Remember the brief but fiery struggle sessions both both of those steaming piles of chud trash? “Goblin Slayer is funny once the setting establishes that the goblins aren’t meaningfully intelligent” was one radioactive take for one , and the other was “well in that conveniently arranged society slavery was actually the best option and everyone was happy with it.”
“Actually the goblins were more like spores and totally had no intelligence while cackling and being scary caricatures of dehumanized savages and the author said so too!”
The goblins somehow weak and cowardly yet become a bigger threat to settlements in numbers
Slaughtering goblin infants is morally justified. They’ll always be bad
Goblins use human shields particularly human women. Also the only way of reproduction is rape of human women
The goblins somehow weak and cowardly yet become a bigger threat to settlements in numbers
The enemy is both too strong and too weak
Goblins use human shields particularly human women. Also the only way of reproduction is rape of human women
The hogs gobbling up this hog slop really like to talk about the opening scene of the first episode and basically get off to it and then piously proclaim how that oh so terrible atrocity that they just jacked off to is also grounds for justified genocide forever and ever after.
The sort of “blackpilled” creeps that brag about how desensitized they are to snuff/gore on 4ch!n were all-in on that cognitohazard, too. Surely the magic gateway to good animoo must be a gauntlet of which in no way is the actual appeal to the hogs oinking while digging into it and trying to get you to do the same.
You mean like “The SV was just a biological function and reproduction necessity of the spore-like goblins that are in no way sapient and only imitate sapience in a way that makes it more exciting for nazis, I mean heroes, to exterminate them?” I saw that. I was there for that.
I’m ashamed that I ever said I liked that slop. It’s pure Disney morality (the good guy and bad guy are totally apparent and nothing is allowed to be complicated, ever. Now it’s super easy to project whoever you don’t like or let’s be honest, less than popular ethnic groups onto the goblins.)
At least Frieza had something material to gain in Dragon Ball, at least in Persona 4, the killer’s a cautionary tale of people with CHUD brainworms: a misanthropic chanlord with a superiority complex cutting themselves off from the world and refuses to connect with others.
at least in Persona 4, the killer’s a cautionary tale of people with CHUD brainworms, a misanthropic chanlord with a superiority complex cutting themselves off from the world and refuses to connect with others.
I completely checked out of Persona after that one that was basically an extended setting-wide high school waifu harem with this fucked up hustlegrind subtext where you totally can excel in every class and yet have enough of a social life to fuck absolutely every waifu in reach and this totally isn’t shoveling into emotionally constipated and socially crushed Japanese students that didn’t do that and now will lament the rest of their lives that they didn’t get to have that perfect high school experience. Shit was a cognitohazard.
I do gotta say I like the Wisecrack video essay on Goblin Slayer that goblins represent everyday tragedies and that Goblin Slayer is himself a representation of the often maligned but essential labor that maintains society whilst “true heroes” represent and fight more existentialist and bourgeois “world ending” calamity.
Shield Hero is just straight up slavery apologia and harem fetishism like all fucking post 2010 Isekais once studios realized lonely men spend a LOT of fucking money on that shit.
Shield Hero is just straight up slavery apologia and harem fetishism like all fucking post 2010 Isekais once studios realized lonely men spend a LOT of fucking money on that shit.
It also has a wildly over the top revenge fantasy built in for every creepy nerd’s favorite preoccupation: fear of false rape accusations. The materials beyond the anime go directions in that that are very… telling (extreme CW: gore, snuff, sv)
spoiler
and portray the false rape accusing character getting raped to death while being dismembered and mutilated before a cheering audience as “just desserts.”
Even the longer version of that which more correctly translates what he said is legit: he said the problem with contemporary anime was that it was by and large made by, and for, otaku. That is to say, it was an industry that was getting further and further away from lived experience and actual humanity in favor of cartoons based on cartoons based on cartoons, with copy-of-a-copy syndrome stripping them of meaning.
chuds seem to enjoy the simulacrum copy-of-copies more than the original thing itself. they like how everything in anime is set along rigid tropes and formulas, with immersion-breaking gimmicks like fan service. they like how everything is video-gamey and follows a very specific set of in-universe “rules” that is very hierarchical and systematized and quantified (ever notice that every single world with super powers has a ranking system where the powers are boiled down to 1-dimensional quantities?)
