Our heroine Natsuko gets isekai’d into her favorite childhood anime, but that’s not all. She’s also a director who is really up against the clock. Even though she’s already had her breakout work — some mahou shoujo series that looks as silly as can be — her house of cards can all come tumbling down if she goofs up her next big project, a romance anime film about first love. But unfortunately, Natsuko’s got a creative block. For whatever reason, she can’t put pen (or pencil) to paper. Why? Is it because she’s never experienced love so she can’t craft the storyboards necessary to get the film started? Maybe, but I don’t know if firsthand experience is all that necessary. I mean, is the romance in Twilight remotely realistic… or even healthy? But it has spawned a hit series of books and movies nonetheless. It’s no more realistic than, say, a romance between a young girl and a goddamn spirit of the Kohaku River. In saying this, I’m not trying to debase Spirited Away or lift Twilight up to one of the best anime films of all time. I’m just saying that realism doesn’t really matter. Go pop in a Makoto Shinkai movie or whatever. Or park yourself in a manga cafe and check out a few fresh series. Inspiration can come from anywhere and it doesn’t need to be real.
I notice, of course, that Natsuko isn’t very good at delegating. She isn’t supposed to be a grunt; she’s the goddamn director. That isn’t to say that grunts aren’t to be respected. The reality is that we can’t all have big ideas. Someone has to do the actual work. Personally, I’m not very attracted to the idea of climbing the career ladder, because I know what’s in store for me as a senior engineer: meetings after meetings after meetings. Meetings with stakeholders, meetings with department heads, meetings at 5am with folks in Europe, meetings at 5pm with junior engineers who can’t grasp a simple RxJava concept. I don’t want to do it, man. I just want to write code. Every organization needs grunts, and I’m happy to be one. But Natsuko can’t delegate; she doesn’t trust others to do her work which then exacerbates the mounting pressure. And when the pressure is bearing down on you, sometimes you want to put it off. Let future me deal with that bullshit; I’m going to go play Dragon Quest 3 for forty hours and fuck holy shit I need to have this build ready by the end of the sprint. Well, now I’m off-topic, because Natsuko is still at her desk. She isn’t trying to procrastinate. She just can’t draw.
So getting isekai into a world on the brink of an apocalypse is a boon, because our heroine is no longer under any pressure to deliver. She can sit back, relax, and gorge on anime food all day. Sure, Natsuko might die because, y’know, there are giant, invading insect-like monsters called the void, but she’s also got a cheat: she already knows how the story unfolds. This is her favorite childhood anime, and she knows it frontwards and backwards. And oh yeah, Natsuko can conjure up all sorts of whimsical powers by simply drawing them, i.e. getting rid of her creative block. In a sense, it’s like a game, and often times, the best way to deal with life is to sit back and make a game of it. And there are a lot of early lessons even if they’re not explicit. Natsuko has no real fighting ability herself; only her creations do. And it takes time for her to draw. Every time there’s a situation, we have to go through the same song and dance. She has to transform like in one of her favorite mahou shoujo anime series, and then the drawing begins. Someone (usually QJ) tells her to hurry it up, but you can’t rush genius! In the meantime, someone has to tank the mobs. Someone has to play support. Someone has to… do whatever it is they gotta do. The point is that she’s already delegating. And who needs realism when you can unmask the insidious enemy with a silly dance? Or when you can stop cultists by getting one of them, a super mega obaasan by our human standards, to fangirl over a rose-wielding bishounen? Okay, fine, this world full of hopeful children can live for another day.
Who’s going to feed my cat?
My biggest beef with the isekai genre is that I can’t relate. Even if you promise me the largest harem full of short-haired tomboys with abs, all the riches in the world, and powers to make everyone bend their knee, the first thing that would come to my mind is, “Fuck, what’s going to happen to my cat?” But isn’t that funny? Isn’t it strange how in all these isekai series, no one ever worries about their pets? Forget loved ones. They’ll be sad of course (I hope) — maybe even devastated — by your sudden, inexplicable disappearance, but they’ll likely live. They’ll pull through and continue on with their lives. What about the pets though? You mean to tell me isekai MCs don’t have pets? But this isn’t the only reason why the concept of isekai doesn’t appeal to me; it’s just the very first thing that comes to mind. What about my bills? What about the food that will spoil in my fridge? I’m totally fired when I can return to my own world. And if I’m going to a fantasy world, I don’t exactly want to shit in an outhouse or whatever. I’m also terminally online. Yes, yes, a fantasy world is new and exciting… to a certain point. Then what will I do with the rest of time? It’s not only about your loved ones or your all-too-dependent-on-you cats and dogs. It’s the logistics of it all, man. So when our heroine Natsuko finally has time to assess her situation, I was initially pleased to see that she wanted to go home. But it doesn’t really last all that long, does it? At some point, when there’s nothing you can do about a problem, you gotta roll with the punches. But I wish these characters would ruminate on their situation for a little longer. What about her deadlines? Doesn’t she have a movie to finish? Maybe time stops in the real world, but she doesn’t know that. We don’t know that either!
