the unwanted undead adventurer insomniacs after school season 2
I’d be exaggerating if I said Isekai Ojisan is the funniest isekai I’ve ever seen, but I simply can’t get enough of its dry, meta humor. Paired with a relatively drab setting and a daffy soundtrack (complete with the goofy ukulele bend), the timing and delivery of the uncle’s lines are just awesome. He manages to look extremely incel-y but has the most dawg-esque personality you could ask for. Despite being infuriatingly dense, unintelligent, and kind of creepy, that man is certainly the star of this season. In fact, the livelihood of the show thrives on this fact, making use of the uncle’s utter stupidity and inability to read social cues to set up funny and interesting situations.
Though the rest of the cast is relatively flat (even the uncle can’t be called dynamic), they’re all quirky and fun to watch. Considering that the main focus of the work is on its comedy, any and all lack of development is completely passable in my opinion.
A more accurate comparison would be with Cube x Cursed x Curious - both of these series successfully manage to replicate some aspects of Monogatari while failing as a story overall. What’s also interesting is that these parallels in execution exist despite the fact that the two imitator series in question focus on entirely distinct elements of the Monogatari formula. C3 is an action harem where the protagonist does psychotherapy for girls with supernatural afflictions. And Undead Girl Murder Farce is a supernatural detective full of verbal foreplay between a human-turned-supernatural invincible MC and his aristocratic, sharp-witted Yamato Nadeshiko girlfriend. Which doubles as a description of one more series, Kyokou Suiri, by the way, when I call all these shows “imitations,” I REALLY mean it.
But enough about their similarities, the actual important part is the differences. The unique selling point of Monogatari is the best prose ever created by man and post-modern reflections on the otaku culture. The unique selling point of Kyokou Suiri is the namesake “made-up deductions” deconstruction of the murder mystery genre. And this is where the troubles with Undead Girl Murder Farce begin, it just doesn’t have a unique selling point. It’s set in the XIX century Europe, except it’s not really the XIX century Europe, but rather The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen cinematic universe, with Sherlock Holmes, Jack the Ripper, Arsene Lupin and so on appearing as characters. Which has been done to death.