The isekai D&D generic fantasy rom-com Shonen slop industry is perhaps stronger than ever. I think it’s good that these shows are still being made because it’s some sort of rite of passage for young bucks to go through a phase and watch a few of them. I kind of missed out on watching this sort of thing before my manchild years, the best I got as an actual youth was Dragonball. These shows have a place because they are broadly about young men actualizing themselves using physical violence to acquire a life and a girl friend. We used to make this sort of stuff in the west now we import it from Korean animation studios. At the top you have shows with a little more meat on the bone and more originality, like your Demon Slayers and your Dandadans on the bottom we have “I was reincarnated as a pig iron pauldron in the fantasy world but I became the most fulfilled”.
I won’t argue that these stories should start subverting themselves, but I am pretty personally tapped out on the genre. I haven’t even watched the second season of Frieren because it’s sort of adjacent to seasonal Shonen stuff. I realized this when the discord watched Dandadan whenever that was airing last year, not a bad show I have just seen it all at this point.
Recently in the evenings I’ve been watching the Spice and Wolf remake that came out back in 2024. I watched the 2008 version years ago, but I had heard online that the remake follows the light novel better so decided to see what’s what. Light novels are an insane yawning pit of despair I refuse to learn about, so reading it was out of the question. What’s funny about S&W is that its about a guy named Lawrence and he’s a merchant. There’s no hype moments and aura it’s just stacking paper and hanging out with a tsundere. It’s like if Macris wrote a romance anime. In this way it’s kind of refreshing. The first big plot in the show is a scheme about bargaining for property rights from a noble who is planning to devalue his own currency by melting it down and reducing its silver content. The second plot is Lawrence getting rug pulled on armor futures. Anime loves to stray into a bizarre territory by stretching it’s premise too thin, but that never really happens here.
What’s interesting to me about this show in the big '26 is that in a way it represents what being a young man is like today. You can’t slay the evils of the 21st century with a sword, you have to be a shrewd merchant to get anywhere. Hard workers are suckers, get in on the ground floor of a crypto-scam. Lawrence suffers because he is too good natured to really win as a merchant. Fuck my piece of shit merchant life. The sensitive young man. Of course, in the unerring truth matrix of anime he is actually rewarded for this by the company of a cute girl. Her name is Holo and she’s some sort of pagan harvest deity that wants to return home to the “north” since humans no longer believe in pagan gods and instead science and monotheism. Actually finishing that journey becomes Lawrence’s goal. The Oaks or whatever. The Japanese have a funny perception of fantasy-land Europe. Broadly I think escaping the ills of an industrializing and mercantile society is a theme of the story as well. Immoral merchants comprise almost all the story’s antagonists. In coal world the only way to win is to just not play. I’m heading north.