“I gotta say, tearing your own family limb from limb is a bit harsh.”
“Sob. All I wanted was for my children to have a touching first encounter with their grandmother.”
Easily one of the best isekai ever made, a hidden gem of a series that has more meat under its skin than it may look like at a first glance.
Leadale is a slow-life isekai with a female protagonist and a VRMMO world turned real parallel world. I’ve seen about a dozen shows featuring these tropes in various combinations and all of them suck. And they always suck in the same way - either they forget the ... part where they’re supposed to be isekai, turning into a generic CGDCT/shoujo/yuribait, or they forget the female MC + slow life part, turning into a generic SAO-clone dungeon crawler with a generic Kirito for a protagonist. Leadale, on the other hand, manages to succeed where those shows fail, and then raises the bar even higher. What truly makes it stand out is that it’s not an “isekai anime,” it’s a genuine work of dramatic fiction that happens to be in the isekai genre. The best comparison I can offer is with Monogatari - that one is also a genuine work of literature that makes use of anime harem tropes for storytelling, rather than just another harem anime. Here are some things Leadale does right:
Wish-fulfillment.
One of the easiest criticisms to make against an isekai is that it is pandering/power fantasy/wish-fulfillment. Usually, you can’t go wrong with that, but only because most isekai series offer a low-effort trash version of wish-fulfillment, not because the concept is bad in principle. Some basement-dwelling neckbeard getting handed status/power/women he doesn’t deserve and didn’t work for does not make for a very compelling narrative.
Cayna, the MC of Leadale, starts the story as a 17-year-old girl that has been stuck on life support in a hospital bed for most of her life. The first thought she has upon being reincarnated is, “hey, my legs work!” The first thing she does is eat a hearty meal in an inn, and the first words out of her mouth are, “I can’t remember when was the last time I ate not through a plastic tube.” You look at that and think, yeah, I don’t mind watching a story about her getting a second chance to walk around, see places, meet people, get drank celebrating with friends, wake up with a hangover the day after, start a family, and see her grandchildren - that is, have a fulfilling life that she was robbed out of by a tragic accident.
Actual intelligent thought put into isekai tropes.
The paragraph above is just one of the numerous examples of how the typical isekai story elements make a refreshing amount of sense from the logical perspective. The reincarnated Cayna is an elf, and the first natives she meets comment that they’ve never seen an elf before. Just a single line answers the usual glaring question of how come the locals never question the blatant alienness of reincarnators. In fact, a centuries-old elf visiting human settlements for the first time is such an ingenious cover story for a reincarnator, I’m shocked that no one (I know of) did this before. Just think how *perfectly* it fits the portrait of someone who lacks common sense and is ignorant about the most obvious things, yet simultaneously possesses absurdly powerful “cheat” abilities and talks about arcane matters beyond common folks’ understanding.
But wait, there is more - Leadale is the only series not just among isekai, but among all the elf-featuring fantasy I know of that does something with the implications of the fact that your world includes an “elder” race of people whose lifespan is counted in centuries and who don’t mind breeding with humans. And that is some mixed-blood characters having an awkward encounter with their great-grandmother that looks younger than them and whose thought process is incomprehensible to them.
The purpose of being an isekai story.
This is something very simple to test - ask yourself if the show would still work if it was just regular fantasy without the opening scene where a Japanese salaryman gets hit by a truck. For a depressingly high percentage of titles, the answer is yes, but Leadale isn’t one of them. There is another common elephant in the isekai room - how come reincarnators never give a fuck about their friends, family, and the entire world they left behind. It would make sense for Cayna to not care much for a life of being a bed-ridden vegetable, yet unexpectedly, she very much does. The only thing she has on her mind is to try and find the way back, or at least find some other people from her original world. There is a poignant scene where it dawns on her that it’s been 200 years, and everyone she knew is likely gone, so she has to hug her knees for a while in order to come to terms with it. This is how you do a reincarnation story.
Female protagonist.
