Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we’ll be checking out… wait, seriously? An isekai? Don’t you folks know how I feel about those? Well, a job’s a job, so I guess today we’re checking out the industry’s latest isekai production: Jobless Reincarnation.
I don’t know anything about Jobless Reincarnation in particular, but I do know that I am flat-out exhausted by the isekai genre, and basically every one of its assumed qualities. There is definitely a strong potential isekai within the template as we know it – a show that genuinely reflects on the alienation of modern society, and interrogates the self-defeating ugliness of using fanatical fandom as an escape from reality. But even the shows that ostensibly do this, like Re:Zero, are still drenched in obnoxious otaku-isms, and simply not written well enough to keep my attention.
Characters in isekai shows speak in fan-aimed cliches, not like human beings, and the worlds they interact with are playpens filled with otaku ephemera, not convincingly realized alternative worlds. They are a warm hug aimed at a very specific set of consumers, which lack either the maturity of perspective or beauty of narrative craft to offer anything to a general audience of art-likers. As someone who has read a lot of actual adult-aimed novels, light novel storytelling is almost never going to impress me; particularly in this field, where novels are frequently written by amateur authors who are taking influence from other amateur authors, and being guided by editors whose notes presumably run the range from “needs more harem archetypes” to “mention her boobs more.” It’s the blind leading the blind while a third guy actively guides them off a cliff, and while the results of this process are understandable, they’re not generally consumable.
So that’s my opinion of isekai anime: a genre with theoretical potential, but no shows I could recommend to art enthusiasts, constructed under economic conditions that may well preclude the creation of any genuinely interesting art. Let’s see what I think of this one!