Mushoku Tensei is a hard anime to review because it constantly hits you with sparks of interesting ideas and moments, only to go back two or three steps and have to build whatever trust it built in the previous scenes all over again, just to ruin it one more time. This means the show is a lot more ambitious and has a lot more going for it than most isekai anime out there, but also ends up having a lot more chances to fuck up. And oh, does it fuck up.

Its beginning is nothing to write home about. Yet another NEET gets killed by a truck while trying to save someone from being run over. However, Mushoku Tensei sets itself apart by having a highly traumatized and morally gray character that received a second chance in life he doesn’t deserve, in a world where his mistakes in both the previous and his current life will be important. Now here’s the issue: none of that matters.

Rudeus is a despicable person, a registered sex offender and pedophile. Lots of authors have achieved great success writing morally gray characters, but Mushoku Tensei seems at times hyper-aware and at times completely ignorant of its main character’s psyche, depending on what the plot needs. What’s the point of characters having flaws if they are going to constantly be rewarded for it? Rudeus repeatedly gropes girls and his “punishment” is getting comically punched in the face while most significant friction is going to be resolved off-screen.

Rudeus’ father in this new world, Paul, is also a registered sex offender and the show expects you take seriously the fact that he raped a woman who ended up being his maid, and that this woman later seduced him, they had sex and she ended up pregnant. What’s so funny about Paul being a rapist? Why does he have a comic “gah?!” reaction when being called out for it? Am I supposed to laugh at this? He undergoes no character development if we’re simply going to skip 9 months ahead when the babies are born and he has already been forgiven for it. These character’s can do whatever the hell they like and no significant harm will come their way. These aren’t character’s flaws, these are gags. We are supposed to find it funny when Rudeus takes advantage of his mother breastfeeding him to lick her breasts, we are supposed to find it funny when Rudeus tries to undress an underage girl while she sleeps. After Roxy leaves the company of the Greyrat family, she is only ever back to be seen being groped, again, by another person. Everything about the tone of these scenes is comical, the music is comical, their reactions amount to scenes that are portrayed as being comical. Saying “We’re scum” every now and then is not enough, you know?

You might be thinking that these characters are going to be taught maturity throughout the show, but you’re dead wrong. It takes 11 episodes for Rudeus’ mistakes to amount to anything significant, and even when it does, the person who pays the price is a tertiary character who’s name we only heard once and has nothing to do with our main characters. The worst part of it all is that this is not even related to his literal crimes against human rights — before anyone tries to say that this society is different from ours, remind yourselves that the character we are following is from our society, therefore the moral framework is closer to ours than to the inhabitants of this world. Saying that it’s how that society works normalizes the problem and brings attention to the fact that a lot of people out there would in fact walk around doing these horrible things if they got the chance. It might be a sad truth about our world and humanity, but if that is what Mushoku Tensei was trying to say — which it isn’t —, then it should take the matter seriously.

When Rudeus arrives in this world, he notes that his parents are young, because he is actually older than them. Rudeus is not a kid, he is a 40-something years-old man trapped in the body of a kid. If he thinks his parents are young, then what does he think of a literal child? Whatever he thinks, that doesn’t stop him from finding them attractive, outright harassing them — even if you make up your mind that this is not pedophilia simply because you don’t want it to be, you still have to remind of yourself that sexual assault is sexual assault, no matter the character’s ages — and saying he is going to intentionally raise Sylph to be his ideal wife. Of course, this is all still portrayed as being comical.

There are two scenes in particular that boggles my mind when it comes to this character’s morality. The first is when Roxy helps Rudeus overcome his trauma that led to his isolation and being able to step outside of his home, only to immediately follow that up with the revelation that he stole her underwear. One stop forward, three or four back.

The second scene is when Philip — Eris’ father — offers Rudeus a place in the family that is going to lead to war between the different branches of the houses, going as far as to say he is willing to put Eris tied-up in his bed so they can consummate the marriage. Rudeus does the bare minimum and refuses it, only to immediately regret the decision saying he could have had a harem of maids and uttering the words “I lost an opportunity.”. This is a half-step forward and thirty backwards. None of this has lasting effects. These aren’t issues being dealt with, they are merely existing. I know people are going to say that this is only the first season, but if you think 4 hours of content is not enough to develop a character, then I have no clue what to tell you. I’m a grown up, I can deal with sexuality in my stories, the issue is that Mushoku Tensei ranges from being weird about it to straight-out problematic. I have read stories that are much darker than this, that have even more questionable characters, but those stories — when they are good — properly deal with the repercussions of events instead of just brushing them aside.

