#and then i guess tousouchuu is following us into summer yayyy woohoo

[cospinol]

...actually this spring’s isekai pickings were a little bit better than usual, not even one 2/10 on my list! isenido just barely scraped by by sparing/pseudo-redeeming touma at the last second, but his plotline was SUCH a downer it made me despise the protagonist enough to knock the whole show down to a 3 when otherwise i’d have at least considered it for a low 4, accrued mainly from the excellent little romance with leviathan (of course her screentime is minimal and the rest of the harem is especially worthless to make up for it) (also, touma’s goofy yandere antics are genuinely a treat, but if i think about them for too long i remember that he literally actually did nothing wrong and my spirit of righteous vengeance starts thinking maybe this shit is a 2 after all). though i will soon have forgotten everything abt this show except for its wonderful myanimelist synopsis

i can’t find a single other website that uses the phrase ‘isekai-normie’, all respect to the mad genius mal editor responsible. the double-isekai aspect is almost so stupid it’s worth talking about but it’s also not even in the damn show, the classmates he got isekai’d with do not even appear in the fucking plot, so i won’t waste more space in this post on it

anyways i was expecting to dole out more 3s this season but everything else managed to accrue enough random charm points to scrape by; fundamentally i’m most affected by tone and this particular set all trended towards the genuinely fluffy and forgiving, which is shocking considering yuusha ga shinda is on this list but i’m a sap so i loved the bullshit reverse body-swap resolution and was even kind of rooting for touka and yuna’s deeply stupid romance by the finale. tensei kizoku is probably the meanest of the bunch but it made up for it in other ways (first and foremost: wataru hatano catboy ojisan. the character he voiced in yuusha ga shinda was also the highlight of that show lol, a seasonal throughline), mostly literally by having great design sense and introducing a whole cast’s worth of new characters every single episode so even though the main harem was another viciously terrible one we essentially ended up spending no time with them at all, i’d mercifully completely forgotten about the elf girl by the time she popped in in the finale

on the flip-side of this is that ‘uncommonly garbage set of love interests’ is the other throughline of the season for some reason, with iseleve being the other main offender, but in that case it’s offset by obvious Main Girl Who Will Win kaori being more than charming enough to balance out the rest of them. i was disappointed that there were so many irritants and distractions in the real-world part of the plot because yuuya using his video game hacks to win at crane games and getting coerced into becoming a fashion model is WAY more interesting than any of the generic isekai antics on the other side of the door (it’s so pathetic it loops around to deeply compelling at points), though i ended up liking the latter half well enough too once the evil onii-sama plot made it to the redemption arc portion. it’s too brief to really write home about or to bump this show up to a 5 but it did remind me pleasantly of a speed-run version of seikoku no dragonar’s prince julius plot, which will always be the gold standard for those (don’t @ me)

and that leaves isesuma Season Two as the only one on the list i haven’t talked about yet but it’s an outlier that i feel like i have to treat a little differently just because it’s very funny as a case study; when the first season aired in 2017 it was genuinely the worst thing i’d ever seen and i didn’t hesitate to give it a 2/10, while this season felt pretty much as average as one of these can get, and there’s no doubt in my mind that they are of pretty much the exact same quality. the only thing that really stood out this season was how little of a shit touya gives about his harem, even with him being a clueless/reluctant-type protagonist i remember the previous season actually attempting to build (even being mostly dedicated to building...?) romance arcs with the sisters in particular but this season girls he’s JUST met just get added to the fiancé roster *by the other girls* without even consulting him and the show doesn’t even play it as a joke. the mal synopsis for this one presents the harem as the main hook but the only time touya seems to care about anything in this entire season is the mecha engineering plotline, if you close your eyes you can pretend it really is still summer 2017 and you’re watching knight’s & magic..................... anyways it still just barely snags a 4 by actually putting in the white-haired catboy rival (i guess he isn’t actually a catboy but i spent all of s1′s intro thinking he was so that’s ingrained as fact for me) who was in all of s1′s damn intro but did not appear in the show at any point. he’s here now!!!!

also, i did drop katsukami at episode 4. self-respect moments