I have been trying to determine what exactly is wrong with Arifureta.
This has proved difficult because there is so much to choose from.
Hajime begins as an ordinary Japanese teenager, gets transported to another world with his classmates, is betrayed, falls into an abyss, suffers terribly, eats monsters, mutates, and emerges as what would happen if a fourteen-year-old boy were allowed to redesign himself after losing an argument in front of a girl.
White hair. Eyepatch. Black coat. Artificial arm. Guns. Tortured past. A new personality built primarily out of contempt. An extremely powerful vampire girlfriend. More girls later. More guns.
At some point he builds vehicles.
There is an aesthetic category beyond shamelessness. I know this now.
I called Overlord shameless. I owe it an apology. Shamelessness implies that somewhere, however faintly, an alarm is still going off. Arifureta taught me the distinction between ignoring the alarm and never wiring it in.
Watching Hajime, I eventually realized that somebody had taken everything I disliked about Demiurge in Overlord and made an entire show out of it. Demiurge has the name, the red suit, the spiked hair, the little glasses, the elaborate cruelty, the whole screaming package of PLEASE UNDERSTAND THAT THIS MAN IS VERY SINISTER.
Hajime is that impulse pointed inward: the desperate construction of an identity that says I don't care what you think while caring with thermonuclear intensity what everyone thinks.
Once I noticed that, unfortunately, I began noticing it everywhere.
Anime had settled into a very specific role in my life by then. After that first trip to Daytona, it became what I watched before bed to keep myself from staring at the ceiling thinking of ways to improve whatever shit I happened to be working on that week.
There is a surprisingly narrow range of shows that work for this. They have to be interesting enough to occupy my brain, but not so interesting that midnight arrives and I am still awake because I need to know what happens next.
Frieren is firmly in the latter category.
More often, I undershoot.
Discovering I have undershot does not necessarily make me stop watching. Browsing the Crunchyroll catalog often feels like more work than enduring another episode of whatever mediocre isekai has already succeeded in getting itself onto the television. I would love one week alone with that godforsaken interface.
By the Grace of the Gods and The Brilliant Healer's New Life in the Shadows both benefited from this inertia. Campfire Cooking in Another World with My Absurd Skill did not need it; I genuinely like that show and will happily watch more.
Arifureta somehow managed to defeat even the switching cost.
I made it most of the way through season two. Somewhere around Hajime annihilating an invading army with what amounts to orbital bombardment and then helping one of his girlfriends move into a dead superhuman body because the new body had better combat stats, I discovered that navigating Crunchyroll was no longer the less appealing option.
She agreed, of course.
This is the advanced material.
I watched By the Grace of the Gods recently. I didn't hate it. It's pleasant. Ryoma is a nice kid. He raises slimes. He works hard. He helps people.
Everyone fucking loves him.
This isn't unusual for a protagonist. The problem is the relentlessness of the ceremony. Ryoma does something competent and an adult is astonished. He does something kind and an adult is touched. He demonstrates knowledge from his previous life and everyone marvels at his wisdom. Then somebody remembers that he's young and marvels at that too.
Ryoma could presumably digest lunch without assistance and somewhere a duke would feel a strange stirring of admiration.
The show bends over backward to sniff the protagonist's hindquarters, compliment him on his diet, pat him on the head and tell him he's an exceptional youth. And Ryoma, naturally, cannot simply say, “Yes, I am unusually capable. I possess the knowledge and experience of a reincarnated adult and have been personally blessed by gods.”
That would be arrogant.
Instead he has to remain perpetually surprised by the discovery that other people consider him impressive.
This is a trope I have come to despise. The protagonist is manifestly exceptional. The author knows it. The audience knows it. Every important person in the fictional world is eventually issued a numbered ticket and directed toward the protagonist so that they may discover it too.
The protagonist alone must remain innocent.
“My goodness! Nobody has ever completed this dungeon!”
Really?
“You've mastered a spell that takes court magicians twenty years to learn!”
Huh. I just tried it.
“This sword is a masterpiece. Where did you learn such craftsmanship?”
Oh, this old thing?