Reaching the bare minimum of human morality is not something to be praised, especially when he is immediately going to prove that he hasn’t reached it yet, but only tricked you for a moment. If this enrages you, then get ready, because it will happen every single episode. If Rudeus not assaulting someone is such a rare occurrence that it has to be praised, then something is awfully wrong. You don’t have to pretend like every single frame in a story is perfect to like it. There is no need to mental-gymnastics your way into overlooking every weird and problematic aspect of the show just to enjoy other parts of it.

This isn’t the only glaring flaw around Rudeus’ character either. Something else that happens in this series is making every character dysfunctional so that Rudeus can seem smart in comparison. Take for example the scene in which Paul is scolding his son for hurting another kid, it takes on an incredibly convoluted path so that Rudeus can show how “mature” he is and say his father is wrong, when none of that would have happened if he simply said he saved another kid from being bullied and hurt. The worst case of this comes with Ruijerd, who has been walking around for 400 years, being hated, feared and fled from because of his green hair, yet not for once has the fool thought about dying his hair. No, it has to be our “genius” protagonist to point out that if people recognize you for your appearance, then maybe you can use a disguise.

When Eris becomes a part of the cast, out of all the different interactions that could have been used to show how she was affected by being raised in a household where her actions never have negative repercussions, this show decides to spend one entire episode talking about how she can’t do math, can’t shop by herself and can’t read. We are honestly expected to believe that she spent all of her years fighting everyone endlessly and never learning a single thing, and this gets followed by yet another arc of teaching Eris how to be a human being.

She is a kid, I get it, I just think that everything relating to these arcs is asinine. Rudeus walks up to Philip and says “What if we expose your child to a traumatic event that can potentially scar her for life so she learns her lesson?”, and the madman accepts it. They are going to pretend that they are being kidnapped, but as it turns out, that one unnamed butler that appeared on that one scene is in the play and actually wants to kidnaps them — this is among the most convoluted plots I have seen in my life and one that screams “temporary conflict created to be resolved” more than anything —, turning what was going to be an acted traumatizing event into a real one, in which Rudeus still makes things harder for Eris so she begins trusting him instead of taking the matter seriously as soon as he realizes it is not acted. This leads to an interesting scene where Rudeus and Eris are exposed to true violence and Rudeus has to confront his own mortality, but by the time the next episode rolls around it has been resolved and we can ignore that for the next couple of episodes until it becomes relevant again.

Then there’s the arc where Eris has to be taught how to dance so she doesn’t get humiliated in her birthday, which I’m not going to say is unrealistic, but I don’t appreciate the fact that Rudeus, who also doesn’t know how to dance, has to teach her how to. Our literal sex offender male main characters are going to have their flaws dealt with off-screen and comically, but when it comes to a female character, she has to be constantly taught how to do things, even by people who in theory don’t know them. We can’t have a female character learning something by herself or with another female character, that’s insane.

You might be thinking that my score is very generous considering how negative all of this sounds. The thing is, this show has lots of interesting moments, it just doesn’t manage to follow up with most of them in a way that I find appropriate or satisfying. For instance I can’t complain much regarding the production values, it is constant top-notch. It might never reach the same level of expressiveness that some shows do, but it is still well beyond what is average for seasonal anime. The action scenes are all beautiful, impressive and easier to follow than I expected they would be, but the issue is that there are no stakes. We might not know exactly how overpowered Rudeus is, but come on, the guy has literal God giving him advice later on, so all of it ends up being spectacle for the sake of spectacle.

I also find the worldbuilding to be quite overrated. The production does everything it can to keep it refreshing and I particularly like how instead of having an opening it uses the opening time and music to show montages and scenarios, though some of them still end up a bit generic. Of course, this is still much more than most isekai anime do and I will give credit where credit is due. Still I can’t shake off things like the demon society working literally like our human society, except with anthropomorphic demons. There is very little regarding actual culture building aside from what you should obviously expect, things such as the nobles having an etiquette, people from different places eating different things, yadda yadda. It’s something, but none of it is impressive.

I planned on making this review longer, but I see no value in analyzing specific episodes or something like that just to reiterate what I have already said. In conclusion, Mushoku Tensei is half as interesting as it is repetitive and problematic, and it is a lot of all of that. It has a soul, one that I can definitely appreciate, but one that is also buried beneath a dozen other things I either don’t appreciate or simply condemn.

Since I can already see the comments being made, I’ll address the matter of why I reviewed this in the first place. Some people will say I want clout, and to that I say I won’t get any clout for this, I will get hate. That is bound to happen whenever you criticize something so popular, particularly when it is something that already sparks a lot of discussion. Believe in what you want to believe, but know that I reviewed this for my own satisfaction, because I am as entitled to my opinion as you are to yours, and because positive criticism is not the only one that exists. It has nothing to do with me wanting to change your opinion, expecting the Japanese industry to take it into account or anything of the like, it’s simply because I want to and because I can.