This Week in Anime -Narou-ing Down Your Anime Watchlist

During the last few anime seasons, TWIA alums have taken up the mantle to wade through the seasonal isekai to find the cream of the crop. This season is bigger than ever, but surprisingly, there isn’t much isekai to sift through. Instead, Nick and Steve look at web novel adaptations and which are worth your time.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by the participants in this chatlog are not the views of Anime News Network.

Steve

Nick, much like a Japanese high schooler trapped in an interdimensional cycle of Samsara, we find ourselves yet again at the start of a fresh season of anime with a fresh trough of isekai slop to snarf our way out of. How many will it be this time? Half a dozen shows? A dozen shows with one dozen different stat screens to stare at agog with despair? Let’s take a look!

Wait…this can’t be right…there’s like, three?

Nick

Hell yeah, man! For once, most of the Narou web/light novel things they keep pumping out are mostly NOT isekai! So, let’s get these three otherworldly offerings together and clock out early while the boss is distracted.

Hold on, a carrier pigeon has just wafted into my window with a missive from our beloved executive editor. It says “NICE TRY, LOSERS. DO ALL THE NAROU ANIME. [INSERT WITCH CACKLE HERE].” Also, do you tip a carrier pigeon?

I think in this case we’re allowed to cook and eat it.

We’ll certainly need the sustenance.

Gotta love those very real titles from very real stories. Kim, helpfully, wrote an excellent primer on that site and its peculiarities that, for me at least, is my main window into a subculture I have minimal experience with. Narou (or Narō, depending on your preferred romanization) isn’t a genre so much as a loose conglomeration of tropes and styles gestated within an insular community that nonetheless proved wildly popular and influential for a concatenation of inexplicable reasons. In other words, it’s a website.

Specifically, it’s a website that became the first station of a media pipeline that’s funneled dozens of shows to market for the last several years, and that’s a pretty unique situation. Narou is far from the only website where young, amateur writers post their creations to an insular community. Still, most other sites like that aren’t part of an enormous media apparatus that can fast-track those self-edited scribblings into full-on multimedia projects. It was a media firestorm in the US when 50 Shades of Grey became a hit after starting life as Twilight fanfiction. Imagine if that spurred Warner Bros. to buy Archive Of Our Own and start using the stories there as source material for dozens of movies every year.

It’s a pretty interesting situation! Honestly, it’s more interesting than some of the premieres we will discuss. But there are some gems here, too, so before I start sounding too snarky, I want to emphasize that Narou, like isekai, isn’t in itself shorthand for a bad story. Hell, Re:Zero is an isekai that began on Narou, and I like it a whole lot!

While the sheer volume of Narou adaptations means we get quite a lot of chaff to go along with the wheat, there are also some benefits to seeing works that began as amateur passion projects. Thousands of first-time creators pouring their brains into Word documents can lead to interesting, unique, often shockingly niche creations that otherwise would never see the light of day. Plus, it’s not like bad isekai is exclusive to this site. The absolute worst isekai show of this season has its origins entirely in traditional publishing.

Wait, maybe that was the real intent behind Lynzee’s message. She gave us the Narou assignment so we wouldn’t have to discuss that darn pig. Damn. I feel kinda bad about spatchcocking that pigeon now.

While I’m not insane enough to do the Preview Guide, doing those Isekai Hell TWIAs each season peels back the curtain on how a narrative like this gets pieced together. That whole premiere felt like a cut-and-paste job of other similarly bland reincarnation stories I’ve snored through. There’s barely anything to comment on. It’s like trying to describe beige.

It’s very much an example of how the creative recycling fostered on Narou can churn out shows that are more checklists of tropes than anything else. Once the novelty of isekai wore off, everyone had to add their gimmick, and eventually, we ran out of those and have just resorted to slightly subverting the gimmick. So now our protagonist has a special RPG power in a world that doesn’t use those powers. Also, everyone looks like a Funko Pop of themselves.

“Nothing in storage” just about sums it up. And we’ve got seven other shows to get to, so I don’t think we need to dwell on this lady or her concoctions any longer.

Alright, so you’re not in the market for potions. Can I interest you in something a little less analog?

Ah, our first VRMMO entry. It’s technically not isekai! Although you wouldn’t know it looking at the protagonist’s avatar.

