Chapter 3: Bullshit! Isekai “parodies” are just isekai but more obnoxious?
Kono subarashii sekai ni shukufuku o! (Konosuba)
Mo felt his knees buckle as his panicked eyes flitted about. Another draft. Another death. Another revival to the same point in the essay.
What had he done do deserve such a fate?
It was his hubris. The arrogance in deigning to write the perfect anime crit essay.
“Are you going to be okay?” Sakana asked, her tone so flat and detached that it seemed the question came more out of a sense of obligation than any real concern. “Should we take a break, or whatever?”
“How many times?” he mumbled to himself. “How many times do I have to write about fucking Konosuba?”
“We can skip this one if you — “
“AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH — ”
Bullshit no Yuusha: Suffering from Capitalist Alienation, I Reincarnate to an Anime Crit Essay!
Volume 1 — Alice in Wonderland and Sword Art Online
Volume 2 [you are here]— Konosuba and The Hero is Overpowered but Overly Cautious
Volume 3 — Didn’t I Say to Make My Abilities Average in the Next Life!? and The Master of Ragnarok and the Blesser of Einherjar
Volume 4 — Re:Zero — Starting life in another world and conclusion
CW: General discussion of some pretty gross sexism, various forms of abuse including verbal, physical, and sexual (I’ll tell you when), bad writing
(Spoilers, duh!)
“It seems Mo Black is having a bit of an existential crisis,” said Sakana. Her eyes flicked to Mo as he made a long, babbling, screeching sound that could only be faithfully described as incoherent SJW rambling.
The goddess cringed. “It might be best if I commandeered the narrative for a little while. We don’t want to drag this out for longer than we need to. Tends not to be great for narrative pacing or social media analytics.” She turned again to Mo. “Wouldn’t you agree?”
“How can anyone not understand the inherent sexism in reactionary fascistcodingofthepostthermianargumentbinary — “
“Maybe a long while.” The goddess chuckled as she turned her attention to you. “Oh? Did you think Mo Black’s cute little power of NARRATION was something I would be unable to replicate? Were you also under the presumption that you could hide from my gaze behind that puny little veil of yours? What did you call it? The fourth wall? How quaint. How preposterous.
“I am Sakana. Queen of kings of dimensions infinite. I am the keeper of waifus. I am the satisfier of, well, you know the rest. Something as weak as the conventional distance between a story’s narrator and its audience will not stop me from saving my realm. Doubt my power like that again and I will cancel your favorite isekai.”
The goddess sighed and shook her head. “No no no, not that kind of cancelling. Cancel culture is a fictional construct propped up by reactionaries and liberal BreadTubers who are afraid of introspection. I mean I’ll literally have your favorite isekai taken off the air. Ever wonder why it took Log Horizon so long to get a third season?
“Exactly.”
Konosuba is one of the most popular anime properties in the West. Ostensibly, the anime derives its popularity for being a parody of the isekai genre. Konosuba kicked off what I’ll call the isekai comedy parody.
The idea goes that most isekai takes itself a bit too seriously. This new wave of isekai exists to poke fun at and subvert the genre’s most common tropes while bringing a little levity to medium as a whole.
I’m not exactly sure what’s wrong with taking myself seriously. I mean, have you seen me?
I’m fantastic.
I’ll take another page from Mo’s book and lay out a definition for the word parody. The Internet is not exactly my domain. Still, as I understand it, parody can be used as a shield to avoid talking about problematic elements in media. Some seem to take the word parody to mean “sincere if the person speaking likes the thing” and “a complete joke that doesn’t matter when the work is being criticized”. Essentially, media only matters when it reaffirms the biases of the speaker, and is meaningless popcorn entertainment otherwise. This “definition” of the word is obviously nonsense. As it stands in the way of my objective, it will be dismantled at once. I urge you to take a moment and purge it from your minds now.
The dictionary definition of parody typically focuses on exaggeration of key traits of a genre or artist for comedic effect. Wikipedia goes into further detail.
“A parody (/ˈpærədi/); also called a spoof, send-up, take-off, lampoon, play on (something), caricature, or joke, is a work created to imitate, make fun of, or comment on an original work — its subject, author, style, or some other target — by means of satiric or ironic imitation. As the literary theorist Linda Hutcheon puts it, “parody … is imitation, not always at the expense of the parodied text.” Another critic, Simon Dentith, defines parody as “any cultural practice which provides a relatively polemical allusive imitation of another cultural production or practice”” (Source)
Parody usually, but not always, involves a kind of commentary on its subject. Parody most often involves humor, but again, not always. The one thing that we can be sure of is that parody requires a layer of insincerity between itself and the subject. A mystery novel that plays with some of the tropes of its genre for comedic effect but ultimately sincerely engages with those tropes sincerely is not a “parody” of mystery novels. That would just be a particularly funny mystery novel. A “parody” of a national socialist that ultimately unironically espouses those disgusting beliefs, is not a parody, but a Nazi who happens to be a more obvious clown than normal.
Likewise, an isekai comedy parody that ends up functionally indistinguishable from what it claims to mock could not, under any reasonable usage of the term, be considered a parody of my realm.
“I think that’s a decent cue for me to come in,” said Mo. He had apparently calmed down enough to speak rational sentences, however, he still seemed rather disheveled.
“You seem rather disheveled,” I said. “Did you comb your hair?”
“You’re not my mom!” The Bullshit Hero snapped like an insecure child. He stopped in his tracks. He smacked his lips a few times, no doubt recognizing the taste of being a secondary character. “Wait, are you narrating now?”
“I am indeed,” I said. “What of it? Do you not trust me with your precious essay?”
“No, I…” The hero pouted. “I just like narrating,” he said in a small voice. “It makes me feel important.”
Konosuba stars a sixteen-year-old average, low-life, shut-in NEET Satou Kazuma. He has no friends, Real Women Don’t Love Him, and he wastes his life away playing video games and reading manga. On his way back from leaving his room in the first time in what we’re lead to believe is weeks, he sees a young woman about to be run over by a truck. In a stroke of heroism, the young Kazuma springs into action, saving the girl at the expense of his own life.
When he dies, he meets Aqua, the beautiful guardian of the afterlife.
Let’s rip the band-aid off here and now: Konosuba was a thoroughly unenjoyable experience for me. That’s an understatement. Wow does this show have no artistic merit whatsoever. It’s looks bad. It’s written bad. Its politics are bad. Each episode is a repetitive slog of shit to sit through.
The show is supposed to be a comedy, but it’s one of the most unfunny things I’ve ever seen. Maybe one (1) character got a single (1) chuckle out of me throughout the two seasons available to watch. And to be honest, there is no shortage of high-profile AniTubers who agree that Konosuba isn’t funny. Or at least that they don’t really laugh at the jokes so much. Yet, we’ve all collectively decided that this show is good anyway even as a good portion of the people who watch it don’t… laugh. You know, the thing the show is supposed to be centered around accomplishing.
Just, one of the greats.
Just, fuck me, this show sucks. It’s a real emperor-has-no-clothes situation we’ve got on our hands.
Sakana picked at her cuticles with a dispassionate frown across her lips. “To be clear, you’re committing to attacking a show that’s very popular among leftist and reactionary anime fans alike, immediately after having defended Sword Art Online of all things? You, uh, understand that this is what’s taking place right now?”
