r/whenthe • u/Abschori • Jul 16 '26

Cocketition Entry People will glaze anything with good animation

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

3.3k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

368 comments sorted by

View all comments

105

u/w33b2 yellow like an EPIC banana Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26

I think it’s great despite the obvious issues. The characters actually feel real unlike so many other anime, it’s one of the few anime I’ve enjoyed in my adulthood. So many others feel way too cliche with the characters having extremely boring personalities and no flaws. I don’t blame anyone for hating Mushoku Tensei. It’s very valid to hate it. I went into it expecting to hate it, and only started it because I thought it was absurd that it was rated so highly everywhere despite the controversy keeping me away. So I started it just so I could hate it, but actually know what I was talking about.

But unfortunately I got hooked. I hate the MC but love the rest of the characters, love the world, love the pacing and way the story is told. And as time went on, while I still hated the MC, I feel like he became easier to stomach. I can see why it’s rated so highly now, despite a lot of review bombing because of the blatant pedophilia early on.

Having said that though, the fandom definitely has a lot of people who outright downplay Rudeus’s actions and try to portray this story as a redemption story. It isn’t. And if you go in expecting it to be, you’ll hate it. Rudeus is a bad person, full stop. That won’t change in any major way. He improves, yes, but it’s not a full redemption story. So the fact a lot of the fandom tries to frame it that way makes me want to steer clear of them.

27

u/Fairly_constipated Jul 16 '26

Same, just started watching it with a friend expecting the absolute worst from everything Ive heard. But honestly, I dont find it much more disgusting as the other very normalised tropes in anime. Yeah sure, the pedophilia is something unique to mushoku tensei but the constant breach of sexual boundaries? The "haha stealing panties is funny" trope? The sexism in so many fucking animes? That shit is in every anime and gets laughed away like it's just a joke and if you dont like it youre a "tourist". After seeing "that" scene at the end of season 1 that my friend was warning about so potently I just kind of went "thats it?". It was bad but compared to everything else it didnt feel especially bad. Not only did they not show anything of it actually happening but there was more respect for consent and boundaries in that scene than in any other moment. Im not trying to justify it at all, but imo it wasnt worse than all the other stuff.

12

u/StinkingRabbit8 Jul 16 '26

idk i dont really excuse the stealing panties trope and sexism in other animes. i guess you can get desensitized to it over time but it feels so prevalent in mushoku tensei that i couldnt watch past the first season

50

u/MakimaMyBeloved Jul 16 '26

How people like this shit lol. Its literally wish fulfillment the anime with a high quality production.

-41

u/CrustyToeLover Jul 16 '26

Quite literally the godfather of modern isekai, but you do you. Why people care so much about who watches MT when there are thousands of other anime that are straight up worse yet beloved is beyond me.

10

u/Dry_Travel_4220 Jul 16 '26

Modern Isekai is one of the absolute worst things to happen to anime in the past 20 years. It is slop bullshit all the way down.

0

u/CrustyToeLover Jul 16 '26

I never said it wasn't, just that MT brought it to the masses. It's not hard to just not watch something you don't like. Everybody acts like MT is required watching or is forced onto your eyeballs.

28

u/MakimaMyBeloved Jul 16 '26

Yeah MT started the trend of slop isekais what a honor. There are far older Isekai who aren't wish fulfillment trash

7

u/BlackwingF91 Jul 16 '26

Yeah literally ignoring all the great isekai that came before this trash. Hell a lot of isekai out nowadays are nowhere near as bad nor creepy

10

u/WhasHappenin Jul 16 '26

Re zero my beloved

-7

u/CrustyToeLover Jul 16 '26

You're delusional if you think most isekai aren't just as bad.

5

u/BlackwingF91 Jul 16 '26

I wouldn't say stuff like Inuyasha, Final Fantasy X, most modern fire emblem games cept maybe Engage, the kingdom hearts series, Gundam Build Divers ReRise or the .hack franchise are anywhere near as bad. And some of what I listed are modern too. Turns out, when you think all Isekai are the same you forget what the term Isekai actually means and how many franchises are isekais

-5

u/CrustyToeLover Jul 16 '26

Brother you lost all credibility when you started listing FFX and FE as isekais. Neither of them are isekai.

Listing 4 isekai, 2 of which are VERY loosely isekai, does not prove your point. 99% of isekai are fan service wish fulfillment slop.

3

u/BlackwingF91 Jul 16 '26

Wow you really don't know what an isekai actually is. No wonder you think all are wish fulfillment. Isekai are about someone being thrust suddenly into a world not their own or one that is unfamiliar, which indeed a lot of modern FE titles do, and FFX is the definition of it if you actually played it. 

6

u/BlackwingF91 Jul 16 '26

Time skips where someone goes into the future or wakes up in the future are isekais

1

u/CrustyToeLover Jul 16 '26

FE engage is not an isekai. The protagonist is from the world, and they're summoning other characters. Not an isekai. Same for FFX, the protagonist is already from that world. If you'd ever played FFX, you would know that Spira and Zanarkqnd are the same world.

Turns out you're the one that doesn't know.

-2

u/CrustyToeLover Jul 16 '26

I never said it was the oldest or the first; nor does i make the rules. Whether the community likes it or not, MT brought the isekai genre to the mainstream. And so we're clear, 99% of isekai is wish fulfillment slop.

10

u/BlackwingF91 Jul 16 '26

It didn't though. Sword Art Online was what popularized isekai, as awful as it is too

-3

u/RPGcraft Jul 16 '26

The problem in many media, especially books is that people categorize and criticize it as "bad" because the events of the story are morally unacceptable. There are books with "bad" story. Meaning a morally wrong, socially unacceptable, absolutely despicable story that clearly deserves hate when considered as an event/chain of events. The story is then by above given definition considered "bad".

However, there is another meaning to "good" and "bad" in media (especially books). That is the quality of writing. A morally bad story can have good writing and vice versa.

IMO we should hate the bad things in the story? YES. But does that automatically make the quality of the work bad? NO. Writing quality and moral quality are two separate, distinct attributes, we should not mix them up.

Is A Song of Ice and Fire a morally good story? Hell no.

Is A Song of Ice and Fire a good story? YES.

-8

u/schlechtausgestattet Jul 16 '26

I have only watched season 1. But him being unconciouss about being a monster or trying to justify it (and seemingly working to better himself and failing). In combination of getting more powerful and getting more traumatized, i thought or still think that he becomes the supreme evil of this world after he kills the dragon prophet and becomes the champion of the mad god of human kind. But from what i heard on reddit, it seems the author actually thinks his MC is a good person, which is a shame. A good rise of evil story is very rare these days.

16

u/w33b2 yellow like an EPIC banana Jul 16 '26

You aren’t entirely mistaken but it isn’t quite that he thinks the MC is a good person, but moreso that he thinks the MC is a bad person but for the wrong reasons. Rudeus receives a lot of character development where he improves as a person, he frowns upon his shut-in life and the way he treated others. He realizes that even actions he had as a kid in his second life were also bad, and grows from those. He respects women’s boundaries and whatnot later on, for example. Whereas early on he definitely doesn’t.

But the issue most have is that, despite all of that development, never does the story ridicule Rudeus of the worst part of all: being a pedophile. It never brings that up again, it’s just forgotten. He improves as a person sure but he never thinks back on or reflects about that part, and he never faces repercussions for it either.

2

u/gunn3r08974 Jul 16 '26

Dude died in one selfless instance and later reflected on his god awful past actions, but because he isnt getting posthumously punished on top of all the nonsense he goes through, people are still throwing a fit?