Re:Zero - I barely made it thru the first season. It starts off pretty strong but deteriorates after a couple arcs when it hands the protagonist his romantic interest for no discernible reason. This means the series ends up as a standard boring wish fulfillment fantasy instead of a more thoughtful or interesting sustained examination of tropes. There are so many character design cliches I honestly haven’t been able to rewatch it. Later in s1, the whale arc, to me, felt interminable and utterly disconnected from any part of the plot I actually cared about.
That said, I can actually remember what happens in the first half of s1 pretty well and it aroused reasonably strong opinions in me. That means it stands out somewhat from most of the anime series I watch. If I were new to it I’d certainly watch the first 16 episodes or so.
It always really bothered me that the protag was a hikkiNEET but, once isekai’d he is the hardest worker around. That’s what made me like Konosuba so much more. Kasuma jerks off in the stables, hates working, yearns for true gender equality, etc. To me, one of my favorite things art can do is examine a psychological paradigm. I also greatly enjoyed Joker for this reason.
The unrepentant dirtbag protagonist is definitely one of the enjoyable things about KonoSuba.
I chalk up the “HikkiNEET to work-obsessed” trope as part of the wish fulfillment of isekai. One of the reasons people give up on RL is because of the lack of consistent rewards. If working really hard suddenly gave you a harem of compliant beauties, piles of gold, and widespread social validation it becomes easier to sustain. Compared to RL where working really hard makes more money for your boss.
This. I think it’s really important to understand hikkikomori and NEET as a result of capitalist alienation, rather than personal failings. In that sense, isekais tend to have an implicit critique of capitalism, though it’s nowhere near coherent.
I’ve written an unpublished novel where an alienated protagonist finds a way to travel in between a modern day city and a spell-flinging world without electricity myself. The idea is that it’ll become a trilogy where he stats out flagrantly rude and becomes outright toxic & deranged not only in the fantasy world, but in the real one as well. This turns him into a social media darling and a fucking scourge on his acquaintances. This is before he ultimately and begrudgingly being a catalyst to save both worlds having learned nothing about morals or the world’s rich lore in the process (of which I’ve written other novels).
I say this because 1) I love talking about it and 2) I’ve always instinctively disliked wish fulfillment fantasy where hard work gets you opulent pleasures.
