Mushoku Tensei is a story about regrets, misplaced time, and how much easier it would have been if you could go back with the knowledge of the suffering that your original path through life sent you down. But enough about my journalism degree, let's talk anime.
I will not lie to you, dear viewer.
I have already lied to you.
Mushoku Tensei season 2 IS heartbreaking, but perhaps not in the way I implied. This is my second review on Mushoku Tensei, and a tl;dr for that one, there’s so much the show does right that it almost overshadows the singular thing it does wrong, that being Rudeus’ redemption as a puffaphilic diddler and self-obsessed loser. Though he makes strides in improving himself in his attainment of what he wants out of life, the numerous opportunities he has to improve himself on any moral, value, or not-rapey level just don’t stick, and it makes the rewards he reaps feel unearned, like he’s any other anime isekai badass protagonist.
I said at the end of that review that I had no hope going into season two. That was also a lie, sorry. Won’t happen again.
My hope for season 2 came from this shot right here, of Rudeus walking past an apparition of his former self tied to a fence. Not only was this a decent callback to one of the only times Rudeus’ experience changed him in any lasting way, but it was also reassuring that Rudeus was moving past his wallowing and self-pity to go and deserve half the good he had in his life. It’s pretty on-the-nose but I appreciated the show not vocally calling attention to it, something you basically never see in modern anime where show-don’t-tell is used about as often as a background artist is allowed to take bathroom breaks, only in moments of exceeding egotism.
I want to clarify something I maybe should have done better in my first review. I think Rudeus being a shitty person is not the problem, it’s that the show doesn’t maintain its self awareness of it. I don’t hate that he’s rewarded despite his transgressions, you can make something out of that, but you need to treat it like it IS unearned, which the series doesn’t do. This aspect is not as bad as it is in season 1, and you can generously attribute it to the whole cousin-coitus incident, but I don't. I think it has more to do with the fact that there’s just less adolescents with which Rudeus can diddy, not that he doesn’t try. Eris doesn’t feel like a valid force to this end because the reason she leaves Rudeus is that she thinks he’s simply too awesome. Even if Rudeus doesn’t know that’s why, it’s once again the rest of the world ruling in Rudeus’ favor despite the fact that they shouldn't.
I should probably clarify what I mean by the penis arc, the main point of praise for season 2 part 1… I think. I’m not as jacked in on what the adolescents or their respective predators are up to these days.
The penis arc is the large overarching conflict for season 2 where, after Eris leaves him, Rudeus finds himself afflicted with erectile dysfunction, no really, that’s what it is. It’s crass, maybe, but it’s a really unique way of putting one of Rudeus’ flaws to the forefront of the series, that being his shallow views that everyone, in this case women, exist only to serve his purposes, in this case sex. His porn addled mind has been thrust into the consequences of its shallow ways, his inability to connect with people leaving him truly alone for the first time in the series to my memory, it’s excellent! By the way, did I just miss this or is it just never addressed that Sara is his cousin? I only found out by accident when I looked at a wiki. Why is the “cousin copulation and its consequences have been a disaster for the my mental wellbeing” thorough line in this story so strong? Incest once, shame on you, incest twice… Um… Castration.
Syphie from season 1 sits at the focal point of the penis arc and the series shows a remarkable amount of self awareness with her in that regard. For reasons I don’t find interesting enough to repeat, Sylphie is in attendance to the doings of season 2 in disguise as Fitz, the male bodyguard to a foreign princess in attendance at the academy. By the way, most of the season takes place at Hogwarts for reasons I don’t find interesting enough to repeat. The two are drawn together over their time in academy and become good old fashioned respectable friends, and there’s not much of a leg to stand on for the opposition camp because Rudeus believes Sylphie is a man the entire time, even notes some attraction to her despite it. It creates this internal conflict of Rudeus’ feelings toward Fitz, in a way that he’s never felt for anyone else, in a context where it can’t be anything sexual. You can’t even justify calling it an instance of Rudeus playing the long con into her pants. They haterproofed it, I can’t BELIEVE they would do this to me!
