a gentle breeze over rolling emerald green hills warm rays of sun tingling against soft cheeks a ripple of energy swimming through the fabric of reality itself the world changes and yet it stays the same mo black the [ __ ] hero and the thoroughly exhausted protagonists of our never-ending tale looks down he pauses for a moment to look at his new set of clothes before glancing over at the busty and irate being that trapped him in this world guess we're doing a time skip now moe said [Music] what
do you look so annoyed at [ __ ] hero growl sakuna the goddess of all isagay and perhaps fish it's my realm an entire genre of storytelling that's on the line here she paused and shook her head though i suppose the state of the world from which you were summoned isn't faring much better the two exchanged a glance as time swells with silence mo looked away and squinted into the sun familiar in function and shape yet foreign all the same to the light he'd known his entire life when this moment of
silent contemplation became unbearable he shrugged well it's been a while right in a weird non-linear temporal sort of sense how about a recap huh the goddess agreed a recap is certainly in order [ __ ] a recap mo black the titular [ __ ] hero was summoned by sakana the goddess of isakai itself and given one simple purpose to find the anime that has ruined each sky for over a decade now and destroy it such that isa guy may once again be good while most fiction stories bring characters out from
an environment that is familiar to them to one that is unfamiliar isa guy consciously starts a protagonist in what the author perceives as the real world before moving them somewhere else this self-awareness of the real world allows isakai to make statements about contemporary life in a way other genres can't sword online one of the first east guide to reach popularity the genres associated with is often blamed for having ruined a genre however upon inspection the hate it received seemed largely
overblown and the story itself didn't quite fit the mold for modern isekai as one may remember comedy parodies like kunasuba and kash's hero attempt to criticize yusukai but end up repeating the same tropes with a thin ironic layer added on regardless of their own shittiness these anime were clearly a response to other shitty isakay and could not be the source of the shitty isakinas themselves which left the hero and the goddess with one question how next to find the anime that ruined isakai an
d save it from its shared destruction [Music] and that leaves us to this moment let's talk about some [ __ ] [Music] izakaya [Music] chapter four [ __ ] what about isakai with female protagonists we have dealt with a lot of sexist anime lately that we have replied to hero so why not turn our attention to the recent isekai with female protagonists female focus isakai have been a new trend lately in anime less new and light novels or manga anyway if we can find out what they're reacting to maybe w
e can pin down the shows that are causing 12d6 metaphysical damage to the entire genre i did you just make a ttrpg joke you never make ttrpg jokes okay but that's bottom tier of tabletop rpg references mo replied besides we're post time skip anything's possible now sakuna rolled her eyes whatever anyway i object to your implication that isakai with female protagonists are anything new before stardot online inuyasha was a staple of the genre plus shoujo isekai have existed as light novels web nov
els and manga this entire time it's more accurate to say that capitalists have begun to realize that women also buy things so the other half of the entire human population can indeed be converted to capital off the backs of non-male lgbt authors in the same way it can off the books of mail offers mo nodded that's a good point we'll need to give this recent trend a name that separates it from the woman that have existed in this genre the whole time just unfairly cast aside how about don't give it
an overly complicated pretentious name how about got it neoclassical female focus isakai mo mo i [ __ ] hate you there have been three of these kinds of shows that have gained a lot of traction lately didn't i say to make my abilities average in the next life descendants of a bookworm and my next life as a villainous all routes lead to doom you need water after reading those titles you know after seeing re zero season two i don't exactly trust goddesses and fluids how dare you say such a foul t
hing about me electricity crackled at her fingertips but the goddess mustered the strength needed to regain her composure ugh regardless analyzing any one of these shows will probably bring us closer to my goal so take your pick how about bookworm with a flick of her wrist a small glowing oar broke off from the summoning seed and floated in front of mo the goddess commanded it to display a sentence of a bookworm for criticism most slowly backed away from the glowing sphere you know what why don'
t we just pass on this one read my mind how about average abilities it mostly follows the male chauvinistic formula but it swaps out a male protagonist for a young girl it's even self-aware like cautious hero was mo beams oh yeah we can have some good continuity from the last volume sakunagrind all you care about is making a good essay all i care about is saving my realm together with the help of incredible amounts of coercion our interests align to create something truly magical lucky us didn't
i say to make my abilities average in the next life which i will henceforth be abbreviating as dismay no instead of the more sensical average abilities so annoying is in addition to being an isa guy a cute girl's doing things show and so we're gonna have to go on a little bit of a detour here and interrogate that before getting into the anime itself cute girls doing things this is a general name the anime community has settled on for shows that revolve around the interactions of incredibly cute
middle and high school age girls i wouldn't really describe this as a genre personally but a super genre these shows rarely have similarities in setting or plot any other genre can also be cute girls doing things generally if we're looking at a show whose main cast is filled with three to six girls you see the ages of 11 and 17 who all have very pale and pretty skin who all have strong but sometimes tropey personalities who all share an incredibly obvious yet somehow never acknowledged by the n
arrative homoerotic subtext and who exist in a world where every passerby every teacher every business owner every traveler is somehow female you're probably looking at a cute girls doing things show if you're watching a show where what happens in the story feels secondary to just watching these girls interact around whatever wacky thing the situation has pushed them to do you are definitely watching q girls doing things show if you want to see this idea at its most distilled and cynical the fal
l 2020 anime dropout idol fruitart is a decent case study on the kinds of tropes that build the experience you're getting with cute girls doing things if you want to instead see this idea done well i would instead direct you to chaon which i haven't watched yet but i've heard nothing but good things about as a coincidence chaon came out around the same time a sword art online and has pretty much had as much of an impact on cute girls doing things as sao had on isa guy the early 2010s really were
a time [Music] now i'm wondering how this would have turned out if i was summoned by the goddess of cute girls doing things instead oh you mean connie sucking ass with the ray's eyebrow wait that's a thing most stared at the isa guy goddess hoping she'd pull out her characteristic scowl and scold him for being gullible but she seems serious what's kenny like sakura put a finger on her chin then shrugged well she's a cute girl the reason why this is relevant to this mate dismay maintenance it's
