine; the man also did comedy.

To prepare for this review, I watched some fight scenes from a popular action show, which, to avoid further controversy, I won’t name. In one scene, a pirate with three swords was in outer space or whatever, and he had to jump from one rock to another. Fine, so what happens if he misses? Does he fall in the ocean, or does he spin his swords around really fast and fly like a helicopter? I think at one point he actually was flying: can he do that all the time? If he does fall in the ocean, does he get hurt, or does he think back on how his friends are cheering him on, which gives him the courage to charge up a glowing yellow ball of energy that makes him immune to damage? There are no answers to these questions. You can practically see the hand of the animator at work: what happens next — in this unnamed anime — is whatever seemed coolest to him at the time. You can animate a jumping pirate and his glowing yellow ball as lavishly as you like, in sixty frames per second: it will not save your fight scene, which has no logic of cause and effect, so it can’t convey danger, so it can’t create tension.

In Viral Hit, every fight scene conveys danger: cause and effect are brutally clear. What happens if Hobin gets punched in the face? You don’t need to speculate: I haven’t seen this many hospital scenes since Neon Genesis Evangelion. Combat is grounded, with a clear sense of time and space, action and reaction. No one carries on a lengthy back-and-forth discussion with their opponent in the fraction of a second before a punch lands. No one changes direction in midair. At no point does anyone’s fist collide with their opponent’s fist to create a glowing yellow ball of energy. Spare me the glowing yellow balls! Did you see how Taehun rotates his foot on the back kick? It’s perfect.

But make no mistake: Viral Hit is not a work of literary realism. It does not attempt to accurately depict the day-to-day lives of street-fighting Korean teenagers. You will be asked to suspend your disbelief. Don’t panic: this is a normal part of enjoying fiction.

Truthfully, Viral Hit is the type of show I look for every season. I don’t mean shows about Korean teenagers who film themselves getting into fights. And I don’t mean charmingly awkward coming-of-age sports action-comedies, although I do welcome new entries in the Rocky-meets-WataMote crossover genre. I have in mind the entire class of well-written low-budget genre fiction: fantasy adventures and death game thrillers and step-sibling romances alike — and you do need to go look for them, because you rarely hear about them, and what you hear about them is rarely good.

As I have said before, and as anyone can see for themselves, at the start of every season, the anime community, for remarkably superficial reasons, assigns certain shows to the must-watch trophy shelf and others to the guilty-pleasure dumpster. A well-animated fight scene in the trailer gives us a new anime of the decade at least twice a year, while the low-budget genre fiction sinks to very near the bottom of the dumpster. And if the content of the dumpster proves to be thoroughly enjoyable from start to finish, if the anime of the decade proves to be unwatchable by episode three, any merits of the former can be dismissed, any defects of the latter can be excused.

Sure, Viral Hit might be a decent little cartoon, a fun watch on a Wednesday night, but Solo Leveling is a timeless masterpiece — and, being a timeless masterpiece, it doesn’t need minor details like character development. It has video game mechanics! It has glowing yellow balls in sixty frames per second! Never mind pacing: just make sure it’s slavishly faithful to the source material. We’ll animate each panel of the web comic and play the clips one after another. Wasn’t there an episode where they interrupted a fight to the death to show three random women eating brunch? Or did I dream that?

Year after year, the trophy shelves are crowded with timeless masterpieces with a shelf life of twelve or thirteen weeks; revolutionary achievements for the medium that rarely go through the formality of actually being fun to watch. If it’s so good, then why isn’t it good? Do you like being served fish bones and coffee grounds on a silver platter? I’d rather eat real food out of a dumpster — well, no: I’d rather those weren’t my choices.

All art is dedicated to joy, said Schiller. Viral Hit may not be popular, and it may not be pretty. I think it was animated on a laptop, in a weekend, by an intern, in exchange for a gift certificate to Panda Express. I suspect it was sponsored by Korea’s powerful taekwondo lobby. And I’m certain no one will ever call it a timeless masterpiece or a revolutionary achievement for the medium. Nevertheless, it manages to achieve in any given scene what fish bones and coffee grounds and lavishly animated glowing yellow balls have failed to deliver in a double-length season: it’s really enjoyable to watch.

This review was banned from MAL. If you have ever visited MAL and read what passes for a review there, then you have some understanding of how ridiculous that is.

Let me say a few words about the genre. It’s not unusual for new fantasy series to embroider themselves with isekai kitsch: it’s practically a cost of doing business, and it doesn’t necessarily harm the story. Going someplace new is an evergreen theme, for Odysseus as much as Kirito, and the video game skill tree our hero might unlock upon arriving someplace new is a harmless bit of kitsch. Ideally, perhaps, the story would include no extraneous elements, but plenty of watchable shows sprint through a tolerable half-episode of isekai overhead before settling in for the real story, which turns out to have nothing to do with reincarnated teenagers assigning skill points.

My Instant Death Ability, on the other hand, wallows in isekai slop from start to finish, doubling down on kitsch at every opportunity, indulging in all the worst excesses of the setting without once delivering on the core appeal of fantasy adventure — which, by the way, has been parodying itself for years. My One-Hit Kill Sister can be considered a parody of a fantasy adventure, and in any case it’s a lot of fun to watch; My Instant Death Ability can be considered an insult to the viewer, and it’s not even a clever insult.

As rushed as it is vacuous, the show is watchable, barely, as a kind of twenty-minute weekly chore. Nothing lasts and nothing matters: establish a location, introduce a character, kill the character, leave the location; no stakes, no conflict, and no lasting consequences. If it ever slowed down enough to convey the plot, or if it ever asked us to care, even a little, about any of the characters, then it would simply be infuriating. As it stands, I did manage to point my eyes toward the screen for most of the runtime, though if you asked me now what happened to the sword master, or what the sage was trying to achieve, or why the robot turned into a dragon, I honestly couldn’t tell you.

Anyone with eyes can see at once why the show doesn’t work. You don’t need to know what words like “structure” and “pacing” mean: the director clearly doesn’t. It looks bad, sounds bad, makes no sense, and serves no purpose. The comedy consists entirely of yelling. For half the runtime, half the screen is taken up by title cards for a cast of nine thousand characters, half of which die every episode, and I wish the other half had died too. There is one cute girl, but she spends every scene yelling at a fat ghost.