Eventually I want somebody to grab the protagonist by the shoulders and tell him that yes, he is fucking special, the paperwork has cleared, everyone has been notified, and he may now proceed with his day.
This is not humility. A humble man can know he is good at something. Thomas Aquinas did not need to believe he was a shitty theologian in order to possess humility.
Humility requires truth.
The trope requires something stranger.
The protagonist gets to enjoy every reward of exceptional status without committing the social offense of believing himself exceptional. He never asks for admiration because admiration hunts him through the streets. He doesn't announce his competence because witnesses are summoned. He doesn't claim superiority because reality testifies on his behalf.
Because he never asks for any of it, he remains morally innocent of wanting the thing the entire story has been constructed to provide.
Arifureta initially looks like the opposite of this.
Hajime does not spend much time scratching the back of his head and wondering whether perhaps his enormous revolver is unusually effective. He knows he's dangerous. He has the coat, the hair, the artificial arm, the enormous guns.
He has the eyepatch.
The eyepatch is doing considerable work.
But the underlying transaction hasn't changed. Everyone still has to notice.
Enemies underestimate him so they can regret it. Powerful people learn that he is not to be trifled with. Women discover that beneath the exterior of an antisocial Hot Topic weapons catalogue there is apparently something irresistible.
Hajime doesn't perform ignorance of his exceptionalism. He performs indifference to its recognition.
We have arrived at the advanced form.
The universe spends an extraordinary amount of energy looking at Hajime so that Hajime can demonstrate how little he cares that the universe is looking at Hajime.
Everyone please notice how little I care.
And then there is Yue.
Yue is a centuries-old vampire who, through one of those extraordinary coincidences known only to anime, happens to look about twelve. She, of course, comes with an affidavit attached announcing that she is several centuries old. Yeah, and a corporation registered in Delaware is technically a person. I'm sure that is important to somebody, but it's not especially persuasive to my eyes.
But Yue bothers me for another reason too.
Hajime has just rebuilt himself. The weak boy is gone. In his place is white hair, an artificial arm, enormous revolvers, contempt as a personality, and enough armor around every old humiliation that nobody should ever be able to reach it again.
Now imagine actually loving somebody who has done that to himself.
Romance contains a threat that power fantasy does not handle very well: another person gets to have an opinion about the person you are trying to become.
She might look at the whole reconstruction and say, “Jesus Christ, what happened to you?”
She might dislike the coat. She might laugh at the eyepatch. She might think the enormous revolver is compensating for something. She might love you and still tell you that you're being an asshole.
Yue doesn't.
Yue looks at the complete Hajime redesign and approves the specifications.
Then more women begin arriving. There is his old classmate. There are others.
There is a rabbit.
I do not remember all their names and I am not going back to look them up.
The important thing is that Yue stops looking like one particular woman whose taste happens to run toward furious teenage gunfighters. She becomes the first reviewer.
Hajime emerges from the abyss having converted every vulnerability he possessed into armor, firepower or contempt, and the universe begins assembling an independent panel of beautiful women to confirm that this was an excellent design decision.
Peer review is positive.
She can't puncture the persona. The story hired her to certify it.
The wounded adolescent does not have to wonder whether the defensive personality he built has made him harder to love. He gets a growing stack of certificates saying the new model is desirable.
He never has to become comfortable with vulnerability.
He gets an eyepatch and a waiting list.
This is why I don't think the problem is power fantasy. I like power fantasy. Almost everybody does.
There is nothing particularly shameful about imagining yourself stronger, smarter, richer, prettier, braver or more competent than you really are. Boys have been hitting each other with sticks while pretending to be legendary warriors for roughly as long as there have been boys and sticks.
The interesting question is what kind of power the fantasy wants.
An enormous amount of isekai seems obsessed with a peculiar one: I want to be exceptional, I want everyone to recognize that I am exceptional, and I want my exceptionalism to be so self-evident that I never have to admit I wanted their recognition.
Once you see this mechanism, Japanese cooking becomes dangerous.
Campfire Cooking in Another World with My Absurd Skill is ridiculous.
I also like it.
