Jobless Reincarnation has a lot of fucked-up trashy aspects to it, but it also explores how those things fuck people up, why and how, and goes deep into character development and a realistic depiction of what healing from trauma (and people who haven't healed from trauma) looks like.
There are a lot of harem anime out there that do not do that type of deeper character work and function solely as male power-fantasies. See, for instance, Tsukimitchi or Rosario X Vampire
'Pedophilic undertones' doesn't relate to 'trashy' or 'harem', even if you read the anime that way. In fact, it can be extremely interesting to see something which is so rarely portrayed or discussed in fiction, even fiction for adults.
The reality of child abuse is neither solved nor rebuked by depictions or explorations of psychology in adult fiction.
I don't even know what this show is, but I can guarantee you any pedo-related stuff in there is highly unlikely to be for the purpose of "depictions or explorations of psychology".
Come on, don't try to kid me. It's there for the same reason all the other seinen anime have a ton of borderline softcore porn tropes in them.
In this case, it's not; but even if it were, does that limit the ability of a text to explore interesting themes? Why?
I'd recommend reading deeper into the scholarly literature of sexual themes in anime and manga before assuming that fans necessarily interpret 'children' into the text. See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26639806
>if you could even call the writing of some guy with no credentials that
The researcher I'm quoting (who's by far not alone on writing this topic in his field) is Patrick Galbraith, a researcher and associate professor of cultural anthropology at Senshu University in Tokyo.
I think anyone deeply familiar with anime knows the harem tropes and sexual-comedy setups that Jobless Reincarnation uses as the basis of their story.
The difference is that Jobless Reincarnation plays out these sexual situations out to the full extend of their drama (ex: Paul Grayrat is caught making a child with the hot maid, there's multiple episodes of fallout because of this as Paul and Zenith, his first wife, have arguments over this).
I'm not sure if this is a teaching moment for Rudy (the main character) though, as it becomes clear that the entirety of the Grayrat line is full of sexual deviants and even some inbreeding.
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Doing the sexy time with the hot maid is... I mean.... its a trope. Its normally a comedy routine. But its played straight here.
Stealing the panties the main character's 40+ year old hot teacher (who is from the demon continent so she looks like only a teenager) is... a comedy trope in anime. (Ie: Panty stealing is all over Konosuba, a comedy anime). But its completely different when its played out straight and in a dramatic anime.
Being open with what fetishes you're cool with, and which ones make you squeemish is part of growing up. I can comfortably say that the stuff Jobless Reincarnation takes as core plot points are uncomfortable to me / "squicky" and unsatisfying sources of drama for me. And due to their long history as a comedy trope in older anime, its difficult for me to take it seriously.
Perhaps your argument is that the "point" is to take these adultery scenes more seriously and think deeply about them and the characters they affect. Except I already know that adultery is wrong, that panty stealing is wrong and I don't have any plans to do either.
So as a source of Drama, my overall confusion with this show is "Why are you dramatizing porn/harem/eroge plots?".
Uh no. Its a stupid plot for stupid porn-level writing setup. I don't consider it a source of drama at all. Personally anyway. I see that a lot of other people seem to like it so I don't want to hate on it too much or cause undo harm to your opinions or whatever. But... its really hard for me to take the eroge/hentai level plots seriously in Jobless Reincarnation. That's all.
Even if I 100% recognize that the author works very hard to set up these situations and think out the fallout and drama in a reasonably "realistic" way (or at least, all the characters acting like they should while still qualifying for the trope). And I think that's the part a lot of people like: the deep thought the author put into this work. Thinking deeply about how all these characters would act in the face of these sexually deviant actions.
I don't know why I even bothered to try to push back, beyond the fact that these kind of "philosophers" plague the anime community. The pattern is very predictable. Tons and tons of ink spilled to try to explain why they're not a pedophile while not doing anything more than distracting from the original point and dithering endlessly. And nobody wants to push back because of it, so they take silence as complicit assent.
If you're head hunting for polarizing anime with borderline underage sexual objectification, you could have gone with the "That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime" anime - take one look at the clothing (or lack thereof) of Milim Nava.
In before people furiously try to rationalize by saying, "Well sure she looks like she's a prepubescent 12 year but ACTUALLY she's 3000 years old", yeah okay sure - but as the saying goes "if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...".
So people know: I've chosen a highly controversial anime on purpose to prove that there's anime some people hate and other anime people love.
I personally couldn't get very far into Jobless Reincarnation. So I'm on the haters side. But in any case, the controversies of this anime are well known.
I actually didn't know there was any controversy around it, but this:
> I personally couldn't get very far into Jobless Reincarnation.
explains your choice. Based on how other modern isekais typically go, it definitely starts out looking like this one is going to go down a similar route, but it really doesn't. The overall character development for the main character is about him figuring out how to relate to others and develop healthy relationships instead of the fixations and fears he started with.
It's a modern Fate/Stay Night. It took a lot of trash Isekai tropes but played them straight and dramatic.
Like F/SN took your harem tropes and video game stats and crafted a magic system out of it... Jobless Reincarnation starts with panty thieves, sex scenes, voyeurism, a harem of three girlfriends and the tries to reverse engineer a story out of the tropes.
It's good for what it is. But it doesn't change that it's fundamentally starting with so called trashy tropes.
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It's clear that they're setting up a love triangle between the Red Head Tsundere hothead, the quiet traditional wife type, and his hot teacher who is a 100+ year old demon but looks like a teenager.
Like, there's more merit to this than maybe I'm making fun of. Because the author tries really really hard to make these situations play out with how a real life person might react to these revelations. But that doesn't change the fact that I can smell these trash tropes from a mile away.
Subjectively, I think Saber/Rin/Sakura of Fate/SN played out more realistically with their harem tropes than Jobless Reincarnations Roxy/Sylphie/Eris.
There's the benefit that F/SN are three different universes so each waifu pick is a totally different story. Jobless Reincarnation is on the other hand separated out by many years. But it's bloody obvious that all three girlfriends are going to come back together later for your old school anime triangle drama.
I guess that was what I liked with F/SN. The three girls were not yet another cheesy triangle.
The interesting thing about Jobless Reincarnation is that, even though the Anime was a late comer in the Isekai genre, the original work, the online novel, is actually a precursor if not the starting point of the current wave of Isekai works.