I may be misremembering some of that, but I’m not going to check, because I don’t care and it doesn’t matter. No one should watch this show, and it’s embarrassing that it was made. I can forgive the people responsible for it, and I don’t think they deserve to go to prison, but a hundred hours of community service does seem appropriate.

Let’s get this out of the way: for the purposes of satire and other social commentary, monsters and disasters can stand for other things. Pollution awakens Godzilla, and he goes on a rampage: Godzilla stands for the cost of industrialization. Similarly, a zombie, being an unnatural, decaying mockery of a human being, can stand for an office worker: too much office work might turn a man into a zombie, or something like that. Indeed, Zom 100 opens on an exhausted, zombie-like office worker, which is at least somewhat relatable: in a way, each of us has our own zombies to overcome in life. For some of us, long work hours might be our zombies; for others, social anxiety or addiction to pornography. But the device on its own doesn’t get us very far: you can kill a zombie with an axe; you can’t kill the economy with an axe, so what have we learned?

In Zom 100, the zombies our hero has to overcome in life are actual zombies, which have actually relieved him from office work. I appreciate that it took an extraordinary threat to catapult him out of his ennui, but to make an exhausted office worker look like a zombie, and then to attack him with unrelated zombies, is a bit undercooked as a parable; frankly, it’s more of a shower thought than it is a theme or a motif. You could have attacked him with Godzilla or even Mothra, so again, what have we learned?

I’m not really asking for didactic fiction: what I mean is, apart from some initial amusement or thrill, monsters and disasters, whether or not they stand for other things, sustain our interest only insofar as they provoke interesting developments in relatable characters. It’s why survival scenarios bringing out the best and the worst in people is an evergreen theme. It’s less about cool moves for killing zombies and more about the human condition: who gets to share the hero’s zombie-proof bunker?

In Zom 100, the character development is about as thin as the social commentary. In episode one, the end of civilization and the prospect of a gruesome death inspire one man, Akira, to pursue a list of childish ambitions with a reckless disregard for his life. He proceeds to do exactly that for eleven more episodes — instead of, say, dying immediately to zombies, like anyone else probably would and almost everyone else actually does. As far as Akira is concerned, the apocalypse, for all of its impressive spectacle, is about as dangerous as the haunted house ride at an amusement park.

The child-safe nature of the apocalypse is a contradiction: near-certain death prompts Akira to change; he changes in the direction of even more nearly-certain death; and the action-comedy plot protects him from the consequences of that choice, which invalidates his growth, if you can even call it growth. Either the zombies aren’t that deadly, and he might as well have had his epiphany without an apocalyptic backdrop; or he isn’t living for the present in a meaningful way, and he might as well pick up food and water while he’s looting home electronics and tequila on his motorcycle.

Either way, further character development is unnecessary: Akira wins at the end of episode one, with nothing left to do apart from having fun. Characters may question his new outlook, events may temporarily reverse it, but his new outlook never made sense to begin with, so he can just change back at the end of the episode. So much for the human condition. Feeling bad? Feel good instead! Quit your job and drink a case of beer. Maybe you really can kill the economy with an axe; at least, I’ve heard the power grid is vulnerable — by the way, Fight Club handled this material quite well. Again, Akira could have died immediately to zombies with a smile on his face: at least that would represent a meaningful choice to live for the present with no regrets.

Instead, through filler action-comedy, we get to watch an office worker enjoying a zombie-themed spring break, drinking beer and meeting girls. Of course, the premise of his happiness is the end of civilization and the gruesome deaths of almost everyone, which is another contradiction. No, a zombie apocalypse wouldn’t improve your state of mind: just imagine the smell. And no, it’s not a black comedy: it’s just a heartless and thoughtless comedy. It hands him a cute girl and, once she’s served her purpose, feeds her to a zombie. I guess he doesn’t need to loot condoms! Her faceless corpse in a pool of bloody slime can be set dressing for the wacky antics of our lovable goofballs.

Mercifully, the series rarely draws that much attention to the callous stupidity of its comedy, and the end result is often watchable and occasionally fun, especially when the blonde girl is involved, although I don’t remember laughing once. For some, those qualities, plus a few well-animated action scenes, may be enough to secure a high rating and hope for a second season. For this reviewer, “occasionally fun” is not a sufficient return on investment from four hours of screen time — you can watch King Lear in three hours — and the technical niceties are always secondary to characters, conflicts, and themes. Simply put, I would not watch another episode of Zom 100.

It is not to die that makes a man wretched, said Carlyle: it is to live miserable and not know why; to work sore and yet gain nothing; to die slowly all our life long. But he also said that a man perfects himself by working; that there is endless hope in work; and that idleness alone is without hope. As it turns out, there is more than one thing to say about this evergreen theme — by the way, Full Dive handled this material quite well. But in the end, Zom 100 has too little to say about its theme and too little to do with its characters. I mean, fine: zombies can stand for office workers; they can stand for industrialism, or free trade, or fiat currency, or the managerial state, and the hero can kill them with an axe or something. In a way, each of us has our own zombies to overcome in life, but you can’t kill regret with an axe, so what have we learned?

I’m told you need a very high IQ to understand Rick and Morty. Whether that’s true or not, you do need a remarkably high degree of media literacy to understand what The Eminence in Shadow was trying to accomplish. (Imagine trying to explain this to your grandmother.) Cid, a Japanese teenager, is obsessed with acquiring the power of a fantasy anime protagonist. Coincidentally, Cid dies, gets reincarnated in a quasi-medieval world, and promptly acquires unlimited power, exactly like a fantasy anime protagonist. At that point, Cid decides to devote his second life to making that world conform even more closely to fantasy tropes by re-enacting his favorite scenes from anime: he wants to battle a demon cult alongside a harem of busty ninjas — pretty standard stuff — so he invents a demon cult and recruits a gaggle of busty ninjas to cosplay with him. Unbeknownst to Cid, the busty ninjas fall for all of his ridiculous lies. Also unbeknownst to Cid, all of his ridiculous lies are coincidentally accurate, right down to the demon cult’s made-up name. Thus, Cid alone somehow continues to misinterpret as cosplay the battle he started against the demon cult he thinks he invented, even as his over-the-top finishing moves level city blocks, killing hundreds.