just why did i do this to my why did i write this i knew i had to voice it why did i write dismay no the reason why this is relevant to dismay no so relevant that i've described cute girls doing things before even describing this maintenance plot is that cute girls doing things is usually aimed at men i of course add a disclaimer that not every cute girls doing things are made for men a lot of them are also yuri which are frequently written by women and aimed at lesbians and other lgbt people bu
t a good tranche of these shows are men showing off cute and sexy girls to other men this is a little hard to pick up on especially as a western anime fan because cute girls doing things as a super genre relies more on look and feel than anything else and the closest thing we have in the west is something that looks and feels like cute girls doing things art barbie shows and other animation aimed at young girls something like say dc superhero girls i promise this is going somewhere but this is a
prime example of convergent evolution where two things with similar traits got to where they are from entirely different circumstances and intentions western cartoons for girls started out as a ploy to sell dolls to girls then over time the writers wanted to actually make meaningful stories for their audiences female characters got fleshed out the genre went through a spell in the early 2000s with shows like kim possible and totally spies that took masculine action hero tropes and superimposed
on valley girl stereotypes and other female-quoted tropes actually totally spies i would probably count as an anime i wonder nope not doing that snap sucking uh all right all right i promise i'm almost done eventually with the dialectic around toxic masculinity reaching its apex a lot of these girl cartoons strove for balance where the girls do cute feminine things but they also tend to be powerful heroes with magic powers who don't need men to save them there's a definite girl boss vibe in the
genre that tries to tie femininity with strength intelligence and independence and that's where the cuteness comes in cute girls doing things anime on the other hand has an entirely different history it actually comes in some ways but not all from idol culture and the prominent target audience for idols are not girls the same age as the idols but middle-aged men idol culture is presented as a relief for men crushed under capitalist alienation if you're a straight man and you spend 50 to 60 hours
a week in a job you hate and doesn't pay enough surrounded by other men if you're also forced as many japanese workers are to attend after work socials with those same people and holiday parties and vacations and so on you don't get time for yourself or for dating or even a sex life idol culture presents itself as the solution to this problem instead of actually meeting people which is impossible for you you can just watch these overly saturated and incredibly sexualized young girls dance and s
ing and do silly things and touch each other it is an incredibly predatory cycle of abuse and exploitation of children that usually ends in death threats when the idols commit mortal sins like dating people their own age or not keeping up their hyper feminine performances at every waking second of every minute of every day and it is from this culture that cute girls doing things derives its purpose anime allows for this same function of providing men with feminine release and perfects it with id
ealize and fantastical settings this is why although a western girls cartoon and an anime may feel similarly cute and feminine your average barbie show will probably never have jiggle physics or feature the main characters groping each other while the same cannot be said for seemingly analogous anime dismay null can be partially understood as idols but isa guy but it gets more complicated than that the vast majority of cute girls doing things aesthetic actually has nothing to do with the writing
and everything to do with the camera and the character design this means that a light novel that was in no way shape or form cute girls doing things and instead featured a female cast can become cute girls doing things with the right director and production lead which can lead to situations where women write stories for women but then they become male oriented stories through the process of adaptation i feel really bad for simplifying cute girls doing things to this degree there's way more to i
t than that and again the entire thing isn't just for dudes but this side of it is the side that's relevant for my point so it's the side i'm taking the time to explain this mate null is the story of a high schooler and teenage girl named misato kurihara that's right it's embarrassing but i'm one of those reincarnated into another world people in her life she was unable to make friends because she was such a high achiever so once she dies after being run over by a truck it came for me the famous
reincarnated into another world out of control truck [Music] she tells god that in her next life she wants to be reincarnated as a completely average girl so she can make herself some friends and so she's reincarnated into a world that follows clark's third law the world is covered in nano machines that respond to human thought and technology so advanced that the world regressed back again into medieval fantasy with knights and sorcerers despite her request misato was reborn as the daughter of
nobles adelaide von ashram she makes some friends and some enemies before she realizes she has a problem she's actually much more gifted in magical ability than everyone else around her it turned out that when god sent misato down to this new world he made her as strong as the mean power of all the creatures in the world but since this can't be real there's no way magic power so strong you can see it pardon the interruption but i can explain that which is considered to be magic occurs when we na
no machines take spell casters thought waves or what is commonly referred to as magical power and cause various phenomena when we compare miles thought waves to the other spell casters of this world they're 6 800 times stronger that's why she can use magic without a spell and why her physical abilities are so impressive but mile asked for her abilities to be average didn't she so what's the deal listen up because the explanation is a little tricky among all the creatures in this world there's on
e that's clearly considered the strongest that creature would be the elder dragon so you see miles power is the average of the weakest creature and the strongest using that logic she gained half the power of the elder dragon you can sort out the rest right there are many more weak creatures and strong one adelaide ended up several times stronger than the median power level of her surroundings which is what she was really aiming for when her powers are revealed adelaide is eventually forced to re
nounce this identity and take up her new name mile she then moves to the big city at the age of 12 forms a party with three other girls mavis vanashti in age 17 pauline age 14 and reina at age 15. now united the four of them go on adventures earning enough money to not go houseless or hungry and uncovering the secrets of the world they found themselves in mile slowly learns that she doesn't really have to be average to make friends she just needs to be willing to reach out to those she cares abo
ut so between the last draft i was reincarnated into and this one i took the time to look at diss maintenance light novel chapters in manga i'm sorry between white reincarnation mopas suddenly remembering the very painful consequences about spilling the truth of return by draft forget i said anything point is there are a lot of changes and additions between the anime and the light novels especially towards the beginning well of course if we're being honest the light novels are quite naive and am