This lack of realism, and favoring of idealistic platonic forms, soothes the chud mind who hates the messy chaos of the real world and wishes everything fit into tiny boxes they could sort. This sort of guilty pleasure of re-making reality to fit into platonism and overpowered main characters is inherent to the appeal of anime to a lot of reclusive people who aren’t looking for any type of realistic portrayal or connection to the world, but instead want to get lost permanently in a fake one that they have full mastery over.
Hence waifus becoming more desirable than actual women.
chuds seem to enjoy the simulacrum copy-of-copies more than the original thing itself. they like how everything in anime is set along rigid tropes and formulas, with immersion-breaking gimmicks like fan service.
Little wonder that “let gamers design games” slogans were about making characters less distinctive and more generically fanservicey.
This sort of guilty pleasure of re-making reality to fit into platonism and overpowered main characters is inherent to the appeal of anime to a lot of reclusive people who aren’t looking for any type of realistic portrayal or connection to the world, but instead want to get lost permanently in a fake one that they have full mastery over.
It still baffles me that so many reactionary and otaku crave a seemingly endless number of escapist “isekai” worlds… but the first thing they want to do with them is crush them under the wheels of capitalism and use metagaming tricks to exploit everyone and everything in them. Maybe they didn’t want an escapist world at all; they just wanted to rule over the one they’re currently in.
first thing they want to do with them is crush them under the wheels of capitalism and use metagaming tricks to exploit everyone and everything in them. Maybe they didn’t want an escapist world at all; they just wanted to rule over the one they’re currently in.
Turns out some people just want to believe they can become the boot.
Little wonder that “let gamers design games” slogans were about making characters less distinctive and more generically fanservicey.
Really just feels like AI art of “attractive women” really fills this gap of creating the reactionary construct of the same damn person ad nauseam, that or nerd and chuds have some version of face blindness where they get upset at having to deal with varied faces of women.
If you can track down a copy of Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, Hiroki Azuma actually describes this process.
To summarize the book- he says that in our current postmodern landscape, what consumers want isn’t narrative (because stories are pointless). What they want is a database of their favourite things, and they want to selectively consume the things in the database based on their own tastes, just remixed forever (A Tsundere is a Tsundere is a Tsundere, it doesn’t matter what color is the waifu’s hair). In effect trading ‘humanity’ to become ‘animals’, just mindlessly consuming the same things over and over again.
The analysis is postmodern and not marxist tho, so he attributes all this to the death of grand narratives and not capital. Still, the book is interesting since you can see those processes happening right now, with the Marvelification/Disneyfication of media
He honestly saw where the industry was heading before most and as a communist knew that capital would ride an industry into the ground to better reap money from easily pleased groups such as men with disposable income and very little in the way of inhibitions.
Macross is one of the first huge TV anime that was specifically made by anime fans. It remixed pieces of older shows, like Space Battleship Yamato, and mixed in a city pop soundtrack to gain a broad appeal.
Arguably, the entire Battletech franchise is like copy-of-a-copy Macross that went a very different direction that found a different valid form.
I think you’re mixing it up with Robotech, which adapted the first Macross show, Mospeeda, and Southern Cross into one big show. The Macross bit is mostly intact, but the English music sucks so much ass that it really messes up the show.
Battletech did snag the Valkyrie robots from Macross at some point (though I’m not too knowledgeable about that franchise), and Transformers used one of the Valkyrie toys as like Starscream or someone early on.
The original Macross show and movie are genuine classics - but they do mark a big shift away from earlier mecha shows like Gundam and Votoms, since their creators are mostly only being inspired by other anime rather than the broader influences Tomino and Takahashi drew from.
Yeah it’s horrifying yet also weirdly funny in the saddest of ways that male isekais are largely on desire fulfillment instead of any self actualization meanwhile you look back on the first ever isekais (those with female protags) and most of the plots dealt with growing up and coming to terms with some form of trauma or issue to be better self actualized.
The Neverending Story managed to be about a boy doing the self actualization thing, at least, especially in the latter parts of the story where he goes through grief, aging, and more.
