I’ve got trouble with “Jerk”
Comedy. That is, comedy predicated on all the main characters being
not just crazy or foolish but outright terrible people. A jerk can
be funny used in the right way at the right time, but they often
don’t hold up as main characters or whole casts.
I’ve also got trouble with Isekai. I
used to think that, as a genre, it was perhaps overly maligned; the
basic conceit of travel from the mundane world to one of fantastical
remoteness is the backbone of countless works of literature, many of
which (like “Alice in Wonderland” or “The Chronicles of
Narnia”) are considered classics. That was before I realized just
how prolific the genre really is in anime, just how reprocessed and
regurgitated its tropes are, and just how frustrating it is when you
find yourself trapped between the failure state in which the world
revolves utterly around the main character’s quest and the one in
which you would much rather have a native character who was germane
to the setting instead. There is such a thing as good Isekai, but
Sturgeon’s Law really does apply.
So why do I enjoy KonoSuba so darn
much?
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