Isekai Office Worker: The Other World's Books Depend on the Bean Counter

Episode 7

This series hasn't always looked good. After a passable first couple of episodes, things started going downhill in the visuals department, and unfortunately, that doesn't seem to be a trend reversing any time soon. Episode seven features some of the absolute worst walking I've seen recently, both in Norbert and Seiichirou sauntering through town and later in Aresh walking as if he doesn't have knees when he moves Seiichirou to the “small mansion” he bought for them. It's jarring, and the story absolutely deserves better.

This brings me to my first real complaint about the adaptation, besides the animation: Selio's voice. Normally, I have no issues with adult women voicing preteen boys (or early teen boys, as Selio is somewhere between twelve and fourteen). But Shiori Izawa's Selio is so off that it sounds like her voice was recorded and sped up to make it higher. It's a bizarre directorial choice that does make Selio immediately identifiable as a brat but does so at the expense of him also being an actual person. This series has had no shortage of people who dislike Seiichirou for their own petty reasons, but only Selio has had the misfortune of a voice that makes him sound like a joke.

Of course, the character who is busy making himself ridiculous is Aresh. His protectiveness and possessiveness when it comes to Seiichirou have been consistently close to crossing lines, and I'll leave it up to you to decide where “buying a house and summarily moving your boyfriend into it before telling him” lands. In another series, Aresh would come across as a walking red flag. He's not good at listening to Seiichirou, has no concept of boundaries, and has gone so far as to threaten poor Norbert, who was just being his puppyish self when he offered to dress Seiichirou for the party. But within the context of this series, Aresh is painted more as overwhelmed with concern for a man who seems hell-bent on self-destruction. As far as Aresh can see, Seiichirou cares so little for his own health and well-being that he'd happily work himself to death without any thought for how much Aresh loves him. It's clear that the knight is acting out of a desire to keep Seiichirou among the living; it's just his good luck that the best methods to accomplish that also involve plenty of skin-to-skin contact and work best if they live together.

Aresh can get away with everything because Seiichirou is fully aware of what he's doing. Does he get annoyed when Aresh climbs into his bed at night? Of course, he does; they have their own rooms for a reason. But he's cognizant of Aresh's feelings for him, and the mention that they've only actually had penetrative sex twice, when there was no other way for Aresh to keep him alive, says a lot. The little boundaries may get crossed, but Aresh is trying. Whether you find it romantic or creepy is going to be personal, but Seiichirou seems to be falling on the side of the former. As he said a few episodes back, it's not that he doesn't know what's going on; he's just trying to process it and decide his own emotions.

Now that he's brought up putting Ist and the other magicians to finding a way to send Yua home, Seiichirou's going to have to really consider what he wants to do. He realizes this week that if such a thing is discovered, he'll have to decide if he wants to go back to Japan or stay with Aresh. It's not his top priority, but that might be because he doesn't want to think about it. So he throws himself into his audit of the church and into getting everyone abacuses, because that's both familiar and something comfortable to think about. Rooting out corruption, financial or otherwise, is work. Work is safe. Thinking about Aresh and his own emotions towards the younger man?

That's not something Seiichirou can tally on an abacus.

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