It’s a bafflingly complicated premise for a fairly generic fantasy story. That is, if we ignore the protagonist’s internal monologue, if we adopt any other character’s point of view, then events play out as one would expect in a typical fantasy world, complete with an overpowered main character. He is, in fact, the shadowy leader of a powerful faction of busty ninjas battling a demon cult, so his actions make sense on a surface level. His monologuing merely wraps them in layers of spurious irony: no one else knows that he’s lying, but he doesn’t know that his lies are true. It’s like wearing a clown costume under your regular clothes so no one ever sees it. Actually, it’s even more pointless than that: the possibility of a secret being exposed can create tension, but in this case, the secret can never be exposed, because the secret makes no sense.

For the record, this is not a parody of fantasy: it is not exaggerating genre tropes. Cid’s over-the-top finishing moves would hardly look out of place in Sword Art Online. It’s certainly a comedy subversion of fantasy, because of course we don’t expect a fantasy hero to be delusional and stupid. Unfortunately, as a fantasy adventure comedy, The Eminence in Shadow is hindered precisely by its subversive premise: again, the one thing that sets it apart from conventional fantasy is that the main character doesn’t understand what’s happening and doesn’t take it seriously. That does set up a lot of jokes, or a lot of iterations of the same joke, but it also makes it difficult to get invested in the plot. That’s forgivable in a straight comedy: the girls from Survival Game Club can run down elderly Australians in a truck, and all is forgotten by the next episode. But The Eminence in Shadow is not exempt from earning our investment in the plot, both because the joke relies on juxtaposing a serious story with a ridiculous hero and because the serious business of the plot takes up so much of the screen time.

Like Overlord, it suffers most from its unrelatable protagonist, who is never allowed to learn anything or grow as a person because it would spoil the joke. After two seasons, Cid remains a mentally disturbed teenager with no interest in meeting girls or making friends, narcissistic to the point of being delusional and armed with overwhelming firepower: a school shooter in a wizard hat. Also like Overlord, the supporting cast of typical fantasy characters is far more interesting simply for being sincere, but they’re given too little attention and too little respect. When a beautiful princess falls for the school shooter, she becomes the butt of the joke because he’s not taking it seriously.

You can reverse-engineer a better fantasy series by leaving out a layer or two of irony. Here’s one: a self-aware protagonist is trying not to be the main character, but he can’t resist interfering with the plot; in the process, he inadvertently wins the heart of a beautiful princess, making him the main character after all. Fine. So why make him delusional? How does that help? If he knew what was happening and took it seriously, it would raise the stakes. Now what if we gave him a relatable reason for interfering with the plot, instead of a weird pop culture obsession? Maybe he could even express a healthy interest in beautiful princesses. Oh, wait: I just wrote Trapped in a Dating Sim.

Or how about this: a genre-savvy protagonist winds up in a typical fantasy world, where he exploits common tropes to predict the tactics of a typical fantasy villain, making him uniquely qualified to be the hero. Fine. So why make him a narcissist? It’s easier to get invested when the hero actually cares about saving the world. Now what if his over-the-top finishing moves were justified by the extraordinary threat? Maybe the villain also knows how to exploit common tropes. Oh, wait: I just wrote Cautious Hero.

Here it is without the villain: an excitable protagonist recruits a harem of busty ninjas to battle a non-existent threat and has to redirect them to solving mundane problems. The villagers keep getting sick? Clearly, the river is infected with demonic parasites: have the busty ninjas build a water treatment plant. Take the fight against demonic corruption straight to city hall: have a busty ninja run for public office; land a finishing move on wasteful spending. Fine, now it’s a satire. I don’t know if that series exists already (KamiKatsu, perhaps), but the point is, practically any change toward greater sincerity would be an improvement. I will not wear the clown costume! Take me anywhere else, from The Dungeon of Black Company to The Last Dungeon Boonies.

Truthfully, if we take away its self-awareness, if we decline to be impressed by its nesting doll of irony, what is left of The Eminence in Shadow? Apart from the hero, the cast comprises, firstly, the fan service: two dozen barely developed female characters whose purpose is to fawn over Cid, though again not to the point that it can be called a parody, if indeed the sexless harem trope admits of parody; and, secondly, the blood bags: however many faceless male minions any given action scene requires to supply the school shooter with targets. In two seasons, I detected no meaningful conflicts. The jiggly ninjas are never in danger, so the action scenes are unexciting, even when Cid lands an extra-flashy finisher on an extra-large blood bag. Like Overlord, his opponents are the underdogs, making his casual brutality look downright tacky.

The character growth is minimal. Cid is never allowed to change, and his delusional monologuing drags out many scenes, leaving too little time to develop even one dozen jiggly ninjas. On top of that, through the monologuing, the series effectively tells us not to get invested in the supporting cast by making them the butt of the joke. As for the jokes, their execution is mostly dissatisfying, Cid’s intentional loss in the season one tournament being a clear example. The concept is fine: he’s trying not to be the main character, so he has to lose his match, but he can’t resist trying out every one of his lovingly rehearsed death animations. Unfortunately, his non-stop monologuing spoils the punch line, and it’s the same animation each time, and it goes on much too long. By season two, the comedy often feels perfunctory: Cid does something stupid for a stupid reason; the harem misinterprets that as a Machiavellian scheme, making them look stupid; and it all works out anyway because of a blatant plot contrivance.

Most episodes are mildly enjoyable, delivering competent action-comedy fan service sprinkled with general anime weirdness. It’s not particularly outrageous stuff; once again, if the goal was to parody either fantasy, harem romance, or anime in general, then it didn’t go far enough. In a season with Ragna Crimson, Cid the school shooter looks downright tame. At least put the jiggly ninjas in danger! The paradox of general anime weirdness is that it always appears more outrageous in a story that takes itself more seriously. Future Diary shot up several schools, and it never stopped being funny. Indeed, Survival Game Club, in addition to being much funnier than The Eminence in Shadow, also somehow takes itself more seriously and appears more outrageous for it.