There has been an outcropping of those in the isekai genre, and I’m not sure what for, as it is painfully obvious that most isekai writers have never been in a room with a female that isn’t their mom. Same deal, ask yourself if the story would still work if the MC was replaced by a male, and if the answer is yes, then the author has failed at writing a female protagonist. Take any iconic action heroine like Ellen Ripley from Aliens or Sarah Connor from Terminator 2. They kick ass and chew bubblegum, yet everything in their words and actions screams XX chromosomes, and it would’ve looked incongruous if male characters were saying and doing those things. And that’s how Cayna is, she might come with the standard isekai protag cheat powers package, but she shows very little interest in using those powers to assert her alpha-male dominance the way Kirito does. Her concerns are entirely private and/or interpersonal - helping people that make up her social circle, dealing with her newly-acquired isekai family, looking for clues connecting her to the original VRMMO, etc.
On top of being an actual woman, Cayna’s personality matches her profile as a teen that missed out on living through the formative teen experiences. She’s generally well-meaning, yet also short-tempered, self-conscious, and naive. She has trouble processing complex emotions, and really, really hates surprises, which leads to unreasonable outbursts she later regrets and has to apologize for.
Slow life.
Does a minor side character being catastrophically bad at winking advance the plot in any way? Does the shoujo manga roses background that permanently follows another character do that? A tiny mute fairy mimicking the MC’s facial expressions? No, what those do is being cute. Even with plenty of drama and deaths in the story, it manages to keep a consistent wholesome atmosphere. I don't really need to tell this, I can just let the show speak for itself. Here's an exchange from the second episode:
- Oneechan, you're leaving?
- Yes. But I promise I'll come back to see you again.
- Really?
- I'll let you know something super amazing. But you can't tell anyone, okay?
- O-Okay. I promise I'll keep it a secret.
- You know that silver tower beyond the mountains?
- The place where the bad witch lives, right?
- Believe it or not... I'm that bad witch.
- What?! But you're not a bad person!
- Make sure you keep it a secret, okay? I'm going to come back every once in a while to make sure you didn't tell anyone.
- Okay! But if you don't come back for a really long time, I'm going to tell someone.
- Then I'd better make sure I come back to this village.
It just radiates heart and wit. If I were to recommend this show to myself from a parallel universe, I'd just show this dialogue, that would be all I need to know it’s a well-written story.
The real character and story arcs.
This one is the total of everything said above. As the story begins, Cayna has trouble truly comprehending that the world she is in is not a video game anymore. This isn’t shown through some idiotic exposition, “these NPCs aren’t people, ay lmao.” It is shown subtly with Cayna and other characters’ behavior. She casually suggests crafting attack magic “consumables” and doesn’t even notice that everyone around freaks out over the prospects of freely-circulated weapons of mass destruction. She thinks about rewriting the personalities of her isekai children (originally custom-ordered NPCs) because it hasn’t quite dawned on her that they are people whose personalities are shaped by 200 years' worth of life without her, life in which they’ve played prominent roles in society and created multi-generational extended families. But Cayna doesn’t stay oblivious forever. With every new realization that people die when they are killed, that her combat pokemons have names, consciousness, and culture, etc, etc - her new reality slowly sinks in. Slowly but surely Cayna comes to fully appreciate and embrace the position she occupies in her new world and the responsibilities that come with it. This is what the story of Leadale is about.
The only reason I didn’t rate it 10 is that the adaptation adds some very unsound original scenes which stick out like a sore thumb.
9/10 for “this is how isekai can be like when written by real writers as a real work of literature, not an embarrassing attempt at fanfiction by some hikineet.”
Alternative Titles Synonyms: World of Leadale Japanese: リアデイルの大地にて Information Type: TV Episodes: 12 Status: Finished Airing Aired: Jan 5, 2022 to Mar 23, 2022 Premiered: Winter 2022 Broadcast: Wednesdays at 23:30 (JST) Licensors: None found, add some Studios: Maho Film Source: Light novel Duration: 23 min. per ep. Rating: PG-13 - Teens 13 or older Statistics Score: 6.961 (scored by 80,286 users) 1 indicates a . Ranked: #47902 2 based on the top anime page. Please note that 'Not yet aired' and 'R18+' titles are excluded. Popularity: #1465 Members: 160,160 Favorites: 890 Available AtResources |
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