ateur they start where your summary starts at the beginning when risato dies they spend over 20 chapters on dealing with adelaide's life in painful detail before finally having mind meet her friends and starting the bulk of the story starting with overly detailed irrelevant nonsense before finally getting to the point i guess it's a lot like your writing mo wow you're really gonna say that in front of my 500 youtube subscribers yes but it is a property that follows its source material much more
loosely than other isa guy and given that this is a cute girls doing things show we need to be extra aware of how the studio actually handled this property the anime starts just when mile is moving to the city while the manga starts in adelaide's last few days before becoming mild yes i can see how this would be useful in my goal plus it could give some insight into how anime studios keep making yisokai that make me wish i weren't immortal so this is a weird place to start but i promise it'll ma
ke sense soon mild has a boob complex in the anime but not in the manga or the light novels that's a weird thing to add in okay well a lot of girls in anime have boob complexes so that in and of itself isn't unusual it's a little bit concerning to give a 12 year old a boob complex so when i was 12 i was playing pokemon platinum outside on my ds i had a crush on a little brunette in my science class and the most i ever wanted to do with her was hold her hand because what else would a 12 year old
even be doing i was on the swings one day at recess and she talked to me and i was so nervous i ended up not being much of a conversation she kind of just left a little hurt and that was the end of that anyway if i was worried at age 12 that my dick wasn't big enough to pleasure her that would probably be a bad thing so maybe milo is not the right character for this specific trope on account of being 12 years old but the other thing that's weird is that it doesn't work for miles character in the
source material one of the things that adelaide found frustrating about being reincarnated besides having incredible magical ability was that she was also very pretty she got non-stop attention from boys at her school and jealousy from the girl when what she really wanted was to be average when she becomes mild raina has to actually tell mile not to date the dozens of men who will be hitting on her asking for marriage because she's pretty and incredibly strong if having a flat chest means she d
oesn't get as much attention that's actually good for mile that's what she wants and the source material treats her like it if there's anyone who wishes they had a larger chest in the source material it's reina aside from being 15 like the age where a teenager might have these kinds of insecurities her backstory of having had her parents killed by raiders also means she's in a hurry to grow up she wants to be a tall curvy and powerful adult magic user who strikes fear into the hearts of her enem
ies but instead she's stuck in the frail body of a child at age 15. it makes more sense for her than to be a little jealous of pauline who despite being a year younger than her is both taller and more well-endowed and even then it's not an obnoxiously recurring gag character trait like it is for mile indiana man in the anime this flat chess stuff is just a gag and it's a gag you've seen in anime a hundred times so you don't exactly notice it other than it being annoying and gross if you only wat
ch the anime but if you check out the source material suddenly you realize that for no reason character-focused storytelling was swapped out and replaced with shitty tropes the light novels weren't all that well organized at the start but they did have a solid sense of what mattered to them and the writing greatly improved as its hundreds of chapters marched on that's the thing about amateur writers you can fix organizational stuff with experience but having an eye for your characters and caring
about them is something you either do or don't and this maintenance author does it since you brought it out there's another change worth noting the scene in the manga where we learn reyna wants to grow up is a scene where mile tells her new teammates stories to entertain them in the manga these stories are specific to each character and they reveal what these characters want the most reina as you said wants to grow up and be strong mavis wants to be a real heroic knight like in the folk tales a
nd fall in love with the princess she's confirmed gay in the manga while this is kept ambiguous in the anime and pauline is a capitalist she'll she's evil but in the anime these stories are switched out for video game references we don't actually learn about the characters in the scene the anime just patsy on the back for being on otaku and they go to hunter school the next day tired because miles stayed up all night making jrpg references speaking of capitalism there are also class issues that
the anime drops but are present in the light novel the light novels aren't socialists or anything but they make a point to remember that because mile was born an aristocrat she's actually much richer than her peers the hunter school she transfers to to meet pauline mavis and reyna has a financial aid program students that can't afford it get free meals in housing mile makes an active effort to hide the fact that she could easily afford to eat out and blend in with her friends who are dirt poor a
nd have to eat every meal at school the anime mentions tuition being free but this specific nuance is entirely lost but mo i think you're missing the biggest change between the source material and the anime but do we have to i i think i made my point pretty well obviously sucking a shooker head you already ran from bookworm do you want this to be a good essay or not okay fine i get it the anime follows more or less from the events of the manga in terms of mile pauline mavis and regina's graduati
on into their party the crimson val however the anime introduces a villain to tie these events together instead of just having them happen one at a time this isn't an inherently bad idea however the villain ends up being a pedophile noble who grooms children this woman takes an interest in mile because her chest is still flat and it plays the whole thing for laughs now one could argue that at least in this case the villain is at least framed as a villain and goes to jail for her crimes but this
is not enough to save the scene in this case just because of the other banality with which the subject matter is approached it's disgusting imagine if this pedophile had instead been a man would the average abilities team have felt so confident in treating the subject the way they did would they have even gone with the idea in this case it's hard to imagine things would have played out the same especially with the sexist double standards of male and female abusers present in much of your world t
oday the first time i watched this show i had completely missed this point it took an anime feminist article actually to make me factor this analysis into my argument i guess for uh people who think i'm perfect and sniff out sexism and anime first time like a legend you shouldn't be afraid to let people call you out when you miss something i think it's clear that the anime industry itself had a serious hand in misshaping average abilities wouldn't it help to learn who was behind the decisions of
the anime mo nodded now let's see here he used some of his own power to open a web browser in the middle of the air the internet is surprisingly good here thank you okay wikipedia time masahiko ota huh what else has he worked on so a lot of cute girls doing things actually like yuri love lab and gabriel dropout and some cute girls doing things adjacent anime like umaruchan the fact that they brought him on means they made a conscious decision with how they wanted this maintenance adapted is tha