The Eminence in Shadow does fill a need: it is the perfect fantasy series for people who are embarrassed about enjoying fantasy. (Compare KonoSuba, the perfect fantasy series for people who hate fantasy.) You get to watch an overpowered main character battle a demon cult alongside a harem of busty ninjas, complete with screen-rattling finishers, Japanglish one-liners, and hypnotizing jiggles — and if anyone breaks into your house and accuses you of enjoying fantasy, you can tell him no, it’s bad and you hate it, but this one is bad on purpose: it’s a deconstruction of the genre, a commentary on the audience. When I said “Delta is best girl,” I was being ironic! Mystify your intruder with semiotics, and he may never suspect that you secretly do enjoy women’s breasts.

Or you can just tell him to leave. It is possible to enjoy genre fiction without layers of ironic detachment: I’m told Gladstone enjoyed Treasure Island (although he might have drawn the line at Future Diary). Of course the fantasy genre has its well-documented foibles. It has been two centuries since Carlyle admonished the ordinary poet, forever seeking in external circumstances, in some past, distant, conventional heroic world, the help which can be found only in himself. And how far have the critical sciences advanced in that time? What novel insights do they offer us? “OP MC! Power fantasy! Wish fulfillment!” Stop breaking into my house. None of that is notable. Heroic fiction predates written language: Achilles was overpowered. Don Quixote parodied heroic fiction in 1605. Dante wrote a self-insert isekai during the actual middle ages. Two centuries ago, every title was a paragraph long. There is nothing new under the sun, including lazy criticism. You can make any story sound stupid by describing it in a stupid way; that tells us nothing about the story, although it does tell us something about the critic. In every case, it is the execution that counts, and not a plot synopsis.

In short, the fantasy genre was not a problem in need of solving. Like any other genre, it has its tropes and its conventions. Think of them as writing prompts: channels for an author’s creativity, rather than limitations on it. They guide the audience, too. Tell us that a Japanese teenager has been reincarnated as the demon lord’s step-sister’s panties, and we understand immediately: we’re settling in for the real story, about being true to your harem of busty feral wolf-girls, something we can all relate to.

The most derided tropes can serve a story well. I may be the only one who enjoyed it, but let me point out that Isekai Cheat Skill has an excellent theme: a good-natured boy with low self-esteem from being kicked around all his life has to learn to let himself be happy when things take a turn for the better. That’s why he doesn’t have to earn his overpowered abilities: because it serves the story to make him feel like he’s cheating. Now tell me: why is Cid overpowered? What narrative purpose does that serve? Or is it enough that the series has drawn our attention to the mere existence of the trope?

I do understand what The Eminence in Shadow was trying to accomplish; I just don’t care enough about tropes to care about subverting them. I care about meaningful conflicts and character growth, but I didn’t get that. I’ll settle for well-crafted jokes and a side of general anime weirdness, but I didn’t really get that either. In the end, what I got was an alibi for enjoying genre fiction, which is one thing I didn’t need two seasons of. It’s an overcomplicated, self-indulgent fantasy series from which a patient viewer may be able to extract a kernel of mildly enjoyable action-comedy fan service.

It is immediately clear that the series is drastically abbreviating its written source material, and whatever appeal the original may possess, little has survived this brutal treatment. It’s like ordering a pizza and receiving a ball of dough, a slice of processed cheese, and a squashed tomato. Scenes play out as if the writer or director were checking off plot points scribbled on a sticky note, with no added detail or depth.

It’s difficult to discuss Spellblades without rewriting it scene by scene because it does practically everything wrong. I will try to avoid doing that, but — well, for example, if you want to establish that a magic school is dangerous, you can introduce what we think is the protagonist of what appears to be a general fantasy action series, then subvert our expectations by having a magical plant devour him five minutes in. It’s a bit more entertaining than having someone state that magic school is dangerous.

A relatable protagonist is a solid foundation for a story, which is why Harry Potter begins at home with Harry Potter. Spellblades begins by rushing no fewer than six main characters into a fight scene. It makes the most important character less relatable by relegating much of his personality to a mysterious backstory to be revealed at some later date, which is problematic in a point-of-view character. Also, it’s difficult to create a sense of mystery when the setting is so underdeveloped: we can’t tell if a scene is intentionally confusing because of a mystery that hasn’t been solved yet, or unintentionally confusing because the adaptation is missing some important detail.

Having met on the first day of school, the main characters quickly become close friends. Anyone who ever lived in a college dorm can understand this formative experience of young adulthood and how the series has failed to capture it. I am not asking for literary realism: I am asking that they bond in a way that feels credible. Real life is often unrealistic. In real life, students build close friendships on chance encounters in stairwells at one in the morning, because real students are notoriously stupid. Wizarding students, on the other hand, are too busy self-seriously collecting plot points to have any formative experiences at all. I think one night of bad behaviour would go a long way toward humanizing them. Didn’t Harry Potter use a cloak of invisibility to sneak his friends into bars? Let the edgy wizard boy date the goldfish-brained samurai girl. It doesn’t have to be dark and mysterious: it can just be fun.

As it stands, the tone is inconsistent: the series often attempts to be whimsical — easily detected in the soundtrack — but the plot, the setting, and the characters are really too dark for that. Harry Potter meets the minimum threshold for whimsy because Harry Potter and friends are basically normal kids, not child soldiers; none of them has a death wish, not even Ron Weasley; and the Slytherins are bullies, not murderers.

As for the violence, action scenes are fundamentally about character conflict. They are not necessarily violent: the chip-eating scene in Death Note is a good counter-example. Violence without conflict is merely spectacle: another pointless tournament arc. Spellblades has plenty of violence but little conflict: many of the fight scenes serve no purpose, as the students are continually challenging one another merely to show off.

The plot is practically impossible to spoil because it includes practically every fantasy trope and treats each of them with about as much detail and depth as a plot synopsis. None of its ideas are inherently bad: every good pizza begins with a ball of dough. The plot, the setting, and the characters could have worked: just rewrite every scene. Make goldfish-brain the main character: her backstory and her growth have real potential, and her topless scene is fine the way it is. I know you can make any story sound stupid by describing it in a stupid way, and I have tried to avoid doing that. Yes, an elf and a troll are fighting bees with a werewolf: so what? Hamlet had a ghost and a pirate ship, and it turned out fine. In every case, it is the execution that counts, and in this case — I mean Spellblades, not Hamlet — the execution is perfunctory, wasting its potential.

