Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.
Nobody needs me to read them the standard line on the contemporary isekai boom at this rate. Nonetheless, here it is, if you’re somehow not aware; the isekai genre, or at least the most common strain of it in the present day, involves people from our world dying and having their souls migrated into another universe, often but not always a fairly standard-templated one based roughly around a JRPG-ish medieval fantasy setting. There are a lot of these. Almost in purely mathematical terms, there are too many of these. It is the most oversaturated genre in modern TV anime, largely thanks to the machinations of J-media conglomerate Kadokawa, and most of them are deeply forgettable. Over at AnimeNewsNetwork, their This Week in Anime column has made a game out of running down the bumper crop of each season for a while now. (Here is the most recent, from back in January. I assume they’re hard at work on this season’s as we speak.) The tide shows no signs of slowing down any time soon.
I’ll be very honest; I don’t really get most isekai. It’s possible I’m just too far removed from the mindset of the teenage boys that this stuff is aimed at these days, but in general, while I think some amount of any genre of fiction is allowed to consist of naked power fantasies, they must at least be interesting power fantasies. (To put it in crasser terms; if you’re going to pen a 20-novel series about a character who is clearly Just You bedding elf chicks and killing fantasy monsters, the elves better at least be attractive and the fantasy monsters better at least be weird.) Contemporary isekai often fails to clear even that bar, and those stories that don’t come across as power fantasies at all are pretty rare. But, hey, credit where it’s due to KamiKatsu: Working for God in a Godless World (what a title), because whatever the hell it’s trying to do, it’s at least memorably strange, and if you can’t clear “good,” then “weird” is a solid second choice.
And things will, indeed, get weird.
Very broadly, KamiKatsu is a comedy. You might call it a parody, but the isekai genre itself is really only part of what it’s taking the piss out of, so that might cast it in too narrow a role. Our lead is the remarkably unremarkable Yukito [Junya Enoki], who is perfectly ordinary. You know, other than the fact that he was raised in a cult and the way he’s killed—remember, isekai series, we gotta kill the protagonist somehow before the story can even start—is that his father, who is inexplicably a really buff tanned bald dude, sticks him in a barrel, ties a magetama around his neck, and has him heave-ho’d into the ocean in the name of their cult’s goddess Mitama. He drowns, because, like, you know, yeah. With his last breath, he wishes to be reborn in a world with no gods and no religion.
After a series of “hilarious” flashbacks where we see things like Yukito fumbling a relationship because his dad’s culties and stepping in dog shit as his life flashes before his eyes, he is—surprise!—reborn in just such a world, where a hot lady, Aruraru [Kana Hanazawa], quite literally immediately jerks him off. (Obviously this is played as a joke but, yes, that happens. I’m just a little stunned by the audacity, somehow.) After some acclimating, he discovers his dilemma and, indeed, the first episode’s central gag. He has been transmigrated to a world not only without any concept of spirituality, faith, religion, etc., but also one without any of the usual isekai fantasy trappings. Yukito’s big quest in this first episode? He helps out the small village he ends up in with their farming, and grumbles the entire time, complaining about how this is Not what he was hoping for when he found out he’d been isekai’d. (To be totally fair to the guy, if I were sent to a generic isekai universe and found out I wasn’t at least an attractive raven-haired elf woman who could, I dunno, use fire magic or something? I’d be pretty let down too.) He has essentially been reincarnated into medieval Germany.
There is a procession of gags, here. They’re more amusing than laugh-out-loud funny, but they get the job done. When Yukito accidentally gets a bit overzealous and harvests a truly ludicrous amount of grapes, he makes wine and everyone in the village gets absolutely wasted. When a monster—rendered in truly ugly 3D CGI—attacks the village, another character consults what looks like a spellbook, only for it turn out to be a ‘strategy guide’ that suggests such gems as ‘running away’. Later, Yukito and friends track down a different forbidden book, only to find out that it’s about sex. Again, none of this stuff is going to blow anyone’s socks off, but it’s alright as far as killing a few minutes between plot developments. I should note, by the way, if anyone was hoping that this series was just an extended worldbuilding exercise about what a natively, purely atheistic society would be like, you are about to be disappointed. It’s when our not-heroes travel to the Imperial Capitol for some business that things really start to go off the rails.
Very basically, Yukito discovers that in this world—or at least this country, who knows about any others—citizens are randomly put to death. We don’t know why this happens, but most people have accepted it as a part of life. The other two people from Yukito’s village, including Aruraru, have not, and this marks them as ‘deviants’, which, we learn, is why they are sent to live in the village in the first place. It’s essentially an outcast camp. This really doesn’t seem like the kind of series that should be touching the “is euthanasia ethical?” question with a 10-foot pole, but they do basically go there, and it’s very odd. On the other hand, the real point here seems more to be to ask the audience, “what if the state could just end your life on a whim? Wouldn’t that be super scary?” I really do not want to be the one to have to tell this show’s writer that that is, in fact, essentially how the real world works, but someone will have to at some point.
This whole experience rattles Yukito, and he and Aruraru end up sharing an intimate scene over it a bit later in the episode, which manages to be many things in equal parts; a bit out of place, sad, a little funny, and, when Yukito gives Aruraru his magetama, oddly sweet. (I’m not going to touch on the notion of Aruraru somehow tying him up just before that scene. That’d be the out of place part.)
More importantly, ‘deviants’ like the ones from Yukito’s village don’t even get the dignity of being merely told that their lives are over. They’re just dragged back to the capitol to be executed by the throngs of faceless soldiers that serve the so-far unseen emperor. (Who lives in some kind of magic dome that looks very out of place compared to everything else in the show. That’s presumably on purpose.) If you’d guess that Aruraru is one of those taken from the village to be slaughtered, you’d be right. Yukito pursues in a carriage, only to arrive too late and end up on the business end of a sword himself.
Then, in desperation, he says something like a prayer, saying that the people who deserve divine protection are decent, honest people like Aruraru. It quickly turns into an actual prayer, to Mitama—you remember, the god that Yukito’s father’s cult worshipped?—and the sky promptly cracks with a massive thunderhead, transitioning into an honestly kind of awesome henshin sequence of a sort. For Mitama [Akari Kitou], that is, as she appears in the flesh in the form of a naked young girl (bad) and then promptly annhiliates everyone who hurt Yukito and his friends (good) and brings them back to life (better). The episode ends on that note, with Mitama introducing herself to Yukito and being a little offended that he doesn’t recognize her.
To put it mildly, there’s a lot going on there, not helped by some very weird editing choices (a lot of the footage honestly looks like it’s been sped up. I checked a few sources to make sure this wasn’t a problem on my end but it doesn’t seem to be). But like I said! Memorably bizarre is usually better than boring. If you’re going to watch an isekai this season, you could probably do worse than this one. I wouldn’t know, I haven’t seen any others yet.
Am I going to keep watching this? Honestly probably not. But I might, and that’s a lot more than most of this glut of a genre can claim. Hats off for weirdness!
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