What really brings it all together, however, is quality writing. No, he isn’t dense, he is 20-30 years older than her and treats her like an adopted daughter, and, I know this might be shocking for isekai-watching weebs, but when a normal 40-year-old man hears his 15-year-old daughter describe what kind of a man she wants to marry, his first thought isn’t supposed to be, “wow, she wants to marry ME.” Such recontextualizations are more than enough to make the story feel fresh. I’ve seen so many unthinking complaints about the protagonist being dense in regard to one girl’s crush on him. Except he doesn’t treat them as a harem, he treats them as acolytes, that is, half retainers, half pupils, half daughters. Likewise, the supporting cast is just girls that make up the MC’s harem. His version of “redo” isn’t to have sex, it’s to take the chill pill and follow his occult pursuit without getting involved with the fates of the world. Except he wasn’t an otaku shut-in that regrets masturbating to anime figurines, he was a mastermind occultist that threw his weight around too much, made too many enemies, and ended up betrayed and murdered in a political conspiracy. For example, the protagonist regrets his previous life and wants to have a redo. Even if all the other elements of the story remain cliched, a unique main character completely recontextualizes them. Just this single change of protagonist is enough to shake up the entire dynamic of the genre. Seeing a 19th-century engineer wrecking medieval knights with dynamite and electricity is the same kind of fun as seeing an oriental occultist wrecking medieval-Europe-inspired-JRPG with curses, ayakashi, paper talismans, and machiavellian scheming. Take a cliched fantasy setting, add a protagonist that normally belongs in a completely different kind of story, watch how he fucks shit up with his out-of-place skillset, toolset, and above all else, mindset. but a meme, yet that novel and this anime have fundamentally the same premise. Now, there is a meme that Mark Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court” is the first-ever isekai novel.

In just one season, we have such isekai protagonists as a professional handyman, a legendary king, or, in the case of this show, an onmyouji from a fantasy version of ancient Japan. The secret ingredient all along was having a protagonist with some actual personality rather than a basement-dwelling incel.

Winter 2023 marks the truly historical moment when the anime industry has finally figured out how to make generic isekai that isn’t utter trash. The anime version of “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.”

Better discord not another anime theme