Forum - View topicEP. REVIEW: Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation
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AksaraKishou
Posts: 1410 Location: End of the World |
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The series spans his ENTIRE LIFE . You're not seeing supporting cast/plot hooks/etc cause dude's a 5 year old living with his parents lol Also, "I want to punt him into a dumpster.". His fam put him in the streets. I think that should satisfy you. |
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Tanteikingdomkey
 Posts: 2346 |
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We got that implied in the first 5 seconds of the anime. Since then he has shown that did nothing to correct or affect him at all. So I am all for punting him into the dumpster and seeing if that teaches him to be less despicable of a human being.
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Hikifroggy
 Posts: 86 |
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i heard the series delves into spoiler[polygamy] in a better light compare to other series that did it
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Abraham Omosun
Posts: 158 |
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Not sure how I feel about his backstory but seeing how Roxy helped him overcome his fear and go outside made me smile a little
The spoiler[masturbation and panty stealing] scenes felt unnecessary and could have been removed easily since they really didn't add anything to the story and the latter just ruins the heartful goodbyes. The animation is still very good and Rudy's monologues and skeeviness are still annoying. The horse getting struck by lightning was really funny, more anime should go that. Personally, the anime needs a more interesting plot or side characters because it is the animation is the only keeping my interest right now. |
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Skyletv
Posts: 81 |
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I don't know man, the one actually doing the spying was Roxy masturbating in the hallway spying on Rudy's parents having sex but yeah, don't feel committed to watching something you obviously don't want to. |
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ATastySub
Past ANN Contributor
 Posts: 647 |
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Voyeurism all the way down does not mean the last in line isn't doing anything wrong.
Honestly I'm very confused about the review stating
because I'm not sure what is meant by "a reasonable metric" when this is the very next paragraph.
To gloss over the "illegal porn" part is pretty suspect, because going into that really breaks the credibility of Rudy being a likeable character at any point. Especially considering his actions in the isekai world being completely in line with what was so horrible about him before. There are myriad ways of making an unlikable protagonist who improves. There are very very very very few of them that involve being a pedophile while also playing it for jokes and lavishly animated titillation. I truly do not understand how this is supposed to win anyone over as quickly as the review proclaims. |
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njprogfan
 Collector Extraordinaire Posts: 1161 Location: A River Named Toms |
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I can understand people getting squint eyed/turned off by some scenes during these two episodes, but having read the manga, (not the LN) there's a major character showing up next episode which may keep some from leaving early. Beyond that, this story gets better and better the further I've read. It's not for all tastes, but it grew on me. And BTW, I will get on that wagon about the animation, absolutely stellar!
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everydaygamer
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I feel like people may be overreacting a bit to Rudy. I mean I don't like him or the things that he's done but at the same getting angry over the fictional actions of a fictional character seems kind of silly.
Yeah he's kind of unlikable at the moment but that's also clearly the point, I'm more interested to see how he becomes a better person than I am being angry about who is at the start. It's like hating a Christmas Carol because Scrooge is a heartless jerk, you're kind of missing the point of the story. |
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Charou
 Posts: 123 Location: Sydney, Australia |
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I have to admit, I'm really struggling to work the whole 'self-insert' angle into this power fantasy isekai, but give me time and imagination and I'm sure I'll come to some sort of compromise...
...Jokes aside, Sugita as the 'internal voice' of our unheroic protagonist makes-or-breaks this one for me. Astounding production values aside (I swear I've seen anime movies less animated than this), there is something effortlessly 'ad libby' about his delivery that elevates even the skeeviest internal musing from nopenopenopedropped to 'oh, Gintoki, you sick bastard, haha'. This make-or-break is akin to Aoi Yuuki's carrying of Spider -- some find her delivery intolerable, others consider it an inspired casting call. There is something shrewd and calculated to both casting decisions, and if a viewer is unaware of that, I think it's understandable that they'd dismiss either work as a misfire or just not for them. Spider and MT are both, absolutely, aimed squarely at seiyuu-savvy viewers. Beyond the Sugita angle, I find it very interesting that they went with three voice types for the protagonist: real life external (bullied, messed up loser -- Steins;Gate's Daru without a hint of charm), fantasy world external (seemingly humble young genius -- pick your cliché there), and then the bridge between these two, Sugita's unleashed internal musings -- arguably the 'real' self unrestricted by a need to keep up appearances and yet deeply scarred by his experiences. Eh, someone more versed in the matter could probably draw parallels between these three and ego, id, and superego, but that's well beyond my scope. I just like the commitment to drawing that division; MT is immediately more interested in the inner life of its protagonist than most isekai, even if it chooses to hold a very ugly, distorted mirror up to its viewers to do so. Sure, Rudeus is a typical isekai power fantasy vehicle but they definitely aren't letting who he was off the hook. He was a complete scumbag, a broken man unredeemed by a last-minute act of goodness or a series of events that drove him to become the epitome of the pitiable, contemptible hikikomori otaku, the Akiba denizen writ large. I did not find either his 'noble' death or his tormented life an attempt at excusing him, only explaining him. I don't think that puts him on the same shelf as great antiheroes, but...eh, at least in the same section of the library; I find most isekai protagonists to be (by design, no doubt) functionally flat, squarely in the 'action adventure turn your brain off and enjoy the fun' category. There's a line I see time and again in anime discussions that good-naturedly minimises