“Abso-fucking-lutely.” Mo shrugged. “I am perfectly comfortable in dying on the hill that Konosuba is a far, far worse show than Sword Art Online. It’s at least more dangerous. It’s not like I’ve got any friends to lose.”
“As long as you’re warned.”
Goddess of healing and the afterlife Aqua explains to him that, after death, Satou Kazuma has three options: to be reborn in Japan, to live an eternity in heaven, or to be reincarnated in a fantasy world run on RPG-mechanics heavily inspired by D&D. He’ll start at level one and build his party up until he can slay the Demon King, and only after the death of the Demon King will he be allowed to return.
So far so standard.
“Well that’s the stated point of it all, isn’t it?” said Sakana. “The show apes the typical isekai set-up to do what it would consider a deconstruction of the genre.
“For example, it’s around then that we learn a few truths. Kazuma didn’t die protecting a young woman. What he thought was a truck was really a slow-moving tractor. The driver saw the girl and could’ve braked at any time. Kazuma didn’t die from the ‘truck’ impact: he pissed himself from fear and went into shock. He died in the hospital with smelly and soaked pants while the hospital staff and his own parents laughed at how pathetic he is.”
“To parody something it’s true you’d have to establish some level of familiarity,” Mo said with a cross of his arms. “Still, subverting a trope here and there does not constitute parody.”
Kazuma is told he’s entitled to bring one item with him to start his adventure. But all of Aqua’s mockery pisses him off. As a revenge for, mild mockery from a woman I guess, Kazuma decides he’ll use this opportunity to punish the goddess. He says he wishes to be reincarnated with Aqua herself as his helpful item. The powers at be accept and now Kazuma and Aqua are stuck in this new world together until they find a way to beat the Demon King.
Kazuma also, like, threatens to rape her. The comments are going to tell me it was played as a joke, but to be perfectly honest, that makes it worse? I think.
“It does,” said Sakana.
“Right.”
I’d like to remind everyone this is, uh, season 1 episode 1 of one of the most popular, most beloved isekai of all time.
Off to a great start with this one.
When Kazuma arrives, he quickly realizes he’s stuck in a rut. The goddess he brought with him turns out not to have any knowledge specific to this world. He tries to form a party, but only ends up recruiting a young mage, Megumin, who can cast one spell a day before passing out, and a warrior, Darkness, who while strong and sturdy, can’t actually hit things with her sword even if they’re still and right in front of her.
The show then, instead of chronicling Kazuma’s heroic rise to power and eventual slaying of the Demon King, follows the misadventures of him and his party trying to survive in this new world. Instead of the standard isekai power fantasy, Konosuba shows us a world where its titular hero is constantly broke, persecuted by the powers at be, and cleaning up after the incompetent actions of his bumbling teammates.
“Last time I followed your intuition,” said the goddess, “so this time, heed mine.”
Mo shrugged. “Sure. What’s up?”
“I say we start with why the show fails to be as funny as advertised.” Sakana took a step back. “One’s taste of humor is subjective. Well normally. Mine is an objective fact. But for the rest of you mortals subjectivity and humor remain inseparable. To make an argument about Konosuba, you’re going to need to narrow your argument down to a statement that holds true regardless of one’s personal predisposition to laugh at the show.”
Konosuba has a very limited number of jokes for a comedy. Actually I’d go so far as to say it has one real joke format that it recycles constantly. No, someone screaming is not a joke. It’s just someone screaming.
Each of the girls essentially has one negative character trait, and every joke is just playing into that negative character trait at Kazuma’s expense.
Aqua is a stuck-up, stupid whiny narcissist who makes every situation worse than it already is. She’s the useless goddess, like all the memes say (more on this in just a sec). Megumin is just, like, obsessed with explosions. The show runs pretty much all of its gags into the ground.
The chief example of this is with Darkness. Darkness is a masochist who gets turned on at inopportune times from the slightest hint that someone might dominate or violate her. She has a definite abuse fetish and purposely puts herself in bodily harm because she gets off to the pain.
Setting aside the fact that this weird kink-shaming shit just isn’t my humor, the fact of the matter is that this kind of stuff is only funny in doses. You introduce Darkness, you hint at the fact that she has a dark side to her that gets off to being beat up or whatever, and you bring it into play when it’s relevant and potentially funny. In a good show, Darkness would have a character made funny by the few times her fetish put her and the rest of the team in awkward/funny situations. You’d also throw in situational humor and other sources of comedy to keep things unexpected.
Instead, the masochism thing is literally just her whole character. It wasn’t that funny when she’s introduced, and every. Single. Line. That comes out of this woman’s mouth is turning the situation into a way to show the audience that yes, she is indeed getting off to this somehow. The show actually references this fact at one point.
As a reminder: pissing in the street doesn’t get better if the person pissing in the street shouts at the top of their lungs that they are, indeed, pissing in the fucking street.
It’s also worth noting that Darkness isn’t a real person. And that the show seems so insistent on making sure you know she has an abuse fetish, betrays something scientists would call “being a fucking creep”.
“Is this the part of the essay where we use a far better anime as a comparison?” asked the goddess.
“It is the part of the essay where we use a far better anime as a comparison!” replied Mo. He raised an eyebrow. “Say, happen to have Cromartie High School in that Summoning Seed of yours?”
She shrugged. “It’s not an isekai, but I’ll see what I can do.”
Cromartie High follows the adventures of Takashi Kamiyama, a straight-laced kid who transfers to a high school of delinquents and is forced to assimilate. All the characters feel like people. They’re all incredibly silly people with exaggerated personalities who don’t exactly act logically all the time. But they’re all people you can get behind. The comedy mainly comes from these people being forced into bizarre situations and interact with each other as if everything’s normal, and the inherent nonsense of the world itself.
As a personal thing, the narrative almost explicitly avoids sex/gross humor as an almost challenge to itself. Cromartie High wants you to laugh because its funny, not because it just brought up something uncomfortable.
In the show, Takenouchi Yutaka is the tough leader of the first years. He’s feared and respected not just at Cromartie High School, but at all the local high schools. His one weakness is that he has motion sickness. He feels as though if anyone were to find out about it, his reputation would never recover.
The comedy in Takenouchi’s episodes comes from the fact that his weakness turns mundane activities like taking a cab or riding the bus into a herculean challenge for him. His episodes are centered around the ridiculous lengths he’ll go through to avoid doing basic things like getting into cars or on planes.
In other words, motion sickness is to Takenouchi Yutaka as sexual masochism is to Darkness. Yet only the former is actually funny.
Takenouchi isn’t defined by his motion sickness. It’s not like literally everything he says warps an otherwise unrelated conversation back into how he gets sick on car rides. He has other character traits. He’s more intelligent than the average student, and he takes his role as “leader of the first years” seriously. In fact, it’s because of these traits that his motion sickness is funny. His motion sickness is a challenge because he’s a person who takes himself seriously.
Takenouchi is a recurring character, but he’s not in every episode. We get breaks between his appearances, so the next time we see he’s going to be in an episode you go “oh no how’s he gonna get out of it this time?”.
