Japan, please. Please stop. I can’t handle many more shows with great production and compelling direction that ruin themselves by sexualizing kids and trivializing rape.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen a show where I wanted less of the protagonist. My problem with him is my problem with the premise: a 34-year-old shut-in dies and is reincarnated as a baby in a fantasy dimension, keeping his memories and knowledge. So far, this is classic Isekai territory, although I personally find the whole “keeping memories reincarnation” part pretty compelling. This show, however, “shakes it up” by making the protagonist an absolutely disgusting human being. I’m not just talking about how I personally find his attempts at humor cringey and lame. The show jumps in an out of plotholes to satisfy his embarrassing nerd culture quips, and while I really don’t like them, I tolerate them. HOWEVER, the protagonist in this show, as a 34 year old mind inside a growing newborn body, actively engages in what I can only describe as the sexual assault of most of its female cast: both adults *and children*. In fact, a scene very early on seems to heavily imply he’s a serious deviant, likely an outright pedophile. His saving grace is that this is unclear, but it’s not much of a saving grace.
He sees a 5 year old girl and thinks “man she’s gonna be hot when she grows up, can’t wait to have sex with her”. *Very* early in the show, he sexually assaults a 9-year-old. In fact, the show heavily features sexual assault for comedic value, and doesn’t even have the decency to pretend like it’s an accident. These characters know what they’re doing, they’re happy about it, and the show celebrates their behavior by slapping them on the wrist and asking the audience “isn’t it funny?”. It’s gross, and it sucks, and it nearly made me stop watching. The *real* saving grace of the show is that as the characters develop and the plot thickens, the pedophilia and rape slows down. But as it stands, no amount of good writing can make up for this.
No matter how old the characters get, Jobless Reincarnation can not outgrow its beginnings about a 34+ year old man in a child’s body fulfilling his sexual fantasies on children and young teens. It’s baffling to me that this anime has something so heinously wrong with it that I don’t even feel the need to mention the child in the succubus outfit, or the upskirts on kids, or the way that kids are told that they’ll grow up to be sex objects. It feels stupid to mention them when the protagonist sexually assaults people with intent and malice. I cannot in good conscience recommend this show to *anyone*. Period. Nothing I say beyond this point will change that.
The slightly lesser crime Jobless Reincarnation commits is that all of this disgusting behavior is completely unnecessary. The parts of the plot that are good are good *in spite* of these trespasses. You could *easily* remove all of that content from the show and it would be substantially better without being much shorter. In fact, the protagonist is two distinct characters haphazardly mashed together: a sweet, intelligent and considerate little boy, and a disgusting 34 year old pedophile. The boy is kind and tender-hearted, but his “inner monologue” is revolting. These two characters do not exist together, and it’s incredibly jarring when they swap back and forth, but the show desperately wants you to believe they’re the same person. They try to garner sympathy for him by showing his past life and how he was bullied and sexually assaulted. So when it happens to a guy, as a part of bullying, we should have sympathy? It should justify his behavior? But when *he* does it by leveraging his situation or his power or someone else’s vulnerability, we’re supposed to laugh it off? They’re not supposed to be viewed as victims, only he is. How can the writing be *that* oblivious?
For a show that heavily features redemption as a theme, it makes sense to have a flawed protagonist, but this is something else entirely. They do a decent job exploring the idea of redemption with other characters, but with Rudy it just completely falls flat. It’s not redemption for him, it’s vindication. He gets everything he feels he was deprived of in his past life, for free, without learning anything, without changing his perspective. He continues to get away with murder (figuratively speaking), and neither he nor the show sees anything particularly wrong with that unless he’s immediately punished for it, *and sometimes not even then*. Rudy is internally conflicted, but the way it’s presented he’s very much still a scumbag, in an unforgivable way. Again, I want him to a scumbag, but it really should not be so much to ask that he’s not an active child rapist. Just no.
The art is fantastic—some of the fight scenes absolutely blew me away with astounding Sakuga. And the pacing is wonderful, I almost never felt like we weren’t learning something important or going somewhere cool. The worldbuilding develops interesting consequences and surprising opportunities for character development, and hell, the dub is great. I am *seriously* impressed by Studio Bind; the production value of this anime was so good that it kept me from walking away when I was screaming at the main character to shut up. But good god is the show disgusting, and that’s what’s so frustrating about this whole situation; the show is a stark mix of *really* good and *really*, *really* bad.
To me, Jobless Reincarnation is two separate shows, just like Rudy is two separate characters: one is a compelling fantasy show with all the positive qualities I just listed, and the other a horrible sex crime show. I feel like an asshole for wanting to see what happens in the first one, because they keep interjecting scenes from the second. It’s almost heartbreaking. I eagerly await the day that someone makes a fancut and trims all the rotten, rotten fat, because the show is bloated with infection, and no one should support that. No one.