The only arguments I can kind of throw against the penis arc is that, Rudeus is pushing 50 at this point and Sylphie doesn’t even know it, and the arc eventually ends with a sexy time. With the former, seeing as I made a whole review (and video) bitching about it in the past, I will do my best to meet the show on it’s own terms and to not bring up that bit, if not because it’s reductive, then because it’s fucking obvious. For the fact that the arc ends in a sexual congregation though, one could argue that it directly goes against this idea that Rudeus’ loneliness is atleast partially substantiated by his inability to view members of the opposite sex as anything other than the opposite... SEX, but I honestly don’t follow that one. The series does a good job to establish that Rudeus loves Sylphie and that his virility is a product of that love, not the other way around. He loves the chicken, why not have the egg as well, as I believe the classic saying is said.
So YEAH, I sort of like the penis arc. It does exactly what I want with Rudeus’ character, challenging his shitty ways and providing him a more fulfilling life after such ways are confronted thoroughly. I don’t find it as interesting as last season, but overall I see it as more complete, and the fact that he actually follows through on it throughout the rest of the season is nice. That’s a lie, but we’ll get to it. For now, good cock, I mean cock, I mean good job.
My problem though arises… with everything else! And Rudeus! And Sylphie!
Rudeus, despite no longer having feeling in his loins, still manages to find the time to sexually assault random women throughout the season. He still treats everyone like they’re barely even real, and I don’t know how to work this into the script but, he buys a slave. He buys a slave. He bought a slave, to make anime figures, and then just like, sent her to Zanoba boarding school and we rarely ever see her again.
It’s such a weird scene too. It starts with Rudeus being like “Hey Fitz, I’m off to buy a slave!” and Sylphie says, quote “I hope you get a good one!” So then they go to the slave trader, casually admire the sex-slaves a little, and he’s not even like, a NICE slave trader, a slave trader you wouldn’t mind babysitting your kids, he’s a shitty whip-wielding old man, there’s not even an in-universe justification for this! And when Rudeus’ deciding on his human transaction, he notices in the 3 year old girl a “hopeless look of someone who longs for death,” and being such a nice guy, Rudeus leans in and says, “Heh, don’t worry, I used to be a chud too. pause Do you want me to kill you? I can kill you. If you want-”
Without even considering the fact that we spent like 3 episodes murdering slavers in season 1, this whole scene is so much more than tone deaf. The tone has bled its life out in an alley, it’s tone dead. And the worst part is I already made a shield hero slavery joke in the last review, so I don’t even get a cheap addition to my word count.
The rest of part 1 is also just fuckin’ boring, pointless and poorly paced. Characters of basically no importance occasionally just pop up to say what they’ve been up to just to go back to their dark corner until their next appearance. But honestly all that pales in comparison in my mind to the letdown that is Sylphies character. I said she worked well in the penis arc but she really doesn’t outside of it and I think she could have been the star of this season.
Sylphie’s entire character is defined by her attachment to a past that was taken from her. It’s the only reason she’s initially drawn to Rudeus in any deeper way than “I think I went to high school with that guy…” and the reason she joins him in researching the mass teleportation. I point at her comical overreaction in Nanahoshi’s room as the most obvious example of this. She’s also constantly held back by her fear of telling Rudeus who she is because she’s scared that he won’t share the same value for the time they spent together, or worse, that he won’t remember her at all. She’s petrified that she’s missed out on so much of Rudeus’ life that, perhaps he’s moved on from her. The truth is right in front of her, she need only ask for it, but she doesn’t know if she can handle it. Rudeus is Sylphie’s last fragment of her old world, and the thought that she isn’t a piece of his anymore paralyzes her to inaction.
Imagine the potential of Sylphie choosing to shake off her attachment to the past, to see her world as it is without the rose-tinted glasses. From there, seeing the holes in this disgusting, broken man, and deciding for herself whether Rudeus is worth it, not to the old Sylphie, but to the Sylphie who remains. Her decision, for once, unrestrained by her life circumstances and her unhealthy attachment to the past.
That’s all fanfiction though, because instead of any reflection on what is perhaps an unhealthy obsession with a world no longer available to her, and maybe the fact of that which took away her old life has given her a new one, it all gets thrown aside so she can explicitly describe to her highness exactly how she wants Rudeus to impregnate her. Are we all watching the same show? How does Mushoku Tensei dodge the otaku wish-fulfillment allegations? Sylphie’s character assassination is not the worst part of the show, but easily one of the biggest let downs.
