Isekai is total pop. In pop music we get universal themes of love and relationships, simple yet catchy lyrics and chords perfectly engineered to get neurotransmitters firing. Isekai on the other hand has appropriated all the heroin like elements of shounen story telling and purified all the training montages out of it. It’s aim is to be distilled “E P I C” from it’s very first moments. But not all pop is equal, as is the case of isekai, despite how easily both can be mindlessly binged.
Slime bored, entertained and annoyed me during its run. It’s at it’s best when it’s trying to give you the next hit, and it’s worst when you find out the person drawing your needle taken up more air and dirt than the sweet nectar. It’s self-evident that most light novel authors do not tend to be that clever, and given I never read the source material of any isekai I can’t confirm whether this is similarly the case for Slime or if the adaptation is just inept. When your characters and dialogue are bad, don’t draw them out for the love of god. Don’t repeat obvious information ad-nauseam (“So wait, have we confirmed that the Orcs are being led by an Orc Lord?”). I suppose the problem now is that isekai as a genre is so ubiquitous that one of the primary ways in which they are distinguish themselves is with good dialogue and characters. Unfortunately this makes many try without the requisite components… You know it’s bad when your characters leveling up makes them look worse. A female lizard goes from fucking gecko to the sort of waifu someone with awful taste would have (aka you).
While I can’t say the Overlord tickles me either, it was at least more consistently compelling than Slime. It is entertaining watch a bunch of side characters marinading in what they consider to be a life or death situation, when we all know at home how “le OP” and magnanimous the MC is, so stakes are void anyway. When the lizards are suppressed in Overlord, the set up is ridiculously extravagant and totally performative. We know this and so does the MC. It’s both entertaining to watch and a teaser for what else is to come because “you ain’t seen nothing yet”. Slime’s set pieces feel deflated and flat in comparison. Thankfully they also have a lizard race to be interacted with so the comparison is even more obvious, but think about how much set up was given to the backstory of the lizards in Overlord relative to Slime. There was at least SOME attempt to a contextualise an identity for this race - the characters that make up it, it's culture and hierarchy and it's location within the world itself. In Slime the lizards have some vaguely obnoxious comedic relief, a ToysRUs trident, a big rock with holes in it and some swamp…? Wow.
I’m not 12 anymore and I’m so oversaturated with these genre conceits that Slime doesn’t really cut the mustard. For every cute little classroom scene we get a perfunctory CG mess being laser beamed out of the sky. For every Orc Lord we get 20 lines of dialogue reiterating that “We might indeed be against an Orc Lord” and “The backer might be a demon lord”. For every entry into Ingrassia we get a cornucopia of the most trite hot spring scenes you ever did see. That’s on buy one get 10 free baby. Don’t do heroin kids.
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