English Dub Review: Didn’t I Say to Make My Abilities Average in the Next Life?, “Didn’t I Say We’re Doing Everyone’s Backstories?!”

Overview (Spoilers Below)

The girls gather around a campfire and take turns sharing their pasts.

Our Take

If you were still wondering just how self-aware this show is, the title of this week’s episode should be all the evidence you need. It doesn’t get any more obvious than this. And there’s so much backstory that they felt the need to nix the opening animation this week.

Reina’s backstory is your bog-standard tragic past. Her parents were killed by bandits. She gets taken in by the group of hunters that saved her from said bandits and they raise her. Then they’re killed by bandits. Bandits seem to be something of a convenient plague in this world. They’re killing people’s parents left and right. Reina’s tale is sad but wholly unoriginal. 

Though Reina’s past does nothing to embellish her character, the effects it has on the present are more interesting. Reina greatly detests bandits, as you can imagine, and whenever the party encounters them she wants them summarily killed. The other girls protest this, saying that just killing them without at least questioning them first is unjust. This small debate they have adds a small wrinkle to their relationship. Any further discourse that may result from this disagreement may also add some much-needed depth to this show. 

Pauline and Mavis’ backstories are more or less what you would expect given how their characters have been portrayed thus far. 

Pauline is from a merchant family who fell into a trap set by a rival merchant, who her mother is forced to marry. Both mother and daughter put on an air of total obedience to hide their schemes and hatred. It’s darker and more upsetting than you’d expect, much like Pauline herself.

Mavis is the girl who wants to become a knight, but her dad won’t let her, so she runs away from home. The dead simplicity her past is in stark contrast to the trauma the other girls have faced. The show itself even takes the time to acknowledge this fact.

And then there’s Mile herself, who obviously gets the most needlessly elaborate backstory of them all. After she got reincarnated into a fantasy world as the daughter of a noble, her life is just one big train ride of tropes. And when these tropes appear, Mile acknowledges that it is a trope through explicit dialogue. This happens constantly, just one after the other. 

This anime is so self-aware that now it’s taking itself apart and explaining each component. “This thing is tired and unoriginal. But it’s funny when we do it because we took the time to point out how tired and unoriginal it is.” This sounds like it’s coming off as a parody or a satire, but it doesn’t have the respect or the insight of either of those things. It’s just parroting tropes for the sake of parroting tropes. Good works of referential humor alter or modify what it is referencing and that is where its creativity lies. There is no creativity here and it just comes across like a dry anatomy lesson. 

Also, apparently, all of the magic in this world is powered by nanomachines. This brings up a ton of questions that the show will probably never bother to answer. The one question I’ll ask is, why complicate your world like this? Just have magic be magic instead of having a big mechanical secret like this for the sake of a few dumb jokes. 

We learned about our main characters this week. We also learned about the anime itself. But I do not feel enlightened by any of this new knowledge. If anything, I feel like I wasted my time. At this point, I just want the next episode to have something original, even if only just a little.