The past season of anime was dominated by two series both set in Western-inspired fantasy settings: Frieren, about a very old elf dealing with the grief of her legendary adventuring party aging and dying while raising a pair of apprentices, and Delicious in Dungeon, a long-anticipated adaptation of the manga about cooking and eating fantasy monsters as part of a long trek through an enemy fortress. They’re both very well-animated shows that have received a wide fandom as well as seemingly universal critical acclaim, at least as far as anime criticism is a thing. And I really couldn’t get into either.
To understand the origin of my displeasure, I think we have to get into the popularity of isekai anime, although neither Frieren or Delicious in Dungeon are properly isekai series. If you aren’t aware, isekai is a sub-genre of fantasy anime in which a real-world loser is transported to a fantasy world that essentially operates like a video game in the style of Dragon Quest or World of Warcraft. From there, the stories function as wish fulfillment in one way or another, with the hero attaining riches, romance, and status that he never had in the real world. The trapped-in-a-video-game series Sword Art Online originated the genre, and since then it’s become nearly omnipresent, fueled by a boom in similar-minded light novels, anime, and webtoons.
Isekai series are often compared to familiar secondary-world stories that have existed almost as long as fantasy as a genre had. There are many viral tweets reminding us that The Wizard of Oz or Narnia or The Super Mario Bros movie are isekai. But I think there’s an essential difference between isekai and the traditional secondary-world story. In pre-isekai anime like The Twelve Kingdoms or Digimon Adventure, the hero wants to return home, however much they might succeed and grow on their journey in a strange and unfamiliar world. The appeal of these stories, of course, is still that we might fantasize about being whisked away into a world that’s more exciting and adventurous than our middle school classroom or office job, but the fantasy required disavowal of that desire to function.
In isekai, there’s no pretense at disavowal: the hero who has been transported to the fantasy world has had their dreams fulfilled, and rarely even references their past life, let alone attempts to return to it. The new world is not strange and unfamiliar: the hero, and the audience, know exactly what to do because they’ve played video games before. The generic, metatextual nature of these stories is often denoted by their overlong, baldly explanatory names. This season alone we have Chillin’ in Another World with My Level 2 Super Cheat Powers, As a Reincarnated Aristocrat, I’ll Use My Appraisal Skill, I Was Reincarnated as the 7th Prince, and the third instalment of That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime.
Many of these series have some kind of twist or subversion of the core wish-fulfillment nature of the genre: this is the parody one, this is the one with a time loop, in this one the hero is a monster, in this one it’s a woman, and so on and so forth. But these subversions, at least in the number they come in, feel like they ultimately affirm the centrality of the subgenre. Just as Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns saved the superhero genre instead of destroying it, every nominally subversive isekai series ends up suggesting that this type of story is the only one possible to tell.
So it is with Delicious in Dungeon. The story involves a fairly generic group of Dungeons & Dragons-esque adventurers journeying through a large “dungeon” to attempt to rescue the hero’s sister from the belly of a dragon.) Despite these seemingly serious stakes, the show (at least what I watched) is a mostly leisurely stroll through a fantasy section, with the focus being the party dwarf’s methods of cooking unpleasant-looking dungeon monsters into delicious food. It’s a novel genre fusion of fantasy and cooking anime, and that along with some strong animation and funny character moments contribute to its appeal.
However, this formula doesn’t quite work for me. The appeal of cooking anime and reality shows, from Top Chef to Food Wars, is a combination of seeing mouth-watering food that one could hypothetically make or eat and witnessing the protagonists come up with novel ways to create a good dish in unusual situations. With fantasy creatures, neither pleasure is really possible: we can’t eat basilisk wings, and what makes them edible is not so much character ingenuity as authorial fiat.
The larger overarching plot is also undone by a lack of urgency: nobody seems very upset or concerned that their party member is currently digesting. Even with the existence of revival magic and the explanation that it will take a long time for her body to become irretrievable, one would still think there would be some psychological toll. If the protagonists don’t care, why should I?
But what really reminded me of isekai was the construction of the world. There is a dungeon, there are adventuring parties who go to the dungeon, there are resurrection spells and monsters, and all of this is treated as though the viewer will immediately know what these things are. I’m told that later on the series comes up with a bunch of dark explanations for why all these exists, but for the purposes of the initial viewer the characters are literally within a video game, or at least a world that was created to look like a video game and worked backwards from there. The whole point of the series is seeing creatures we recognize grilled and served.
The opening of Frieren functions the same way. We see an adventuring party saving the world, and we instantly know their stories and who they are: the fighter, the cleric, the elf, the dwarf, all saving the world from the no-name brand Demon King. The point of this set up is that we see what happens beyond this generic quest, when the adventurers have started to die off and the immortal elf is left alone, but later episodes don’t really complicate the setting or introduce any original fantasy ideas.
Frieren also uses another trope of the isekai genre in the overpowered protagonist. Frieren is extremely magically powerful, to the point that she can blow away almost any threat. This kind of hero can work in outright comedies like Mob Psycho 100 and One Punch Man, and to an extent in series like Fist of the North Star where the episodic tension is waiting for the baddie to get their comeuppance, but it seems counterproductive to a seemingly serious dramatic arc like the demon arc that occurs early in Frieren. The demons are presented very seriously, as purely evil creatures, but they barely pose a threat to Frieren’s apprentices. Frieren literally defeats an enemy by having higher stats than her. This is the element of wish fulfillment fiction is most grating to me: the hero crushing a one-dimensional bad guy at length, like someone making an extended argument against a strawman.
Ultimately, the reason why both these anime reminded my of isekai is the sense that the fantasy genre has been fully explored, and that the only thing left to do is variations on a theme. This extends to the stakes of the plots: nobody really buys into suspense about whether the characters will save the world or rescue the damsel in distress, so why bother presenting the conflict seriously and trying to create a sense of genuine danger? I love metafiction, but there’s a sense of metafictional exhaustion, where stories are all just a pre-tested combination of tropes with some novel variation that’s supposed to put a smile on the face of a jaded otaku.
Ultimately, I hope that we can get more fantasy series in the future on the vein of Fullmetal Alchemist or even last year’s Jigoraku, which had its own problems but at least came up with some cool monsters. In a genre where you can do anything, do something new! Or, if you have to do something I’ve seen before a bunch, at least pretend it’s new and engaging on its own terms, instead of embracing the postmodern exhaustion of isekai.