t mo squinted uchi no maid uh oh uchi no merca uzasuguru or my maida so annoying is an anime about a pedophile and former air force pilot who signs up to be a maid for one of her neighbors after noticing her neighbors have a cute russian daughter the maid specifically fetishizes the girl's white skin and blonde hair and openly states she's quote not attracted to women who have begun to menstruate unquote despite the child desperately trying to inform her father that her maid is constantly harass
ing her taking her underwear and in general trying to touch her in ways that she doesn't want the father refuses to listen the story for 12 excruciating episodes is just this poor child defending herself from being abused while the narrative frames it as a joke i've watched a few episodes of this and from waterton an angel flew down to me basically the same premise but replaces air force pilot with busy otaku college student and russian child with her sister's kindergarten friend and you've got
it because i at one point wanted to do an essay on pedophile anime and lolicon in general but i couldn't sit through it i am the [ __ ] hero i can handle a lot of [ __ ] but that was that was a little much even for me someone else can write it though i'd be happy to read it over for you it's it's just not my fight the point is not to launch some kind of moralistic crusade against masahika ota he directed an anime i don't like big deal there are so so many other people behind the decision to actu
ally produce this anime in the first place the point is that if we talk about isekai my realm getting worse more cliched more sexist and more well creepy we need to understand the full extent to which the machine of capital makes sure that these kind of isigh are what get made i'm pretty sure there's a great podcast episode about manufacturing comes out don't plug other things in your izakaya say you sell out sell out to who to myself ah ah [ __ ] that hurts the point here is that the average ab
ilities production committee took what could have been if adapted well a refreshing and potentially subversive isakai written by a woman probably based on the source materials pen name and made instead more conformist garbage that cares more about dragon ball z and legend of the galactic heroes references and its own damn story the anime feels like same old same old written by creepy men for creepy men when this really given what was originally published should not have been the case what was wi
th the legend of galactic heroes references anyway no idea logh is cool though sakana rolled her eyes it's it's neat i i think what's amazing about average abilities however is that signs of what the show could have been still shine through despite how relentlessly capitalists botched its execution while mile like saya and kirito before her is overpowered the power fantasy and obnoxious need to be stronger than everybody else in existence is thankfully missing the crimson valleys a team is also
non-hierarchical there isn't a leader that the others sing their praises about or follow around pauline is good at finances so she handles the team's budget reina is driven in focus so she picks the quest the team goes on and sees them through to completion mile has incredible magic power a wild imagination from her previous life as an otaku and a ton of scientific knowledge from her previous life as a super genius so she provides the training and skills needed to put the group on top and mavis
i mean she's got the style what else would you ask from her [Music] we can't exactly call it good representation in part because it'd be hard to say what's being represented here but mavis being allowed to simply exist as androgynous or even masculine at times and being celebrated for that is appreciated especially considering how male focus izakaya tend to treat say male characters that are extremely feminine with hostility homophobia and a refusal to acknowledge that these characters are valid
in their identities beyond a shameful fetish if you watch past the boob jokes and the actual pedophilia you'll begin to experience the anime we should have gotten instead of this one and that's a shame because one shouldn't have to say just watch past the pedophilia and it'll be good that's nonsense average abilities is therefore just not a good anime really and since the light novels were not particularly well written either due to the author's lack of experience it's an incredible shame that
this story will never be done justice under my watch of all things the manga is perhaps the most salvageable version of the story but it's really behind mo knotted that tracks onto my experiences with the anime i rolled my eyes and mocked all the references and the haha look how self-aware i am humor in the first few episodes because i knew this maynal wasn't actually challenging those tropes at all but i fell in love with this show after episode 4 or 5. at first i thought it was because it just
gets better but upon interrogation 4 and 5 are just when the production committee stops [ __ ] up the narrative so hard and starts letting the story that actually exists here breathe none of the creative energy except for maybe the color design and animation direction actually wants to anything good second opposed say mo what if there was an isakai that was very similar to average abilities that basically had the same premise but again featured a male protagonist what would you think then well
i'd say i'd have to watch that too if nothing else to identify the types of tropes that would be reintroduced into a show like this may know if the female focus element was removed luckily for me you don't have such a convenient anime for me and we can move on right right goddess why are you looking at me like that [Music] yoga [Music] the sun are you kidding me shares many many similarities with dismantle a protagonist is reincarnated to a fantasy world as a small child this child lives a perio
d of life in a noble family before realizing they have extraordinary magic abilities the child moves to a big city at the age of 13 instead of 12 to enroll in a hunter school the child is bad at making friends but stumbles upon by chance three working class kids who the child forms close friendship with the four graduate together and form a party before going on adventures together the principal difference between the eight's son and diss maintenance really is the gender of the protagonist mile
is a girl while the eighth son's gwendolyn von beno biomagster is a boy i'm not going to let you go without pointing out how absolutely awful everyone's name in this anime are look at this it's always bad fake german names too elise katerina from hohenheim johann yolande aurelia overweight caterina linda von weidel amadeus half of these fantasy tropes are based on medieval english folklore and the rest of the tropes probably come from france why german why literally never any other language it's
infuriating it's fine when legend of the galactic heroes does it though well it made sense there that story has a nazi parallel the eighth sun is a truly empty piece of work what's worse is that it lies to you before being reincarnated gwendolyn is instead a middle-aged businessman named ichinomiya shingo who like all workers suffers from capitalist alienation he wishes to be reborn in a world where he's free from the shackles of poverty coerced labor and aging after falling asleep during dinne
r one night he seems to get his wish he's reincarnated as the six-year-old wonderland von beno baumeister surrounded by luxury food and important people finally he could live his dream of a life of relaxation where no one could tell him what to do well not quite the next day wonderland discovers that his noble family is actually extremely poor and not only that the wonderland is the eighth son of said noble family so he'll probably inherit nothing brother walter and brother carl which means we'r