Never meet your heroes
Idolizing celebrities was never something I understood, because you don’t really know them. It’s not that they are hiding skeletons in their closets; it’s that they have money to project a certain image so what’s actually real (i.e. natural) and what’s manufactured? Celebrities are selling an idea of themselves, but they’re not the only ones. A common refrain about social media is that we only see what people want us to see. I can’t even idolize my favorite influencer; one minute they’re feeding the homeless, another minute they’re pushing moldy lunch meats on our kids (just kidding, that guy is not my favorite anything). But what about fictional characters? Surely, the heroes of our fantasies can’t hide anything from us, can they? So of course, I find it funny when Luke and his gang start things off by not being very heroic: right from the get-go, they can’t be assed to give poor Natsuko a ride back to the city. Why bother saving her just to let the poor girl wander through the desert alone? At the time, they thought she was a gremlin, but even then, are gremlins not deserving of pity? Apparently not, because everyone can hear Natsuko’s growling stomach in the celebratory dinner afterwards but she doesn’t get a single morsel to chew on. Even the great hero from our heroine’s favorite childhood anime isn’t someone that she truly knows. Even Luke’s characters have layers that are yet to be revealed.
I actually don’t mind plot holes all that much
But if this isekai world is faithful to that childhood anime of “yore,” where are these layers even coming from? Natsuko often remarks that a lot of the surprising details about these characters and the world around them cannot be found in the “reference sheets.” She makes it sound like the all-knowing bible of her favorite anime. Well, maybe our hardcore fan isn’t as knowledgeable as she thinks she is. Maybe there are interviews with details that Natsuko has never seen or read before. The most damning thing about Luke so far is that strange outburst of misogyny in the second episode. He initially rejects the idea of recruiting Natsuko into the Nine Soldiers simply due to her gender. His excuses are nothing women haven’t heard before, so I won’t bother listing them. The point is, maybe this is who he was always intended to be, but his creator can’t exactly go on interviews or write in the reference sheets that, yeah, this guy is a douchebag who has kinda sketchy ideas about women. You could argue that Luke’s a dumbass who thinks misogyny is the best way to reject Natsuko, but even if you’re trolling, why do those bigoted thoughts come out so naturally? But I digress; the original question is about the hidden depths to these characters and from where they arise.
Maybe — even more plausibly — these new details are due to that dastardly thing called subtext. Natsuko recounts that in the original movie, when Luke defeats the “Ultimate Void,” it suddenly turns back into Memmeln. It seems like a “plot hole,” our heroine says, because it’s never explicitly spelt out to the audience that the elf and her ilk are plotting the demise of civilization. But is that really true? Naturally, the elves of this world are like other fantasy elves in one crucial respect: they tend to live for a really long time. So it’s easy to imagine that they’re tired of this never-ending conflict against a faceless horde. It’s not only about fighting for centuries and centuries on end, but living with the anxiety of an impending apocalypse sounds like torture. Tomorrow might be their last days alive. Or even worse, the last days of their comrades, while you, the long-living elf, have to soldier on in perpetuity. I can’t even imagine going through my day-to-day routine with that hanging over my head much less for hundreds of years.
But the one thing that struck me as most odd about our traitorous elf was actually back in the second episode. It is (again) that incident involving Luke’s outburst of misogyny. Memmeln is cold to him in the aftermath, so it’s easy to assume that she was offended by his words. But as you observe Memmeln throughout the four episodes that we have thus far, it isn’t difficult to notice that she barely reacts to anything at all. With her long elvish life, it’s easy to reason that she’s probably seen it all. As such, Luke’s attitude is nothing new; if she hasn’t seen or heard him say those words before, it’s likely she’s probably seen or heard someone else say worse. But Memmeln seems detached in every situation. At the end of the second episode, after they’ve managed to overcome flying bugs and survive to live another day, everyone is hugging and cheering. Why wouldn’t they? They fought hard and got a new lease on life. But Memmeln is expression-less, her true feelings concealed behind a mask. Obviously, I don’t expect her to be happy since she’s part of a death cult, but she’s not angry, frustrated, or annoyed. Rather, Memmeln seems depressed. I’m not saying something like, “Oh wow, depressed elf girl! Ergo, she’s the evil mastermind! No plot holes here!” But we can imagine. We can infer. We can draw our own conclusions and form our own interpretations.
Natsuko is right in that the original story contains a plot hole. At the same time, however, we are conditioned to see or hear the words “plot hole” and immediately think “there’s a flaw in the story.” But a story can have gaps in it for deliberate reasons. The most boring answer is that the writer made a mistake. Whoopsie. It’s unlikely that you could make one of the Nine Heroes a villain and mistakenly forget to justify it to (at least) yourself, but it’s possible. Another boring answer is that it was simply left on the cutting room floor. Maybe they felt that the movie was bloated, so they had to cut a few things out like Memmeln’s subplot.