Oh damn that’s one of my favorite films. Was made by Wolfgang Peter so existentially German without catering to the Americanized culture of wacky childhood hijinks, instead depression and trauma.
Gate was the most over the top cringey fascist boot fantasy I could possibly imagine, with Happy Tree Friends levels of slaughter and brutality to show just how tacticool the Japanese military was and then showing them somehow soloing every other military in the world.
Unprecedented levels of Japanese nationalist jacking off.
Yeah, there’s a part in Gate where foreign military forces move in on Japan to try to secure the gate and they all get destroyed even while the JDF is also busy doing war crimes in magic fantasy land, because the JDF is just that amazing.
Unfortunately, yeah. The overlap between tacticool JDF stans (too many in Japan already) and “what if fantasy world but brutally torn to pieces with tacticool modern firepower” edgelords (the kind that were also into grimdark MLP fanfics and the like) was pretty significant.
Oh god, it was like an isekai but for an entire military organization for fascists longing for Imperial Japan to fetishize all the while a fucking Abrams tank gleefully runs over people and commits war crimes because yeah no shit a fantasy swordsman versus a fucking gunship is an already forgone conclusion.
I can at least respect Gundam for 1 being anti-war, and 2 not fetishizing it whilst also have believable parity of power matchups.
I’ve been subjecting myself to this show for the last few days now because apparently I can’t escape dealing with it in anime communities and I do actually need to know what I’m talking about in order to shut down moderator opposition.
It’s sus af in premise but Shield Hero is actually 100x worse. In practice the mc in Mushoku Tensei doesn’t really do much beyond the usual bad anime sexual harrassment jokes and when he does finally lose his virginity he’s practically jumped on while repeatedly saying no. His relationships with others are generallllllly healthy and promote being a very good person other than it being through the eyes of a neet shut-in and the incel stuff that comes with that. The character arc is one of a person genuinely overcoming their issues and being a (mostly) good person. This is just my impression of season 1 though, no idea about the other.
Shield Hero on the other hand justifies actual slavery and actual grooming. The mc is an asshole, does not change or improve, and their assholeness is simply justified by everyone else in this world being a big asshole to him too. He has literal slaves, and he genuinely grooms those slaves for sexual desires. Everything is bad about this. It has zero redeeming features.
When I contrast the two, I actually can’t put them in the same categories.
In short, what I’m saying here is that the Shield Hero fans are irredeemable but the Mushoku Tensei crowd seem to me like they can be redeemed.
I was an outsider looking into the bags of dead doves, but if one of the dead doves is merely stunned and the other is decomposing, I appreciate you sharing the distinction.
Don’t get me wrong though, Mushoku Tensei is still quite bad. A shut-in virgin neet with pedophile tendencies dies and goes to a fantasy land as a newborn child. He continues to display an attraction to girls that are very young. He performs the usual anime sexual harrassment jokes, although the worst of these are reserved for adults at least. The redeeming part is that the dude does actually become a hero, he does actually try to be a person worth emulating besides this stuff. There are redeeming qualities here. He wants to be a good person. He actively seeks out ways to be a good person, to self improve, and to do his life right in ways that he failed originally.
Shield Hero on the other hand is a fucking asshole who quickly decides owning slaves sounds great and then also sexually grooms his slaves and this is fine because he doesn’t just beat them like the other slave owners do. His slaves LIKE him! Yay! But then he’s also an irredeemable asshole in every other interaction too, he never grows, he never tries to be better, he’s never depicted being remotely heroic, he is an asshole. The only “hero” shit he does is because he is thrust into it without real choice.
Of the two stories one is trying to justify every belief that reactionary shutins have while the other is trying to empathise with the depression that creates those shutins while also promoting the kind of healthier life that they should be seeking. I think when you lay the two shows out like this they can be viewed slightly differently.
I admit neither such franchise appealed to me anyway.
Isekai “what if fantasy world exploited like in bideo bame” trash was so endemic to the genre that I ever nearly avoided Dungeon Meshi/Delicious in Dungeon entirely but I decided to sit down and give it a try anyway.
The first refreshing discovery was that there was no “isekai” protagonist asshole. AT ALL. If you haven’t seen it, please do.