e poor nobles and in terms of an inheritance i'm the eighth son are you kidding me [Music] his family may have the legal authority to make decisions in his domain but wonderland himself will live life similarly to a peasant refusing to let this be his fate gwendolyn searches for a way he can lift himself out of poverty to keep a long story short he finds a test in his new family's home for a magical aptitude and realizes he's mysteriously more powerful than most people in history he gets trained
by the spirit of another legendary mage escapes his family and travels on to become an adventurer he meets his party members aaron von arnim ina suzune hirenbrandt and luis yolanda aurelia ofelbach they're all the youngest siblings in their families like wonderland and so the four of them bond over having something to prove to the world that i guess being a younger sibling isn't that bad i don't the show acts like this is a coherent theme but it's not one would expect therefore from the 8th sun
similar party dynamics to dismay no but that simply isn't the case and the main reason why is that none of the other characters have rx see even though mile is overpowered her teammates are still allowed space in the narrative to have their own struggles mavis struggles with their family reina struggles with her past pauline has their own moments as well in fact mile's personal struggle of making friends is starting the first episode and basically gets put on hold until the end so that the rest
of the cast can have time to shine the eighth sun is deeply allergic to any such consideration the two girls louise and ina their entire arc is asking wonderland if they could beat his concubines that's it that's the story it consists of them asking to be his concubine and his 12 year old wife saying that's fine and normal oh i didn't mention wonderland's wife okay basically gwendolyn gets an arranged marriage with this priest named elysee katzerina von hoenheim and she ends up joining the part
y too this is her introduction shot so there's that erwin is exactly analogous to mavis actually he like her is a swordsman slash swords woman for mavis with no magical ability who just trains very hard to have the physical ability to be useful to the party aaron worries that vendelin might not have need for him if he's too weak so wonderland hires him as his personal servant and he revels in the fact that his master has given him a job as for wonderland himself he slays a dragon around episode
4 gets promoted in his noble rank gets a ton of money and woman and still somehow complains that this is a bad thing actually because so many people are just jealous of his hard work and success i [ __ ] you not every antagonist in the show is just some man who's jealous of wonderland principally the change in gender for this story turns what was and dismay no a non-hierarchical friend group into an extremely hierarchical pecking order in the 8th sun there's a head male a chad if you will who ha
s all the money in power as a man your role is to work under him and graciously serve his every need and prove your worth through hard work such that chad may share some of his spoils with you and if you're a woman just slot yourself into chad's harem you better be conventionally attractive and you better work to keep chad happy otherwise he'll drop you for a more attractive girl with this view of hierarchy in mind gwendolyn's endless complaining about how even though he's escaped life as an off
ice worker he still has work and obligations as a noble is rather frustrating if we establish in volume 1 that isa guy ceased to critique the world by comparing it to a fictional one the 8th sun has a piss-poor critique of the world it complains about capitalism and hierarchy that exists in our world and then flees to another world to reproduce those same injustices seemingly unaware that it can choose to stop being garbage at any time we ought to examine the source material for the eighth sun a
s well as how it was changed in adaptation said the goddess all right unlike average abilities adaptation which overwhelmingly added regressive elements to a story that was not there in the first place the eighth sun's team seems to have attempted in vain to make the story more workable we can say the most jarring example of this is wonderland's attraction to his child peers in the anime the issue is simply not brought up wonderland may have started out as a 25 year old man but he's a child now
so his partners are also children it almost just gets away with not asking the question of why a grown man would fantasize about being a child again so he can sleep with children but there's enough ambiguity to read the best possible interpretation into the text in the manga wonderland openly states that he is not a lolicon the story makes it explicit that he still has the mind of his pre-reincarnation self at this point over 30 years old and so isn't attracted to his peers that is of course unt
il his marriage with a 12 year old bride who wendell is openly attracted to and who the narrative gleefully sexualizes the light novels go a step further instead of claiming not to be attracted to children wonderland instead explains that when he was an adult he thought he wasn't attracted to children but it's been six years since he touched a woman that wasn't his isakai mom and now kids are starting to look pretty tempting actually this is a rough translation because it's an unofficial transla
tion of the light novel but it'll do for now i thought that i had no interest in lollies just like in my previous life but when louise asked me while smiling i can't say anything is it because for many years other than mother and sister-in-law i hardly talked with a woman that i am biased nah i also had a girlfriend before in my previous life i don't have a fear of strangers or gynophobia but i didn't meet that many people in these last six years so by chance maybe i developed a lolicon complex
there is clearly a sanitization effect taking place some executive decided that adapting the story would not have profit but then the people who read the source material realized it was horrifying and tried to fix it by just forgetting this stuff exists oh but i remember i always remember although it'd be rude to keep staring at her there was no one in the same generation like ina who could win against those two hills the originally inconspicuous nun's habit was pushed up by your breasts portion
while there existed such things as eleven-year-old graveyard idols with efcus in my previous life there are many people in this world who resemble europeans and americans in shape and appearance therefore it might not be too strange for an approximately 12 year old girl with above f cups to exist here there is no contradiction between the themes of disliking corporate hierarchy and the hierarchy of gwendolyn's party in the light novels as there are in the anime because well the light novels jus
t love hierarchy straight up and make no attempts to do anything else the most important change between the anime and its source material is the ending of the first season in the anime wonderland has a conflict with his older brother kurt he doesn't want to kill him but kurt ends up dying by the end and wonderland replaces him as the heir to his family the season ends with wonderland resuming his role as an office worker from his past life this time overseeing the development of his noble territ
ory in the source material things are more or less the same only wonderland kills his brother and sleeps with his brother's wife from then on wendelin collects over a dozen wives many of whom are his own family there isn't a single prominent female character who doesn't just end up sleeping with wonderland or marrying him no amount of trimming around the edges can fix a story as fundamentally sexist as the 8th son are you kidding me since the majority of isakai anime are adaptations of source ma
