I don’t know, maybe we’ll get that Godzilla/Gamera movie one of these days after all. Although it would probably be a Warners/Legendary thing, so it wouldn’t really be what we’d dreamed about all these years. Still, I’d go see it now that I’ve thought of it. How much could the American remake rights to Gamera be? Get on that, Warners.
Anyhoo, although I’ve tried not to force this down people’s throats too much (except for The Rev over his B-Fest visit, poor guy), I’ve basically just been watching anime over the last six months to a year. There are literally new episodes every day, a new slate of shows (and sequel series) every three months, and for a newbie, a huge backlog crop of the very best of the medium out there to dig into.
One of my favorite animes is Overlord, the adventures of a socially-inept gamer (if you can imagine such a things) stuck as his character in a world approximating the MMORPG he played for a decade. This is a very standard genre right now, part of the broader Isekai genre. Isekai just means “another world,” featuring characters transported to, well, another world. The roots of this genre go back to John Carter, the Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland, although modern anime certainly uses it most consistently.
I don’t know how this happened, but next month we’re going to get a crossover series featuring the casts of four different and hitherto unconnected Isekai animes. Are the respective four animes all produced by the same studio? Are the source ‘light novels’ for the various programs all published by the same publishing house? I don’t know, but the crossover show is an actual thing.
All the shows are fantasy, and all are Isekai, and three of the four range from pretty grim at times to very grim all the time. The fourth show, though, is a rather hilarious comedy Isekai, so I have no idea how the merger of the characters will work.
I’ve seen all four shows (the last I watched after hearing of the crossover some months ago), and here’s the slate:
OVERLORD
One of my very favorite shows, it’s a standard Isekai except that the protagonist is either sort of evil or very very evil. Watch the show yourself to find out, it’s on Hulu. The cast is huge and great, and the central characters, considering again the fact that they are nearly all horrible monsters who hate and despise humans, are when not doing awful things to regular people quite adorable and lovable. It actually makes me nervous for the human tendency to fall in love with even evil things once we familiarize ourselves with them.
RE:ZERO
A (surprise) nerd is transported to (surprise) a fantasy world. Usually the protagonists of these things are insanely overpowered in their new surroundings, but not, to his regret, this guy. His one ‘advantage’ is that the world acts like a game in one respect: When he dies, it resets to a certain point in the action. Sadly for him, though, dying violently turns out to be rather unpleasant, so he tries to avoid using his one ‘power’ as much as he can.
THE SAGA OF TANYA THE EVIL
How’s this for high concept? A sociopath corporate businessman is murdered after conducting layoffs, and basically goes to war with his universe’s God. To teach him a lesson, the guy is reborn as a girl in an alternate universe version of Europe just about to enter what is a very close analogue of World War One, save that magic works here. Even pre-teen mages are considered a superweapon, and so Tanya, his new life, quickly finds herself swept up in the action fighting for the faux Germany. Think of a more psychotic version of the last season of Blackadder, as the (at her best) utterly amoral Tanya uses any means necessary to secure her own safety and bring horrible death and ruination to her enemies, which is a broader category than you might think. If you like the works of Harry Turtledove this is the show for you.
KONASUBA
This is the wild card. The other three shows are all pretty straight and often quite grim–except for Tanya, which is always quite grim–while Konasuba is a hilarious comedy featuring the comic adventures of a team of lovable douchebags having various D&D style adventures. It’s a great show, my favorite of the four other than Overlord.
So how will this crossover work, then? One obvious factor is that the crossover itself will be essentially comic. This is indicated by the fact that it will feature ‘chibi’ versions of the various characters. Handily, I have a taste of what this will be like, as the Blu Ray sets of Overlord feature the chibi adventures of the program’s six warrior maids. You can watch these on YouTube, but don’t do that if you haven’t seen the actual show yet. This chibi Overlord is insanely adorable while still not really glossing over the essentially deeply evil nature of the cast. To be fair, they are only evil to beings who aren’t part of the Great Tomb of Nazarick. However, that’s an entire world of people and magical beasts, so, you know.
Anyway, while I remain amazed at things like the MCU, this really steps things up a notch. I hope this is great. I’ll find out soon, I guess. Still, we now live in a world where this can happen. If that’s the case, what couldn’t come to pass. It’s a dizzying prospect.