The first refreshing discovery was that there was no “isekai” protagonist asshole. AT ALL. If you haven’t seen it, please do.
You might enjoy Hai to Gensou no Grimgar, but for different reasons. It’s much more about the character development and struggles of a group of people trying to learn to work together. Everyone in the group is given fairly equal screen time, and the world is extremely dangerous in similar ways. It’s very slow though, sort of plays like Slice of Life but in a world where the only means of earning food involves dealing with dangerous near death experiences regularly.
Unfortunately it’s not long enough and the audience didn’t take to it immediately because the characters are all slightly unlikeable in various ways to begin with, so it didn’t really get the popularity needed for it to get more seasons.
It’s unfortunate that the industry has gone such a bad way that just an absence of its worst profitable cliches is enough to sound interesting without knowing anything else yet.
Ok ok ok I had to come back to this thread to tell you about Season 2 of Mushoku.
The entire fucking season is about the MC overcoming their erectile dysfunction. That’s it. That’s the season. All of it. The entire character motivation of the season is having ED and not being able to get it back because he doesn’t trust women after his first time went so badly wrong (the aforementioned jumping on him while he said no dozens of times, which ended with her running away the next day when he loved her) and the entire basis of his ED is that he needs to be in a relationship with someone he actually has real intimacy with and has built up real trust with.
That’s it. That’s the entire season. Episode after episode about erectile dysfunction.
Oh and they still have to solve it in the end with magical viagra juice.
This show is unbelievably stupid and definitely problematic at an elevated level but it’s also not Shield Hero. I do think however it is trending towards a harem, a sort of Edward Elric meets Sword Art Online harem meets sexual harrassment.
tl;dr: MC gets ED from being traumatised by girl he loved that kinda forces him into sex when he didn’t want to then runs away giving him huge abandonment issues. MC pursues a multi-year journey of study at university to cure ED, with the cure being real intimacy, real trust, and drugs.
I can believe they watch anime.
Like Goblin Slayer and Shield Hero.
Remember the brief but fiery struggle sessions both both of those steaming piles of chud trash? “Goblin Slayer is funny once the setting establishes that the goblins aren’t meaningfully intelligent” was one radioactive take for one
, and the other was “well in that conveniently arranged society slavery was actually the best option and everyone was happy with it.” 
I HATE THE THERMIAN ARGUMENT
“Actually the goblins were more like spores and totally had no intelligence while cackling and being scary caricatures of dehumanized savages and the author said so too!”
MY HATE FOR THE THERMIAN ARGUMENT IS PURE
The goblins somehow weak and cowardly yet become a bigger threat to settlements in numbers
Slaughtering goblin infants is morally justified. They’ll always be bad 
Goblins use human shields particularly human women. Also the only way of reproduction is rape of human women
The enemy is both too strong and too weak
The hogs gobbling up this hog slop really like to talk about the opening scene of the first episode
and basically get off to it and then piously proclaim how that oh so terrible atrocity that they just jacked off to is also grounds for justified genocide forever and ever after. 
Everything about these goblins conveniently justifies their complete extermination. Makes you think
It’s just how the fiction was written just enjoy the fiction as written and enjoy the genocide as presented let people enjoy things TO EACH THEIR OWN
The Iron Dream called out this bullshit back in the 70s and yet it persists
Um ackshually
my favourite Goblin Slayer discourse was all the vomit-inducing takes on SV 
“its just a normie filter bro”
Oh fuck. That.
The sort of “blackpilled” creeps that brag about how desensitized they are to snuff/gore on 4ch!n were all-in on that cognitohazard, too. Surely the magic gateway to good animoo must be a gauntlet of
which in no way is the actual appeal to the hogs oinking while digging into it and trying to get you to do the same.
You mean like “The SV was just a biological function and reproduction necessity of the spore-like goblins that are in no way sapient and only imitate sapience in a way that makes it more exciting for nazis, I mean heroes, to exterminate them?” I saw that. I was there for that.
I’m ashamed that I ever said I liked that slop. It’s pure Disney morality (the good guy and bad guy are totally apparent and nothing is allowed to be complicated, ever. Now it’s super easy to project whoever you don’t like or let’s be honest, less than popular ethnic groups onto the goblins.)
