If I had a dime for a gender swapping isekai anime that came out in winter 2022 ?I would’ve two dimes. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s strange it happened twice.
For reference the other series is Fantasy Bishoujo Juniku Ojisan to in which two best friends get isekaied together and one of them turns into a girl, which the other does his best not to fall in love with. In Kenja no Deshi wo Nanoru Kenja on the other hand we get our protagonist reincarnating into the future of the VRMMORPG game in which he played an archetypical overpowered mage character complete with Gandalf style beard, to find himself to be a young teen girl, an alt character he’d created the night before. As per usual for this sort of series, he’s not all that bothered inhabiting a girl’s body, though slightly annoyed at needing to re-establish himself. Because he can no longer pass himself off as Danblf, the character he played, he instead calls himself Mira and passes himself off as his own disciple, which is what the title refers to. Mira then sets out to discover what has happened that made the game world real and why he was reincarnated into it thirty years into its future, meeting up with old friends along the way. The series rapidly devolves into a series of typical RPG adventures with increasingly difficult challenges. It’s clear that something is going on but no real conclusion is reached by the time the series ends.
When the first episode dropped it was widely derided for its ‘quality’ as there were some rather unfortunate CGI animation sequences and also because it ended on a minutes long montage without dialogue as Danblf woke up as Mira and discovered he was now a girl. Or at least had a girl’s body. I had therefore been loath to try this, but once I watched that first episode I thought it wasn’t that bad? That ending sequence without dialogue was clearly intentional and while it didn’t quite succeeded, I like that it tried to do something different. It was a pretty good way of introducing all the secondary characters. Likewise the frequent CGI battles were not that bad. In the end this was a perfectly acceptable isekai fantasy, a step above something like Leadale. I liked that the main gag about Danblf reincarnating as Mira was that she still spoke in the same grandiouse language as he did, rather than any sexist bullshit about now being a girl and not respected or anything. The times Mira was judged according to how she looked it was because she looked so young rather than because she was a girl. In another season I might’ve skipped this, but I can’t say I didn’t enjoy watching this.
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