Mushoku Tensei

I have been watching Mushoku Tensei since season one came out, when I binge watched the entire thing in one go. Then season two came out, the one at the university, and I watched it again. And now season three. In between there was this long stretch where I did not really watch anime at all, so when season three dropped I watched a recap of the first few seasons to get myself back into it, and then I realized, dude, I need to rewatch the whole thing again. After that I had this insane urge to just know the entire story. Is it the light novel, is it the manga, where does it go. So I went reading about all the arcs that come after season three, enough to understand each one. I have no patience, so I binged deep past where the anime stops.

I do not really know how to express what this show is. I do not think words explain it. There is just everything in it, the story, all of it, and it holds together as something that is perfect to me.

The guy

What pulled me in is the guy himself, and how he evolves. He starts old. He starts from a depressed life, from a place where he was scared and miserable. When I only watched the anime I did not really know the full story of who he was before, and it is much more depressing than the anime shows. He was locked in his room for years. He did not even go to his parents' funeral. His siblings kicked him out. There is a ton behind him that the show only gestures at.

Then he gets revived, and here is the cool part, the part that is true and that I keep thinking about. He still has those issues. He changed places. He literally went to a different world, a full reset, and he still carries the same fears. He did not want to leave his family's house until he was five or something. He still makes the same mistakes he made before.

But in his new life he has a ton of things more that help him overcome those mistakes. It is the environment. It is the knowledge he already has from the last life. It is time, because he gets to start again from the beginning. And it is his parents, people around him. He really liked Paul, his father. His teacher, who he married later. Things like this. The things he missed the first time, the family, the people around him, the time to grow up again, those are exactly the things that save him in the second life. That is what gets me. You do not escape yourself by moving. You just get another run at it with a better setup around you.

The second thing I deeply like is progress. It is character development in action, but it goes deeper than that. There is stuff that does not change, that just makes him who he is, like how he is attracted to women. And then there is the part that moves: progress with skills, with magic, with whatever he was fighting with, and the journeys, like when he went to the demon continent. You watch him get better across all of it.

And when you watch it all develop, you see the steps underneath. He starts as someone who just plays around. Then he becomes someone who deeply cares about learning and progress. He starts caring about building muscle. He goes to school, he graduates. Then he starts building a life. He looks for something stable, he gets married, he buys a house. That is the same shape you see in an ordinary life, which is strange because you do not see that much in anime. In anime you get a ton of crazy stuff. Here you get a genuinely skilled guy, probably near the top, living a life that still has the ordinary arc in it.

If I apply it to actual life, the learning curve in the show is obviously faster, and it does not really matter, because it depends on the person. Someone starts learning very young, someone starts very late. That part does not matter. The steps are still the steps. The order of it is still there.

The dialogue before he dies

His conversation before he dies was probably one of the best things I have read. He was talking about how he lived well. That was it, and I was like, damn, that hit me hard. He had an ordinary life, and an ordinary life was the only thing he had ever been starving for. His children, his grandchildren, his family are healthy. He trusts them to do well. He made all the right and wrong decisions, but it does not matter. What matters is that he lived well. I was experiencing that as if it were me on the deathbed, saying it.

The maturity he has at the end still gets to me. His body even changes when he meets the man god. His soul changes. It is not even his body anymore.

And everything before that makes it land. He builds a stable life and then tries to protect it. He was content. Then the challenges come. The man god is trying to do anything to kill him and his descendants, and really that is just risk management. Damage limitation. The way I understand it, the man god knows one of Rudeus's descendants will eventually help Orsted either kill him or lock him away, and he has been losing that fight for a very long time already, so he is trying to ruin the thing Rudeus built before it can grow into the thing that beats him.

Here is one of the things I like most. The main character is not even Rudeus. It is Orsted. Rudeus is a side character at the end of it. So the story does not end when Rudeus dies. He dies and the story keeps going, and that is the whole thing.

I have not read all the way to the end, so I do not know exactly how it closes. But from what I have read so far, the objective he was carrying did not die with him. It got carried by his descendants, the ones who come after him, and that is the part that keeps going past where he stops. There was stuff Rudeus himself could never finish. His family finished what he left behind.

That is the one that really gets me, and I get emotional talking about it, because it is true outside the show too. You build something and you do not get to see it through. A ton of your descendants end up doing things you wished you could do when you were a kid, things you wanted and never reached. You hand it forward and it keeps moving without you.

The story just hits. It is something you relate to, something you feel easily, something that sticks. It is definitely one of my favorite animes, and it is one of those I know I will come back to.