At least Frieza had something material to gain in Dragon Ball, at least in Persona 4, the killer’s a cautionary tale of people with CHUD brainworms: a misanthropic chanlord with a superiority complex cutting themselves off from the world and refuses to connect with others.
I completely checked out of Persona after that one that was basically an extended setting-wide high school waifu harem with this fucked up hustlegrind subtext where you totally can excel in every class and yet have enough of a social life to fuck absolutely every waifu in reach and this totally isn’t shoveling
into emotionally constipated and socially crushed Japanese students that didn’t do that and now will lament the rest of their lives that they didn’t get to have that perfect high school experience. Shit was a cognitohazard. 
I do gotta say I like the Wisecrack video essay on Goblin Slayer that goblins represent everyday tragedies and that Goblin Slayer is himself a representation of the often maligned but essential labor that maintains society whilst “true heroes” represent and fight more existentialist and bourgeois “world ending” calamity.
Shield Hero is just straight up slavery apologia and harem fetishism like all fucking post 2010 Isekais once studios realized lonely men spend a LOT of fucking money on that shit.
It also has a wildly over the top revenge fantasy built in for every creepy nerd’s favorite preoccupation: fear of false rape accusations. The materials beyond the anime go directions in that that are very… telling (extreme CW: gore, snuff, sv)
spoiler
and portray the false rape accusing character getting raped to death while being dismembered and mutilated before a cheering audience as “just desserts.”
Even the longer version of that which more correctly translates what he said is legit: he said the problem with contemporary anime was that it was by and large made by, and for, otaku. That is to say, it was an industry that was getting further and further away from lived experience and actual humanity in favor of cartoons based on cartoons based on cartoons, with copy-of-a-copy syndrome stripping them of meaning.
chuds seem to enjoy the simulacrum copy-of-copies more than the original thing itself. they like how everything in anime is set along rigid tropes and formulas, with immersion-breaking gimmicks like fan service. they like how everything is video-gamey and follows a very specific set of in-universe “rules” that is very hierarchical and systematized and quantified (ever notice that every single world with super powers has a ranking system where the powers are boiled down to 1-dimensional quantities?)
This lack of realism, and favoring of idealistic platonic forms, soothes the chud mind who hates the messy chaos of the real world and wishes everything fit into tiny boxes they could sort. This sort of guilty pleasure of re-making reality to fit into platonism and overpowered main characters is inherent to the appeal of anime to a lot of reclusive people who aren’t looking for any type of realistic portrayal or connection to the world, but instead want to get lost permanently in a fake one that they have full mastery over.
Hence waifus becoming more desirable than actual women.
Little wonder that “let gamers design games” slogans were about making characters less distinctive and more generically fanservicey.
It still baffles me that so many reactionary
and otaku crave a seemingly endless number of escapist “isekai” worlds… but the first thing they want to do with them is crush them under the wheels of capitalism and use metagaming tricks to exploit everyone and everything in them. Maybe they didn’t want an escapist world at all; they just wanted to rule over the one they’re currently in.
Except they want the women to look like cartoons.
Turns out some people just want to believe they can become the boot.
Really just feels like AI art of “attractive women” really fills this gap of creating the reactionary construct of the same damn person ad nauseam, that or nerd and chuds have some version of face blindness where they get upset at having to deal with varied faces of women.
If you can track down a copy of Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, Hiroki Azuma actually describes this process.
To summarize the book- he says that in our current postmodern landscape, what consumers want isn’t narrative (because stories are pointless). What they want is a database of their favourite things, and they want to selectively consume the things in the database based on their own tastes, just remixed forever (A Tsundere is a Tsundere is a Tsundere, it doesn’t matter what color is the waifu’s hair). In effect trading ‘humanity’ to become ‘animals’, just mindlessly consuming the same things over and over again.
The analysis is postmodern and not marxist tho, so he attributes all this to the death of grand narratives and not capital. Still, the book is interesting since you can see those processes happening right now, with the Marvelification/Disneyfication of media
He honestly saw where the industry was heading before most and as a communist knew that capital would ride an industry into the ground to better reap money from easily pleased groups such as men with disposable income and very little in the way of inhibitions.
The consequences of Macross
Could you elaborate on that? I think I agree with you but I wanted to make sure I knew what you were getting at specifically.