terial studio meddling executive interference and capitalist pressure are so much more influential than what people tend to imagine especially given the fact that most weebs seem to think that the point of an anime adaptation is to adapt a book they've already read word for word scene for scene do you remember sao sakana's upper lip curled up in annoyance do i remember you're asking me the goddess of all isakai if i remember sword art online a story which diegetically we just finished talking ab
out not even an hour or two ago just cueing up the next side tangent don't be rude so in the second quarter sword art online there's a whole subplot where protagonist kazuto's stepsister and very not step cousin suguha falls in love with him and it's a whole thing it's a whole drama in fact it's the central drama for the season textually the arc ends with suga getting over her attraction to her brother realizing that it's unhealthy and choosing to start a new era where she and her brother are be
st friends that support each other but visually especially when she's in the game she like looks like this right and also this suguha and her in-game counterpart lifa are by far the most sexualized seo character just ever there's no other character that competes and the more you stray away from the source material and the main anime into the spin-offs and the games the more sexualized she becomes she's tits on legs basically and i cannot stress how ass this is i cannot overemphasize how terrible
of a narrative decision this is it's so bad you know why because again textually that is ignoring everything happening on screen and just reading the dialogue sao is a story that quite earnestly subverts and deconstructs a really common but toxic anime trope the whole my sibling is in love with me thing it argues that this would actually be a really bad thing in real life it encourages kazuto to return to a healthy relationship with his wife asana and by not giving sukuha any other love interes
ts argues that she doesn't really need to be in love anymore to find happiness but subtextually that is now including how the camera actually treats her all of that goes out the window all the stuff about how a brother-sister relationship would actually be super unhealthy in real life no longer holds weight because the camera is basically constantly wiggling its eyebrows at you and suggestively saying hey hey wouldn't it be rad if you had a sexy little sister you could [ __ ] no actually no it w
ould not i hate it here and for the longest time i didn't really know what to do with this people have rightfully complained that sao is pro-incest is online isakai um i don't know i don't like this enemy i like it i don't like incest i don't care and in volume one i more or less file this under sao has problems with how the camera treats its female characters i didn't know what to do with what i felt was a pretty huge gap between what was written and what the director of the anime decided to do
as it turns out though suguha isn't like this in the source material in the original book she had like a slimmer body type and a lot less fan service tsugu have never had a snowball's chance in hell to compete with asuna for kazuto's affection the story is indeed just about suguha getting over the toxic feeling she has for her brother it turns out that when sao was adapted from the web novel to other mediums publishers and executives thought it would be better if the story had a fan service cha
racter and tsuge being the little sister figure in love with her brother was perfect for that they recommended they upper cup size a bit and give her a more showy outfit and author kawaharareki agreed so to recap we threw away what could have been one of the most subversive and deconstructive arcs in the whole genre because some dude in a suit somewhere thought this was more important was it though was it worth it and i guess that's my point here whether it's altering this mignolet to fit into t
he same male-centric archetypical boxes we've seen a million times or choosing to adapt a story like eight sun at all and trying to tape on a deeper meaning in the adaptation or butchering entire characters at the ultra fan service like sao does wasn't worth it did these decisions which were made entirely with the hope of generating profit create better more meaningful more fulfilling stories are three main conclusions to take away from this exercise in brain rot first though the return of femal
e protagonists to the forefront of isikai is indeed cause for celebration simply having a female protagonist isn't going to fix the genre likewise the genre isn't broken because of its male protagonist it's broken because of a sexist and classist ideology that pervades the genre non-men writing non-male characters are more likely to write outside of this ideology than men writing male characters but that does not mean there's something essential about masculinity that makes isekai bad or somethi
ng essential about feminine 80 double fixing second while it's possible to make a good story reactionary by cutting and reframing scenes here and there you can't fix a story that's fundamentally broken by trimming and cutting if you're going to adapt an easy guide that has structural issues with the way it handles gender you have to rewrite the whole story you can't just cut out the worst scenes and keep the rest you won't fool anyone at least you won't fool me finally and i really can't believe
i have to say this but less pedophilia maybe like less of an open desire to want to have sex with children and anime children cannot consent to sex we shouldn't normalize a culture that pretends otherwise i'm not even saying never have fanservice or big boobs in anime ever again i'm not saying lock up everyone who self-publishes a web novel with lolly [ __ ] in it i don't want to enforce anime standards tm that the state can use to bust down your door if you don't comply i'm literally just sayi
ng if you're a capitalist and one of your employees comes up to you and says sir that light novel you want to adapt into an anime it's got several pages of the main character fantasizing about 11 year old graveyard idols with f cups maybe step back and go oh [ __ ] my bad it's probably not worth making people work on this then the harm i'm doing to society isn't worth the profit or barring that it's not even going to make a ton of money or be popular so i shouldn't bother well uh about that the
goddess said her eyes bored into the ground what it's got like a 6.20 on mal no one likes the show no one likes it now but see it was the most popular show on crunchyroll for the first half of spring 2020 people only started dropping it when they realized it was skimping out on the action scenes had next to no fan service and was cutting content all around you're you're kidding right well the first few episodes are perhaps the best the series has to offer and with the context they added about be
ing a corporate slave one could conceivably imagine that the anime would finally offer something different to my genre's decline but it becomes obvious that this is not the case soon enough moe narrowed his eyes are you okay goddess you seem a bit on edge on edge isn't even the half of it the air began to smell of ozone as clouds have scared the sky how do i explain this in a way you'll understand you humans many of you have needs correct like romantic and intimate needs it's pretty common among
human sure well i don't have that i do have however a bottomless desire to destroy anime that pissed me off i don't like the face you're making you got me there i guess said the [ __ ] hero with a shrug you know i can sort of rationalize sparing sao and passing on destroying konosuba and cautious hero was my idea certainly but next you're gonna tell me we can't blow up the eighth sun either because it's really just a product of all the forces that we've talked about so far and just another symp
