Isekai Ojisan – 4 [You Helped Me Through Tough Times]

Hello, and welcome to another week of Isekai Ojisan! Apologies for the delay on this, its Otakon weekend which makes for a busy time for me. This was another decent week for Ojisan, a lot of the comedy still worked, but its a definite step down compared to the last episode. Why? Well lets dive in and talk about it.

Starting off, I think this was a decent week for Ojisan. Not as funny as last week sadly, mostly do to it’s overuse of the elf gag, but still solid. The issue is just that we’ve seen her so much by this point that we have gotten a handle on their relationship. It doesn’t feel like there is much left to learn about them, so unless Ojisan starts to progress it in a meaningful way than it’s just going to feel like its repeating itself. Only each time with slightly higher stakes and sexual tension. Is watching him completely miss the point and accidentally lead her on still a little funny? Yeah, it still gets a chuckle. But not as much as it did the first time. Or the time after that. Basically the joke is becoming rote, and that’s not good for a comedy.

As for the non-isekai humor, I think that was still good, with the best jokes revolving around Fujimiya. Not the flaskbacks, her ugly face still isn’t that funny, but I do enjoy her relationship with Takafumi. It’s very similar to the Uncle’s relationship with the Elf in that Takafumi either doesn’t realize what is happening, or is actively pushing it away. Only this time its not wrapped up in Isekai tropes and has the Uncle to act as the knowing bystander. I think this works a lot better, though mostly because of the irony of him completely failing to see his own missed romance. Whatever the reason though, I think the gags surrounding these two are just much, much better.

Take for instance the photo gag. This could very easily have been just another ecchi scene. Blood spurting out the nose and all that jazz as Fujimiya attempts to get Takafumi to see her sexually. Instead though what we get is a non-reaction. Instead of being flustered, Takafumi is more concerned with having photos of a middleschooler in a swimsuit on his phone, asking if that’s legal. On top of that, Fujimiya also ends up losing out to an ad for a coffee bean sale, just driving the knife in deeper and deeper with how little he’s actually interested in her. The Uncle noticing this dynamic and directly calling it out after failing to notice his own romance is just icing on the cake. That is, assuming he hasn’t noticed and isn’t just playing it off… Conspiracies.

There were a few other good jokes in the episode beyond this to. Stuff like Uncle looking like he’s 30 in his teens, or revealing that his life motto came from a video game strategy book. I thought these were well setup! My favorite though had to be the smoke screen and signal flare joke. The original idea that he just doesn’t have a modern cellphone was good enough. But the follow up reveal near the end of the episode that they were 100% serious about the flag, and how Uncle came soaring in with a knife ready to murder to some people, landed really well for me. It’s like… when Ojisan is firing on all cylinders, you never know what throw-away joke will become a punchline later on. So while a lot of the isekai jokes don’t land, there’s at least a bit of surprise on which is picked.

So yeah, a decent episode for Ojisan. I’m still very concerned about how its going to last an entire cour, I very much suspect it’s going to fall off around episode 7 or 8, but for now at least I’m having a good time. And that’s more than I can say for most new seasonals.