Mukohda's absurd skill is access to a Japanese online supermarket. He can reach across dimensions, order ordinary consumer products and cook with them in a fantasy world. His enormous magical wolf Fel solves nearly every combat problem by turning it into something dead enough for Mukohda to put in a wok.
A cataclysmic monster arrives. Fel kills it. They wonder whether it is edible.
Frequently it is.
The fantasy world even contributes ingredients that are plainly better than their mundane equivalents. Orc meat is exquisite pork. Fine. Excellent. The other world has produced something genuinely superior.
Then Mukohda breads it, fries it, serves tonkatsu with Japanese seasonings, and everyone discovers that apparently fantasy pork had been waiting patiently for Japan to finish the job.
That is the part that interests me.
Mukohda himself is not Hajime. He doesn't seem especially hungry for recognition. Much of the time he would apparently prefer to cook dinner without gods, legendary monsters and assorted supernatural dependents turning the meal into an international incident.
By this point Mukohda barely has to participate.
Fel is nearly unbeatable in combat. Japanese food and consumer products are nearly unbeatable everywhere else.
Mukohda is along for the ride holding the shopping cart.
Even Fel's preferences tend to collapse eventually. He prefers meat. Fine. Give him the sweet thing anyway. One nibble later another frontier has fallen.
If one recipe simply sucked, I doubt the show would have made it into this essay. If some local cook tasted Japanese food and said, “No, ours is better,” the fantasy world would regain a little friction.
Instead Japan keeps winning encounters nobody quite announced were contests.
And again, Campfire Cooking is charming enough that I don't particularly mind. Watching a giant wolf become emotionally dependent on dinner is funny.
But it reveals another version of the mechanism. The protagonist doesn't even have to become extraordinary. Just make a world where whatever he brought from Japan keeps winning.
This is where the Japaneseness of the trope becomes hard to ignore.
The pseudo-European fantasy world is full of strangely specific holes. It doesn't have this cooking technique. It doesn't have that ingredient. Its medicine is primitive. Its business practices are inefficient. Its craftsmen haven't encountered some obvious trick. Its social customs lack some useful Japanese habit.
Then the protagonist arrives carrying the missing pieces.
He doesn't say Japan is better.
That would be gauche.
The foreigners say it for him.
I don't think the underlying desire is especially Japanese. Vanity is not a Japanese invention. Neither is wanting people to admire you. Every culture has had to deal with the unfortunate discovery that human beings enjoy status.
What varies is what you're allowed to do about it.
I wonder whether what we're seeing is a desire that survived the cultural immune response to the outward display of the desire. Direct self-aggrandizement is socially ugly.
Fine. The desire adapts.
I won't tell you I'm brilliant. You'll discover it.
I won't tell you my culture taught me useful things. You'll beg me to teach them to you.
I won't tell you my cooking is better. You'll take one bite and make noises normally associated with structural failure.
I won't demand status.
Status will pursue me.
There is an American version of this fantasy, obviously, but ours often has the decency to be an asshole about it.
Tony Stark knows he's smart. Maverick knows he's a phenomenal pilot. The cowboy walks into the saloon already aware that he can shoot.
That matters because once the ego actually belongs to the character, the story is allowed to do something with it. Tony Stark can be an insufferable prick. His vanity can hurt people. His confidence can be justified in one scene and ridiculous in the next. Maverick's belief in his own ability can be part of what makes him good and part of what gets him in trouble.
The fantasy can indulge the desire and criticize it at the same time because nobody is pretending the desire isn't there.
The version I'm complaining about has plausible deniability.
Ryoma doesn't claim to be extraordinary. Everyone else does. Hajime doesn't ask you to admire him. He very ostentatiously does not care whether you do.
The protagonist gets the gigantic ego's reward without the gigantic ego's culpability.
“I don't think I'm special. It just so happens that every independent observer in the known universe has reached that conclusion.”
The problem isn't that a fantasy world admires something the protagonist brings with him. Of course it can. Sometimes the foreign food really is better. Sometimes the new technique really does work. Cultures borrow from one another because people encounter good things and keep them.
What starts to grate is when there is nobody left in the story who can see around the protagonist.
