Beast Tamer

With every anime season there’s a minimum of five terrible new fantasy anime to come along with it. Genre fatigue has been slowly setting in for years, and nearly every one of these glorified internet fanfics have been derided as “power fantasies” or “self-insert series” by people who actually care about the quality of the media they consume. Extremely bland peerless main characters plowing their way through any obstacle and hundreds of indistinguishable girls in increasingly trite fantasy realms seems to be the basic establishing formula for these series, most of which were written on novel websites made for the sole purpose of getting sheltered Japanese teenagers a chance to become a regular Nisio Isin (if he had zero literary credibility). Name any seasonal anime that sounds even marginally like what I described and it’ll probably have spawned from one of these places. They don’t even have to be isekai anymore, that’s the really tragic part. The cancer has been metastasizing into other genres. It’s basically an endless content farm for fledgling hacks who think originality is unoriginal, the ones who keep using the same exhausting story beats over and over because they genuinely can’t conceive of anything better. Beast Tamer happens to be one of the worst to rise from these kinds of places in recent memory; a series that falls onto the production line already pre-assembled, ready for mass consumption and unlikely to induce any kind wonder, awe, or intellectual stimulation of any kind.

Seriously every episode gets progressively less and less separable from every other foray into the genre that by the time I reached episode 13 I couldn’t even remember the name of the show. Was I still watching Yūsha Pātī o Tsuihou Sareta Bīsuto Teimā, Saikyōshu no Nekomimi Shōjo to Deau or was I watching Shin no Nakama ja Nai to Yuusha no Party wo Oidasareta node, Henkyou de Slow Life suru Koto ni Shimashita? Or was Ningen Fushin no Boukensha-tachi ga Sekai wo Sukuu you desu? (Fucking Christ stop letting these people write their own titles. They’re longer than some chapters in their own novels.) Summarizing the plot of this show would take too much effort, when it deserves so little; basically this boring asshole named Rein gets booted from a party of annoying one-dimensional asshole adventurers who do nothing but bitch and moan about literally everything (everyone in-universe hates them too because this show lacks subtlety), since his incredibly useful and niche Beast Taming power isn’t strong enough to reach their specific standards (even though they recruited him in the first place, I’m not sure why it suddenly became a problem after what seemed to be years of companionship because the show doesn’t explain anything about any of the characters’ reasonings) and he goes from place to place using his talent to pick up chicks to add to his harem-party. They all happen to be unfathomably overpowered too, so they all team up to fight monster designs traced from a middle schooler’s How to Draw Manga book. Then they meet the boring asshole heroes again and predictably beat the fucking shit out of all of them in the least cathartic fight ever “animated”, I’m talking 5 FPS here, and after being defeated they offer Rein his position back like a bunch of NPCs and he predictably says no, because who would give up crushing monster girl pussy every day for a bunch of the writer’s high school bullies personified? They fight a demon at the end of something too. They have another Microsoft PowerPoint battle, Rein uses some dumb new power to save the day, they meet a new ghost girl, everyone still hates the asshole heroes, and nothing else happens to meaningfully change the status quo. If you think I’m oversimplifying it, you’d be wrong, because I’m actually making it sound even more complex than it actually is.

I can’t imagine why anyone would watch this kind of creatively bankrupt slop; I’m not even trying to sound pretentious here. I like Fairy Tail for God’s sake. I’m just dumbfounded. Getting through a single episode of this shit nearly put me to sleep, because within the first 2 minutes I had already predicted nothing engaging would happen for the rest of the episode. If an uncultured Philistine like me struggled to watch half an episode of this series without convincing that my life was critically lacking in some form of intimacy, I hate to imagine what would happen to the most prodigal media analyst if they tried engaging with this. They’d probably lose the will to live upon seeing how far anime has degraded as an artform. I might sound a little defeatist here but it’s hard not to when the medium you’ve loved for years has become almost unrecognizable, just a corporate-controlled springboard for mediocre writers to keep regurgitating the same content for years instead of trying to hone their talents. 90% of anime looks like this now, and even then not many other forms of media are faring well either. Art used to be about constantly challenging yourself to create something only you could make; but now it seems like anyone could make half the stuff you see on tv or in theaters. It’s not hard to imagine why so many people are even more depressed and unfulfilled than ever; all their routes of escapism are slowly becoming homogenized and boring, and art only exists to tick off boxes on a checklist to appeal to the stupidest kinds of people. I fucking hate Beast Tamer, I hate that it’s getting a second season, I hate “web novels”, I hate isekai, I hate what the anime industry has become. It’s just the same goddamn thing every month. If any aspiring writer picked up a pen one day and made something genuinely special, something that doesn’t fit into any preconceived molds and fills others with inspiration, one that an AI couldn’t replicate with minimal effort, it’ll render corporate-approved swill like Beast Tamer completely worthless. Please everyone, go out and write a story no one else can. Don’t let this be the future.