Kono Subarashii Sekai ni Bakuen wo!: r/anime Awards 2023 Thoughts
This is part of a series of posts, reworking my casual writing from the r/anime Awards about the various shortlists and nominees. I do a lot of writing for the awards which never gets released outside of awards, so I figured I’d try bringing some of it out and putting it here. They’re not meant to be anything too serious or in-depth, just reworking my thoughts as I posted them in the awards server to here. This isn’t representative of the awards themselves or anyone other than myself involved in the awards. I’ll make a larger post with all the shortlisted shows from each category in the Write-Up Collections tab after I’ve posted all of the individual write-ups for that category here.
Of the categories I was juror for in the 2023 r/anime Awards, Kono Subarashii Sekai ni Bakuen wo! was shortlisted in Anime of the Year, and Yunyun was nominated for Comedic Character, so those were the categories where I discussed it.
Watch Links: Crunchyroll
This is a more Slice of Life entry of KonoSuba, centered around Megumin before she met Kazuma, Aqua, and Darkness. It's got some fun comedy, and the visual comedy in the expressive characters helps this greatly. It's also got some strong emotional moments between Megumin and Yunyun, one of my favorite dynamics this year. It dips a little bit in the middle segment, but the beginning and end arcs are strong. Megumin's aspirations and support from her friends make for an engaging journey to achieve her goals.
Putting the comedy a bit more on the backburner was a good thing. This isn't to say the comedy is gone, it's not. But it's toned down significantly, especially in the first arc at the school. When it was Megumin and Yunyun living in the town, it was super chill and I really vibed with it. It was a neat twist on the show and showed that Megumin has a lot more dimensionality to her than just "crazy explosion loli". I already believed she did, of course, but this fleshes out her character, even if the show wasn't as funny and lacked the dynamics of the full group from KonoSuba. I take issue with people saying KoboSuba doesn't work without Aqua or Kazuma, or that Megumin can't carry the show without them. She's not a one-trick pony who just does the explosion and falls over haha funny. She also does that, but she's got plenty of other jokes here without the explosions, and on top of that she develops a really nice relationship with Yunyun. Later segments get more comedy heavy and suffer a bit because of it, since this is not filled with KonoSuba's best jokes.
The Megumin and Yunyun dynamic was fantastic. There's some other cool dynamics here, the biggest runner-up being Komeko and Megumin, but Megumin and Yunyun are the stars of this show. No other dynamic is nearly as interesting or worked on. That isn't to say there was no value in other interactions, but it wasn't as meaningful to Megumin as a character or the story of the show.
I did not feel like it was retreading old ground. It's definitely funny to watch the gang of misfit assholes be assholes to each other, but I found a focused adventure of Megumin as she tries to climb up in the world and Yunyun's role in helping her to be much more interesting as a dynamic than anything the mainline series has to offer.
To talk about the arcs, the school arc was amazing and I love it. It has all my favorite moments in the show and is where almost all the good character stuff happens. The arc with the axis cult sucks and I wish it was removed from the show entirely. The final arc in the beginner town had fun moments but felt like it existed more to get us to the endpoint than to actually do something meaningful.