Usually, we joke about these shows intentionally making their protagonist the most bland, unremarkable piece of starch possible. This damn show beat us to it.

And you know, I was on board with the show for a spell. When it’s just showing a faceless guy playing a video game, there’s an old-school Let’s Play quality that infuses the boringness with an odd sense of purpose. I felt maybe I was just supposed to chill and watch a dude pick virtual herbs for 20 minutes. But then the show tries to introduce other characters and conflicts, and it all falls apart.

I love how the entire conceit of this show falls to crap if you’ve ever played any MMO. The whole idea is that Potato Boy is purposefully playing a boring character. Like yeah, there are absolute assholes who will treat other players like crap for having builds that aren’t following the most hardcore meta, but those builds rarely include “high-stealth ranged DPS with magic and healing.”

It’s like writing a basketball story where your character is an underdog because he’s better at passing the ball than shooting.

You’d think the anime actually about a video game would understand how said video games work. Alas.
Should’ve stuck to the herbs.

To be fair, it’s the exact kind of flawed attempt at an “underdog” setup that you’d expect from a first-time writer who wants a power fantasy but is too proud to admit it.

There’s a certain kind of unpolished charm there that I could see attracting readers or viewers. Not me, though.

Oh god no, this thing is boring as hell. I think it’s interesting to think about how its origin means this is an obvious narrative scuff that could never be waxed out in adaptation.
Plus, it’s not like it’s the only VRMMO show this season that fundamentally misunderstands something about gaming. It’s just way worse at disguising that fact than its competition.

Shangri-La Frontier looks incredible and does not contain a single authentic human being or cognizant thought about game design.

I mean, it gets there for a minute. The central idea of the main character as somebody who likes fighting their way through crappy, poorly designed games is a neat one! If they made a whole show about this dude playing through stuff like Urban Sasquatch, I’d probably watch it.

Yeah, that part rules. I think most gamers have a pile of “trash” games they are fond of despite their jank. Granted, I don’t know anyone who makes that their entire personality (unless they’re getting ad revenue for it), but at least that’s a hook.

Unfortunately, it then immediately abandons that hook for “but what if playing bad games made you a Chad at good games?” like suffering through An American Tail for the PlayStation 2 is just training with weighted clothing before loading up Elden Ring.

The premise also doesn’t make sense because most of the big AAA games out there are bloated, bug-ridden messes. Why not lean into that angle? I’d much rather watch a guy zip and clip through Skyrim than see this dude be mildly impressed by how well Number Go Up.

Hell, play into the unique horror of a fully immersive VR game bugging out. How weird would it be to experience dropped frames with a sense of smell and touch? Would turning on God Mode with console commands be cool or terrifying? What does walking around when the texture of your own skin doesn’t load in do to your psyche?

If none of that, just show me his full playthrough of Faeria Chronicle Online. It honestly looks great.

Hell yeah, a buddy comedy about having to muscle through a 50+ hour RPG while dragging along the NPC from hell? Any of these would be infinitely more interesting than watching this dude min-max his way through life as Big Bird.

Not sure how this is the anime that ended up with the highest production values of the Narou bunch—nice animation, strong storyboarding and scene composition, willingness to get goofy—but it isn’t quite enough to lift it out of its fundamental narrative and character misses.

As brain-off entertainment, those production values are enough for it to get by, but it feels like wasted potential. Still, between all the shows this season with stat screens, I’ll take Shangri-La Frontier over RPG Batman.

Berserk of Gluttony, more so than any of these other examples, has the stench of edgy teen grimdark fanfiction slathered all over it. It is one degree of separation removed from Ebony Darkness Dementia Raven Way, but it too is held back by its conformance to common Narou tropes.

Readers might notice that “guy who everyone thinks sucks is secretly great” is kind of a running theme through these shows, and this one leans on that trope so hard it’s liable to break any second now.

Its first episode is entirely about our protagonist, Fate Graphite, getting wedgied and stuffed in lockers by The Cool Kids, played by a trio of knife-licking corrupt knights. The only reason he doesn’t get swirled is because this world doesn’t have indoor plumbing.

And don’t get me wrong, uploading dreck like this to AO3 is the sacred right of all dweebs just trying to make it to the other end of high school. But boy, is it weird to see an entire anime production devoted to translating these insecurities onto the screen.