“Meanwhile, Darkness is literally just the masochism thing,” said Sakana. “When she appears on-screen, it’s for the purpose of getting off to something weird.”
“It’s boring,” said Mo.
“Not just boring, creepy.”
Mo cleared his throat. “It’s certainly creepy if it’s not your style of humor.”
“Right but more importantly, what it practically boils down to is obsessing over a woman’s sexuality and complaining about it incessantly. Kazuma is also a pervert. He steals woman’s underwear multiple times, he obsesses over the breasts of his teammates, half the decisions he makes in the show are with his libido. But he’s never essentialized the same way. If anything, when it comes to sexual perversion, Konosuba draws its humor from its insistence that lust is natural in men and unacceptable deviancy in women.”
Are there jokes in Konosuba that actually land? Sure. They mainly center around Megumin.
Everything about Megumin screams over-the-top fantasy worldbuilding. She’s got the bright red robes and a huge wizard hat for wizards. She wears an eyepatch not because of her deep and sorted past but because she just thinks it looks cool. Her family is one of immense mystical power, but she actually spent most of her childhood being broke and scrounging around for a good meal.
She has this thing where she gives things over-the-top fantasy names that sound cool to her but are actually incredibly stupid. It happens exactly twice: she names her cat Chomusuke, and Kazuma’s sword Chunchunmaru, which I think means something like “chrip chirp blade”.
The gag is generally considered one of the funniest in the series, and Megumin is more or less the most popular character from Konosuba. We’ll revisit this fact in a bit.
For now though we make an observation: the vast majority of Konosuba’s humor feels samey because it centers around the hatred of its female cast. Konosuba doesn’t just hate its own women though. It hates women.
Imagine for a second I paid someone $5,000 dollars to write me a young adult story. I specify it needs to be a story where one or more people are transported to a fantasy world inspired in some way by D&D, and that the story needs to focus in some way on a dysfunctional D&D party. Other than that, our mystery author is free to write whatever they want.
There are many different ways that this story could turn out. Specifically… who are the people involved in our fantasy D&D party? What are they like? What kind of adventure do they go on?
Why is the party dysfunctional? Is it because the people don’t get along? Are they too busy crushing on each other to get anything done? Maybe they’re all competent individually, but their powers cancel each other out and they’re for some reason forced together. Maybe each one thinks they’re the leader and they can’t put aside their egos to work together long enough to succeed. Maybe the party is split down the middle for some stupid reason and that causes conflict.
Any one of these could be a great story.
Now imagine our imaginary author got back to me, and his story was like:
I decided to write a story where all the women are stupid whore bitches who can’t do anything right. Like literally all of them. There are no exceptions. The protagonist has to beat them all with a stick until they bleed because they’re all stupid whore bitches and it’s funny because they deserve it. The reason why the party is dysfunctional is because the protagonist surrounded by low-IQ sexual deviants who are always ruining everything for him.
Would that not warrant like, a little suspicion? Like “hey there bud are you okay?” Y’know, just a tad?
Okay, now swap out beating them all with a stick with constant verbal abuse.
That’s Konosuba. That’s the show.
When the possibility of Konosuba being sexist is brought up, the conversation usually gets bogged down in a conversation about whether or not the main characters “deserve” to be despised as much as this show does. I’ll do everything I can to avoid falling for the same trap.
The reactionary argument usually goes as follows: sexism is only sexism when you’re unfairly mean to women. The women in Konosuba are all terrible people. Aqua in particular is selfish, demanding, whiny, and rude. She regularly makes fun of Kazuma*.* She’s financially irresponsible, she’s arrogant, and she makes decisions that put everyone close to her in danger.
The big meme around Aqua in online anime fandom is that she’s the Useless Goddess. This doesn’t come from the fandom. The story literally calls her useless multiple times. And a bimbo, actually.
She therefore “deserves” to be hated and it’s therefore Not Sexism™.
Reactionaries usually say that people calling Konosuba sexist are really just sensitive SJW white knights who can’t take it when female characters are anything less then perfect. They say it’s our fault that we can’t get “flawed” female characters because whenever men criticize women for ANYTHING people cry sexism.
The problem with this is that it’s a pointless conversation.
Aqua isn’t a real person. The only reason why anything in fiction is the way it is is because a writer chose to make it this way.
When an SJW says something is sexist, we’re not asking if the characters are mistreating women in the narrative of the story for no “justifiable” reason. We’re questioning why the author of the text made the decisions they did in the first place.
A writer had to decide that this was going to be the personality of the female lead. He had to decide to consciously make up a woman who “deserves” sexism and then take every opportunity to drag her through the mud.
“I feel like it’s about time to quote Dan Olsen’s The Thermian Argument,” said the goddess.
“I’ll let you do the honors,” replied Mo. “Practically an Easter Egg at this point.”
It’s important to realize that the show doesn’t just criticize Aqua when she does stuff wrong, right? The show criticizes her constantly, and uses the things she does wrong as cover. That tends to be how verbal abuse works.
The show makes fun of her for eating, the show makes fun of her for sleeping late. Kazuma is the one that summoned her to a new world without warning, but the show criticizes Aqua for not having thought to bring her purse with her.
There’s an episode where the party goes on a quest to gather as many sentient cabbages as possible to sell and eat. Aqua tries as hard as everyone else to gather the cabbages, but it turns out that most of hers are lettuce, and she doesn’t get anything out of it. That’s not something she did, but it’s still something we’re supposed to hate her for.
In episode 4, Aqua and Kazuma find themselves down on their luck and about to go broke. Kazuma sits around moping, complaining that this was supposed to be his big adventure but he’s stuck with a useless loser goddess who won’t act like the waifu Kazuma knows he deserves.
While Kazuma is sulking, Aqua is busy. She’s making these little flowers to sell and try and make the two some cash. She isn’t doing anything wrong in this scene. She’s being helpful and productive. She is literally putting herself to use in trying to solve the problem. This is the opposite of being useless.
The narrative hates her for this too.
Aqua isn’t useless because of any specific thing she does. She is essentialized as useless, and the justification comes later. If she does something and it works out, it’s proof she’s useless. If she does something and it doesn’t work out, who cares, she’s still useless.
Since the world of Konosuba runs on D&D mechanics, every character has at least six stats: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. There are a few others added to the mix, like Luck and Vitality, which I think is just HP. I don’t actually care about Konosuba’s magic system, honestly.
“We could talk about how measurable general intelligence has always been bullshit, and how fantasy mechanics that represent intelligence as some fixed, arbitrary value reinforce a whole host of incorrect and bigoted worldviews,” said the goddess. “But for you, it might be best to keep moving for the time being.”
“Aw, I’m sure we have a little bit of time.”
“You do. I don’t. I’ve got a realm to save here.”
When Aqua and Kazuma spawn into this world, we learn that Kazuma’s Intelligence and Luck are unusually high, while Aqua’s intelligence is extremely low.
Because Aqua is a goddess, her stats will never improve. It just so happens that, no only is she biologically hardwired to be stupid, she will never improve no matter how hard she tries and no matter what she pretends to do.
Reactionaries pretend Aqua is this flawed, complex female character for the purposes of justifying how the narrative frames her. In reality, she’s just what TV Tropes would call a Hate Sink.
