I’ve tolerated a lot of dull anime in my time, I even managed to finish the one with the smartphone from last year. But Death March kara Hajimaru Isekai Kyousoukyoku isn’t just dull and borderline creepy.
Death March is dull and full on creepy. First thing you notice about a thirteen year old is how big her breasts are? Creepy. Being an adult, twentysomething year old programmer reincarnating in a fantasy world looking suspiciously like a mixup of the two games you’ve been working on, with unlimited power and looking like you’re fifteen again? Boooring. Thinking about how wonderfully soft those thirteen year old breasts feel, then thinking you’d totally hit her mother if only she was twenty kilos lighter? Nope. Nope. Nope.
Isekai or trapped in fantasyland stories always tends to be power fantasies, some hapless nerd trapped in an meaningless life dying or somehow being transported to a world where his talents (rarely her talents these days) just happen to make him the most powerful person in existence. You know they’re nerd fantasies because so few have any imagination than to then stick their overpowered self inserts in anything other than rote roleplaying scenarios, going into excruciating detail about how the adventure guild works and such. Death March is worse than most: nothing happens in the first three episodes after douchebag here wakes in fantasyland and gets his power ups by genociding lizard men. There’s just endless fuzzing about getting to a city, getting a place to sleep, to be registrered with the guild, going on a tour of the town with the first of what no doubt is going to be an extensive harem. Nothing happens, and in great detail. And this is not an anime that can makes this interesting. The really obnoxious sexism is the rotten cherry on the shit cake.
Now I did actually read the manga version of this until I got bored, but I’d hoped that the anime version could improve on the source material. Sadly, no. If anything, it made it worse. There was no internal monologue on enjoying the softness of a thirteen year old girl’s breast for one thing and while protag-kun made the same remark about wanting to bone her mother if only she was twenty kilo lighter, it’s so much easier to ignore if it’s just one panel rather than having to listen to it.
I haven’t even mentioned the slavery thing yet, where basically our hero sort of kinda inherits some slaves and they’re of course all cute little girls for him to spoil and them to call him master and it’s all icky and ew and if you’re any kind of hero and have god like power levels, why wouldn’t you want to actually do something about slavery other than rescue some cute preteen girls from it?
So yeah, I’ve watched a lot of shitty anime, especially newly streaming anime, because it’s only twenty minutes a week and if it’s dull or obnoxious I can do something else and just have it on as visual wallpaper. But there’s a limit and Death March has reached it. I need to cut down on my intake of shitty anime anyway, so on the chopping board it goes.
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