My first exposure to The Eminence in Shadow was my friend on Discord singing praises for the anime. He told me it was a parody show that took all these tired isekai cliches and turned them on their head, much like Overlord. And he was right; The Eminence in Shadow is much like Overlord in that they both use the illusion of satire to deliver the same regurgitated stories and character archetypes as the genre they claim to parody, played completely straight with only the slightest modicum of irony to keep the veil from dropping. At first glance, you wouldn’t even be able to tell this is a parody. I struggled to sit through 4 episodes, and dropped it when I realized it was exactly as I’d feared; mediocre isekai nonsense putting on the pretense of being something greater to sell merchandise of the cast of nondescript archetypal anime girls. Only months later, after copious debates with my Discord friends and after several drinks was I able to finish the proceeding 16 episodes, all the while baffled by what I thought at the time was the sheer incompetence of the directing and adaptation of mediocre genre fare. But upon looking into the manga and LNs, I can confidently proclaim that Eminence in Shadow (the anime) is one of the most subversive, avant-garde comedy anime of all time. It’s so dedicated to making every single joke, every mildly humorous moment from the original works so profoundly atrocious and lacking in impact that it circles back around and reaches its intention: being the world’s greatest anti-comedy.

I’m going to get this out of the way quickly and say that, despite my earlier claim, the original manga and LNs (or whichever comes first) for this series aren’t masterpieces. The writing and dialogue are stiff and awkward, the story hinges on contrivance, half the cast is sorely lacking anything to distinguish one another, and there’s copious amounts of “ironic edge” that would make an r/nihilism user blush. But I’ll give it exemplary praise in that it’s actually genuinely funny at times, something so rare for the majority of media like this that I was caught off guard at first. Cid Kagenou is truly hilarious whenever he goes into one of his absurd Machiavellian rants in his head as he details his complex blueprints for putting on the front a boring, cringey man. He seems like the natural conclusion of Lelouch from Code Geass (or Light from Death Note if you’d prefer I cited an actually good character), taken to an illogical extreme. He’s the kinda guy who would nail himself to a cross to get stronger (he actually does this in one of the novels!). He truck’d himself for the specific purpose of being isekai’d. Scenes like where he asks a girl out in the most humiliating way possible are just so expertly compounded by him narrating every single action and decision in his head, such as calculating the perfect trajectory to bow down like a pathetic spastic. Here, every chuuni delusion is spelled out, making him look simultaneously awe-inspiring yet totally corny. He takes everything in stride; playing a pussywhipped slave is all part of his self-proclaimed master plan to rule the world in secrecy. Even when he’s surprised at how accurate his random guesses are, he just rolls with it. As much of a copout as it is, I think it’s a really great bit that keeps the story moving without getting too predictable. We even get to see inside the heads of other characters as they try to process the shitstorm of absurdity unfolding in front of them.

Now try to imagine an adaptation that completely cuts out the vast majority of Cid and the rests’ monologues, shoots down the jokes in midair so they just fall flat, and throws the tone of the series into disarray, killing any and all nuance the source material had going for it. Even disregarding the lack of first-person mental POVs for the most part, the comedic timing and execution is awful. The anime can’t seem to decide how it wants to portray Cid, choosing to take him 100% seriously the vast majority of the time. This distortion of the manga’s comedic nature to justify going all-in on the embarrassing power fantasies seems almost purposeful, and I’m not cynical enough to consider it a case of full-on directorial incompetence, nor a case of misplaced hubris like MAPPA’s Chainsaw Man adaptation; despite this being his first true directing gig, Kazuya Nakanishi has a good 20 years of experience working mostly assistant director and animation director positions on a number of well-received titles. I’m not sure how likely it was that everyone involved with production completely misunderstood the nature of the series, so I’m guessing they decided to change it to appeal to more casual viewers. It’s like the inverse of the manga, where there was some self-awareness around how much of an admirable dweeb Cid actually was behind all the posturing; the exaggerated art hammered the point home and made it so the tone was never too self-serious. He’s supposed to be cool because his ridiculous larp always ends in success, not because his ridiculous larp looks cool in-universe. The anime just asks you to take everything at face value, or at least seems to because the way they handle comedy in the anime is frustrating.