On the positive side, the series is morally inoffensive, exalting friendship, courage, traditional martial arts, and the ethical treatment of animals; in that respect, it’s better than Black Lagoon. I liked the kissing scene, the severed hand, and the barbecue guy. The last arc was watchable. The voice actors did the best they could with the material.

All in all, Reign of the Seven Spellblades is unfortunately quite bad. At times, it was entertainingly bad; looking back on the season as a whole, the edgy wizard kids, the goldfish-brained samurai, the slightly improved final arc, etc., I can even say that it was endearingly bad, as long as I do not have to rewatch any of it. I can recommend it as a case study in how not to tell a story, but I cannot recommend it as a fantasy series.

It’s normal to sprinkle in moments of pure fun, like a beach episode or a Chika dance. It’s a form of fan service; it’s icing on the cake. Isekai Cheat Skill is a cake made entirely of icing, a fan service apotheosis, and it works improbably well. Light comedies look downright mean-spirited by comparison. There may be no series more eager to please the viewer. If a scene isn’t pleasantly surprising, it’s at least predictably enjoyable.

To illustrate, I’ve just written a new episode: the hero goes to the zoo; obviously, an escaped lion attacks; using his isekai cheat skill, he chucks it into a lake, saving a cute girl with enormous eyes — let’s say the prime minister’s daughter; she takes him on a date, and the rest of the episode can just be a close-up shot of her eating a crepe.

The theme was well chosen as a fan service comedy delivery system: the nicest guy in the world gets everything he ever wanted, and he has to learn to let himself be happy; which is to say, the conflict is internal. Apart from that, the stakes are hilariously low: threats ranging from intramural sports to escaped lions are introduced, defeated, and dismissed in five minutes flat, leaving plenty of time to watch a cute girl eat a crepe.

In light of its tone, it’s difficult to fault the pacing. Yes, we spent an entire episode at a shopping mall. On the other hand, that episode was delightful. I will absolutely take a trip to the mall with fun characters and fan service over the finest hand-crafted generic fantasy fight scenes, which in any case the show could not afford. Plenty of heroes have racked up higher kill counts, but did any of them go out for crepes?

Actually, yes: there are crepes in Trapped in a Dating Sim (episode five) and Chivalry of a Failed Knight (episode three). So, granted, the stakes could have been higher — the adventure and the comedy more balanced — but it’s okay that they weren’t, because those series already exist, and I don’t expect a balance of flavours when I order an all-icing cake. Isekai Cheat Skill went overboard, but at least it fell off on the warm and charming side. I have tried to rewatch episodes without smiling, and I fail every time.

(For the record, I fail this challenge as soon as Kaede, the redhead, enters the frame in the opening credits. Watch episode five; gaze into those enormous vermilion eyes: you can really tell when both of Kaede’s brain cells are operating at maximum capacity.)

With a good-natured hero and a pleasing eagerness to let good things happen to him, Isekai Cheat Skill consistently achieves a kind of easygoing joyfulness that shows with bigger budgets and more reputable pedigrees have struggled to deliver even once. In an age of irony, it’s Candide minus the irony: every episode is a beach episode, every girl is the best girl, and all is for the best in the best of all possible fantasy worlds.

Spy Classroom is a simple, competent, consistently enjoyable light action comedy about cute girls learning how to be spies. The high-stakes first arc is particularly engrossing, but the fun cast of characters makes even the filler episodes quite watchable.

The show feels solid from start to finish because it never overreaches: we were promised cute girls learning how to be spies, and we got exactly that. It’s spy fiction as light action comedy rather than military thriller, but it still delivers reasonably clever spy-like twists: gadgets, disguises, shadowy figures, double- and triple-crosses.

The tone is well balanced because, again, it doesn’t overreach. The girls are cute and silly, and the deadpan teacher complements them well; the spy missions are exciting, even when the stakes are low; and the tragic backstories, when they come up, give the story a bit of heart without wallowing in sadness. It’s about as cozy as spy fiction gets.

The season is fairly well paced: three main characters, including the teacher, are well developed, and what I called the filler episodes typically focus on developing one side character each through enjoyable albeit low-stakes action mixed with comedy. The voice acting is charming, the animation is serviceable, and the subtitles are acceptable.

I remember once slogging through an episode of some romantic comedy I won’t name, trying to force myself to enjoy it. I gave up eventually and put on My First Girlfriend Is a Gal, of all things, a less than beloved franchise, and my relief was immediate and overwhelming, because finally I was watching a show that actually tries to deliver on the core appeal of its genre; a show that consistently does the obvious right thing. I feel the same way about Spy Classroom now: it’s a minor success. It doesn’t shout at you; it’s not trying to seem important; it doesn’t even demand your full attention in every scene. But if you ever find yourself slogging through the latest “revolutionary achievement for the medium,” consider a simple story about cute spy girls instead.

How bad can anime get?

Start by limiting the scope: if a critic were rating food, assigning it a score from one to five stars, it would be reasonable to restrict the scale to the sort of food that might be served at a restaurant. A cup of protein powder isn’t a one-star meal: it doesn’t get a rating, because it deviates too far from what the scale was designed to measure.

Would you rate protein powder? True, it’s a fine dietary supplement. Moldy bread is not. But you can survive eating moldy bread (I am not recommending this), which is more than can be said for toxic waste. But toxic waste can in theory be consumed by humans (again, I am not recommending this), which is more than can be said for the planet Mercury, which is too large and too far away to be eaten by anyone. Then again, the planet Mercury is at least a concrete noun, unlike, say, patience. So there you have it: one star for patience, considered as a meal; two stars for the planet Mercury; three for toxic waste; four for moldy bread; and five for protein powder. Unfortunately, having devoted at least four-fifths of our rating scale to inappropriate things, we are forced to assign our favourite food the same score as protein powder.

