Alternative title(s): Hyakuren no Haou to Seiyaku no Valkyria
Light Novel Adaptation by EMT Squared
Streaming on Crunchyroll

Premise

It’s an isekai show. What do you want from me.

colons’ verdict: Neural Network-generated isekai shows

This week on Allowing Machine Learning Algorithms To Have Quirks, I trained a neural network on every isekai show from the last five years, to see what it would come up with. Unfortunately, even with generous compute power, generating video from a neural network is pretty time-consuming, so I was only able to generate one.

It did a good job! It expertly captured the essence of Shit Protag, successfully built a cast of zero-dimensional tropes in the bodies of women and girls, and absolutely nailed the completely uninteresting setting. There’s a scene in which Shit Protag gets horny and gives one of his existing harem members a headpat, there’s a scene where he gets to decide the fate of a woman who’s tied up in front of him, and there’s another where he slams his fist on a table hard enough to make it bleed and make his cape swoop up all cool-like. It even managed to use a key part of the premise of In Another World With My Smartphone.

Unfortunately, it appeared to struggle with setup. This makes sense, of course; isekai shows tend to spend the first three minutes or so with noticeably different situations. It seems that this particular neural network opted to simply ignore it; Master of Ragnarok completely skips over the setup, and instead begins some years into Shit Protag’s time in the video game world. This may also have been my fault; I didn’t vet the input material and there may have been some second seasons in there.

It sure is a wild coincidence that this keeps happening.

At one point, crowds around Shit Protag can be heard yelling ‘sieg patriarchy’, and at another, a woman he’s trying to enslave is grateful to receive the ‘little sister’ role rather than the ‘daughter’ role, because little sisters are not completely subservient. Everyone must swear by the ‘oath of allegiance’. Clearly, in averaging out the different ways these shows attempt to obfuscate their politics, the neural network simply removed the obfuscation altogether.

The animation is a little ropey, too. As an example, I think at one point it took the body movements from someone’s sword-swinging movement and instead attached a very large hammer, which looked a bit silly. It also seems like it was unable to work out any guiding principal behind how water balloon breast physics tend to work, and the result is almost subtle. At least, relatively.

Next time I do this, I think I’ll try to turn the creativity (or temperature, as I believe it’s called in char-rnn) up. Even the moth that landed on my hand while we were watching this found it boring.

Oh, I also included the video for Big Enough in the input corpus.

Euri’s verdict: The fake anime that plays on a small TV in the background of another anime, except it’s real. Again.

Don’t worry, the image above isn’t taken from Kanon 2002, it’s from The Master of Ragnarok & Blesser of Einherjar, a shit and perfectly appropriate name for yet another steaming pile of garbage. It’s a story about all the cool guy things you could get up to if you were whisked away to another world, such as stealing women away from their families, looking down and at an angle so that your eyes disappear and you look moody, and chatting to your sister, who is probably a love interest, via a mysterious mirror.

You’ll be surprised to hear that the protagonist is completely devoid of personality, which makes him perfect for projecting yourself onto. That way it’s like you’re the one in this very dull world, being woken up to conversations about your morning wood and the bodily needs of healthy young men. You’ll also have access to your magic smartphone, which is very original and useful when you wanna, like, skype chat or something.

This show sucks. The identical show that aired less than a week ago sucks. Digimon Adventure is still the king of the isekai.