tom of the problem mo blanks but that's good though right not if you want to blow stuff up moe the goddess pace frantically back and forth her pale skin becoming more and more flushed as she did [Music] i know what i'll do she said finally with a sadistic smile on her face i'll drudge out the worst yes i ever made in recent memory a show so terrible so devoid of merit that no one even for an instance thought it was good a show so thoroughly despised that destroying it can do nothing but good for
isakai as a genre [Laughter] yes it's clear to me now i know just the anime that will satisfy my needs wait let's talk about this rationally here shut up for the next chapter i'm taking control of the narrative i'll speed this process along myself chapter five [ __ ] let's destroy the worst he that guy ever made my case against the master of ragnarok and the blessed vine hedyar shall be swift decisive and final there shall be no room for nuance no room for well maybe the first few episodes were
n't that bad and such this anime is other [ __ ] it is easily one of the most all-around unpleasant and embarrassing isakai ever created the only other serious contenders that come to mind are death march to a parallel world rhapsody and a curious more recent show about an [ __ ] and defensive armor that i won't even bother naming wiping it off every plane of existence will do nicely every once in a while you come across something so truly [ __ ] that you begin to wonder how it was made like the
steps in which this went from idea to paying people to finalize and how many people had to have thought this was okay for it to have been completed and this is one of those times just promise me you won't stay up too late okay it'd be a shame if our patriarch was too weary to give orders it's good at this anime to immediately let us know what kind of time i'm going to be having here suro yuto was a 16 year old otaku high school blah blah blah other worlds blah blah summoning who cares the story
starts two years after his first day in a new world yuto figures he hasn't been isakai to a fantasy world but to some offshoot timeline of earth during the bronze age so he uses his trusty solar-powered cellular phone with permanent access to the internet to just look up how iron tools and battle strategies were formed his immense wisdom leads him to claim the title of patriarch think king of the wolf clan one of several rival clans to find themselves constantly at war besides the fact that thi
s premise is pretty much isakaiwai's mataphon totomuni in another world with my smartphone the show gives us a chance to introduce us to the wonderful cast of characters we'll be introduced to we've got felicia um who yes her name is felicia yes she has a basic american white name in the middle of a bronze age fantasy story apparently set in scandinavia yes it takes you out of the story literally every time her name is said which is often yes i'm in pain but it will be over soon i promise so we
have felicia who exists as nothing more than walking fan service her personality is being attractive and blonde and her purpose is life is to be attractive and blonde mo drew my top to look like hers so i hate her even more for having simply existed what else is important about our friend felicia here oh yes uh relationship to yuto sworn little sister [Music] as it so conveniently turns out the wolf clan has an ancient tradition whereby all citizens of the clan are either considered sons or daug
hters of the patriarch or brothers or sisters of the patriarch so in practice ito goes around defeating the other commanders in battle all of which of course happen to be attractive woman and then after he beats them because he looked up 21st century battle strategy on wikipedia he forces them to either become his daughter or his sister to which they always say yes and they always end up falling in love with him and they always make sure to emphasize how much they're in love with big brother or
father because my own genre has become my personal hell if one wishes to talk about the incest themes of sao this is a whole other level of terrible anyway we eventually meet sigrun who happens to be yuto's not daughter daughter this is quite the efficient we're building because they both clearly want yuto's weird teen otaku body we then learn through a phone call that yuto has a lover he's waiting to return to after he gets unisa guide meaning we're now officially at a harem plus a love triangl
e the harem expands with the addition of ingrid the local blacksmith and linnea the leader of the horn clan that yuto defeats with no trouble we've also got these two men who are going to stand in uto's way and make life miserable for him because they're secretly jealous of how cool he is and how apparently uto is just god's gift to woman i for one would never do such a cruel thing to woman so an overpowered hero a love pentagon in which resides a four girl harem two men who are bad because they
dare be men around our main hero who's the manliest of all incest ample amounts of obvious sexism and a literal patriarchy is that all clear yes good congratulations you just finished episode one there are 11 more to go and they're all just like this good luck there's a lot to criticize [ __ ] master of ragnarok why don't we talk about how it justifies slavery huh in the anime's third episode third three yuto sees two slaves a mother and a daughter in a slave market by his palace and decides to
buy them for their protection he says so this is a harem show of the mom and the daughter which do you think would make sense to include in the harem neither of course can consent to sex on account of being property but one of the two is at least a legal age surely then it's the mother that joins the harem and not the child's slave daughter yes no i swear half of my anime are only set in a medieval setting as a cover for depicting child abuse we never even see the mom again actually she doesn't
have speaking lines she disappears so that the child slave can be fully integrated into utah's orbit since i'm a slave should i even be bathing with everyone else because this kind of feels inappropriate yuto is such a kind protagonist that he puts both the mother and the daughter to work in his palace the question of why even use slave labor if utah claims to be against it is never raised ragnarok seemingly out of spite will simply not stop talking about how much of a slave this girl is they a
re apparently not just slaves but from a well-to-do family that fell into hard times and were sold into servitude there's an interesting conversation to be had where people naturally feel sympathy towards people who are oppressed because they fell into bad luck and don't deserve it versus people who have been oppressed their entire lives it's outside of the scope of what i set out to prove but it's a conversation worth having let's say ragnarok falls on the wrong side of that issue too of course
the slave character doesn't mind that yuto has prolonged her state of existing as property actually she's rather grateful to her protagonist's generosity meanwhile yuta goes on and on about how this young girl is so bright and wonderful and if only she wasn't a slave if only she was truly free he's doing the best that he can we're told but it's not enough to grant her her freedom but yuto owns what's her name again it's a furious i actually had to look that up anyway etherea is property he's fr
ee to do with her as he wishes including letting her and her mother go at literally any time if money is an issue he can order that she receive a stipend like that at no point is not letting this person live her life as an autonomous person not an option uto's literally the monarch of this entire kingdom his word goes he could end slavery on command ragnarok the show justifies actual chattel slavery to sell the male audience an unrealistic female relationship dynamic that's the only reason why y