The fantasy world stops resisting him enough to remain a world.
It becomes an audience.
Its cultures are waiting to be improved by him. Experts queue up to be surpassed. Authorities certify him. Skeptics are corrected by him. Villains underestimate him. Women discover whatever quality the author most urgently needs them to discover.
Sometimes the entire technological development of a civilization appears to have stopped at precisely the point necessary for an ordinary Japanese teenager to restart it.
Which brings me, with considerable reluctance, to the banished-underestimated-prodigy branch of this family.
The Brilliant Healer's New Life in the Shadows is one specimen.
God help me.
Zenos begins with a party that treats him as useless and throws him away.
This creates a debt.
The world owes him recognition.
Then the story begins collecting.
Zenos becomes an unlicensed underground healer operating out of an abandoned building in the slums. This sounds appropriately disreputable until patients begin arriving with medical catastrophes that apparently nobody else in civilization can treat.
The beautiful female leader of the ogre gang has somehow swallowed a magical hand grenade.
Fortunately, our humble unlicensed healer can remove it essentially instantly, without pain, save her life, and then decline the enormous reward because the procedure barely inconvenienced him.
Naturally, she falls in love with him.
Please take a number.
The loli elf is ahead of you, affidavit already on file. Then the wolf girl, the lizard girl and the beautiful ghost haunting the abandoned building where he set up his illegal clinic.
The beautiful royal guardswoman will be joining the queue later.
Different office. Same paperwork.
Everyone who failed to recognize him is eventually outed as an idiot, usually with several beautiful women standing nearby to confirm the diagnosis.
The licensed professionals cannot do what he does. Dangerous people respect him. Important people notice him. Women keep materializing around the clinic.
And Zenos remains wonderfully innocent of the whole transaction because, as the story repeatedly reminds us, he is just a humble unlicensed healer who has no idea how extraordinary he is.
He doesn't have to march back to his old party and demand that they admit they were wrong. That would be petty. He can remain perfectly nice while reality handles collections.
He gets vindication without vindictiveness.
It's revenge fantasy with the revenge laundered through third-party performance reviews.
I don't have to tell you that you were wrong about me.
I don't even have to want you to know.
Reality will arrange for you to find out.
There is something painfully adolescent about all of this, which is probably why Arifureta irritates me beyond reason.
I am not judging this entirely from outside.
When I was about twelve, I finished my first Dark Side playthrough of Knights of the Old Republic and went through a period of being, by my own recollection, absolutely fucking insufferable. The details have been mercifully blurred by time and what I assume is a healthy degree of repression.
But I remember the posture.
Contempt looks a lot like strength when you're twelve.
Adolescence is when the desire for recognition becomes entangled with terror at being seen wanting recognition. You care enormously what everyone thinks while desperately wanting everyone to believe you don't care what anyone thinks.
You imagine the comeback you should have delivered. You imagine returning transformed. You imagine the girl noticing. You imagine the people who laughed discovering they were wrong. You imagine becoming so obviously formidable that you never again have to ask anyone to take you seriously.
Most of us have been there.
That's why the fantasy works.
The embarrassing part isn't wanting recognition. There is nothing especially shameful about wanting somebody to see you, admire you, desire you or realize that you became good at something difficult. There's nothing strange about any of that.
The embarrassing part is constructing an elaborate alibi for wanting it.
There are better stories hiding inside the same desire.
Let the protagonist be good at things and enjoy being good at them. Let him know when he's showing off. Let him crave praise occasionally and feel stupid about craving it. Let somebody remain unimpressed. Let an expert know something he doesn't. Let another culture possess a custom that survives contact with Japanese mayonnaise.
Let the girl not immediately recognize his hidden greatness. Let him try to impress somebody and fail.
For the love of God, let him misunderstand something without the misunderstanding later becoming evidence of his unconventional genius.
Give the fantasy world enough dignity to exist when the protagonist isn't looking at it.
Then give the protagonist enough dignity to want something without pretending he doesn't.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to be seen.
There is something very funny about constructing an entire universe to stare at you while you pretend not to notice.
And if you absolutely must do that, fine.
Just lose the fucking eyepatch.