Arguably, the entire Battletech franchise is like copy-of-a-copy Macross that went a very different direction that found a different valid form.
(I’m kind of sad that it shuns/dunks on the once-definitive transforming jet mecha because of IP legal struggles though)
Macross is one of the first huge TV anime that was specifically made by anime fans. It remixed pieces of older shows, like Space Battleship Yamato, and mixed in a city pop soundtrack to gain a broad appeal.
I think you’re mixing it up with Robotech, which adapted the first Macross show, Mospeeda, and Southern Cross into one big show. The Macross bit is mostly intact, but the English music sucks so much ass that it really messes up the show.
Battletech did snag the Valkyrie robots from Macross at some point (though I’m not too knowledgeable about that franchise), and Transformers used one of the Valkyrie toys as like Starscream or someone early on.
The original Macross show and movie are genuine classics - but they do mark a big shift away from earlier mecha shows like Gundam and Votoms, since their creators are mostly only being inspired by other anime rather than the broader influences Tomino and Takahashi drew from.
I was thinking you guys were talking about redo of healer… Then I realized this is another anime. These isekai really seem to like this
Yeah it’s horrifying yet also weirdly funny in the saddest of ways that male isekais are largely on desire fulfillment instead of any self actualization meanwhile you look back on the first ever isekais (those with female protags) and most of the plots dealt with growing up and coming to terms with some form of trauma or issue to be better self actualized.
The Neverending Story managed to be about a boy doing the self actualization thing, at least, especially in the latter parts of the story where he goes through grief, aging, and more.
Oh damn that’s one of my favorite films. Was made by Wolfgang Peter so existentially German without catering to the Americanized culture of wacky childhood hijinks, instead depression and trauma.
Thankfully Redo seems to not have legs like its more softcore counterparts
Holy shit my curiousity got the best of me and in the very first episode slave trade just as you guys said
Oh God now they’re on “hey I treat my slave well” second ep.
I already see grooming coming. I absolutely hate this shit
When demis level up they becoming instant grown ups. Ok I’ve had enough
Yeah again no joke it is legit “oh no guess I gotta buy slaves” instead of you know just killing the slaver
Great example of how otaku and libertarians damn near intersect into a perfect circle at times
Yeah seeing a few episodes of this. Fuck this shit
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
Don’t forget Gate.
Gate was the most over the top cringey fascist boot fantasy I could possibly imagine, with Happy Tree Friends levels of slaughter and brutality to show just how tacticool the Japanese military was and then showing them somehow soloing every other military in the world.
Unprecedented levels of Japanese nationalist jacking off.
deleted by creator
Yeah, there’s a part in Gate where foreign military forces move in on Japan to try to secure the gate and they all get destroyed even while the JDF is also busy doing war crimes in magic fantasy land, because the JDF is just that amazing.
deleted by creator
Unfortunately, yeah. The overlap between tacticool JDF stans (too many in Japan already) and “what if fantasy world but brutally torn to pieces with tacticool modern firepower” edgelords (the kind that were also into grimdark MLP fanfics and the like) was pretty significant.
deleted by creator
Oh god, it was like an isekai but for an entire military organization for fascists longing for Imperial Japan to fetishize all the while a fucking Abrams tank gleefully runs over people and commits war crimes because yeah no shit a fantasy swordsman versus a fucking gunship is an already forgone conclusion.
I can at least respect Gundam for 1 being anti-war, and 2 not fetishizing it whilst also have believable parity of power matchups.
Mushoku Tensei
I’ve been subjecting myself to this show for the last few days now because apparently I can’t escape dealing with it in anime communities and I do actually need to know what I’m talking about in order to shut down moderator opposition.
It’s sus af in premise but Shield Hero is actually 100x worse. In practice the mc in Mushoku Tensei doesn’t really do much beyond the usual bad anime sexual harrassment jokes and when he does finally lose his virginity he’s practically jumped on while repeatedly saying no. His relationships with others are generallllllly healthy and promote being a very good person other than it being through the eyes of a neet shut-in and the incel stuff that comes with that. The character arc is one of a person genuinely overcoming their issues and being a (mostly) good person. This is just my impression of season 1 though, no idea about the other.