uto doesn't do the logical thing it's a fantasy in which women have the aesthetic appearance of being strong and independent but are actually dependent on men and create that dependence we're actually doing this we're actually justifying literal slavery for waifus hmm now what is this clout chasing link doing in my video essay be gone at once the master ragnarok and blessed irvine hedyar also makes mockery of male victims a sexual abuse for cheap laughs and fan service felicia what are you using
to scrub me because it does not feel like a washcloth i'm using my breasts naturally why just white it's a pervasive and revolting issue with the text master ragnarok shows repeatedly its protagonist being sexually abused while yuto is surrounded by a woman lusting after him he's actually not sexually interested in any of them he's saving himself for the crush he left at home in japan when he was isekai i almost wonder why even bother having a harem if the only interactions between the main cha
racter and the woman will be negative regardless ragnarok seems to think that because it's cast as attractive it can have its woman make aggressive sexual advances towards uto they'll explicitly ignore his cries for them to stop and his insistence that they make him feel unsafe they'll rub their breasts against him they'll reach various genitals they'll engineer situations where they get to touch him however they want in order to force themselves to have sex with him there's a line in episode on
e ragnarok really wastes no time after yuto has just woken up and because he's a young man having just woken up he has an erection human men can get erections when they wake up and i have it on good authority that it's not actually a sign of sexual arousal for your species it just happens because of human physiology felicia takes this as an invitation to initiate sex when utah declines felicia says maybe i could help you out with that it must be hard having all that energy stored unfortunately i
'm gonna have to pass but thank you for offering oh i think your top half and your bottom half don't quite agree with each other which is really really really not how that works physical arousal is not a substitute for consent this is literally the disgusting abhorrent talk of rapists what is so hard about this the top half is literally the only part that matters if the genders were swapped and or aters or men cornering a woman like this touching her sucking her feet yes that happens pressing th
eir privates against her back repeatingly denying her attempts to leave sexual situations even from the sexist [ __ ] we've seen come out of the anime industry and my genre in particular i don't think that would have been published on a technical level master ragnarok and blessed irvine hedyard is by far just the worst piece of media i have ever owned a viewer may find it way more fun to watch than konosuba but that fun is not indicative of quality surprisingly though it does pass the bechtel te
st with one scene i know right i'm actually pulling out the bechtel test for this garbage speaking of which i don't actually think either season of konosuba passes amazing there's a scene where two of the harem girls ingrid and sigrun are talking sigrun is the warrior type but she lost her katana in battle ingrid being the best blacksmith in the business [Music] if i was a weak human i wouldn't stumble over that tongue twister ingrid being the best blacksmith in the business makes her another ka
tana see green is happy for the sword but she's too attached to her old weapon to show it ingrid takes that as an assault under skill which leads to this bit right here there's more character in chemistry in these five seconds than in the rest of the anime combined that's not a point of praise for ragnarok this is actually another point against it because this scene while in isolation it contains potential is only used in service of more garbage storytelling in politics there's a similar moment
in the 8th sun are you kidding me ah the world of male authors realize that women can date each other or even just be friends with each other without also needing to fall in love with the author self-insert if only my genre had this consciousness the stories i could tell [Music] the mass of ragnarok and bless irvine hedyar is the archetypical problematic histagon it is like every problematic anime trope on top of each other played at once with such an accelerated pace of development that it leav
es you on the floor seeing stars it's entirely fan service yet there's a hot springs episode right in the middle the main love interest doesn't get a backstory until episode 9 of 12 and when she does the first two things we learn about her is that she has a large chest that makes her friends jealous and that she cooks well just the two fantasy stay-at-home wife traits back to back everything looks terrible ragnarok physically hurts to look at sometimes and i'm a goddess if there were an anime th
at ruined isekai it would look like this nonsense the master of ragnarok and blessed vine hediar is so terrible and so obvious and straightforward in its worship film and fan service that no one defends it even the weebs who normally wail sjw propaganda any mention of reasonable politics are forced to admit that ragnarok fails on every conceivable level at this point the sky had become so dark and the wind's so fierce that moe was forced to huddle inside his hoodie for protection lightning swirl
ed around sakura as she cups the glowing orb that represented the master of ragnarok and the blesser of i'm hedy are in her hands do you see now mo this is how you save isakai when i'm done with this garbage there will be nothing left don't you dare stop me mosheka's head nope no thanks on that you can do whatever feels right please don't hurt me the goddess slept for joy and began a chance winds of darkness pros of flame double d waifu's tropes of shame i condemn thee the master of ragnarok and
blessed irvine hedyar for reprehensible writing that borders on the level of a crime against humanity thou have defiled the very name of art for thine justification of slavery for thy belittlement of male sexual abuse for thine animation which burns the eyes and defends the senses for thy writing which fries the brain thou shalt be cleansed from the souls of all anime fans no longer shall thy name be pronounced even from the darkest corners of twitter i suckana queen of kings of dimensions infi
nite keeper of waifus and goddess of alisa guy condemned thee to death that was pretty good that was one [ __ ] take holy [ __ ] my tug was waiting to say that [Music] and just like that the sky cleared the wind subsided the oppressive odor of ozone dissipated into nothing and a warm sun returned mo scratched his head and looked around before his eyes returned to the goddess do you remember what anime we were just talking about sucking i just smiled now is not the time for such questions [ __ ]
hero it's all over now and i feel so much better post-explosion clarity sure is a wonderful thing it's kind of creeping me out that you're smiling this much but uh if you don't hate me as much and you're willing to move on with the essay that's fine by me come then let's decide together what to investigate next [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] wow the things you do to make a living pretty rough i can't ease only to end up slinging food in a maid cafe he meets his
party members irvine arnhem lina susane hi jesus erwin von our name lina ina [ __ ] okay erwin okay jesus christ he meets his party members irwin von arnim ina susanne here in bronze and louise yolande i already i [Music] i aurelia [Music] oh
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