Oh, right, I actually read a fair chunk of the original web novel of this. First I'll talk about that, then about the anime adaption in a different part.
For a web novel it's pretty good. Now, when you hear the premise "young overworked salaryman is transposed to a fantasy world in a 15yo body, promptly picks up a party of younger girls, most of whom are literally his slaves, it's entirely reasonable to be skeptical. Fortunately I'd been forewarned.
If I had to describe it, it'd be as a slice-of-life series with some occasional violence. No, really. Basically it's the story of how a youngish, overworked programmer goes on an involuntary vacation in a fantasy world and ends up being the mom of a traveling orphanage.
See, the core premise is maintained, that the main character is, as stated... an overworked young-ish salaryman. He gets Isekai'd, decides "fuck it, time for a vacation", and becomes a tourist. Of course, he's a responsible adult, which is where most of the plot and the character of the work comes from. When he starts accumulating slaves, he's aware enough to recognize consciously that yeah actually releasing them when they can't protect themselves and slavery is a universal institution, that ain't gonna work out.
Some of the first stuff he buys for them are picture books and a merchant's prototype set of word flashcards. He teaches himself how to cook so that he can make sure everyone gets a balanced diet, and takes pains to ensure that people with different dietary needs (i.e. the vegetarian elf) aren't excluded from having tasty food. He limits sweets intake. Even weeks later in the story it's still normal at night for the younger characters to cuddle up around him while he reads stories to them. He goes out of his way to avoid trouble they can't handle, and his solution for stuff likely to spill over into their business is to mask up at night and murder the shit out of it--not just so that he doesn't have to take on more responsibility, but so that things the others aren't strong enough to deal with won't end up slamming into them like a freight train. Instead of carrying the party, he deliberately acts as a safety net while they push their boundaries and grow stronger. A big chunk of his growth in the RPG sense is in support skills, he takes the time to learn how to craft weapons and armor so that he can iterate out better gear for the rest of the party instead of just giving them famous magic shit that people will try to kill them for.
There's lots of fun, clever little bits. For example, the main character worries about cultural cross-contamination when he introduces foods from Earth, but eventually figures out that that's already a lost cause, since people have been reincarnating and summoned for thousands of years. They already have mayo and red bean paste buns in the fantasy world! All the famous holy swords have names lifted from Earthly sword legends. There's a city named after a pun in Japanese. When he recognizes a plant with mild healing properties inside a town while collecting a different reagent, he has the sense to realize that the locals probably use it, and avoids collecting it. When he needs something simple done, he pays poorer people in the area pennies to do it rather than cheating it with magic or massively overpaying with stuff they'd be killed for. Even though he had an ungodly amount of money, he still goes out of his way to make and sell useful stuff to maintain an income stream like a fiscally responsible adult.
Occasionally they run into people who are stereotypical scenery-chewing villains.. except they usually turn out to be that way because their families and subjects were slaughtered and they want assisted suicide/revenge on the people they think are responsible/&c.
The whole process of people being brought over is interesting as well. Apparently folks are yoinked from a bunch of alternate-Earth Japans--one where it's still an Empire, another with a North/South division, &c. Some people reincarnate, some are summoned, some are summoned with knockoff blood-sacrifice rituals.
So. The real question. What about the ero shit? The character who's a reincarnated dirty old woman tries to seduce the main character with mind magic when they first meet. He shakes it off, essentially says, "WTF put your clothes on, I'm not a lolicon" (says the character, I can't speak for the author >.>), and they talk about their circumstances. The few instances of crushing that happen within the main party quickly reach the resolution of "let's wait five or six years and see how you feel when you're an adult". Dude goes to a brothel once with a random taxi-cart driver he met though, lol.
Where that really comes to a head is when they eventually bump into The Hero (a grown man) and his entourage of busty princesses (no, really). He's a self-aggrandizing dipshit who got his first party killed by going in over his head. More importantly, he's an unabashed pedophile. Not in the edge-skirting Japanese way of "oh, you're fifteen, that's close enough!" but "Twelve? That's like five years too old." No shit, that's almost a direct quote. There's a real heavy sense to the scenes with him, where there's the superficial implication of "lol they should swap parties", but the obvious more serious implication of "holy shit that would be awful" 'cause the sexual predator that lusts after six-year-olds would have a bunch of underage slaves... until they died when he did something stupid again. Meanwhile the main character would get sucked into noble politics and official responsibility, but that's small beans.
Oh, and those older women lusting after the hero? They're perfectly okay collateral-damaging a whole city with magic when he gets in over his head. They treat the children the guy leers at as competition.
The reincarnated-old-woman had known that guy before and fucking hates his guts. The main character gets them out of Dodge ASAP. And god damn did that set of chapters really drive home the underlying point the novel has made about the stereotypical isekai protagonists.
tl;dr: The web novel is refreshing, thoughtful, charming, and mostly not creepy, though the translations aren't the greatest and there's some degree of rambling.
Now, on to the anime.
I watched four episodes. They made a ton of changes which appear to serve no purpose except making it more like a stereotypical isekai story with a stereotypical not-Kirito haremshit protagonist.
Even when Satou fights an actual demon lord later down the line, he's just a big dude. The demon he fought in the first city was the size of a big dude or a small cart, not an apartment block. There was no wyvern fight early in the story, never happened. Wyverns in this canon look like giant pterodactyls, not underfed dragons. He met the blonde soldier girl when he found her in a tree during the initial demon attack in the city. He had no trouble getting into the first city, just walked up to the gate, guard was like, "No ID? Sure bro, you got the cash? Let's get you sorted out," in not so many words. Blonde soldier girl didn't have overprotective older friends who held Satou at sword/boltpoint, she had friends the same age who teased her because she was crushing on him. The scene where the bigoted guy knocked over the beastkin slave girls while they were carrying wood never happened because he didn't exist. In the labyrinth they rescued the slave merchant, a noble, and the noble's daughter from the spiderwebs. The wood probably came from a scene much later where he and the beastkin girls encountered the innkeeper's daughter + 1 carrying firewood back and helped take some of the load. Satou got shown around the city by an older woman working for a JoaT guild that he hired.
And on and fucking on. It feels really shitty in comparison. I'll keep watching for now, but it looks to me like they're trashing most of what made the novel good for the sake of aligning with what shitty otaku viewers want.
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Topic: I like anime, do you like anime? (Read 3138420 times)