Clearly, this won’t do. The rating scale must be restricted to professionally produced animated film and television with at least one recognizably human character (she can be a robot cat-girl, that’s fine: I mean the human spirit) and a plot that sort of makes sense. Anything that doesn’t rise to that level does not qualify for a rating. I wouldn’t rate a Falstaff beer commercial, a GameCube cutscene, a trade show demonstration of new animation technology, or an experimental short film, because in each case, what the work aims to achieve deviates too far from the purpose of a normal work of fiction.

With that in mind, how bad can anime get? My go-to example is The Strongest Sage with the Weakest Crest, a fantasy adventure from the winter broadcast season of 2022. I quit watching about halfway through episode one, which pretty much says it all.

Recently, I was challenged on this (though not personally): if you look at the lowest-rated shows of all time, someone said, and compare them to what you think are the worst, you will see a stark difference. I thought that was interesting, so I found a list on MAL of the lowest-rated shows of all time, and I picked one based on the artwork: Spectral Force, a two-episode fantasy adventure from the late 90s I had never heard of, apparently based on a video game I had also never heard of. I watched both episodes.

My verdict: surprisingly entertaining, and it certainly didn’t overstay its welcome. The first bit of episode one was so disjointed that I didn’t know what was happening, and all the CGI in that episode looked about as bad as a video game cutscene from the late 90s, but the show had a fun story to tell, and it didn’t waste time telling it. I got an episode and a half of decent fantasy with mediocre to terrible production value.

I like that it introduced characters that seemed arrogant and selfish at first, then subverted my expectations by giving them hidden depths of loyalty and courage. The demon princess was a fine protagonist, and she and her sister had some touching moments. The villain wasn’t very well developed. The twist at the end of episode one was kind of neat, and it made me want to keep watching. Going into episode two, I wasn’t really performing an experiment anymore: I was just watching a fantasy show.

So then I tried to watch The Strongest Sage with the Weakest Crest again, having just finished watching, of all things, Spectral Force. I want to really emphasize this: I had just finished watching… Spectral Force. How much lower could my expectations be?

Well, The Strongest Sage with the Weakest Crest proved to be just as terrible the second time: I could not force myself to pay attention. It felt like it’s not even trying to tell a story. It was like watching a corporate workshop on anime production: intolerable.

Again, bear in mind, I laughed at some of the jokes in Spectral Force — I mean, I might have laughed at the CGI, too, but the show also made me laugh on purpose on at least one occasion. There was at least one battle scene that made me think: “That was kind of a neat battle scene.” The demon girls were pretty cute. The hero’s party was somewhat creatively designed, especially the priestess with her gun and her funny little hat. Yes, the show is exceptionally clumsy, but the core is fine.

In conclusion — I don’t have much of a conclusion. What have we learned? I still think The Strongest Sage with the Weakest Crest is the worst show I’ve ever seen. If you enjoyed it, I’m happy for you, and if you helped make it, I mean no offence. As for Spectral Force, I don’t really know what to make of it — I guess that’s what happens when you browse the lowest-rated shows of all time and pick one at random based on the artwork. I think I enjoyed it more than the fourth season of My Hero Academia, so there’s that. In any case, I’ve done my due diligence on the worst anime I’ve ever seen.

Widely praised, even before its release, as a revolutionary achievement for the medium of anime, or indeed for art in general, Chainsaw Man turned out to be a dark subversion of the superhero genre, like an R-rated X-Men. It’s well animated, fairly stylish, sometimes funny, and gruesome enough for teenage boys. Unfortunately, as a standalone story, it lacks direction and depth. By the end of the season, I wanted to shower off the bloody slime and curl up with Bocchi instead.

You can get a lot done in twelve episodes if you pick one thing and focus on it, whether that’s a character or a theme. In Chainsaw Man, on the other hand, a lot of things happen, often violently, but not in great detail or depth. It wanted to deliver a series of shocking moments, and I suppose it succeeded, but the plot had to be stretched pretty thin to cover them all. You can always patch it up with flashbacks, but the end result lacks the polish and precision of a show like Akiba Maid War.

Typically, to deliver a shocking moment, you put a normal person in an extreme situation. In Chainsaw Man, on the other hand, there are essentially no normal people: innocent bystanders barely exist; ordinary emotions barely register. It can be intense, but without that normal baseline, it’s difficult to know how to feel about strange anti-heroes fighting equally strange villains. It’s certainly dark: darkness takes centre stage, in Hot Topic eyeliner. Characters obsess over death and revenge; get drunk or go insane; kill brutally and die horribly. Again, it can be intense — more so if we got to know them better, but that takes time and restraint: you can’t ask me to care about someone you’ve already blown up, no matter how spectacular the explosion.

Of course, flashbacks are not actually a substitute for proper pacing and structure. If you want to introduce a major threat, try foreshadowing it. “This just in, the Hair Devil has attacked a hair salon.” Change the source material if you have to: there’s no law against it. Now imagine if the work relationship between Aki and Himeno developed in parallel with Denji’s origin story: it would highlight the difference in the characters’ motivations. The first eight episodes could have been stretched to a full twelve, with a little extra world-building along the way. It was really at its best in the mid-season anyway, as a monster-of-the-week workplace action romantic comedy.

As it is, Himeno, a fine character, is given too little attention; with enough flashbacks, we do learn quite a bit about Aki, another fine character; Power’s comic relief is always welcome, and Kobeni’s too. Unfortunately, for some reason, the protagonist is Denji, a shiftless idiot defined by his lack of both depth and agency. Denji works as a joke; as the show’s main character, he fails to drive the story forward.

All art is dedicated to joy, said Schiller, who invented dark, and I wish there were more joy in Chainsaw Man. Is a beach episode too much to ask for? What I mean is, I’ve seen joyless, nihilistic subversions of the superhero genre, and many other genres, many times before. I know you can kill people with a chainsaw. Maybe next season we’ll find out why that matters.

Ninja Ittoki is an action show about teenage ninjas in robot suits, and it’s surprisingly frustrating because it comes so close to being a good show. Character growth, little world-building details, a willingness to take risks, fight scenes that actually matter, occasional comedy to lighten the mood, a plot that wraps up in a timely manner: a lot of it only sort of works, some of the time, but its heart is in the right place.

