tl;dr - Don’t read the series discussed below. Don’t make my mistake. Send help.

Have you ever found yourself unable to stop reading/watching something that you know is bad? Well, I certainly have. The reason I mention this is because that is exactly what I have been doing this past week. Story time…

Last week, I saw a chapter for the series Sen no SKILL o Motsu Otoko Isekai de Shoukan Kemono Hajimemashita! in the recent updates section on Mangadex. The cover and synopsis caught my eye. I thought that the whole traveling between two worlds thing might be fun, kind of like Sasaki and Peeps was in the winter anime season. However, the other thing that caught my eye was the very poor rating in Mangadex of only 6.26; quite low compared to even mediocre series that I have dropped in the past. So I decided to read some for myself to see what was so bad about it. There are many things I could write about this series, but here are a couple that come to mind first…

The series consistently sets up drama or tension and then almost immediately resolves it. The fact that the MC is consistently gaining new abilities means that more and more contrived situations can be solved by some random skill the MC has. At least two other times the MC has been in some kind of a pickle, but then the literal God of that world descended out of nowhere and bailed him out on the very next page.

Another frustrating thing about this series stems from the fact that the MC is able to go back and forth between modern-day Japan and the medieval fantasy isekai world. He is even married in Japan. This presents an opportunity to have the MC struggle to balance the two worlds and have them interact in interesting ways. That is, if this was written better. Instead, Japan is almost completely ignored except that the MC can bring modern goods to the isekai world and sell them for lots of money. The MC’s wife is also never utilized for story reasons. She literally doesn’t appear in the series until she sits the MC down and asks for a divorce, freeing him from basically any attachment to Japan and giving the isekai romance plot a green light. Like, what was the point of having the wife in the first place?

My final bit of criticism here is a relatively minor one, but I didn’t want to ignore it. In the fantasy world, we are eventually introduced to other isekai’ed characters. One of them is from the USA (Salt Lake City in particular). When he meets our MC and learns that the MC can travel back and forth between worlds, what is one of the first things this American requests from our world? Guns of course! Never mind he is an epic hero capable of destroying armies with a slash of a sword and magic…I guess there is just something in our American blood that craves guns. Similarly, there is another character originally from India that sets out on a quest across the fantasy globe in search of curry. The author isn’t really straying far from national stereotypes in this one.

Now…you might point out that perhaps I just haven’t read far enough into the series. Maybe I just haven’t been able to perceive the author’s grand vision and see it executed. Well, much to my own disappointment, I have read all 70 translated chapters of this series. I am not proud of this achievement, nor did I enjoy the experience of it. I simply pressed on in hopes of finding signs of improved storytelling. In that respect, I actually feel like the most recent arc is actually a little bit better, at least in that it is a proper arc and wasn’t immediately resolved due to some deus ex skill by the MC. I fully expect disappointment at the end of wherever this arc is going though. Setting proper expectations is important.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

One thing I liked about Shoujo Nyuumon is that it touched on the issue of menstruation.

Among the manga that I have consumed where a male turn into a female, almost none of them touched on this subject.

You would imagine that is such a huge change in lifestyle or inconvenience for them, but somehow they don’t get periods, and are able to go about their life like before?! Especially mind-blowing are those where the MC was isekai-ed into a medieval world, where sanitary products don’t exist?! I can only assume they kept their manhood.

I know that realism isn’t the focus of such manga, but sometimes, they require too much suspension of disbelief from me.