About a third through the first episode of Do It Yourself, protagonist Yua Serufu spents a bit too long daydreaming while biking and hits a lamp post face on.

I shouldn’t laugh, as I managed to do exactly the same thing while walking through Barcelona, reading a comic. Not the first time that had happened to me, nor was it the last, but it was one of the more embarassing ones as I was on a school trip at the time. There was also the time I hit a car door, but in my defence there I was cycling down hill and the fecker in the car opened it right in my face with no opportunity to avoid it. Riding a bike is full of little accidents and sometimes it leaves you with a no longer functioning bicycle like this.

Now luckily both a derailed chain and a mis aligned handle bar can be fixed even if you don’t have a dependable senpai with her own tool kit showing up. If you don’t mind getting your fingers dirty, a simple chain can be put back on easily as long as you can put a little of slack in it. The bikes I used to ride as a child were even more simple than Serufu’s one, in that they were terugtrap (back kick or back pedal) bikes with no brakes or gears. To brake you instead just kick the paddle back which immediately locks the bike’s wheels, the pedals not being able to move backwards at all. If you’re not used to it (like the pack of American tourists I saw trying them out last week) it can be a little tricky and you need to be careful breaking at speed, but the simplicity of it means there’s little that can go wrong on it. Fixing the chain when it went off is just a question of wiggling it back in place and the hardest part was usually taking off the mud guard first.

Fixing the handlebars is even easier. You put the bike upright, keep the front wheel locked tightly between your knees and just wrench it back into place. Doing that usually got me home safely. If you were smart and you had your biking kit with you, you could use an allan key to then properly lock it back, as we see Rei doing a little bit later in the episode. Problem was that if you kept these kits on your bike, you had a high chance of it getting nicked… So we mostly ended up just doing it with brute force and hoped the lock keeping the pole in place hadn’t wriggled loose too much. If it had, you could find yourself with the handlebars a lot closer to the wheel then comfortable the moment you some force on them. Of course, there were also a couple of times when it turned out the front wheel hadn’t been fixed tightly enough to the actual forks and you ended up with it going its merry way while you went ass over kettle over the now stationary bike frame, so it could always be worse…

Mathias, the world’s most powerful magician has achieved everything he can in life within the limits of the weak magical crest he was born with. Still unsatisfied and wanting to learn more and more powerful magic, he decides to reincarnate himself to get the optimal crest to achieve his ambitions. When he does reincarnated, a thousand years or more into his future he’s happy to see that he has got it, but surprised to discover it is now considered the weakest crest. Something has gone wrong with the world’s common sense and only one thing can be responsible: demons!

Shikkaku Mon no Saikyou Kenja (The Strongest Sage with the Weakest Crest) looks like an isekai wishfulfillment fantasy, just lacking the protagonist being from Earth rather than their own world’s past. The world is the same sort of medievaloid Dragon Quest derived fantasy world, complete with demons, magical schools and adventurer guilds. Mathias himself is standard isekai protagonist B, overpowered but dismissed because his powers don’t fit preconcieved notions of how to use magic. This turns out to be the result of centuries of behind the scenes manipulation of magical knowledge to weaken the world for a demonic invasion, as Mathias discovers when he goes to magical school in the first episode. There he meets Lurie and Alma, a swords woman and an archer, with which he forms a part. Lurie and Mathias immediately form a crush on each other, which Alma likes to tease her childhood friend with. Together they go through various magical school adventures before the series turns into the war against the demons, with them in the frontline as they travel the kingdom uncovering their plots.

To be honest, this wasn’t a very good series. Plot and setting were cliched from the start while the execution was pedestrian at best. There was little tension throughout as Mathias was so clever overpowered most of the time none of his opponents were a great challenge until the final couple of episodes. Neither the animation nor the character design was up to making any of it interesting either. The only reason I stuck it out was Iris, the dragon Mathias had once defeated in his previous life. In the manga version she was an Id driven gremlin only interested in eating and fighting, doing her stuff in the background while the plot happened in front of her. But she too was neutered in this adaptation. Had Winter 2022 been a better season I wouldn’t have started this, let alone have finished it.