Anime ‘The 8th Son’ Is Better Than You Think

This season of anime has some highlights, such as Tower of God and … OK, maybe nothing else aside from returning shows like Ascendance of a Bookworm and Fruits Basket. But I am going to make an argument that the seemingly bog standard “isekai with an overpowered hero and a harem” show The 8th Son? Are You Kidding Me? is something much better than what it seems to be at first glance.

Of course to do that I need to point out things that happen in the story and why those things elevate 8th Son above expectations, and that means spoilers. While I will try to keep them as light as possible, read on at your peril if you want to avoid the show being spoiled. I’ll put the spoiler alert when we get past the stuff that is in the show descriptions on sites like Crunchyroll or MyAnimeList (where 8th Son sits in a comfortable spot as the 10th most popular show this season).

Overworked salary man Shingo Ichinomiya falls asleep after an exhausting day and wakes up in the body of a six year-old in a fantasy world. He becomes aware that he is Wendelin Von Benno Baumeister (nicknamed Well), the youngest of eight children in a poor but noble family. Realizing he has no chance of inheriting anything — not that there is anything worth inheriting — he discovers that he has a very rare talent, an affinity for magic.

Based on that description, you can easily imagine this being just another garbage isekai with an OP author-insert main character. But the fact that Well starts out at the age of six, and that he is in a dirt-poor family that has only one thing going for it in its status as nobility is different from trash-tier isekai like In Another World With My Cell Phone and Master of Ragnarok and Blesser of Einherjar. In fact, it seems like a rip-off (err, inspired by) the excellent Ascendance of a Bookworm.

SPOILERS BELOW

The very first scene, however, shows Well as a young man, wielding very powerful magic as he clears land on what seems to be his own estate. You get to meet what is clearly his harem, and everything seems on track for an easily skippable isekai. Then it jumps back to show how he came to the world, and when Ichinomiya wakes up as Well, it is at a big party that he eventually realizes is an engagement party for his eldest brother. And in that scene we get a smart exposition of who Well is and what the world is like he finds himself in. So maybe this might not be garbage after all. But the animation is pretty low quality, so the jury is still out.

The next surprise is how the show handles Well’s magical training. He discovers he has magical ability by chance and in secret, but a powerful mage living in seclusion nearby feels the effects of the test and finds Well and takes him on as his disciple. Well keeps the magic and the training a secret from his family, but not for meaningless plot reasons, but because he realizes that having the youngest son out of eight with such a rare and in-demand ability will likely screw up the succession plans for his older brothers. Wait, smart family political writing in an OP isekai?

I won’t go into detail, but the story of Well and his relationship with his magic training master Alfred Rainford is smart, fun and deeply moving, and was the element that cemented for me that this wasn’t just another crap-level isekai. After a few episodes, the show takes a time skip forward seven years to when Well sets out to learn magic and become an adventurer at the Adventurers Academy. At that point I was again ready for this to be treading over the same old isekai tropes, but the show just kept throwing curve balls at me, mostly by writing smart stories about how the appearance of a rare magic user would affect the power structure — in everything from his school and classmates to the local Duchy to the kingdom as a whole. And not always to Well’s benefit.

The final thing that nailed this show down as something special was the most recent episode in which Elize, the noble girl that is engaged to Well (stuff happens) accepts the two girls in his school training party as his concubines. I thought, “OK, here is where it drops into the trope trash pit.” But then I remembered that from the moment Well advanced in his nobility ranking (stuff happens) the girls Louise and Iina had been angling to become his concubines — not out of lust or love as in any other harem isekai, but because of the benefits of being in a noble family. In both cases, they plan to use that standing to advance their own personal goals related to their own families and their issues.

When Louise earlier tries to seduce her way into a concubine role, it is one of the funniest, cringiest things I’ve seen since watching Cara Delevingne try to dance seductively in Suicide Squad — in this case though, intentionally funny.

To be fair, 8th Son isn’t perfect. It has to actually use the tropes to be able to … not actually subvert them but write about them so smartly. And the animation is pretty weak, particularly in the thankfully few occasions it uses CG. My god, I haven’t seen CG animation that bad since it was cutting edge in Reboot in 1998. But I am constantly and pleasantly surprised at how the show portrays the complications and even downsides to being an OP isekai protagonist. And, unlike too many other shows, it isn’t on hold because of the pandemic, so I don’t have to wait to see if it keeps up the surprising writing quality.

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