Welcome to another week of Iskeai Ojisan! A bit of a slow post on my part, grad school makes my schedule difficult. Don’t you worry though, I’m not stopping anytime soon! So without further ado lets just jump into this weeks episode.
In general I think this week was strictly fine. There were some decent, and not so decent, jokes. A bit of a lore dump and even some Uncle history dropped in. But those last two are more concerning than you might think. Because while they seem innocuous, to me they indicate that Ojisan is listing dangerously close to becoming that which it is mocking. Take last weeks joke about his “gift” from God being useless for instance. Turns out? It’s actually just as OP as any other “gift”, allowing him to use magic more quickly and at a level no one else can match. The supporting cast of women, previously lampooning Isekai casts? It’s just a harem now. Being thrown in jail, getting payback, and looking like a rapist? Well now this is just Shield Hero. Considering we are only halfway into the season, this makes me very concerned.
Before I get into the bad jokes though, I do want to talk about what was positive this week. The whole insanity bit in the cell with him talking to himself god a chuckle. I enjoyed the 3 levels of red herring there as they called him insane, he said he was fine, we looked closer, and then it turns out he really wasn’t insane. Or at least not totally, that continues to be left in the air. I was never sure which side Ojisan would fall on. And the same could be said for the animals! I was expecting them to be cute and lovable, or to at least fight on his side for freedom. Instead they all turn out to be locked up for a very good reason, swarming the countryside! They aren’t gut bustingly funny sure, but they got a chuckle.
On the flip side though I really wasn’t a fan of the ecchi jokes this week. Most of that is just me absolutely hating ecchi humor, I will admit. I hate it in rom-coms, I hate it in CGDCT shows, I hate it in Shounen. I think it’s the lowest common denominator of comedy and wish it would go away. So it should be no surprise that Elf being stripped, put in a hoodie and then stripped again missed hard for me. Like I get it, Elf is cute. The design is nice, Ojisan draws her well. I’m not questioning any of that, she’s hot. But when you spend this many episodes building her up as a supposedly strong female character, stripping her down really negates the whole “I only beat it because of her” thing. Especially when she falls in love with him right after!
The same can be said for Mabel’s jokes, though those are slightly different. The dog house, the ring, them “sleeping” together. They all lack the layers that made a lot of the earlier jokes, like Youtube, funny. Instead they are pandering to common Isekai tropes and then trying to both play them straight while making situational comedy out of them. It just doesn’t work for me! I’d much rather Ojisan actually have them hate him and follow him around for that reason than because of some self-insert love obsession. It’s because of this that I fear Ojisan is listing dangerously towards just being a normal Isekai. This is the harem I was talking about! And it’s only going to grow since they “introduced”, and by that I mean name dropped, a female legendary hero who we will no doubt meet next week. It’s just kind of disappointing.
So yeah, all in all Ojisan was strictly fine this week. In fact it was probably less than fine looking back at what I wrote. I didn’t love any of it and I absolutely checked out of a good half of the episode. Maybe this is just this weeks humor not being up my alley, I don’t know. But I’m really starting to fall off of the show. What about you reader? Am I overreacting to this weeks jokes, is it just not my kind of comedy? Or is your interest in Ojisan waxing as well? Are you even still reading this posts, or am I talking into the cold void of the internet? Forgotten and alone… Anyways, existential crisis aside, that’s it for this week! See you next time.