The early episodes are problematic. If I can’t understand how the characters feel, I can’t get invested: like a ninja after dropping a smoke bomb, suspension of disbelief is nowhere to be found. A character makes a strange choice: am I supposed to be surprised by that, or am I putting more thought into this than the writers did? The surface-level content is fine: there’s no plot hole. We’re just missing the motivation.

The rest of the season is much improved, like an intensive care patient making steady progress toward a full recovery. It’s still flawed: the villains are never well motivated, and I would have liked to see less emphasis on Ittoki’s robot suit and more on his training. Still, I must admit, by committing so hard to taking itself so seriously, Ninja Ittoki eventually wins on sincerity, and the final episodes are downright exciting.

If you want to see high school students fight with knives in robot suits, and you also want a show with a heart and a brain, Ninja Ittoki works, more or less. There are better choices, like rewatching Future Diary, No Game No Life, or Chivalry of a Failed Knight. On the other hand, to my surprise, I think I would watch Ninja Ittoki stumble through another twelve awkwardly sincere episodes of knife-fighting ninja friends.

Taming the Final Boss is a mildly enjoyable diversion at best: it’s an uninspired romantic comedy in an uninspired fantasy setting with a convoluted premise, a badly rushed plot, and lacklustre romance and comedy. Though the setup is superficially similar to this year’s excellent Trapped in a Dating Sim, what develops is much less impressive: like a winning chess position, except every piece is slightly misplaced.

The pacing is disastrous: the season is crammed with standalone arcs, each of which is rushed, all of which leave little time for characters and relationships to develop. Nine episodes in, the show is still introducing entire factions in thirty-second expository clips. I thought we were going to see a video game villainess seduce a demon lord: are we done with that? I feel like we could have squeezed more out of it.

Actually, it’s not clear at all how the story builds on or benefits from the premise. Why make her a villainess? Why reincarnate her? Why in a dating sim? Any one of those elements could have taken the story in an interesting direction if it had been treated as more than just isekai overhead. It’s not difficult to imagine: an evil heiress gets dumped, tries to get even, and winds up fixing her life, and the kingdom, essentially out of spite. Or how about this: reborn into fantasy high society, an ordinary modern girl has to act the part of a notorious noblewoman. As for being trapped in a dating sim — I mean, that one practically writes itself: it’s funny when a normal person has to deal with stupid genre tropes. Unfortunately, the show delivers none of the above.

The animation is noticeably cheap, but the real problem is lazy writing, whether it’s solving mysteries offscreen — no time for fun, we’ve got plot points to deliver — or ruining a joke by explaining it. Fight scenes lack tension because everyone has poorly defined magic powers. The romance is half-baked. The villains are not well motivated.

Like The Dungeon of Black Company — a much better show overall — the protagonist is refreshingly motivated. But instead of pruning her overgrown backstory and giving her room to grow, the writers merely embroidered her with isekai kitsch. Although I mildly enjoyed parts of every episode, I wouldn’t watch another season.

At the start of every broadcast season, the online anime community, based on little information, assigns certain shows to the must-watch trophy shelf and others to the guilty-pleasure dumpster. This spring, the stylish and beautifully animated comedy Spy Family understandably took a spot on the trophy shelf. The show is not at all bad; in fact, it’s quite watchable. It’s just not as interesting as it looks: style over substance.

The premise and the plot are complicated, but the core dynamic is this: the husband is basically serious, and his wife and daughter are silly; thus, the serious character is forced to deal with the others’ silliness. It’s a solid foundation for comedy, but I don’t think the writers built all that much on it, so viewers will enjoy or endure multiple scenes, even episodes, of essentially surface-level fun: cute, silly, mildly amusing filler.

The wife, Yor, the world’s dorkiest assassin, is delightful, but the show can’t wait to write her out of an episode in order to give more screen time to a small child. Unfortunately, children make questionable protagonists: they lack maturity and therefore depth, making them, again, merely cute and silly. More Yor, please.

It’s as if every element of the show, from the stylish look of the characters to the simple structure of the jokes, was designed to be modular fun: you can take it out of context, chop it into short clips, and get a similarly enjoyable experience. On the other hand, this implies that the context, i.e., the plot, isn’t adding much. As a result, even touching scenes feel like short, high-quality clips sandwiched by cute-and-silly.

Spy Family is certainly fun, and I would probably watch another season. I just think it needs to be less pleased with itself and add more depth. We get it: you’re cute and silly. But we can’t eat cotton candy for dinner.

With no budget to speak of, consigned by many to the guilty-pleasure dumpster, Trapped in a Dating Sim delivers an excellent fantasy adventure with action, drama, comedy, and romance, along with giant robot suits, surprise marriage proposals, pirate airships, racetrack gambling, and high-stakes tea parties. Defying expectations, it’s one of the best shows of the season: that’s the value of consistently good writing.

The hero, being trapped in a dating sim, is thrust into conflicts of love, money, war, and class, some of which cannot even be resolved by beating people up in a giant robot suit. Many of them can, though, and the action scenes are exciting, despite the cheap animation, because we care about the characters, who stand to gain or lose a great deal in this surprisingly credible matriarchal teenage dating-sim aristocracy.

Speaking of characters, a lot of them seem generic at first, because they are indeed ripped from the plot of a badly written dating sim. That turns out to be a great setup for character development when the game goes off the rails: look at what the show does with the rich mean girl, who is in fact the best girl. Meanwhile, the game world brought to life is wonderfully imaginative and at the same time comically inconsistent.

Trapped in a Dating Sim manages to be quite funny without being overly clever: it’s less about carefully constructed comedy scenarios than about setting up fun characters with different personalities and motivations and turning them loose to interact in entertaining ways. The hero, his little robot, the mean girl, the queen, the prince, who sucks: you can drop them into pretty much any situation and watch the chaos unfold.

The whole season is well paced, with meaningful conflicts driving character growth, imaginative world-building, a satisfying conclusion, and roughly zero filler. If any show deserves a second season with a much bigger budget, it’s Trapped in a Dating Sim.