That’s where the penis arc kind of fails, even if Rudeus is personally dealing with the fallout of his actions, the series outside of him still ensures everything is in his direct service. Rudeus is a character with slightly more self-awareness than the people writing him. I don’t think I’ve ever seen something like that, they’ve thoroughly acknowledged the problem yet have made no attempt to stop contributing to it… No wait, I can think of one.)
This pervades into part 2 of season 2, which I originally didn’t plan on talking about because I don’t find its problems as interesting as part 1, but then I got really mad so, here we are.
To the best of my memory, Rudeus is basically without his usual perverseness in part 2 (with one very poorly thought out exception where Rudeus almost gopes his mother-in-law). This is less of a good thing and more the removal of a bad thing that did not service anything. In fact, to my reckoning, if you ignore the fact that there’s actually a 30+ year age gap between these two, I can't think of anything Rudeus does that’s wrong by intention, which I really hate to complain about, seeing as how much I banged on about it in the past but, it really feels like what they pulled with Amber.
Minor spoilers for season 1 and 2 of Invincible.
Amber is a minor character in Invincible, who is kinda awful in season 1 because of one specific episode. Amber is dating John Vincible and while they’re touring a college campus, robots attack. John Vincible is doing the Clark Kent thing, runs off to put his costume on, beats up the robots, changes out of his costume, only for Amber to be furious that he ran off while the robots were attacking people, that he didn’t help. It’s already a little unreasonable for her to be mad because, quite frankly, you shoulda made like the tree as well, but later, John reveals to her that he is in fact Invincible, and she’s just like “Yeah dickhead, I know. And I still hate you.” What? If the conveyance was to be that she’s mad at John for lying to her, bringing that up immediately after he saves her and many others lifes is just a really weird way to go about it. Amber isn’t too much of a character before this point either, so this is just a really bad way for her to come off.
To my memory, Season 2 of Invincible basically just, entirely retcons that this Amber stuff ever happened. That’s why I compare the two. A complete retcon-removal of some shitty shit does solve the problem, but not in any satisfying way. Amber’s was a removal of a massive character inconsistency that seemed like something that should have never made it past the producer’s desk, but Rudeus IS these personal failures. They define him, they separate him from the pack. The Amber changes between season 1 and 2 were like a bugfix, Rudeus got his whole chest cavity harvested. Even besides that, Amber gets fleshed out on her incompatibility to be with someone like Mark, someone who can only be consistently available at the price of cataclysmic loss of life, a conflict in her selfless nature and selfish needs. What does Rudeus get? Did elvish pussy just fix him? Could elvish pussy fix meee-?
The problem with Rudeus was never that he was a shitty person, it was that his shittyness was never acknowledged by the show or wider world. He has smaller moments of reflection throughout part 2, but it doesn’t go much further than “can you please stop calling my wife a whore.” OH BUT, HE STILL HAS A SLAVE SO, THIS REFUSAL TO ACKNOWLEDGE RUDEUS AS SHITTY IS STILL THERE, JUST QUIETER. It’s like in Harry fuckin Potter where they’re like “Ah Hermoine you pish posh, why’re you bein such a wanker innit? Dobby likes being a slave, you’ve no right to say he doesn't!”
Sylphie and Rudeus get married this season and move into a house on the edge of town. How nice.
Their relationship is definitely not a focal point, or atleast not an interesting one, for the entirety of the second part. Lied again, we’ll get there. Notable about it though is that there’s a deception throughout it all, the whole “being a 40 year old from another world” thing that kinda gets called to the foreground by Nanahoshi for 15 seconds before going away again. Thank goodness, I didn’t want to confront an ugly truth about literally me sigmajak.
Instead, a sizable portion of part 2 is dedicated to side characters, which was desperately needed in part 1 but, you know, better late than never.
We get a whole episode dedicated to Nanahoshi, a side character who is kind of really important and also not at all. After a breakdown that leaves her near catatonic, Rudeus resolves to help her, not to get back to her old world, but to find fulfillment and support in this one. He sees himself in her, falling into a solitary lifestyle and unable to pry herself out of it. In some effect, Rudeus is being her Roxy, forcing her to see the good in the world she’s now forced to inhabit. It’s a nice way to show how Rudeus has improved both in his abilities and his more personal empathy.
