Failure Frame

A review of season one

Failure Frame is not a difficult series to understand, but it is a difficult one to review. I think it is important to make this admission to the reader at the outset, at least by way of warning. No sooner do I approach the task of reviewing this less-than-beloved 2024 isekai fantasy adventure anime than I find myself led to the consideration of subjects of unexpected breadth, depth, complexity, and abstraction. Indeed, no other series has raised, for this reviewer, as many questions about the nature and function of criticism.

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!