Oh for sure. Load up your angsty fantasies about becoming a brooding superhero with special powers and a talking sword to any place that will tolerate them. Just please polish that stuff up for prime time if it’s going to become an actual, published work. At the very least, find a more interesting angle than Number Go Up Because Reasons.

Or, at the very very least, couch those numbers in a system that isn’t so granular. For instance, your daughter leaves the nest and returns super strong. Just call her an S-rank. You don’t have to get fancy.

Ah yes, we’ve finally advanced beyond the immature power fantasies of being a cool, strong guy and into the mature power fantasies of being a cool, strong guy who’s also a dad.

It’s an interesting question, whether we’ll see more parent-focused Narou or isekai stories as the authors and readers grow older or whether the next big trend will usurp their popularity. My Daughter Left the Nest and Returned an S-Rank Adventurer, despite the faintest twinge of creativity in its premise, doesn’t end up as transformative as I would have liked. It almost gets there, though.

If nothing else, it’s the first show we’ve mentioned that I’ve considered watching another episode. The premiere’s main hook is that this guy and his loving adopted daughter haven’t seen each other in a while because she’s busy with work. Is that the premise of a Lifetime holiday movie? Sure. Yet it’s still a damn sight more interesting than Man Make STR Big.

I found it more of a horror story about how many times an employer can ignore a vacation request. This is why vaguely medieval fantasy adventurers need to unionize.

Working unpaid overtime to save villages from giant ants is at least more justifiable than doing it to stock shelves or fill in spreadsheets, but yeah, this girl should start working on becoming an S-Rank picketer.

The premiere’s cute enough, but I dunno, I wanted a little more substance. The dad losing his leg and grappling (poorly) with the end of his adventuring days is probably fodder for a good arc down the line, especially with how well his daughter is doing for herself. Is the writing strong enough to deliver on that, though? It’s possible, but the Narou examples we’ve covered so far haven’t knocked it out of the park in that department.

It also looks like butt, which is another consequence of so many of these damn things being made every season. The anime industry is already straining mightily under the strain of overproduction, and Kadokawa has, per their marketing, committed to making even more every year. So even stuff that could be promising gets dragged down by under-resourced productions with no time to give anything the polish it may or may not deserve.

There’s what, like 60 anime airing this season? It’s unconscionable. It’s too much. I’m not even joking. You could halve that, and it would probably be more than necessary. And that feeds into why I might end up speaking more harshly about some of these series, because at a certain point, things are just being made to be made, and that’s no way to make art.

Trust me, as somebody who watched and wrote up every new show to get licensed, I feel the burden. Even when stuff is great, unique, or just a solid execution of a familiar idea, it’s easy to get lost in the enormous wave of everything coming out. S-Rank Daughter could very well have a touching little story to tell, but that’s not always enough to hold onto.
I’m going to be real with you: I watched I’m Giving the Disgraced Noble Lady I Rescued a Crash Course in Naughtiness. I wrote up a whole preview guide on it. I have a folder of screencaps that I am certain are from the premiere. I could not tell you a damn thing about it if you staked my life on it.

I get you. Sometimes, I scroll through my screencaps folder and find a title I don’t remember watching. It turns out to be a TWIA assignment I completely memory-holed. Crash Course eventually ends with a charming premise (it’s not that kind of naughtiness; get your mind out of the gutter). Still, the premiere spends a lot of its time ambling without direction.

Frankly, even the premise is a little too slight to work for me. Like woo, teehee, it’s “naughtiness” in the way a five-year-old in Sunday School is naughty for making fart sounds with their armpit. Oh, you rascals. Next, you’ll stay up past bedtime and drink sodas with caffeine.

Come on, they gotta start small. Look at that girl. If you gave her a single joint, she’d die.

Just saying, the real subversion would be if she turns out to have a wild side. He tries to take her to a PG-13 movie, and she winds up getting into a knife fight like the world’s craziest rumspringa.

I’m also skeptical they’d be able to keep up this premise for an entire cour, let alone however long the novel series might be. But I’m willing to forgive a little treacle in exchange for the lack of video game jargon.

I like my imaginary version better. Let that girl lose her head.

Funny you should mention losing heads.

Sorry girl, we’re putting you in the device. We put the show’s credits on it and everything.