Shield Hero on the other hand justifies actual slavery and actual grooming. The mc is an asshole, does not change or improve, and their assholeness is simply justified by everyone else in this world being a big asshole to him too. He has literal slaves, and he genuinely grooms those slaves for sexual desires. Everything is bad about this. It has zero redeeming features.
When I contrast the two, I actually can’t put them in the same categories.
In short, what I’m saying here is that the Shield Hero fans are irredeemable but the Mushoku Tensei crowd seem to me like they can be redeemed.
I was an outsider looking into the bags of dead doves, but if one of the dead doves is merely stunned and the other is decomposing, I appreciate you sharing the distinction.
lmao yeah this is a good description
Don’t get me wrong though, Mushoku Tensei is still quite bad. A shut-in virgin neet with pedophile tendencies dies and goes to a fantasy land as a newborn child. He continues to display an attraction to girls that are very young. He performs the usual anime sexual harrassment jokes, although the worst of these are reserved for adults at least. The redeeming part is that the dude does actually become a hero, he does actually try to be a person worth emulating besides this stuff. There are redeeming qualities here. He wants to be a good person. He actively seeks out ways to be a good person, to self improve, and to do his life right in ways that he failed originally.
Shield Hero on the other hand is a fucking asshole who quickly decides owning slaves sounds great and then also sexually grooms his slaves and this is fine because he doesn’t just beat them like the other slave owners do. His slaves LIKE him! Yay! But then he’s also an irredeemable asshole in every other interaction too, he never grows, he never tries to be better, he’s never depicted being remotely heroic, he is an asshole. The only “hero” shit he does is because he is thrust into it without real choice.
Of the two stories one is trying to justify every belief that reactionary shutins have while the other is trying to empathise with the depression that creates those shutins while also promoting the kind of healthier life that they should be seeking. I think when you lay the two shows out like this they can be viewed slightly differently.
I admit neither such franchise appealed to me anyway.
Isekai “what if fantasy world exploited like in bideo bame” trash was so endemic to the genre that I ever nearly avoided Dungeon Meshi/Delicious in Dungeon entirely but I decided to sit down and give it a try anyway.
The first refreshing discovery was that there was no “isekai” protagonist asshole. AT ALL. If you haven’t seen it, please do.
You might enjoy Hai to Gensou no Grimgar, but for different reasons. It’s much more about the character development and struggles of a group of people trying to learn to work together. Everyone in the group is given fairly equal screen time, and the world is extremely dangerous in similar ways. It’s very slow though, sort of plays like Slice of Life but in a world where the only means of earning food involves dealing with dangerous near death experiences regularly.
Unfortunately it’s not long enough and the audience didn’t take to it immediately because the characters are all slightly unlikeable in various ways to begin with, so it didn’t really get the popularity needed for it to get more seasons.
Faraway Paladin stays away from the video game analogue and is just pure fantasy without any real , from what I could remember, slavery/harem tropes.
It’s unfortunate that the industry has gone such a bad way that just an absence of its worst profitable cliches is enough to sound interesting without knowing anything else yet.
Ok ok ok I had to come back to this thread to tell you about Season 2 of Mushoku.
The entire fucking season is about the MC overcoming their erectile dysfunction. That’s it. That’s the season. All of it. The entire character motivation of the season is having ED and not being able to get it back because he doesn’t trust women after his first time went so badly wrong (the aforementioned jumping on him while he said no dozens of times, which ended with her running away the next day when he loved her) and the entire basis of his ED is that he needs to be in a relationship with someone he actually has real intimacy with and has built up real trust with.
That’s it. That’s the entire season. Episode after episode about erectile dysfunction.
Oh and they still have to solve it in the end with magical viagra juice.
This show is unbelievably stupid and definitely problematic at an elevated level but it’s also not Shield Hero. I do think however it is trending towards a harem, a sort of Edward Elric meets Sword Art Online harem meets sexual harrassment.
tl;dr: MC gets ED from being traumatised by girl he loved that kinda forces him into sex when he didn’t want to then runs away giving him huge abandonment issues. MC pursues a multi-year journey of study at university to cure ED, with the cure being real intimacy, real trust, and drugs.