A Ninja and an Assassin Under One Roof

I've also been watching this and it's pretty entertaining. It's light, fluffy slop kind of like a darker version of the slime killing isekai.

Anime:

Lazarus is kind of disappointing. Given everyone involved in this I was expecting something much better, but the art and choreography makes me think of like early 2000s saturday morning cartoons, the CGI isn't the worst but it's still worse than if it were just static panels, and the cinematography is awful. The writing is also really mediocre, at least so far. I'll keep giving it the benefit of the doubt and giving it a chance in the hopes that it'll turn around and payoff, though. Something like a C, although that's maybe being generous because I expect it to hit its stride sooner or later.

I've Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level is light, fluffy slop that's half slice of life and half monster of the week except the end result every time is the weekly monster gets adopted into the ever growing circle of found family and friends. The art's not fantastic but it's not bad either, there is literally no tension ever, and the story doesn't go anywhere. Maybe a B or a C, because it's entertaining and inoffensive but nothing particularly stunning.

Solo Leveling is completely vapid, pointless slop with flavorless, one-dimensional characters, a bland, extremely derivative story, and pretty bad pacing, but holy fuck does that not even matter because apart from being nicely animated in general the sakuga action scenes are just gorgeous with amazing choreography, visual design, and cinematography and the only CGI that I've ever looked at and thought "wow that actually looks pretty good and doesn't detract from the scene at all." To top it all off the musical score is both great and perfectly blended into the scenes to control and elevate their emotional impact so that I actually got chills watching the most trite bullshit you've ever seen. This series is an aberration that defies any and all reason, taking something so completely flavorless and empty that even Todd Howard looks inspired by comparison and giving it such a lavish treatment that it somehow becomes not only good but an amazing spectacle. A for the sheer spectacle, D for the story on its own.

Mushoku Tensei is a deservedly notorious series that I've seen ascribed the blame for all the worst trends in isekai slop, but I remember someone here saying that it's weirdly much better than you'd think, and is in fact much better than its premise would suggest so I gave it a shot earlier this month. The protagonist starts out as a repulsive brainrotted pedophilic gooner, but after dying horribly and being reincarnated as a newborn baby in a fantasy world he slowly grows up and self-crits his way out of his main character syndrome and the heinous intrusive thoughts he has while working through trauma, loss, and depression and forming meaningful and healthy relationships with other people, gradually becoming a better person bit by bit and loathing who he used to be every time some heinous intrusive thought pops back up.

I started reading the books after finishing the second season and the first few of those are a lot more unpleasant reads than the anime but also make it way more clear that Rudy at that point is in fact meant to be understood as bad, actually. Like I always argue that when depicting something bad you can't just implicitly trust the audience to understand that it is in fact bad, you have to tie in a refutation and condemnation somehow, and these very explicitly do that in a direct and textual way, cycling from the worst intrusive thoughts -- and I've been calling them this throughout because that's how its presented in the text, they're these disruptive interjections that pop up unbidden into Rudy's internal monologue and break its flow -- into revulsion and self-loathing and usually some kind of direct refutation albeit one that's filtered through his brainrot, and if his internal monologue can't do that job the story hops into a different character's POV to do it better and more clearly. Over the course of the first six books those intrusive thoughts become less and less frequent and he loses most of his brainworms, and by the 12th book (which is as far as the anime's gotten) he's basically just "what if Harry Dresden wasn't a chauvinist, and instead was the world's most enthusiastic wife guy," with a great bit of self-reflection at the end where he tears into what an immature, awful piece of shit he's been over the previous 16 years and how much his failures cost him and his family.

The whole thing's an incredibly slow-burn character drama that jumps back and forth between genres, is full of amazing worldbuilding and a treatment of history and myth that most series just don't bother with (I'd put it on par with the Wheel of Time in this regard, and there are some other parallels with that as well), and is quite possibly the only isekai to actually use that narrative device for a good reason and to good effect (emphasizing alienation and homesickness and how being ripped away from one's home and family is a tragedy and not a fun adventure fantasy, both through the character of Nanahoshi and through the big catastrophic thing that happens in that world as well) instead of just as a lazy way of sending some audience-insert blank slate into an escapist power fantasy. It's also got a bunch of really suspect, problematic things that creep past any sort of textual criticism or resolution, in addition to all the unpleasant and gross things that it does actively criticize and work through. I could go on and analyze and criticize it further because I've been doing all this in my head over and over while churning through more than a volume a day, but that would take too long and I still don't know what the fuck I think of it anyways. I will say I can almost forgive the harem bullshit it eventually turns into because of just how incredibly gay Rudy is for his wives, like he thinks about them the way Enver Hoxha talked about Stalin and it makes the whole thing almost tolerable.

Let's see, ratings... I honestly don't know. The anime is gorgeously animated with nice music and for the first season every opening is some bespoke series of scene-setting environmental shots that look wonderful, and it's just all very well put together. Content-wise it's a lot milder than something like Game of Thrones, it's just that especially early on you've got the literal worst guy ever saying the most heinous shit you've ever heard at regular intervals. Overall it's quite good, it's just that's also going along with a lot of uncomfortable bad, too. Let's say a heavily caveated B? for the anime, and an even more critical A? for the novels, but without actually recommending either unless someone can stomach wading through all the gross bullshit it heavily frontloads the series with in order to get to the big payoff of genuine character growth with characters who manage to form healthy relationships while grappling with their own insecurities and inflated opinions of one another, and an overarching story that's basically "what if you mashed up the Wheel of Time and The Dresden Files?"

I'd started watching some other series but between the pirate streaming site I'd been using having horribly buffering issues that made everything unwatchable and getting unhealthily engrossed in reading and critiquing Mushoku Tensei, those are the only things I've seen more than like one episode of in the past month.