#but also b) the rest of the plot is so grim on a grand scale. they brought myne back for more after s1???!!!???

[cospinol]

very late once again but, better late than never, Here Is my final fall '23 overview of isekai/isekai-adjacents/miscellaneous rpg fantasy garbage! another season where the twin major franchises are 'dropped with extreme prejudice' and 'was not dumb enough to pick this up in the first place' so my watchlist is a little thin, but nonetheless:

there's some internal narrative among the scores on this list, in that tearmoon empire couldn't quite get over the line to a 7/10 despite hovering very close to that territory the entire season (mia /is/ an absolute delight of a protagonist and the comedy hits more often than not, but the show as a whole ends up being concerned with its Capital P Plot to a degree that would only be an asset if the plot were actually good. it's a genuine shame, when it has so many strong characters and strong moments, in both slice-of-life segments and the more serious scenes, but i wish it didn't ask me to take a moment every now and then to look at the big picture, because the big picture isn't good enough to justify scoring it on par with the objectively stronger shows i've given 7s this season) which ended up bumping s-rank musume down to a 5 sympathetically, because they're definitely not created equal lol...

s-rank musume is largely Fine, with enough dedication to and competence at its dad-feels iyashikei to balance out its Light Novels Being Adapted At Maximum Speed plot nonsense, and it manages to extract a lot of (basic, but still) emotional beats out of belgrieve father-figuring at various troubled youths while coming to terms with his oncoming middle age. unfortunately, the core dynamic (and the show's titular character) is a huge liability - the way the writing chooses to portray ange's affection for/obsession with her father is truly absurd and travels well beyond the territory of 'exaggerated anime character antics' into 'at all times this character's behaviour makes sense for, at most, a precocious ten-year-old', and it makes many of her scenes deeply unwatchable, especially when her peers are written as normal young adults. it's less of a problem when the show is more of an ensemble (which is most of its run) but when your final two episodes are an ange-solo showcase about how her public tantrums and Telling People About How Cool Her Dad Is make her the most noble and upright person in the room, my goodwill is gone. this show is only on this list for the thinnest and most cursory maou-sama plot in the world btw, blink and you'll miss it, i just wanted to complain about it a little

continuing the theme of Girl Protagonists, problematic or otherwise, potion-danomi has the textbook setup for one of my least favourite subgenres, Girlboss Isekai About A Character Who Doesn't Care About Anything, and indeed kaoru forms no sincere connections to any other characters in the show; is smug, detached and superior until the writing decides she needs to be a force of moral good to own fodder characters (violently, and/or mean-spiritedly); flips motivations on a dime whenever the show gets bored of its current setting - and yet i came out on the other side of this one liking it worlds better than the likes of roukin, kuma kuma, leadale and so on lol. the back half of the show where she travels around to locations-of-the-week manages to find a comfortable rhythm that these shows rarely do, and although the core cast is weak and cursory, i was very charmed by the side characters in the 'let's open a store' arc; ultimately, the impression i left the show with was, for the very first time, that the protagonist had developed an entertaining one-on-one personal dynamic with another person in the show, even if it was just the stupid military official she was doing under-the-table potion deals with. it's The Little Things but it's enough to bump you up to a 5/10

andddd the shows in the 4/10 'default score for the genre' box are sitting there because they are as default as they come - certainly they're both annoying in their own right (boushoku no berserk conned me into watching it at all by opening with a fun villain voiced by daisuke hirakawa and then neglected to feature him in the rest of the damn show; toaru ossan takes a bizarre hard left turn into idiot-protagonist-based morality with some Morally Correct Torture Slash Gleeful Murder in the finale after being mostly blandly pleasant all season, though there are definitely earlier suggestions of a jarringly punitive mindset in this mostly slice-of-life show. also it brings back the zombie basement from seija musou for what feels like of half its runtime, what the hell), because that's what the default is, but neither of them feature anything egregious enough to drop down to 'remarkably bad'. it's simply The State Of The Genre...

...except that, of course, there's the outlier, whose first season i forgot to put in my spring log because it's doing the usual trick backwards and also making everyone else look real stupid while it's at it:

it's not that hard, guys. idk maybe try putting arius sabaramond in your isekai next time or something