For me, however, plot holes can be intriguing by merely existing. Do I find this particular revelation about Memmeln to be intriguing? No, but I’m also not a fan of the original fictional movie like Natsuko. But I am a huge fan of Soulsborne games, and if you have any passing familiarity with the storytelling in those games, then you know that they are full of plot holes. Jam-packed with plot holes. And it’s all deliberate, because Miyazaki, the creator and inspiration for most of those games, are trying to recapture a feeling from his youth. As a child, he tried to read English novels with his less than perfect English comprehension, and in doing so, he often came across plot holes — literal gaps in the story due to his own limited understanding. Rather than being deterred, Miyazaki brought this very idea to the games that would make a name out of him. For people who want to know all the answers, this oblique sort of plot construction can be maddening. C’mon, tell us who the Gloam-Eyed Queen is! But as long as plot holes aren’t signifiers of bad logic, then what they can do is make you re-examine what you think you know and don’t know about your favorite stories or characters. Memmeln isn’t just a supporting character living in Luke’s shadow. She’s her own person with her own goals and motivations. What are they? And have hardcore fans like Natsuko given Memmeln’s character the due consideration that the elf deserves?
The humanity of it all
I quite like the animation when Natsuko summons her creations. I think Natsuko’s English VA is doing a remarkable job, which adds to my enjoyment of the overall series. I like the fact that Unio looks so out of place. I’m not a fan of his Teddie of Persona 4 coded energy, but that’s no bearing on the actual show itself. And honestly, the episodes do fly by when I sit down and watch them. Basically, I’m not bored. The pacing is solid enough that my attention span — not quite destroyed by decades of living on the internet but it is nevertheless full of hideous scars and pockmarks — is still able to cope. And yet, I feel like there’s something missing in Zenshu — something that would help me really embrace the story.
What I’ve been enjoying a lot over the past year have been Youtube channels about creepy stuff. Y’know, strange incidents (for Christ’s sake, stop telling me about the Russians drilling a hole to hell), bizarre mysteries and disappearances, disturbing stories about killers and whatnot, so on and so forth. It tickles the macabre, morbid part of my brain. But a lot of these stories, especially the ones about serial killers, can often lose sight of what really matters, and that’s the people affected by the tragedies. I’m not quite concerned about the killer and his stereotypical bad childhood. Instead, tell me more about the husband with a heart defect who always thought he would die first only to come home and discover his wife’s body. Or the detectives who must drive themselves to obsession, combing over every frayed piece of string or fragment of dirt left on the crime scene lest they be critical clues that unlock the mystery. Or the amateur internet sleuths who stay up until 2am on Discord, dreaming — hoping! — that they can somehow glean a hidden truth that a professional cannot. This is why a death’s a tragedy. Forget the killers, man. I don’t really care that a killer’s messed up brain chemistry meant he can’t feel guilt so he spent his youth torturing rodents or whatever. Rather, I want to know how people, despite all the madness, still manage to pick up the pieces and carry on in the aftermath of wanton, senseless destruction.
And maybe this is unfair of me, but so far — this whole setup with Natsuko’s favorite childhood anime, a talking unicorn, a rich girl turned masked wrestler, etc — it all feels like a game to me. And yeah, I suppose it’s not supposed to be all that serious. But if it ain’t all that serious, I’m not all that emotionally invested either. My mind drifts to Solo Leveling, where a guy goes from loser to chad who now drops liners in battle like, “Looks like it’s over… I said it’s over!” Wow, so cool. What an alpha, sigma, or whatever Greek alphabet I’m supposed to be nowadays. My point is that it was kinda interesting when this guy could barely make ends meet, but his mom is in the hospital slowly withering away and he’s got a little sister and her education to worry about. Now that those concerns are less… concerning, what are we going to do all day? Pose with your back to the audience and make quippy lines all day? Moreover, he survives, and the cute girls and the one token sappy dork survives, but everyone else dies. Everyone else who had a family (or a cat!) is fodder, so we can prove that the mobs are strong and thus our hero is even stronger by defeating them. And this brings me back to the serial killer thing above. There are people here. Tell me their story. How are they coping in this harsh, cruel world where a random gate can turn red (whatever that means)?
Sure, Zenshu isn’t really that kind of anime. Even when the death cult is singing for the end of days, it’s quite comical and humorous. Ultimately, Zenshu’s pretty light-hearted despite its setting, and it doesn’t need to be anything else. It absolutely doesn’t need to cater to me. Hell, we don’t even know if what Natsuko’s seeing is even real. It may very well be the case that she’s stuck in her own tired Reddit theory-crafting nightmare, i.e. she’s in a coma (from the spoiled bento?) and it’s all a dream. And even if this is actually real, it’s still based on a dinky anime that was panned by both critics and audiences alike. Only our heroine is quirky enough to love it. But personally, having said all of that, I still wish Zenshu would slow down and tell me more about this last city that is on the brink of being completely wiped out. What it means to live here. What it means to hear the bell that signals an attack. What it means to pin all your hopes on heroes who can sometimes be petty, sometimes be misogynistic, sometimes having a bad day so you and your girlfriends in the choir might meet up and plan a little world-ending ritual. But then again, maybe I take things too seriously. For what it is, Zenshu is fine. I wish I loved it.