A Hate Sink is a character whose intended role in the story (the role the authors made for [them]) is to be so despicable that the audience wants [them] to fail just as much as they want the heroes to succeed…. [T]his person doesn’t have to be the main villain of the story, or even a villain at all to begin with.
There are going to be people who like Aqua. Who glean whatever positive traits they can out of her character. But that doesn’t change the text of the story. Kazuma still calls her useless, a bimbo, and pathetic in the first five episodes. The show wants you to agree with him. If anything you could argue that the show expects you to love to hate Aqua, and a good chunk of her popularity comes from this idea.
So what, are you saying we’re not allowed to write female Hate Sinks?
Don’t write Hate Sinks at all, actually. It’s incredibly lazy writing. No one exists for the purpose of being hated. Plenty of bad people in this world, but they don’t exist for the purpose of you hating them.
But Aqua in particular is a Hate Sink made up of all the things the manosphere means when they say AWALT (all women are like that). Aqua is attractive, tempting even. She has big boobs and her skirt-thing rides so high a common fandom meme is wondering if she even wears panties or not. But after she suckers you in with her looks you realize how terrible she actually is. She’s biologically incapable of intelligent conversation, she’s a drain on Kazuma’s financial resources, and Kazuma is better off without her.
She’s a straw-man caricature of a woman that exists to channel anti-feminist male rage. She’s…
Hold on, I feel like I’ve written this exact thing before.
“Are you okay?” Sakana asked.
“Weird sense of déjà vu is all.” Could this be the power of D̵a̵r̵w̵i̵n̵’̵s̵ ̵G̵a̵m̵e̵ RETURN BY DRAFT?
Anyway.
The other women are all like this, to varying degrees. You’re not supposed to like Darkness, you’re supposed to be disgusted by how her sexuality is on display. You’re not supposed to like Megumin, she’s just as much of a burden on Kazuma as the other two.
The female character the narrative is kindest to would probably be Wiz, a demon-turned shop keep the party goes to see from time to time.
But she’s bad at what she does too. She runs a shop, but whenever she does her job, the business loses money. A man actually comes in and takes over the business for her and everything starts working out again.
This is literally a story where every last woman who appears on screen is either stupid, incompetent, or a “slut”. Did people seriously expect me not to say it’s sexist? Why? Because it’s popular?
So next time an author of color writes a story where all the white men are evil, I won’t hear any complaints of “reverse racism”, right? Right??
.
CW: Various forms of abuse [cw2]
(Use ctrl+f “cw2” to skip ahead in the essay if you desire)
Sakana made a series of precise hand motions, the Summoning Seed changing shape to match. “It’s time to talk about the 9th episode of Konosuba’s first season,” she said in an exasperated breath. “It’s rather infamous.”
“The succubus brothel one?” He added to himself, “What the fuck am I doing where I can say something like ‘the succubus brothel one’ and it makes sense?”
“In episode 9 of the first season, Kazuma goes to a specialized brothel that offers succubi escort services. Customers are to describe their sexual fantasy to the service, and, provided the client doesn’t get drunk, a succubus with that exact description will visit the client in their dreams and have sex with him exactly as they describe.
“There are no incubuses in the brothel, presumably because no men are attracted to other men and no straight women have sexual needs? I was under the assumption that the point of a capitalist enterprise was to expand into as many markets as exist and rake in a profit. Though, expecting ideological consistency and thoughtful worldbuilding from Konosuba might be a bit like expecting a rock to sprout wings and fly south for the winter. In truth, the brothel exists as is for the purposes of straight male fan-service.
“The succubus taking Kazuma’s order presents her business as an alternative to, well, actual rape.”
Mo groaned. “I feel like I couldn’t make up this situation if I tried. Like if I had to parody a sexist anime I don’t think I’d go this far. But I understand you’re not exaggerating, goddess. That’s literally what the… succubus… at the succubus brothel, tells Kazuma.”
“She explains that, when men need to relieve themselves, forcing themselves on a woman would be bad because the rest of the party would beat them senseless, or the woman might cut his dick off,” the goddess continued. “With the succubus escort service, you get perfect fantasy sex without any of the messy risks of literally forcing yourself on another person.
“There is no mention of how wrong rape itself is.”
Konosuba essentially maintains that “men have their needs” and the only reason men don’t just rape women when they feel like it is because there are societal consequences to doing so (ones that feminists invented). These lines subtly place male sexual frustration above female autonomy.
And no, this isn’t played as a joke. The “funny” part of the episode hasn’t actually started. This is just explaining to the audience why a service like this exists in this world. So don’t @ me saying this is a CoMedY and I’m not supposed to take it seriously.
“That’s a bullshit excuse anyway,” said Sakana.
“SO ANYWAY THIS EPISODE IS GOING GREAT — “
“Don’t move on!” Sakana snapped.
“First you tell me to move on now you tell me to stop.”
“Quit whining and listen, Bullshit Hero,” she said. “Comfort women.”
Mo blinked. “Comfort women? Like, from World War II era Japan? What about comfort women?”
“Just. Think.”
“Oh fu — “
In World War II, the fascist Japanese empire took over vast amounts of territory in the Eastern Hemisphere. The Japanese army would kidnap thousands of women from China, Korea, the Philippines, and other places and set up stations where these women would be assaulted by Japanese soldiers. The justification for these atrocities was simple: Japanese soldiers were men. On the front lines of military expansion for the empire, men grew tired and sexually frustrated. They “deserved” women to relieve themselves with.
The justification for the existence of the succubus brothel is exactly the same. Male adventurers on the front lines of fighting against the Demon King also grow tired and sexually frustrated, and it’s also natural to expect them to relieve themselves with a woman. The difference here is, Konosuba almost laments the fact that women nowadays won’t let men get this relief (read: women have control over their own bodies and won’t let themselves just get raped). Narratively, the succubus brothel exists to create a caste of women who exist for the express purpose of male sexual pleasure.
“And that’s the tea,” Mo said.
“Not even halfway through the episode.”
“Shit. Okay, what happens next? Let’s see…” The light from the Summoning Seed shifted and flashed again. “Kazuma asks if the service will accommodate all his darkest fantasies, including, but not limited to: celebrities, girls he knows, 2D waifus (the show stresses this one), and actual children. Cool cool cool cool cool cool. Cool. Konosuba just having a normal here aren’t we?”
That night, Kazuma is so excited for his dream that he can’t sleep. He draws himself a hot bath to relax, and thinks he’s fallen asleep. When Darkness walks in to use the bath, Kazuma thinks his succubus dream has started. He demands that she scrub his back as foreplay before they fuck. Darkness is clearly uncomfortable. As Darkness refuses, Kazuma’s demands get more and more aggressive and straightforward. Darkness eventually agrees. She cries and blames herself for not resisting.
“Inventing a woman that blames herself for her own abuse has to be some kind of advanced victim blaming,” said the goddess. “It’s bullshit all the same. Pure, unfiltered, thick, repugnant, bullshit. Here’s our daily reminder that this kind of thinking should not only never be entertained, but fought whenever it manifests.”
“Hear fucking hear.”
This is the “funny” part of the episode. Like this is the joke. Not the subtly justifying rape thing from earlier.
