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

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.

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

Flying rat is honestly more appetizing than some of the stuff we'll be covering, let's be honest. With a relatively light isekai load, our seasonal sample platter has to focus on the illness rather than just its most prominent symptom: Shosetsuka ni Naro. This publishing site has helped birth such modern classics as Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody, My Unique Skill Makes Me OP Even at Level 1, and I've Somehow Gotten Stronger When I Improved My Farm-Related Skills.

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.

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.

We'll mail-order her some nice cuts of bacon if we make it through the whole season without having to talk about Anime Vase de Noces.

Anyway, the point is that Narou is not an inherently bad place for creation to originate, but it's certainly got its peculiarities. Part of the reason there are so many isekai stories is because those types of web novels got popular, which inevitably led to people turning their ideas into isekai setups or riffing on the premise to get attention. Repeat that cycle enough times, and you get stuff like I Shall Survive Using Potions, easily the blandest full-isekai show of this batch.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.