The phrase “so bad it’s good” gets thrown around a lot nowadays. It’s gotten to the point where it can be hard to distinguish between ironic and unironic enjoyment at times. If you’re legitimately having a good time with a piece of media, even if it’s not in the way it was intended to be enjoyed, does that make it loop right back around to being good? Why are some stories enjoyable in their badness while others are just… bad? Art is subjective, after all; the rules of what make something “good” are completely nebulous and undefined, and something that doesn’t follow traditional storytelling conventions can end up being your favorite movie or TV show of all time. So what, really, does it mean for a story to fail so bad at conventional storytelling metrics that it succeeds in a completely different way? It takes a very precise alchemy, a melange of bad ideas, even worse execution, and a complete lack of self-awareness that you’re messing everything up. It requires the ambition to try so, so hard, and the lack of skill to fall so, so far.

Or, to be more precise, it requires something along the lines of Arifureta: From Commonplace to World’s Strongest.

What I want to emphasize right up front is that the only reason I ended up enjoying this show as much as I did is BECAUSE it’s such a trainwreck. On a conceptual level, Arifureta’s story is about as unpleasant and uninteresting to me as it could possibly be. It reads like a mercifully less incel-y take on Shield Hero’s revenge isekai, where the otaku self-insert summoned to a fantasy world is shat on by everyone and turns into an edgy thirteen-year-old boy’s interpretation of badass to fight back against a cartoonishly unfair world. Along the way, of course, he picks up a harem of paper-thin waifus that all exist solely to serve a particular fetish and nothing else, because what’s a good inferiority complex without a healthy serving of alpha douchebag posturing? There are some interesting ideas hovering at the margins; Hajime, the loser in question, is summoned to the fantasy world with his entire class, which could potentially lead to interesting conflicts and situations once he goes full edgelord, and there’s at least a token effort to humanize the majority of the cast so it feels far less mean-spirited than it could have been. But the writing is abysmal, the characters are all completely obnoxious (the voice acting for the harem bait is all uniformly awful and cringe-inducing, especially the blatant ripoff of Konosuba’s Darkness), and the storytelling is pure wish fulfillment garbage. Hajime somehow manages to bring guns into this fantasy world, for fuck’s sake, even fifteen-year-old me would be rolling his eyes if he saw this.

My point is, it’s when Arifureta is at its most competent that it’s at its most insufferable. Whenever the storytelling makes basic logical sense and scenes play out fairly straightforwardly, I can feel my eyes start to sink back into my skull and my teeth start grinding in aggravation. I cannot stand these shitty characters making painful attempts at “comedy”, how surface-level every potential conflict is, how self-righteous and pissy Hajime is about everything once he goes will Kaneki, how bland and lifeless the worldbuilding is. I know we’re all supposed to pretend that the light novels are so much better and this anime is shitting on everything that made them work, but I’m sorry, all the evidence points toward the conclusion that the source material is just straight-up garbage. Arifureta was never going to be good without a serious overhaul, and nobody was going to put that much effort into fixing the flaws of just another dime-a-dozen isekai slopped out to make a cheap profit off sad virgins who want to imagine themselves as the coolest motherfuckers alive who kill all the jerks and get all the chicks. And I say that as a sad virgin myself; we deserve better stories than dreck like this. If Arifureta was adapted somewhat competently, then it most likely would have been a complete waste of time for everyone involved.

But Arifureta wasn’t adapted competently. Arifureta’s adaptation was a complete and utter disaster. And I can’t help but love it for that.

There’s a lot of reasons why this show fell apart so spectacularly- apparently, there was a lot of behind the scenes drama involving the original author being unhappy with the way things were going and the entire team and studio being overhauled- but the end result is plain to see; Arifureta the anime is an outright catastrophe of adaptation. The first episode drops us right into the action, skipping the entire prologue section that might have given us any context and emotional stakes to hang off of, and then it doesn’t bother to give us that context at all. It jumps back and forth through time meaninglessly, completely confusing the audience as to when any of this is supposed to be taking place or why any of it matters. Hell, you wouldn’t even know we were in an isekai story at all unless you noticed a brief image in the OP or a momentary panning shot in the middle of a bizarrely edited sequence that makes it impossible to tell what’s going on at all. We are just given nothing to connect to, but the show keeps barreling forward as if it’s already hooked us in. And the editing is so incomprehensible that it’s often impossible to tell what’s happening in any given scene. It’s a complete, unmitigated storytelling trainwreck, and that’s all BEFORE you get to the embarrassing low-poly CG used to render all the big monsters in the fight scenes. Seriously, if you ever complained about how bad Overlord’s CG was, you owe Ainz and crew an apology, because Arifureta makes Overlord’s CG crowds look like Land of the fucking Lustrous.

And that’s why, despite how much demonstrably just does. Not. Work in this show, I couldn’t help but enjoy my time with it. It’s so awful at so many things that its abject failure loops right back around to being charming. If a competent version of this show would be like an angry thirteen-year-old throwing a temper tantrum demanding to be taken seriously, then the version we got is that same thirteen-year-old shitting his pants and collapsing in a puddle of big boy tears as he realizes how immature and stupid he really is. The first is pure aggravation, the second is pure schadenfreude. A “proper” version of Arifureta would be loathsome, but a version that completely undermines its attempts to be meaningful through sheer comic incompetence? Yes, please. This is the level of care and attention that shows like Arifureta deserve. This utter incompetence befits the immature, cowardly, entitled nature of stories that pander to our basest, meanest instincts. Hell, the fact that it fails so spectacularly at everything means that the impacts of its worst instincts- every girl wanting to jump MC-kun’s dick for no reason- are mitigated, while its better ideas- attempting to give all the characters a degree of sympathy to challenge Hajime’s brattiness- feel far less token. There are moments in the back half that actually kinda touched me! And there’s no way I could’ve connected with the show on this level if all the aggravating stuff at its core had been any more prominent.

So friends, don’t be sad that Arifureta didn’t turn out good. Arifureta was never good in the first place. Arifureta didn’t deserve to be good. Arifureta deserved to collapse under the weight of its own baked-in incompetence, because that’s all it was worth in the first place. If this show were made “well”, we would never give it a second thought once it was over. But thanks to it being such a spectacular, enjoyable disaster, I think we’re going to be looking back fondly upon it for quite some time to come.