So it turns out that the real succubus was still on her way. Aqua eventually traps her because she hates demons and thinks the succubus is an intruder. Kazuma figures out what’s really going on, and ends up blaming the succubus for his behavior and pretends he didn’t even remember what happened that night.
There’s this fun little exchange at the end of the episode:
Darkness: I have to admit, I was quite shocked by how forceful you behaved, but it was also sort of thrilling [AN: ???]. It was, however, unacceptable to make me do things I clearly had no concept of.
Kazuma: Please. You’ve got as much common sense as the next girl to have known what was going on. No way you’re as innocent as you say you are. Oh, and, you walked in on me, remember? So, how can any of this be my fault? … You know I was in there and you came in anyway!
In the first episode of the second season of Konosuba, the conversation is picked up again:
Kazuma: Don’t get a big head just because your body’s somewhat sexy! I reserve the right to be selective! Darkness: Wh-Why you… And after everything you made me do in the bath!
Kazuma: That was because I was under the succubus’ control! You’re the one who went along with it and washed my back! Just how easy are you!?
More victim blaming. I’m not actually sure I can find the words for how shit this is. Everything I write feels like an understatement.
So here’s the rip, right?
If you strip away all the fantasy worldbuilding and the talk of succubi and goddesses and other worlds, what’s actually happened here is that a man “misread” a sexual encounter, demanded sexual favors from a woman, and ignored her repeated attempts to escape the situation. And then, after the fact, Konosuba turns around and goes “it’s not the man’s fault!” and “she was clearly into it anyway!” and “if she didn’t want to do it why didn’t she just say no??”
This is outright sexual abuse. The fucking worst part is that the writing fucking knows what it’s fucking doing! Megumin literally says it’s sexual harassment so, again, don’t fucking @ me saying otherwise. This is text. It’s there you just watch the show.
This isn’t even a thing where I have to extrapolate anything. The show made sexual abuse happen and then admitted to its audience that’s what’s happening and then told its audience not to care because XYZ sexist talking point.
Suddenly you realize that this isn’t some hypothetical dream scenario that has no basis in reality, but something that literally millions of women around the world have experienced at some point or another to some degree. Everything from the abuser’s unwillingness to take responsibility to the woman being blamed tracks 1:1 with reality.
Konosuba literally invents a situation where a man sexually harasses a woman and justifies it. The show asserts that rape is a natural thing men want to do. The show makes sure the woman who’s harassed is always horny. That way, if she’s horny, that means she liked it, even if she’s saying no. It invents a situation where the man would be confused about the situation and blameless. Then it blames the woman for being there. And then it calls her full of herself. And then it demands to know why she didn’t say no harder. And then, to top it off, Konosuba has its most likable character say that sexual harassment in general just
like
isn’t a big deal.
Fuckin.
Minor
crime.
Feminazis should just like,
chill out about it.
Y’know?
“Why not take a moment to catch your breath?” Sakana asked.
“Yes please.”
She cleared her throat.
“When Megumin is introduced, she makes herself out to be a powerful wizard capable of incredible feats. In actuality, her almost fetishistic love for explosion magic means she’s only capable of casting one spell a day before getting exhausted. When Kazuma realizes this, he tries to kick Megumin out of the party, seeing as he deems her at least as useless as Aqua. Megumin resists because she just wants a place to be able to cast explosion magic every day.
“Megumin and Aqua are covered in slime from a monster they fought all day. When the fight between Kazuma and Megumin escalates, some bystanders take Megumin’s side. They get it into their heads that Kazuma ‘defiled’ (as the show puts it), the girls. This gives Megumin an idea.”
“She basically uses the opportunity to accuse Kazuma of sexual abuse. Now, the entire town thinks he’s a pervert (well he is, but not for that specifically) and, if Megumin gets kicked out of the party, everyone will hate him. Kazuma relents and lets Megumin stay.
“This little sequence shows what Konosuba thinks of sexual harassment and assault allegations. Konosuba views these two things as things women make things up to take advantage of men and to get ahead in their own lives, and not something that actually happens to real women. Megumin is how reactionaries think of female sexual misconduct accusers, from Tara Reade’s accusation of US presidential candidate Joe Biden to those who accused anime English voice actor Vic Mignogna.”
A character like Darkness just exists for fetish fuel. There isn’t anything complicated going on behind the scenes. There’s no hidden genius to her character. She’s hot and she’s a lot of people’s kink in one way or another. The fact that that kink also apparently includes taking a girl without her permission and actually having her be secretly into it is not proof that rampant misogyny isn’t what’s taking place here.
This isn’t about being a sensitive SJW or whatever the fuck. I’m not special or smart or particularly more woke than anyone. It’s literally just reading comprehension.
Those lines up there are the most infuriating thing about Konosuba that exists. First of all, a show that treats sexual abuse like Konosuba does, with its victim blaming and tacit endorsement of it by asserting its a natural thing men just want to do, fucking, lecturing people on what is and is not “real gender equality” drives me up the goddamn wall.
But the real issue here is that these lines are red meat for reactionaries. If you spend enough time in reactionary online circles you’ll see this clip shared around with people calling it “based” or “the truth about feminism” or whatever the fuck. Because it matches this thinking to a tee. Konosuba willingly acts as sexist propaganda. It puts all those shitty feminists and leftists in their place to the sound of a roaring applause from its dipshit audience.
There are few things I hate more than reactionary propaganda. A bad idea is a bad idea. A bad idea trying to spread itself like the plague? A million times worse.
None of this shit is fucking necessary to do comedy. These are only “jokes” if you agree or ignore the horrifying manosphere-esque ideology that fuels them. It’s just disgusting.
The reason why we can’t have complex and flawed female characters in anime is because shows like Konosuba keep getting made. It’s not because SJWs keep calling “everything” sexist. It’s not because of “Cancel Culture”. It’s not because we’re all too “PC”.
We call sexist things sexist when they are demonstrably sexist.
What a fucking joke, honestly.
Kono yūsha ga ore TUEEE kuse ni shinchō sugiru (The Hero is Overpowered but Overly Cautious)
Do I even have the emotional energy left to do this one?
“Presumably, you were making a point with all your screaming and crying,” Sakana said. “So you better.”
So you know how, like the job interviewer asks the prospective employee “What’s your greatest weakness?” And they answer something stupid like, “I’m too much of a perfectionist”, or “I work too hard for my own good?”
This is that, the anime.
The premise of this isekai comedy parody is pretty simple. The gods rule over a near-infinite number of worlds, including Earth. Each world has a different difficulty level. At the beginning, we meet Ristarte, a recently inaugurated goddess tasked with defending an S-class level world from the Demon King. All Ristarte can do is heal, so she has to summon a powerful hero to help her defeat the most challenging type of world there is.
Ristarte figures the best place to get strong heroes would be in Japan, because the Japanese have seen and read so many isekai that this kind of situation would be natural to them. Hardy har har.
Ristarte shuffles through a whole stack of possible candidates until she lands on a young man with unusually high stats. The one note on him is that he’s impossibly cautious.
Ristarte decides that that one flaw can’t possibly outweigh the stats, especially since she needs to find a way to defeat such a powerful foe. So she summon’s him.