what I think lies at the heart of Mushoku Tensei: This anime is trash and so am I. It's funny when used as a sort of 'one of us' call to (in)action, an embrace of the Losers Club so many of us sought but likely found too late, but MT mercilessly exposes how unfunny the concept is when played out to its extreme. It's hardly an original concept but to see it coupled with a power fantasy isekai and then leave that incorrigible outcast from societal norms 'in control' of a nascent ubermensch while still wracked by the trauma that saw him cast out of reality and into pathetic fantasy in the first place is, at least in my experience, unusual and refreshing. That this is a 'seminal isekai work' (to paraphrase one of the ANN preview guide snippets) and yet has more meat on its bones than most of the isekai work that followed it as regards WHO is actually inside this reincarnated god-like child makes me wonder if when it comes to unfiltered isekai protagonist construction, once was more than enough. Were the production itself not jaw-droppingly good, I'd probably seek out the novels instead based on that alone -- and as I already said, I find most isekai LN, much like YA, to be facile and uninterested in even their main characters' inner life. They sure do make for flashy anime though. With MT's mixture of grotesque but believably damaged protagonist and sakuga-all-the-way-down, I'm getting my cake and eating it too there. Sugita greasing gears that would otherwise grind is no small factor either. Oh, and regarding the amount of actual sexy times in fantasyland, eh, it's funny what people get up to when they don't have centuries of religious dogma telling them it'll consign them to eternal damnation. Shows like this and Interspecies Reviewers give us a glimpse into that strange promised land where consenting adult sex is *fun* and masturbation is a natural response to stimulation otherwise unfulfilled (I mean, Roxy could have done it in her room but then Rudeus might not have seen it i.e. we might not have). This natural state of pleasure-seeking contrasts beautifully with Rudeus' approach to sex: to him it is ultimately a voyeuristic taboo, something to be spied upon and slavered over. He equates sex with porn, period. I wouldn't be surprised if one of the ultimate goals of the show is showing him not only what real love is, but also how unperverted sex can be. But to do that, first he has to stop self-identifying as a pervert. As far as potential Hero's Journeys are concerned, I've seen worse. |
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murgleis1
Posts: 44 |
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That was a beautiful post Charou. I couldn't have said it any better.
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Covnam
 Posts: 3651 |
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I've read about 20 or so chapters of this (spoiler[a couple of chapters after they get teleported away]) and enjoyed it, so I'm looking forward to seeing this animated and hopefully go far past where I've read. So far I haven't been disappointed and the visuals have been great.
It's odd that people are focused more on what he was watching than what (and when) he was doing. If the web novel is even worse than the light novel as mentioned, then that just seems to me to be the author going to absurd extremes to get his point across in case the situation wasn't obviously bad enough already. More for shock than anything else. I think the anime presents it better than what was described earlier as being in the novels, leaving the content more ambiguous since that's not the point of the scene.
I thought the same at first about the former (having long since forgotten about that scene from when I first read it). If this scene doesn't become relevant some where down the line, why bother? But thinking about it, I think you can justify it's inclusion as a form of characterization. Often these heroines are shown to be (or at least thought to be) pure, innocent, sexually immature/naïve etc, but with this brief scene we can clearly see that Roxy is not. It's a brief way to add to Roxy's character without having some strange and inappropriate sex related conversation between her and Rudy. |
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Key
Moderator
 Posts: 18194 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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I agree with Charou's other points as well, but thought this one deserved special mention. I plan to address this in one of the next couple episode reviews. As for other matters: yeah, in reading back through the review, I probably shouldn't have used the word "spied" on the Roxy masturbation scene, as I can clearly see now how that might have been misleading. Rudy didn't go hunting her down to spy; he came across her in the hall doing it. (Admittedly, he was up to no good at that time, but not that kind of no good.) Since multiple people mentioned wanting the Rudy Obnoxiousness Meter anyway, I'll think about how to handle it for next episode. This one would have been tricky to rate anyway, since I thought he improved significantly over the course of the episode. |
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Anneyuno1
 Posts: 68 |
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The problem with MT is Why should I care about Rudy? The series has not shown nothing redeemable on this character. There's no reason to think him deserve redemption.
I'll tell you a character like Nana deserves redemption more than Rudy because they lied to her and she no other choice. Also if the series does not portray that perverted attitude as something bad but as a joke then the character will never stop being a pervert. |
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everydaygamer
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It's not so much he deserves to be redeemed as much as will he be redeemed. The point of the story is that this awful person gets a second chance and now we get to see how he decides to use it. It's only been two episodes I'm pretty sure we care as much about Rudy as we could care about any protagonist this early in the story. At this point, we're watching out of curiosity more than any desire to see the protagonist succeed. Whether or not that will change as the show goes on we'll have to wait and see. |
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lossthief
ANN Reviewer
 Posts: 1395 |
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That doesn't really address the initial question though, which is why should anyone care to stick around for that change to happen? I can think of plenty of series past and present where, even if the main character was heavily flawed, I still felt compelled and excited to see their journey. With Rudy, I just find his perspective repulsive and unpleasant, and being trapped inside his head for the entire ride just makes it even more excruciating. Gorgeous animation notwithstanding, there's nothing in this world, cast, or narrative to compel me to stick around with this guy for weeks or months on end to see if he eventually becomes less of a total chode. |
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