Tearmoon Empire was the most delightful surprise out of all the series we sampled this week. I had pretty low expectations for AU Marie Antoinette, but the premiere (and its OP) proved really funny and surprisingly intriguing.

While not technically an isekai, it very much hues the idea of the Otome Villainess model. Just that instead of getting insight into her future via video game knowledge, our heroine learns it through her bloodstained future diary (no, not that one). It rules.

Admittedly, I know most of what I know about the French Revolution thanks to The Rose of Versailles, but I got a kick out of all the blatant references. You’ve got Versailles, the Bastille, “let them eat cake,” and even Anne, who seems to be the Tearmoon equivalent of Rosalie Lamorlière. While I think most of the writers on Narou can be safely classified as nerds, a history nerd feels like a welcome change of pace after so many gamers.

That’s one of the areas where Narou’s total lack of barriers to entry can be beneficial. While the whole Villainess redemption idea is ubiquitous these days, adding a spin to it by tying it into the very historical allusions that inspired the original archetype is a great move that probably wouldn’t have happened in a more traditional editorial space.

Tearmoon additionally seems cognizant that Marie—I mean, Mia can’t stop the Tearmoon Revolution just by being nicer to her waitstaff. She has to get down and dirty into taxes, expenditures, and beyond, and there’s a lot of potential for intelligent storytelling in there.
And by intelligent storytelling, I mean Mia saying “desu wa” at least one hundred times per episode.

I like that the show acknowledges Mia wasn’t the cause of the problems that led to the bloody revolution, just an obvious symptom of the political rot within the royal family. Her appreciation of her privilege is a start, but if she wants to avoid going into the Apparatus, she’s got to, like, make life better for the common folk. Though that’s also what I thought The Most Heretical Last Boss Queen would do before it just…didn’t.

Well, if this show doesn’t live up to its potential, we all know what to give it.

Mia better hope she learns her lesson, or else attracts the protective attention of a thirsty lesbian.

That’s basically what The Rose of Versailles is about. But that show is also over 40 years old, and anime lesbian technology has made incredible advances during those decades.

Now, this is where we get into the Narou Niche stuff. No other set of circumstances would allow somebody to say, “I want to write like five books about how much I fucking love Ojou-sama characters,” do that, and then spawn a whole multimedia production to a worldwide audience. That’s the power of New Media at work, baby.

Subcultures upon subcultures upon subcultures. And I’m in Love with the Villainess truly takes refuge in its audacity. You will walk away from the premiere understanding that our heroine has the hots for hair drills.

There is, admittedly, more to the show outside of unbridled thirst for haughty blondes whose hair resembles a duck penis, but it doesn’t become apparent until past where the premiere ends. Yet there’s still something charming about just how distinctly Online the show’s POV feels. I can envision Rae making an agonizingly long tweet thread explaining why people don’t get the deep, emotional complexity of her favorite anime girl, and capturing that authenticity is worthwhile to me.

The key is that she’s obnoxious but still ultimately likable. I think that’s the balance many of these Narou authors struggle with because you need enough experience and self-awareness to separate the protagonist from the author. Rae’s personality has the authenticity that stems from such authorship, but there’s also enough distance to make her genuinely funny, like a self-effacing reflection of the person writing her.

None of those other isekai chumps would ever have the confidence to dock their protagonist’s grades for being too horny, I’ll tell ya that much.

Though, I’m in Love with the Villainess feels like a more self-aware and self-confident creation compared to many of these works. It’s derivative but wears that aspect on its sleeve and actively plays with it. It’s indulgent but invites the viewer to laugh at that indulgence just as often as with it. It’s still got the marks of an amateur creator but is far less ephemeral.

Given that these stories had humble, amateur beginnings, the tally shakes out rather ordinarily. I’ve got two Narou series I’d like to keep up, a handful of middling ones, and a pile of shame. Those are pretty good results, honestly.

Sadly, we’re no closer to eliminating the isekai menace. This means we have to become the change we want to see in the world. Steve, get your fingers limbered up, and your writing playlists pulled up on YouTube. We will start a NEW trend on Narou and replace all this stuff. I’ll get to work on I Started A Prog. Rock Band With Three Maids ASAP.

We shall usher in the next age, and our new gospel shall be writ in blood.

Or typed. Probably typed.