My Instant Death Ability
A review of season one
My Instant Death Ability is a fantasy adventure-comedy, an isekai parody, that fails to entertain in any way, on any level: it fails as a fantasy adventure and as a comedy; it fails as an isekai and as a parody. Rushed, vacuous, convoluted, dull, predictable, and most of all forgettable, it is the sort of parody that makes me look back fondly on the least beloved entries in the parent genre for the endearing sincerity and simplicity of their incompetence. Come back, Reign of the Seven Spellblades, all is forgiven!
Let me say a few words about the genre. It’s not unusual for new fantasy series to embroider themselves with isekai kitsch: it’s practically a cost of doing business, and it doesn’t necessarily harm the story. Going someplace new is an evergreen theme, for Odysseus as much as Kirito, and the video game skill tree our hero might unlock upon arriving someplace new is a harmless bit of kitsch. Ideally, perhaps, the story would include no extraneous elements, but plenty of watchable shows sprint through a tolerable half-episode of isekai overhead before settling in for the real story, which turns out to have nothing to do with reincarnated teenagers assigning skill points.
My Instant Death Ability, on the other hand, wallows in isekai slop from start to finish, doubling down on kitsch at every opportunity, indulging in all the worst excesses of the setting without once delivering on the core appeal of fantasy adventure — which, by the way, has been parodying itself for years. My One-Hit Kill Sister can be considered a parody of a fantasy adventure, and in any case it’s a lot of fun to watch; My Instant Death Ability can be considered an insult to the viewer, and it’s not even a clever insult.
As rushed as it is vacuous, the show is watchable, barely, as a kind of twenty-minute weekly chore. Nothing lasts and nothing matters: establish a location, introduce a character, kill the character, leave the location; no stakes, no conflict, and no lasting consequences. If it ever slowed down enough to convey the plot, or if it ever asked us to care, even a little, about any of the characters, then it would simply be infuriating. As it stands, I did manage to point my eyes toward the screen for most of the runtime, though if you asked me now what happened to the sword master, or what the sage was trying to achieve, or why the robot turned into a dragon, I honestly couldn’t tell you.
Anyone with eyes can see at once why the show doesn’t work. You don’t need to know what words like “structure” and “pacing” mean: the director clearly doesn’t. It looks bad, sounds bad, makes no sense, and serves no purpose. The comedy consists entirely of yelling. For half the runtime, half the screen is taken up by title cards for roughly fourteen thousand characters, half of which die each episode, and I wish the other half had died too. There is one cute girl, but she spends every scene yelling at a fat ghost.
I may be misremembering some of that, but I’m not going to check, because I don’t care and it doesn’t matter. No one should watch this show, and it’s embarrassing that it was made. I can forgive the people responsible for it, and I don’t think they deserve to go to prison, but a hundred hours of community service does seem appropriate.
Originally published on my Substack.
