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With each new season I like to read the synopses of the new isekai shows, not because I think they’ll be any good, but instead to see how the “standard isekai protagonist” has aged with the audience. It used to be highschoolers getting hit by trucks to enter the magical anime fantasy realm. Then it became college students, and now we have people in their mid-to-late twenties working soul-crushing IT jobs before biting the bullet. I can’t wait for the day when otakus are all geezers and we get to watch a show where an 80-year old dies of cancer and is reincarnated as a ... magical sword boy who gets into hilarious sexual encounters with girls 60 years younger than him. For the time being though we have the first isekai I’ve seen with the protagonist pushing middle age: Kamitachi ni Hirowareta Otoko.

Ryouma Takebayashi is a 39 year old salaryman working for an exploitative company and experiencing the generally garbage life of a pre-isekaid isekai protagonist, when suddenly he dies of a heart attack. Some gods in the afterlife decide to send him to a generic dragon-quest-esque fantasy world for reasons I can’t remember - probably something to the effect of “you were loser Japanese guy who died unexpectedly and that’s just what we do with your kind”. Now as a newly reincarnated 8-year-old with all the memories of his old life, Ryouma proceeds to sit on his butt in a forest and do jack-all for three years. Well actually he trains a bunch of slimes, because isekai shows always seem to require some sort of gimmick to let them say, “see it’s not completely a generic isekai show!”, though I feel like this gimmick is one-upped by that other isekai where the guy actually becomes a slime. In any case a few years later some locals find Ryouma living as a child hermit and invite him back to their town where he continues his current lifestyle of doing jack-all.

Now as other reviews point out, the low stakes and slow pace are certainly intentional: the show is a combination of the isekai and iyashi genres – the two ultimates of otaku escapist fantasies. It’s supposed to be a nice charming slice-of-life about a jaded man experiencing a wonderful magical world in juxtaposition to his terrible previous life. And to be honest I have nothing against either genre in principle – I enjoy shows like Konosuba and Non Non Biyori. However the key component those shows have that Kamitachi ni Hirowareta Otoko lacks is characters that are fun to watch. Kazuma, Megumin, Aqua, and Darkness may not be particularly complex characters, but they are at least distinct and play off each other well. It doesn’t matter that the plot of Konosuba mostly involves the main cast bumming around one city, because their dysfunctional antics make me laugh and want to keep watching.

Kamitachi ni Hirowareta Otoko’s characters have no such uniqueness. Pretty much the only defining feature of all of them is that they all love Ryouma and think he’s amazing. There’s a noble family, some guard people and staff for the family, some adventurer animal-girls that appear at some point and just join the pack of people following Ryouma around, and some staff Ryouma hires for his free slime labor laundry business. Beyond their appearances and roles I don’t think I could explain any of these people. They all just stand around spouting expository dialogue or more blandishments about Ryouma and his amazing magical abilities. The other character that gets the most screentime is probably the noble family daughter, which the show uncomfortably sets up as a romantic interest for Ryouma. They do try to justify this by saying that Ryouma’s mind is degenerating back to that of an eleven-year-old, which is pretty damn terrifying if you think about it. All the girl does though is fawn over Ryouma and talk about how she wants to “do her best” like any generic anime girl. I felt no connection to her or her relationship with the main character.

As for Ryouma himself, there wasn’t much hope for his personality. Being your average isekai protagonist means he can’t manage anything beyond generically “nice” or passive, lest the audience loses the ability to self-insert themselves into him for even a second. There’s some stuff about how he’s dealing with the traumatic experience of his previous life, but it’s only ever briefly mentioned and never gets explored as much as I wanted. Every so often it’d cut back to scenes of Ryouma’s previous life to show how it sucked compared his new one, and I’d actually get a bit more invested. I’d have liked if the show jumped back and forth between his two lives more often, but instead we had to watch him scrub a sewer or walk around some mines or something. It reminded me of Youjo Senki – where I was all on board for the theological pissing match between a cynical salaryman and “God”, but the show kept interrupting that with the forgettable magic WW1.5 stuff.

I feel like my biggest frustration with the plot was how procedural everything felt. There’s like three episodes spent on Ryouma setting up a laundry business with his slimes, and it all just happens without any narrative twist or anything. We watch him go to some merchant lady to get funding, acquire a building and renovate it, open the business, hire some staff, and so on. It’s about as interesting as watching someone actually start a laundromat. I know you can say it’s slice of life, and that it’s not supposed to be some sort of edge-of-your seat Death Note thriller, but again I go back to the issue of the characters. Non Non Biyori is just a story about some girls going to school, but I like the characters and their interactions, which is what makes it a successful slice-of-life show. In Kami-tachi for the duration of this “Laundry Arc” we mostly just hear characters tell Ryouma how great his business will be and how they can’t wait to use it. I get no sense of characterization or desire be a part of this world where everyone seems to exist only to praise Ryouma.

There’s not much to say other than that. The world is uninspired, of course, though they do sometimes decide to bore us with pointless lore factoids about the different slimes and such. The music was forgettable, the art and animation was serviceable but bland – with the notable exception of the crappy CGI horses – and the voice acting was similarly generic. And I mean I don’t think anyone was expecting otherwise. It’s a generic isekai with slice-of-life elements, of course it was gonna be bland. I only watched it because the main character was 39 years old and I had a friend to laugh at it with. So now I have to wonder why the show compelled me to even write a review of it.

In the end I think it has to do less with the show itself and more the fact that it exists, and the depressing ramifications that it brings. There was a part where Ryouma gives a speech and everyone smiles and listens to him, and then tells him how wonderful he is again. This makes Ryouma cry and remember when he would give speeches in the office in his previous life and nobody would listen. I realized then that you could remove all of the magical aspects from this show. The true fantastical element – the reason this show was made and why people would want to watch it – is the concept of other human beings caring about and praising you. The showing is saying to its audience, “Ryouma is you: someone who has a miserable life of loneliness and torment. Your mother will die and you’ll work non-stop for bosses that abuse you. Your life will not improve. Instead you will get to suffer for nearly forty years then die alone. Only then will you experience paradise. Or maybe not, all we want is for you to watch our show where you can pretend this will happen to you, you pathetic wretch.” It’s trying to sell the idea of love and positive human interaction to people who don’t get to experience it, or maybe do and don’t recognize it because they want the perfect happy world of anime-land. The problem is the interactions of the show become so saccharine that it pulls me out of it, and I just see it as a heartless product trying to take advantage of depressed people.

I dunno maybe I’m being a little hysterical about it, there’s plenty of other things in the weeb media sphere that have just as pathetic implications. On the whole though I’d say this show doesn’t function well as a story, or even as a self-indulgent human affection simulator. If you want that experience just listen to a Japanese ASMR video where a girl whispers positive affirmations to you for a few hours then sucks your ears off like she’s trying to eat her udon noodle lunch right in your face.