In that way I like it, but, it also doesn’t feel like it works between these two. Nanahoshi had her friends, her family, her old life taken from her when she got sent to this new world that she’s desperately trying to escape. She’s been taken from a world where she belonged, but Rudeus’ conflict was always that he felt he couldn’t fit into his old world and only now is in the place that’s right for him. There’s an interesting bit to be had between these two and their opposing conflicts, one who now belongs and another who lost where she used to, but the episode mostly focuses on the fact they both suffered from being socially isolated, with Rudeus showing her that there’s always a place you belong and that you should value outside perspectives. Which is fine, I guess, but it’s not really an interesting interaction between the two, it’s more of a children's book where one of them gets hurt, the other helps, and then they’re like “friends we made along the way” or something. If it sounds like I’m being down on this episode, it’s one of my favorites in part 2, which should be even scarier.
Norn and Aisha and mostly Norn get their own episodes too. They’re polar opposites in their relationship with Rudeus, their extremely limited interaction with him as children having deeply-set their preconceptions. Norn’s only memory of him is defending her father against a perceived, maybe not just perceived, attack by Rudeus in the first season, and it instilled this profound aversion to him. Aisha, doesn’t matter. Don't look at me like that, you know it's true.
Norn’s hatred of Rudeus causes her to distance herself from him, and by extension from Sylphie and Aisha, two people who supported her as a child.
From entirely offscreen sources, Rudeus finds out that she’s been skipping class, locking herself in her dorm, and buying slaves. I’ve lied again, that last one was Rudeus. His first reaction is to start heavily projecting his own experience onto the situation, breaking into her class and accusing the students of bullying her till she left. It’s there that he finds out that, even away from home, she can’t escape being compared to others. Her whole life it was Aisha, (I guess she does matter a little) and now at school, she’s tied in everyone’s eyes to Rudeus, her overachieving world-class mage of a brother who is perfect and would never have sex with his 15 year old cousin.
The idea that he’s inflicted onto his sister the same pain that was inflicted upon him is legitimately distressing. When he goes to check on her, he sees a vision of his old self, too hurt by the world to stand living in it any longer. He thinks back to the people who came to help him, how poorly he treated them, how hard they tried for hours at a time. He recalled his thought on how no one except himself could understand what was going on. And granted, he doesn’t understand Norn. He thinks it’s a simple thing of feeling inferior to her brother, he doesn’t know she’s horrified that her being seen as lesser will eventually lead everyone around her to abandon her, the way her family almost broke up the first time she met Rudeus. So she abandons the world preemptively before she can be abandoned by it. She suffers precisely because Rudeus is the center of the universe, something I’d been bitching about for years, and finally it hurts Rudeus. And like I said, Rudeus doesn’t know why she’s so beaten up, but he knows where it eventually leads, so does everything he can to help her. Just that, just Rudeus proving he loves her unconditionally, the same way her dad does, is enough to shatter this broken, distorted worldview.
I can poke holes in it, sure. This fear of abandonment isn’t really foreshadowed very well by the whole Paul and Rudeus fighting thing, and the whole “I’ve been compared to Aisha my whole life” isn’t great either because one, Rudeus actively distances himself from that comparison when talking to them, and two, we haven’t seen these two in the same room since one episode ago, so it feels less foreshadowed and more incidental. It’s also Rudeus suffering from something that wasn’t really his fault, when there’s been so much that he should have been blamed for. I don’t care. These episodes are really nice, and are easily the best parts of season 2.
I’ve spent a lot of time just talking about these 3 episodes, but it’s because, in season 2 part 2, there just isn’t much substance, at all. The Nanahoshi episode is episode 3, the Norn episodes are 4 and 5. What goes on before that is basically nothing, Rudeus buys a house and kicks out the local crackhead, Rudeus and Sylphie get married, Sylphie is revealed to be Elinalise’s granddaughter because, who the fuck knows, why not. Every episode after 5, minus the last two, we’ll get to it, are just a complete wrench in the pacing. We get some meaningful stuff with Norn, give some relationship advice to Elinalise, Roxy pisses her pants, Rudeus throws up, it's passably entertaining in the showmanship but feels like there really isn’t much else going on under the surface. I’m being a little reductive, but there really isn’t much to do in this bit.
In response to the death of Paul, the flawed man who made him as he is today, Rudeus, stricken by paralyzing grief and pain, his father having sacrificed himself to save him, does the only thing he can do… He sleeps with his teacher.
In a vacuum, it’s actually the least gross sexual relationship he’s had in his life, by like, a lot.
