The Beginning After the End is a series which has been steeped in controversy since the first previews for it were released. A lot of this discourse stems from either the adaptation being a disappointment relative to its source material or comparisons to fellow fantasy web novel epic Mushoku Tensei, which often make it feel like the anime is rarely being judged on its own merits, just on how it fails to measure up to prebuilt hype and fan expectations.

But the thing is, none of that really matters. It doesn’t matter how TBATE compares to its source material or to any other shows, not only because it has little bearing on the experience of anime-onlies, but also because you don’t need to compare TBATE to anything else to know it’s a bad show, it sucks completely on its own merits.

Let’s start with our central character, Arthur Leywin. On a conceptual level, he at least manages to be something more interesting than other Isekai protagonists by virtue of having an actually interesting life before his reincarnation, having been not some generic schlub from the real world, but a warrior king from a sci-fi universe. From this, the show began to develop an emotional core in its initial episodes, showing Arthur as an emotionally stunted person breaking out of his shell thanks to having a warm, loving family and a semblance of a normal life for the first time.

Now, on paper, this sounds all well and good, but in execution it reveals many of the show’s key flaws. Firstly, the show’s dialogue & scripting is bad. Much of the show, but especially the first episode, are dominated by Arthur’s dry internal monologue, and while internal monologue-heavy writing can benefit a story, just look at The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, but that requires a richness of character and personality that TBATE simply lacks. Arthur’s internal monologue is a dull, monotonous drone which both makes for a detached atmosphere that creates too much of a buffer between the characters & the audience and also offers too little genuine insight into Art’s character to justify how much of the script it takes up. It gets less bad after the first episode, but even then it’s utter drivel. Combine that with how obscenely unnatural the exposition dumping is and how similarly monotonous the rest of the dialogue is, and the result is an utterly dry, charmless experience.

This goes hand-in-hand with another major problem the show has: the characters themselves, which are largely as flat and one-note as can be. Arthur himself is arguably the best of them due to his interesting core concept, but past the first episode or so, he devolves into the generically nice, emotionally uncomplicated, utterly static, hypercompetent isekai protagonist with only flashes of what made him interesting in the first place. But compared to the rest of the cast he might as well be a Kunihiko Ikuhara character in terms of depth, because by god is this cast barren and sauceless. Arthur’s parents are vaguely badass & nice to their kid, Tessia is a generic damsel princess only made unique by often serving as comic relief (despite being incredibly unfunny), and the rest of the cast are so devoid of intrigue even compared to them that they might as well not even have names. They exist to orbit around Arthur and nothing else.

And it’s not just the characterization which suffers due to the poor scripting, as the structure & pacing are also quite bad. There’s a dull mechanical clunk to the clip at which the story moves, every episode a fragmented series of vignettes which gets across just the barebones bullet points of what’s necessary to make the episodic plot happen without any real ability to let the concepts or emotions the script is introducing actually breathe. One episode ends on a note implying the next will be soft and emotional, only for said episode to immediately breeze past the poignant emotions set up within the first few minutes just so it can spend the next section of the episode infodumping about the magic system some more. Any intrigue which might emerge from the narrative is crushed under the weight of getting to the next point in the story outline because it’s written not as an immersive tale to truly be engaged with, but as Content^TM to be mindlessly consumed.

And while the scene-by-scene pace & episode structure are too quick for their own good, the wider narrative is a different form of lifeless & mechanical: the utterly sluggish kind. Much of the plot is essentially a game of pinball where Arthur is catapulted to whatever locale or new conflict the author feels like exploring at any given moment without real agency of his own. This would be fine if there were some meaningful character arcs being progressed, themes explored, or if the narrative itself were more interconnected, but the writing lets itself down on all fronts. The story is practically a random events plot where every arc feels equally devoid of meaning, interesting drive, or genuine connection beyond just sharing the main character. It’s a directionless slog which makes most of its 12 episodes feel like an utter waste of time once it’s all said & done.

The only ideas the show truly commits to consistently conveying are that Arthur is meant to be really badass and this is his shameless power fantasy. While early episodes do make some effort to have him struggle, both physically and emotionally, from the halfway point onwards it’s clear that metaphorically sucking his dick is the story’s only concern. Notably, while the show struggles to spend the proper time developing the genuine emotional core it wants you to think it has, it does reserve an entire episode for an asinine storyline where Arthur effortlessly crushes a one-dimensional jerkish noble who started a pointless conflict with him. The kind of thing that’d be called aura farming if the show were actually cool enough to have aura. It really does show where the writers’ priorities lay when push comes to shove, no? Pretty much the only thing missing from the litany of usual masturbatory slop is the obligatory harem of interchangeable waifus lusting after the MC, and I frankly wouldn’t be surprised if the show ended up introducing one later in the series anyway.

And finally, the elephant in the room: this show looks like utter garbage. Calling it a PowerPoint presentation is an insult so common as to feel cliche at this point, but it’s overused because it’s true. Every episode has boatloads of cheap limited animation which particularly stands out to most people because it’s used specifically for the scenes which would actually require some modicum of effort to do. Whether it be something relatively complex & dynamic like a fight scene or something that’d require emotional weight like a major character reuniting with their family, all of them are rendered with nothing but cheap pans over still frames rather than anything actually dynamic or animated.

Though it’s not like the actually animated parts look all that much better. Even at its best, the show’s character animation is stiff and its direction lifeless. The utter blandness of the art style also sticks out, the show’s entire visual identity is wholesale copied from every other piece of JRPG-inspired slop to come out of the anime industry in the last two decades, and the show’s occasional meager attempts at invoking awe are ruined by this to a laughable degree. Like, for example, there’s one episode where Art enters a city that’s supposed to seem amazing based on his reactions and the whimsical music, but when the camera is actually on the environment it’s, uh…

…yeah, not exactly a perfect picture of fantastical grandeur or wonder there, huh?

Honestly, the worst thing about the shitty animation is that it isn’t even shitty in an interesting way. At least the Berserk 2016s, Ex-Arms, and Hand Shakers of the world are breaking new ground in their ability to fail and end up becoming comedy disasterpieces as a result. TBATE couldn’t even be bothered to be that level of fun bad, it’s just shitty in the same way every other slop isekai is and making fun of its visuals stops being fun once you’ve exhausted the PowerPoint jokes. Seriously, a high profile failure to this degree not even being ambitious enough to fail in a spectacular manner is the worst sort of failure.

Maybe the source readers are right and there’s a good version of TBATE out there somewhere, whether that be the web novel, the webtoon, or just some idealized vision in the mind of its original author. I don’t know and that ultimately doesn’t matter here, but what I can say with certainty is that their anime adaptation is absolutely not worth your time in any respect. It is devoid of any passion, creativity, and soul to a genuinely insulting degree and I hate myself for spending so much time on it.