Ryūgūin Seiya is as edgy as he looks honestly. He’s the isekai protagonist equivalent of the guy who never uses healing potions before the final battle, who never lets his HP go down below green, and always makes sure he’s 30 levels above the level curve. ProZD did it better than I can.
The parallels with Konosuba are obvious. We have a self-aware comedy isekai with a useless healing goddess responsible for bringing the hero to the other world front and center.
For the first few episodes, I had a lot of hope for this show. For one thing, unlike Konosuba, the story is told from the female lead’s perspective, not the man’s. She lusts after Seiya’s hot bod in ways that women aren’t typically allowed to in anime. It’s much better than how Konosuba shames Darkness. Her outfit is sexy, but the fanservice is actually fairly minimal. For isekai, anyway.
Best of all, the premise is interesting. The thing about video game players who avoid all risk and grind all the time is that, usually, that doesn’t work in a well-designed game. Video games reward risk and exploration. In competitive games, playing too defensively actually means you’re letting the opponent build up their own strengths and combos. I was looking forward to watching a show about a character who’s physically strong, but whose own insecurities stop him from being truly great.
The show is, after all, called The Hero is Overpowered but Overly Cautious.
So, uh.
That didn’t pan out. The story may be from Ristarte’s perspective, but it’s definitely just about Seiya and how cool he is.
The story does eventually come around to mocking Ristarte’s open lust for Seiya, I just needed to watch more episodes. As a goddess, Ristarte’s hair has magical properties that, when combined with ordinary items, upgrades them to a significant degree. Seiya regularly sneaks up on Ristarte while she’s sleeping to pluck her hairs out for his gear.
Ristarte makes him a little doll out of her hair so that he can have it without literally touching her every night. But when she presents it to him, the narrative frames Ristarte as the creep here. Seiya calls her gift disgusting and just throws it in with the rest of his stuff.
The way Seiya treats Ristarte gets kind of concerning after a while. He mostly regards her as a useless healing goddess, to the point that anime fans have taken to calling her “the yellow thing” after Aqua’s nickname “the blue thing”. Did I mention that anime fans have gotten to dehumanizing these waifus by calling them things and not people?
“Seems like maybe a pattern worth keeping in mind,” the goddess said.
After the first few quests, Seiya becomes so strong that he doesn’t need healing, and when he does, he finds healing potions that can do her job better. He basically just keeps her around for inter-dimensional transport and cooking. Ristarte is an object to him that has a specific use value, and she spends a lot of time on screen just trying (and failing) to get him to see her as more than that.
The narrative more generally tends to sway against Ristarte as well. I mean, there’s this one scene in episode 3 where she’s complaining to her goddess friend, Ariadoa, about how useless she feels around Seiya, but then she starts getting depressed that she has smaller boobs than her friend.
So like, I don’t know if you noticed, but uh Ristarte doesn’t even have small boobs. Setting aside the fact that this is just a recipe for giving people body dysmorphia, which it is, the show will take things where Ristarte is obviously above average in like, I guess, cup size, and just introduce ways to make sure she doesn’t even gain confidence in herself from that. She’s not allowed to feel good about herself throughout the entire story.
It feels like the show wanted a hot woman, but they know that hot women also generally have self-confidence and we can’t have that. If women felt good about themselves they wouldn’t have a low enough self-esteem to fuck me while I abuse them whops I mean
uh
forced diversity?
So we just throw in a woman with even bigger boobs to even things out. There. Perfect.
Seiya is a Mary Sue. Unequivocally. He’s way more of a Mary Sue than Kirito ever was. The entire narrative bends around him and his strength. The other characters literally can’t develop because Seiya exists and sucks the narrative spotlight out of them.
Seiya’s “personality flaw” of being overly cautious isn’t a flaw. His paranoia is always rewarded without fail, even as he alienates the people he’s supposed to protect. He’s a cold, calculating douchebag who treats people’s lives like tools to further his own strength… and doing that just so happens to be, not just the best option, but the only option. Every. Single. Time.
“To that end,” said Sakana, “let’s talk about Mash and Elulu, two kids who Seiya adds to his party early on.”
“What’s there to talk about?” “Nothing. And that’s kind of the problem. See, the two are young and eager to prove themselves in combat. But Seiya is so overpowered he pretty much does every fight alone. The kids watch from the sidelines and do nothing for 12 whole episodes. Upon Seiya’s instruction, they carry his bags, and that’s it.”
“Everything that people asserted was true about SAO is way more true about Cautious Hero. Hm, I wonder which has the higher MAL score?”
“Don’t check, it’ll only make you sad.”
“toO LATE”
There’s a scene towards the middle of the series where the party is tasked to defend an outpost from one of the Demon King’s generals. The general of the outpost is a woman, Rosalie. She’s the opposite of Seiya in personality. She’s driven by a desire to jump in head first into action, to save her friends. She thinks that wasting too much time planning gets the people close to you killed.
After 6 episodes of Seiya being overpowered and Ristarte being shat on, Rosalie is a great change of pace. What we have here are two characters with opposing points of view who have to come together to defeat a common enemy. Is this where Seiya perhaps begins to see that acting distant and paranoid can have down sides? Is this where Rosalie learns that a bit of caution to back up her passion can get her where she wants to be faster? Will there finally be a second competent character in this series after Seiya?
The answer of course is no. Rosalie is immediately put in her place. Seiya basically tells her to wait around while her friends die until he comes up with a plan to save everyone singlehandedly. To Seiya, Rosalie isn’t passionate and brave, she’s a weak and stupid woman.
When Rosalie gets mad enough, she tries to hit Seiya, so Seiya slaps her into next week. Seiya just keeps hitting her again and again while she screams in pain. This goes on for at least a minute until Rosalie is crying and red in the face. The narrative literally calls her a dog.
And to top it all off, the show makes fun of the feminists who would eventually come along and write really long essays about it.
To give credit to the show, I do appreciate it when anime tries to like, get the jump on my opinion, as if that’ll stop the treatise from being made. I feel so represented.
But the treatise, like Thanos and death itself, is inevitable.
Just to make it clear, the issue with this scene is not that Seiya defends himself from getting hit. No feminist argues that “not assaulting women” means men can’t fight back against assault.
The problem here is that Seiya is, like the title says, overpowered. At this point in the story, Seiya has surpassed some of the gods themselves in terms of his strength. Rosalie meanwhile, is just a normal human woman.
This is less like defending yourself from a threat to your life and more like curb stomping a toddler repeatedly until her blood’s all over the pavement because she bit your arm and then calling that self-defense.
If you wanted to argue that men should be able to defend themselves from attack, maybe actually pick a woman who actually has the capacity to harm Seiya in any real way. Cautious Hero just invents a confident, powerful female character just to mock her, put her in her place, and beat her until she cries because she “deserves” it. And then it turns around and cries fowl about how crazy those feminists are.
Why is it that when people say stuff like “men should stop attacking women”, some men immediately take it upon themselves to invent situations where it would indeed still be okay to beat a woman senseless? Your response to “men sure do rape women a lot, and that should probably stop” shouldn’t be “what if the girl is horny and she looks like she wants it???” it should be “yeah u rite.” And your response to “maybe don’t hit women” shouldn’t be “but what if she had it coming???” but “yeah u rite.”
