Hear me out, I know that previously I already addressed several themes of Isekai and reverse Isekai without ever actually writing an article on the genre and its evolution, but to be fair there are people out there who did this way better (thinking at you Gigguk, the Isekai gigachad – you da real MVP). In other words, this will be another piece that will assume you have at least a partial understanding of the anime industry within the past couple of years.
So let me hit you with four seemingly random words: Dead Mount Death Play.
Dead Mount Death Play is an ongoing manga (about eleven volumes as I’m writing this) that recently received an anime adaptation. It belongs to that reverse Isekai genre that I was mentioning, when the character from another world is reincarnated in our own.
So at this point, what is that spin that makes this anime at the very least a worth-while watch?
I had once talked about deconstruction and how playing with the themes for renovation purposes is important; that is an aspect where Dead Mount Death Play shines. In the first episode one would assume that it’s a very typical reversed Isekai trope: your main character, the good paladin, that is killed by the antagonist and then reawakens in our world. Well, at least that is what you are lead to think. The reincarnated character is actually the necromancer that the paladin was fighting, and here things start getting interesting. As the (now-known) protagonist’s backstory is unfolding, you discover that he does not resemble his initial depiction. Yes, you may argue that this technique would be banal at this point – expect the unexpected and so on – but how the nuances between good and evil are continuously questioned and slowly presented keeps you ‘hooked’.
The body in which the necromancer awakens in our world, appertains to the boy of a rich family, a boy that had been assassinated. You discover of the Underworld of Shinjuku, a place where ‘trouble-makers’ (powerful serial killers and seemingly supernatural beings) gather. By this point, the flow of the story becomes that of a detective novel, with a special branch of police investigators trying to arrest these psychopaths on the one hand and the necromancer trying to understand which member of the boy’s family had tried to kill him on the other. To add to this mysterious dimension, enter mana and magic, a feature that the necromancer is still capable to use in our dimension (but also possibly even some of the trouble-makers).
Again, seems like a good watch, but what is the true selling point?
Well, I raise you how the protagonist interacts with his new surroundings, discovering the differences between secondary and primary world, but more specifically how his own backstory fits with everything. He had been emarginated in his previous life as a necromancer and even upon helping several children to survive a harsh environment, the religion of the secondary world had killed them off for fraternizing with an impure being. The necromancer portrays the injustices of his own world and we as readers can empathize with them and to an extent even correlate them to our own. That’s the rub, that is the characteristic that I appreciated in this twist of a reverse Isekai. For now, I only had the opportunity to enjoy the anime and did not manage to get to up to speed with the manga, but if the writer keeps this pacing and has clear ideas, I believe it will be a very good series by the time it ends.
Also, the characterization of some of the ‘trouble-makers’ is really compelling(reflecting the ‘rule of cool’ as well), their backstories and the sense of mystery the writer creates within them is fascinating; even though admittedly some of them are pretty much psychopaths.
[PS: I realize there is a bit of fanservice going on here and there, which apparently is tenfold in the manga, and that it is one of those cases that is gratuitous and subtracts from the immersion, but the anime is still a good watch]