Everything in the anime is taken dead serious, failing to preserve the ever-present irony of the source material. It’s a dreary, obtuse mess where every scene plays out about as lifelessly as a bad Shakespeare adaptation; try to count the number of times there’s an expository scene that’s just shot reverse shot of characters talking with uninterested faces as nothing else happens for 3 to 4 minutes. Sometimes it happens multiple times per episode. Even worse, every time they try and go ahead with landing a punchline it derails the tone of the scene. Even a modicum of comedy feels out of place in an adaptation this dull. It’s like Fullmetal Alchemist 03 took SSRIs. But for all that show’s failings, it had competent directors, writers and production staff to turn it into something worthwhile, all of which Eminence in Shadow does not. Whoever was planning the anime out has no idea what makes the original material funny or engaging. Instead of embracing the inherent silliness, the anime only retains the worst of Eminence’s “humor”; repetitive gags that wouldn’t impress a middle schooler. You can almost spot the gaps in dialogue where they could’ve added canned laugh tracks after every joke. A character’s name being “Perverted Asshat” and it being thrown around ad nauseum is one of the least terrible examples might give you insight into how dire the material you’re dealing with can get.

And that’s not even getting into the problems I have with the source material itself. Firstly, Cid’s character makes no sense when you look into his motivations; his goal is to become both a background character AND the man behind everything, yet every action he takes as a civilian is contradictory. He’s always interacting with the most important people around him, getting into fights he easily wins with his superior magical powers, and finding himself involved in every conspiracy. Most of the time he isn’t even pretending to be Shadow while doing all this. Am I missing something? It feels like the writer just wanted an excuse for Cid to dick around in at magic highschool and somehow couldn’t find enough of a reason to have him do his supervillain shtick while he was actually in-character. What’s the point in immediately render your main character’s goal meaningless? It’s not like they wanted to dedicate any time to developing other characters, because as many as there are, they’re shallow as a puddle.

As much as Eminence can satirize edgy self-insert MCs, the series hardly has any faith in its characters and reduces them to boring, derivative models taken from every other low-effort power fantasy that came before it. Every female character has the same face. I can’t even remember half their names outside of Delta, who looks like Blake from RWBY, which is somehow a more watchable show than this. At least I can name most of RWBY’s cast and describe their personalities. Seriously every new female character in Eminence feels like they were produced in a factory that makes anime girls who are so hard-tailored to be appealing to lonely, bitter people like me it actually feels patronizing. The worst part is that they all look so similar that they blend together after the first 5 episodes. I started getting confused as to who was talking to who in some scenes because even their voices have very little differentiation. I don’t have any problem with conventional characters insofar as they possess interesting attributes; I couldn’t even begin to describe what makes any of these copy-paste bitches so special. That won’t stop people from spending thousands a month trying to summon them in all their fanservice uniforms on the shitty Eminence gacha game Crunchyroll was promoting (even though they don’t own the streaming rights to the anime???). The other side characters are equally dismal. If you skipped all the scenes of Cid’s classmates at the dumb Light Novel magic school talking about inane plot developments or fucking about you’d be skipping more filler than the average Shippuden arc. I know most of these season isekai shows spend an exorbitant amount of screentime on side characters jabbering on about dumb bullshit but it feels particularly egregious here, in a show where none of them serve any purpose aside from that. I’d be really impressed if you could find somebody who genuinely cares about these losers.

Eminence isn’t all contrivances and pretensions. As boring as the direction is in conversational scenes, it’s got enough flashy fight sakuga to distance itself from the dozens of far worse isekai that came out around the sam. Episodes 5 and 20 are the standout, where the direction and animation quality actually take a massive step up for a few minutes during said episodes’ central fights (I AM ATOMIC is way too cool a moment for this series). Kenichiro Suehiro (the RE:Zero guy)’s soundtrack is the hypest shit you’ll ever hear. As much as I want to scrutinize every aspect of this series out of spite, there’s some genuine passion put into it. I can be a sore loser and say “I wish Hoshi no Samidare got that same treatment!” but that wouldn’t solve anything. As a whole The Eminence in Shadow is just so sincerely unimpressive that it makes me wonder what anyone sees in it; of course I already know what they see in it, cool fights, self-insert protagonists and women who show affection, but it makes me wonder why nobody wants anything else. The isekai/”literally me!” genre dissolved into a homogenous mess of repetition somewhere around 2016 or 2017 and the anime community hardly seems to care. But the amount of fans acting like Eminence is really that much of a breath of fresh air just goes to show that deep down, people are growing weary of the formula and any surface-level deviation from the norm is cause for consideration. I can see it. I understand. It’s still bad, but I’d be lying if I said it’s less more inviting than “I Got Reincarnated as Chad and Girls Pay Attention to Me Now” or Attack on Titan: The Final Season Part 9 out of 20.