When we talk about assault, we’re not talking about defending yourself. We’re just talking about assault. It’s the reactionaries that change the subject. Could it be that reactionaries maybe have a teensy weensy bit of a problem misogyny?
“You could stop the essay here and say ‘isekai sexist’,” said the goddess. Power crackled at her fingertips as the air became noticeably colder. For a moment, her upper lip curled in disgust. But she seemed to force herself to relax. “But it might be worth analyzing the show’s 11th-hour twist first.”
Mo snapped. “Oh right, that bullshit exists too.”
“Again. You are the Bullshit Hero. It’s in the title of the es…” the goddess buried her face in her hand. “Just do your thing. Please.”
Essentially, as the show goes on, Ristarte starts to get more and more upset about the way Seiya treats her. She genuinely cares about him, and the fact that he treats her like an object all the time starts to get to her.
If I’ve talked about how little this show respects its female lead, the female lead herself would seem to agree with me.
The way Cautious Hero treats women is deliberate, in a way that’s different than how Konosuba treats its female characters.
It turns out, and I shit you not, but it turns out that this is actually the second time Seiya has been summoned to another world. The first time, he was summoned by Ristarte’s friend Ariadoa, with a woman named Tiana, and a few others.
The first time through, Seiya was compassionate and driven. He jumped into every fight as soon as possible without formulating a plan. His recklessness almost got his party killed a few times. One of his party members lost a whole leg because of Seiya’s impulsiveness. Every boss fight left Seiya and his crew with 1 HP left, but it always worked out in the end. Call this one… The Hero is Underleveled but Overly Ambitious! or something.
Throughout the adventure, Seiya and Tiana fall in love. Tiana fights the final battle pregnant and barely makes it through alive. They beat the Demon King with 1 HP as usual and are about to celebrate.
But then, it turned out the Demon King had TWO lives!
Oh nooOOoOo. If only he had been overly cautious!
So everyone dies, even Tiana and her child. Only Ariadoa survives, since she’s a goddess. Seiya is sent back to his world with no memories of his reincarnation. The gods feel so bad for Tiana that they reincarnate her into the heavens as the healing goddess Ristarte. Again, no memories of her past.
It turns out Seiya is actually a really nice guy. He hit Rosalie not because he hates women, but because he doesn’t want to see innocent people get hurt. He reduced Mash and Elulu to bag carriers because he wants to keep them safe and away from the front lines. He verbally abuses Ristarte not because he’s a total flaming dickhead, but because he instinctively cares about Ristarte due to his subconscious memories from his romance with Tiana.
When Seiya was summoned into the world, he was given one message.
And that was all it took for him to realize that his duty was to protect everyone he loves from harm.
See, you don’t get it. He’ll do whatever it takes, even if you think he’s mean. He’s actually a great guy. He treats her like an object because objects are easier to keep safe!
[yikes yikes yikes yikes]
Speaking of which, Konosuba does this too with Kazuma.
So we’re left with two isekai comedy parody that both revel in the abuse of women and edgelord, tell-it-like-it-is protagonists. The show praises both for their ability to call out so-called feminist hypocrisy, and the fans love it when these protagonists put annoying women in their place. They both feature female leads who the audience is supposed to hate, but end up popular at the same time.
The two shows circle back around and say that these protagonists are actually morally good. They’re not just good, they’re gooder than good. They’re the best good. They’re so good, that the abuse is good. The abuse is why they’re good, even.
We contrast characters like Kirito from characters like Seiya or Kazuma because their personalities and framing are so different. We say that, because Kirito acts “good” all the time, while Kazuma acts “realistically”, one is wish fulfillment and the other is grounded. But is that right?
Is what Cautious Hero and Konosuba portray really “realism”? Are Kazuma, Aqua, Darkness, and Megumin people you could see existing in real life? Is Seiya? Kazuma just seems like a piece of shit. He’s not “realistic”. Darkness is especially not an actual person, neither is Aqua. Do people really act like Seiya? When they do, do things in “real life” magically work out like they do in Cautious Hero?
“When we started talking about these two shows, we started with the assumption that they were both isekai comedy parodies,” said Sakana. “I laid out a solid definition of the word ‘parody’ to work with. You’ve been judging Konosuba on those grounds, on its failure of comedy and how that stems from an ideology inability to treat its female characters as people.”
“Uh yeah.”
“If Konosuba and Cautious Hero really failed at their stated goals as hard as you claim, would they not be less popular than they are currently?”
“Maybe?” He shrugged. “I don’t police what anime normies are into. I just smugly judge from a distance.”
“If you’ll just allow me the narrative again. No, don’t look at me like that. You’re getting it back. Goodness. It’s just for a few paragraphs, Mo. No. No. Stop pouting. Sto — “
The reason why Konosuba and Cautious Hero can fail so miserably at both comedy and parody and still be popular is that the meta narrative framing of these shows itself is deceptive. Konosuba is not a parody or a comedy, really. Neither is Cautious Hero.
If we view characters like Aqua or Ristarte as Hate Sinks, we get an incomplete picture of what’s happening. We can’t explain the people who like these characters unironically. We can only somewhat explain why the Konosuba sexualizes Aqua as much as it does, and why Cautious Hero thinks to ship Ristarte and Seiya together after spending 80% of its runtime making us hate her. We can’t explain a “comedy” that has one, maybe two jokes at best.
But if we drop the charade that these shows are trying to use comedy to poke fun at isekai, everything snaps into place.
Imagine instead that Konosuba and Cautious Hero are functionally indistinguishable from the two million other isekai that feature young men who find themselves transported to another world with magic powers and surrounded by beautiful women.
Of course we sexualize Aqua. Of course we have a disturbing scene where Kazuma abuses Darkness. In these stories, anything goes if it’s arousing. Of course Cautious Hero ships its hero with the gorgeous blonde goddess who cooks well and fawns over his six-pack abs. And if I told you that, in the source material and spin-offs for Konosuba, Kazuma and Megumin regularly flirt, that wouldn’t be a surprising fact either. Shipping and gross power dynamics in relationships are how wish-fulfillment isekai work.
The question then becomes how to reintegrate the show’s noticeable disdain for its women back into the analysis. The answer to that problem is post-irony.
Consider the fact that the market has become so saturated with these types of stories that they really do feel clichéd. Consider the fact that enjoying these stories unironically can come with social consts. If you enjoy a story where an obvious self-insert goes to another world to find love, all the while sitting in your room dateless, alienated, and alone, does that not betray the patheticalness of your own situation?
Post-irony is the practice of using irony to hide sincerity from the audience. The “comedy” and “parody” of Konosuba and Cautious Hero are just a thin layer of self-aware irony used to distance the viewer from the fact that they are indeed engaging with these tropes sincerely. Online fascists, as another example, will set up spaces that look at first to be edgy spaces that mock fascist thought, but are really just a place for sincere fascists to share their beliefs without being criticized.
The benefit of post-irony is that, if a critic doesn’t understand that this is what’s happening, the critic will find the response to everything they have to say to be the same: “it’s just a joke, it’s just satire, why are you getting so mad?”
Mo stroked his chin. “Hey. Hey! Yeah, that makes sense. It explains quite a bit. I mean, have you been to r/konosuba?”