Roxy asked earlier if Rudeus had a girlfriend, so maybe Roxy just didn’t know that Rudeus and Sylphie were married-
She did.
Well surely she didn’t know he had a kid on the way-
She did.
OK WELL SURELY SHE WASN’T KNOWINGLY TAKING ADVANTAGE OF RUDEUS IN A VULNERABLE EMOTIONAL STATE-
She says that one explicitly, actually.
Its so hard to talk about this part of the series, because we either take the show at face value and, Roxy is an asshole, or we go one level deeper and see that this is all just a cheap justification for Rudeus to get himself a harem. It’s so obviously flawed that I’m mostly just gonna try to meet it in the middle, where it still doesn’t work.
The justification for this whole relationship is just, really weak. Rudeus’ admiration for Roxy is almost entirely based on the past, same as it is for Sylphie, but without any of the interpersonal mingling. There’s just so little going on between these two before the intercourse incident that it also feels like it’s betraying Sylphie in an entirely different way. Instead of Roxy and Rudeus growing a bond over a period of time, it feels like their connection really cements itself in Rudeus only after the sex, which goes against like, the MAIN THEMATIC THOROUGHLINE that went on with Sylphie and him.
Also, this comparison to Paul’s relationship with Lilia and Zenith, like they were both just OK with it all and it caused no conflict or strife towards anyone- Were we watching the same show?! Has the haterworm dug so deeply into my brain I’m making shit up?! All parties were pretty heavily affected by that, but it worked out so, good job Paul! You cheated on your wife with Lilia because you LOVED her, and it not only disturbed no one, you did the right thing every step of the way!
A thing I find fucking insane is people’s reaction to all this being, “Wow, polyamory in an anime” in both encouraging and chuddy ways, its fuckin' ridiculous, this is NOT polyamory, this is harem bullshit!
I’m with Elinalise on the first half. I don’t see why someone can’t love more than one person at the same time. I’m only with her on the second half in principle, why should Rudeus and Roxy’s love be cut-off because of Rudeus’ circumstances of life. In practice, I think this relationship is so heavy handed and put together without thought for any consequences. It’s betraying to Sylphie, deceptive on multiple angles, and it feels like an afterthought to make Rudeus’ upcoming harem seem more justified than it actually is. There was maybe a way to make these two work, but we certainly did not find it.
Of course the next episode is just them all talking about it, and of course Norn calls Rudeus an asshole and of course everyone tells her to shut up because god forbid Rudeus ever have to suffer any consequences for the shitty shit he shits.
I’m told that in the original novels, this is all handled a whole lot better, and I’m kind of forced to believe that because I cannot imagine it being handled worse.
That’s the problem with this series’ whole attempt at redemption, from whom is Rudeus redeeming himself? Rarely is it acknowledged how shitty Rudeus is by those around him, so it’s not from them. If it’s supposed to be redemption from within himself, he rarely acknowledges his own, more deeply rooted personal failures, and when he does, it’s less that they’re resolved, and more that they just, stop coming up. Last option then, it’s supposed to be redemption from us, the audience. And with that, I am not convinced. There’s just not a strong cause-and-effect between the experiences Rudeus has and consequent improvements in the ways he treats the world around him. Maybe that’s more closely tied to the real world, people aren't computers that you can just slot old parts out of, but it doesn’t make for a good story.
This is such a nitpick but, I think it’s evident to the saddest part of the series. Season 1 had an opening score, it would usually play at the start of the episode behind a montage of our main cast doing something boring, usually. Something that didn’t require any amount of time devoted to it in the main plot. There was no prepackaged flashy visuals or anything like that, it was a simple nod to itself, to the world and the characters it depicts. It indicated to me that there was a special level of effort at play here, that this series is special, and even though I had my problems with it, I really believed it was. It had the legs to do something different, to do something great, to not be more of the same isekai.
Now, for most of both parts, there’s a big, pre-made opening with a big rock song behind it, just placed into every episode. To be clear, I don’t have a problem with this opening, I don’t have a problem with openings in general. I just think that it’s symbolic of a decline in the rest of the series. There is no longer anything special in Mushoku Tensei. It’s a boring, generic, wish-fulfillment isekai whose only remaining distinctness is its above average animation, good-writing so occasional it feels accidental, and what I can only describe as a broadly artful tone. It’s worse than bad. It’s worse than generic. It’s both, and it’s heartbreaking because it could have been so much more.
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