Skeleton Knight in Another World takes a well-liked, well-trodden fantasy premise and turns it into a baffling mess: the tone is so inconsistent, the pacing so awkward, and the plot so aimless that I couldn’t engage with anything that was happening.

Fantasy can be light-hearted and serious-minded at the same time. You just need to balance those elements and maintain consistency in the tone, so the serious moments don’t contradict the levity. Skeleton Knight failed utterly in that regard: what could have been a light fantasy adventure runs headlong into sex crimes and slavery like a magic fox into a wood chipper, then tries to act like it never happened. The serious subject matter is not taken seriously, either by the show or by its aimless protagonist.

Speaking of aimlessness, it’s difficult to overstate how little gets done: plenty of conversations, but little character development; plenty of fight scenes, but little conflict — and no, you can’t raise the stakes by making every enemy grunt a sadistic maniac. The awkward pacing and tonal inconsistency go hand in hand, because you can’t maintain urgency on a rescue mission while also enjoying a leisurely slice of life.

Compare it to Cautious Hero, Trapped in a Dating Sim, Grimgar, Goblin Slayer, Jobless Reincarnation, even The Fruit of Evolution. Obviously, these recent fantasy shows differ tremendously from one another, but each one manages to maintain a consistent tone and spends its screen time building up a coherent story with well-defined characters.

Clearly, I enjoy a broad range of fantasy. I wanted to enjoy Skeleton Knight as well, but I can’t get invested if I don’t know how to feel. In this case, I was thoroughly bored after five episodes and had to force myself to keep watching in case it paid off later, which it didn’t. Ultimately, the show never figured out how to tell its story.

Shikimori’s Not Just a Cutie is disappointing: it’s an insubstantial and frankly boring slice of life masquerading as a romantic comedy. There’s no conflict and very little chemistry, and the jokes fall flat in part because the characters are so dull. The pink-haired girl is cute, I guess, but the writing can’t compete with Love Is War, Love after World Domination, or Science Fell in Love, to name three from this season.

Some romantic comedies drag out the courtship phase; the genre is notorious for it. Shikimori tried the opposite and overshot the mark: the main characters start as a couple, and the show doesn’t know what to do with them. Any leftover questions feel more like plot holes than plot hooks: I can’t imagine how these two got together, and I’m not sure the writers can either. In every episode, in every scene, she’s passionate and energetic, he’s bland and ineffectual, and what’s missing is the balance and tension of either Don’t Toy with Me, Miss Nagatoro or My Dress-Up Darling.

Also, why make the male lead pathologically clumsy and then also supernaturally unlucky? Was there a reason for that? At times, it’s like the premise is interfering with the plot: Shikimori does manage to deliver a couple of mildly enjoyable moments, pretty standard romantic comedy stuff, but they require a temporary suspension of his unexplained curse, which would otherwise make him choke on a shrimp or get blown up by fireworks or something. Just let the scene play out!

I can’t even give Shikimori credit for its rare moments of fun: it’s more like an incomplete failure, as the writers or animators mostly bungle what should have been standard, even classic, romantic comedy. Somehow, even a summer festival feels lifeless and drab, in part because the animation is incredibly cheap, and in part because none of the characters are allowed to have conflicting goals.

I was bored after three episodes and quit after six: in theory, I like the unconventional relationship, but the plot failed to capture my interest before I ran out of patience for staring into the watery violet eyes of a gasping weakling. Not every show gets a second season, and this one wasted its screen time. Sadly, Shikimori’s just a chore.

Tomodachi Game is a reliably clever and surprisingly charming thriller. The game show format is a fun premise — who doesn’t like puzzles? — but the story builds on well-defined characters and their murky relationships. The danger and drama are appropriately dangerous and dramatic for a teenage cast: this isn’t a Saw film. After only six episodes, I’m completely invested because I trust the writers to deliver.

With careful pacing, the show maintains a high level of intensity without either exhausting the viewer or resorting to edgy gimmicks. Instead of a normal protagonist trapped in an extreme situation, which is perhaps more typical of a thriller, Tomodachi Game gives us an extreme protagonist driving an already extreme situation further out of control, and I think it works wonderfully. Occasional clues leading up to well timed reveals will reward your attention even on repeat viewing. Serious subject matter is taken seriously, while at the same time the show invites us to have fun figuring out the latest mystery, at times practically breaking the fourth wall to do so.

Essentially, you could say it’s Death Note at Degrassi High, as troubled teens match wits in a reasonably high-stakes game whose rules are clearly defined but entertainingly exploitable. The format demands unusually accurate translation; fortunately, both the English subtitles and the English dub are very good. The animation is serviceable.

I actually watched every episode more than once, trying to spot all the clues and figure out the answer, and the next episode’s reveal was never disappointing. I recommend avoiding all spoilers so you can enjoy the show at your own pace as well.

The Dungeon of Black Company is a blast: it’s a standout adventure comedy that offers something new every episode. A lovably obnoxious anti-hero and his more-or-less unwilling friends scheme and bumble their way through a wild variety of conflicts, from dragon-slaying expeditions to shareholder meetings and others I don’t want to spoil. I had no expectations going in, and it took me a few episodes to figure out what the show was trying to do, but by episode four it was smooth sailing, so stick with it.

Black Company turned out to be exactly what I wanted and ultimately didn’t get from KonoSuba and Combatants Will Be Dispatched. The main character is motivated by a clear goal and drives the story forward. He faces an interesting variety of credible threats, from losing his life savings to losing his actual life. He’s supposed to be obnoxious, and he absolutely is, and he does get punished for it, but he isn’t reduced to a laughingstock or a punching bag either. I wanted to see what he would do next; I wanted him to succeed; I laughed when he screwed everything up. It’s a nice balance.

The pacing is excellent: it really does give you something new every episode. Action scenes are more likely to showcase creative problem-solving than generic fantasy swordplay. The characters are fairly well developed: credible friends, credible siblings, credible students and mentors, credible anti-heroes and villains, and a few gestures toward credible romance. The animation is serviceable. I prefer the English dub.

It’s not perfect, and in the cold light of day, I suppose its flaws are noticeable, but somehow Black Company left me feeling really generous: I want to see more of it, and more shows like it. Can we call it a bonus? Overtime pay? That seems appropriate.