Sakana shook her head. “I’m sane.”
“Meaning?”
“I don’t Reddit.”
“r/konosuba is the Reddit fan forum for Konosuba. And the majority of posts on r/konosuba are just people posting hot fanart of one of the three girls and the comments section arguing over who they’d rather screw.
“There are entire threads of people arguing over if they like it better when the show draws boobs huge and perky or more heavy and realistic-like. A simple blanket hatred of Konosuba’s female characters doesn’t fully explain the percentage of the audience that’s in love with them. Konosuba fans will probably tell you they think all the girls are fantastic, actually, despite how hard the narrative works to the contrary.
“But if the hatred for the Konosuba girls is post-irony, if it’s used to misdirect an underlying lust for all of these characters, it makes sense.”
.
.
“I guess??” The goddess gave the hero a blank stare. “I didn’t actually want this information in my brain but thanks. Sure. You nailed it.”
[cw2]
Urban dictionary describes a “simp” as
• A man that puts himself in a subservient/submissive position under women in hopes of winning them over, without the female bringing anything to the table
• A man that puts too much value on a female for no reason
• A man that prides himself with “Chivalry” in hopes of getting sexual gratification form women
• A square with no game other than “Rolling out the Red-Carpet” for every female
It means what reactionaries have always meant when they throw the word “cuck”, “soyboy”, “numale”, or “beta” around. It’s performative masculinity born from insecurity in your own masculinity. It’s the word men use to get other men to reproduce their own gross behavior towards women.
The interesting thing about the word “simp” is that it covers a wide variety of behavior. Yes it condemns men who cling to women unnecessarily, who insert themselves into their lives in hopes of sex, who can’t read social situations and obsess over women who are just trying to lead their own lives. But the nature of the word simp is that any man who cares about any woman too much is a simp.
All manner of feminists and leftists are simps by definition. Care about women’s rights? Simp. Have female friends? She’s not even fucking you, bro. Simp. Don’t think men should treat women like shit? Wow, simp alert. If you’re not getting pussy what do you care about her rights?
I feel like there’s a word for this. Toxic. Toxic. Toxic masc something or other.
If this shit is stuck in your head, it’s impossible to form relationships with women. Because any functional relationship where you care about the other person and let them live their life at the same time just makes you a simp. To not be a simp means to only have relationships with women you disregard, despise, and control in some way or another.
SAO’s Kirito is a virtuous guy who cares about Asuna and all the other women in his life. He goes out of his way to understand and protect them. To a reactionary, Kirito lets women “control” him and him caring about the women in his life proves that.
Kirito is a simp.
Kazuma is the anti-simp. He’s not afraid to berate and hit his women if they fall out of line. If he wants to see them naked he can just make them. Darkness, Aqua, and Megumin are hot, sure, but that’s not gonna make him sentimental like some simp. He’s too much of a man to treat the women around him with respect. Same goes for Seiya. Ristarte is beautiful and madly in love with him but that doesn’t stop Seiya from putting the woman in her place when she deserves it. Classic anti-simp behavior.
“You could say the isekai comedy parody is the same fantasy for different kinds of men,” chimed the goddess. “We say isekai is marked by perfect, so-called Jesus-kun protagonists who are noble, chivalrous, and good. This leads us to label shows like Cautious Hero as parodies when they in fact parody nothing at the core.”
Kirito is a male power fantasy for men who see themselves as “good people”. For men who think that, if shit hit the fan, they would do their best to protect the weak. They’d fight for the people they cared about. They’d approach whatever challenges that came in their way with the right amount of compassion, pragmatism, and intelligence to get the job done right. In this version of the fantasy, Kirito is strong, he’s in control, and he gets a beautiful wife who he loves as much as she loves him.
Konosuba and Cautious Hero are male fantasies pitched at men who hate simps. These men allow themselves to admit that they are in some respects selfish or rude. If this kind of men were isekai’d, they know they wouldn’t care about helping random people or saving the world. They’d want to run around amassing as many waifus and as much money as humanly possible. They’d take what they wanted, whether power or sex, and they wouldn’t blink twice.
To be clear, these men don’t see themselves as bad people. They generally see themselves as good people who possess character traits that society has unfairly decried as “problematic”. At its least harmful, the thinking goes something like
“Sure, society says I’m a jerk for yelling at her, but it’s just because I care so much about her”
At its most harmful, it looks more like
“Sure I forced myself on her, but come on I mean a man’s gotta relieve himself somehow. What’s unfair here is that these sluts won’t even give me a chance. Besides, it’s not like she couldn’t’ve said no if she didn’t want it, right?”
This isn’t the same as saying that everyone who’s ever liked Konosuba is a bad person, a sexist, or a sex offender. I am arguing however, that Konosuba and Cautious Hero see toxic traits in men and reinforce them rather than challenging them. I’m saying that these two shows justify all sorts of gross male behavior, on the spectrum of being kind of an ass to an actual rapist, as part of the exact kind of power fantasy that fans claim these shows parody.
These kinds of shows take men with flaws that should probably be addressed somehow and instead tell them: “actually no that’s what makes you cool”, “that’s what makes you a great person”, “you’re just misunderstood”, “it’s just those SJWs and feminists bringing you down”, “go out there and be who you’ve always been”. This is how the fantasy operates.
The reality is, Seiya still gets an insanely beautiful woman lusting over him while he saves the world and doesn’t even care. Maybe Kazuma’s always running into bad luck, yeah he’s not the strongest character in the world, but he’s at his core a panty-stealing badass with three hot girls following him around. And yeah they’re useless bimbos but they’re all still into him anyway, right?
In their own ways.
It’s perhaps time we decouple the Jesus-kun archetype from our definition of isekai. What defines isekai instead is a kind of male chauvinism, of which Jesus-kun can sometimes be a part. A power fantasy that exists to show how great and cool and awesome our male protagonist is. Sometimes the protagonist is a “good person” and sometimes he’s “edgy” and “realistic” but it’s just the same at its core.
What makes these toxic male leads more dangerous than the “nice” variety is that they explicitly justify male behavior that we need to be working as a society to improve. But the “nice” chauvinistic fantasies don’t get a pass either: both at the end of the day see women as things that are moved around to reward or please men, instead of as autonomous beings with just as much value to contribute as the opposite gender.
Sakana scratched her head. “I don’t understand.”
“What, the male chauvinism?”
“No that makes sense.” She sighed. “What confuses me is how either of these shows can be at the root of isekai’s problems.”
Mo squinted. “Uh…”
“They’re sufficiently problematic enough, sure. But they’re also post-ironic pseudo parodies, right? Even if they ultimately keep the wish-fulfillment they claim to criticize, these shows are a reaction to other isekai. Iterations of the original.”
“Sure.”
“An iteration comes after a cause, by definition.”
“That’s… fair.” Mo paused. “Let’s dig into what exactly male chauvinism in isekai means, shall we? We might find an answer closer to the truth there.”
Volume 3
You’ve reached the end of volume two. Thanks so much for reading! Be sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel, follow me on Twitter, and sign up for my Patreon if you’re up for it.
A special thanks to KranasAngel for helping me with this one as they always do. They’re seriously the best.
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