The Eminence in Shadow
A review of seasons one and two
The Eminence in Shadow is a comedy subversion of a fantasy adventure where the joke is that the hero of the story doesn’t understand what’s happening and doesn’t take it seriously. It’s complicated without being clever, proving that layers of irony and self-awareness are not a substitute for meaningful conflicts, character growth, or properly timed punch lines. By season two, any given episode was barely holding my attention long enough to deliver its payload of mildly enjoyable action-comedy fan service.
I’m told you need a very high IQ to understand Rick and Morty. Whether that’s true or not, you do need a remarkably high degree of media literacy to understand what The Eminence in Shadow was trying to achieve. Cid, a Japanese teenager, is obsessed with acquiring the power of a fantasy anime protagonist. Coincidentally, Cid dies, gets reincarnated in a quasi-medieval world with magic, and promptly acquires unlimited power, just like in a fantasy anime. At that point, Cid decides to devote his second life to making that world conform even more closely to fantasy tropes by re-enacting his favourite scenes from anime. For example, he wants to battle a demon cult alongside a harem of busty ninjas, so he invents a demon cult and recruits a gaggle of busty ninjas to cosplay with him. Unbeknownst to Cid, the busty ninjas fall for all of his ridiculous lies. Also unbeknownst to Cid, all of his ridiculous lies are coincidentally accurate, right down to the demon cult’s made-up name. Thus, Cid alone somehow continues to misinterpret as cosplay the battle he started against the demon cult he thinks he invented, even as his over-the-top finishing moves level city blocks, killing hundreds.
It’s a bafflingly complicated premise for a fairly generic fantasy story. That is, if we ignore the protagonist’s internal monologue, if we adopt any other character’s point of view, the events of the plot play out as one would expect in a typical fantasy world, complete with an overpowered main character. He is, in fact, the shadowy leader of a powerful faction of busty ninjas battling a demon cult, so his actions make sense on a surface level. His monologuing merely wraps them in layers of spurious irony: no one else knows that he’s lying, but he doesn’t know that his lies are true. It’s like wearing a clown costume under your regular clothes so no one ever sees it. Actually, it’s even more pointless than that: the possibility of a secret being exposed can create tension, but in this case, the secret can never be exposed, because the secret makes no sense.
For the record, this is not a parody of fantasy: it is not exaggerating genre tropes. Cid’s over-the-top finishing moves would hardly look out of place in Sword Art Online. It’s certainly a comedy subversion of fantasy, because of course we don’t expect a fantasy hero to be delusional and stupid. Unfortunately, as a fantasy adventure comedy, The Eminence in Shadow is hampered precisely by its subversive premise: again, the one thing that sets it apart from conventional fantasy is that the main character doesn’t understand what’s happening and doesn’t take it seriously. That does set up a lot of jokes, or a lot of repetitions of the same joke, but it also makes it difficult to get invested in the plot. That’s forgivable in a straight-up comedy: the girls from Survival Game Club can run over elderly Australians in a truck, and all is forgotten by the next episode. Eminence, on the other hand, is not exempt from earning our investment in the plot, both because the joke relies on juxtaposing a serious story with a ridiculous hero and because the dry business of the plot takes up so much of the screen time.
Like Overlord, the series suffers most from its unrelatable protagonist, who is never allowed to grow as a person because it would spoil the joke. After two seasons, Cid remains a mentally disturbed teenager with no interest in meeting girls or making friends, narcissistic to the point of being delusional and armed with overwhelming firepower: a school shooter in a wizard hat. Also like Overlord, the supporting cast of typical fantasy characters is far more interesting simply for being sincere, but they’re given too little attention and too little respect. When a beautiful princess falls for the school shooter, she becomes the butt of the joke because he’s not taking it seriously.
You can reverse-engineer a better fantasy series by leaving out a layer or two of irony. Here’s one: a self-aware protagonist is trying not to be the main character, but he can’t resist interfering with the plot; in the process, he inadvertently wins the heart of a beautiful princess, making him the main character after all. Fine. So why make him delusional? How does that help? If he knew what was happening and took it seriously, it would raise the stakes. Now what if we gave him a relatable motivation to interfere with the plot, instead of a weird pop culture obsession? Maybe he could even express a healthy interest in beautiful princesses. Oh, wait: I just wrote Trapped in a Dating Sim.
Or how about this: a genre-savvy protagonist winds up in a typical fantasy world, where he exploits common tropes to predict the tactics of a typical fantasy villain, making him uniquely qualified to be the hero. Fine. So why make him a narcissist? It’s easier to get invested when the hero actually cares about saving the world. Now what if his over-the-top finishing moves were justified by the extraordinary threat? Maybe the villain also knows how to exploit common tropes. Oh, wait: I just wrote Cautious Hero.
Here it is without the villain: an excitable protagonist recruits a harem of busty ninjas to battle a non-existent threat and has to redirect them to solving mundane problems. The villagers keep getting sick? Clearly, the river is infected with demonic parasites: have the busty ninjas build a water treatment plant. Take the fight against demonic corruption straight to city hall: have a busty ninja run for public office; land a finishing move on wasteful spending. Fine, now it’s a satire. I don’t know if that series exists already (KamiKatsu, perhaps), but the point is, practically any change toward greater sincerity would be an improvement. I will not wear the clown costume! Take me anywhere else, from The Dungeon of Black Company to The Last Dungeon Boonies.
Truthfully, if we take away its self-awareness, if we decline to be impressed by its nesting doll of irony, what is left of The Eminence in Shadow? Apart from the hero, the cast comprises, firstly, the fan service: two dozen barely developed female characters whose purpose is to fawn over Cid, though again not to the point that it can be called a parody, if indeed the sexless harem trope admits of parody; and, secondly, the blood bags: however many faceless male minions any given action scene requires to supply the school shooter with targets. In two seasons, I detected no meaningful conflicts. The jiggly ninjas are never in danger, so the action scenes are unexciting, even when Cid lands an extra-flashy finisher on an extra-large blood bag. Like Overlord, his opponents are the underdogs, making his casual brutality appear downright tacky.
The character growth is minimal. Cid is never allowed to change, and his delusional monologuing drags out many scenes, leaving too little time to develop even one dozen jiggly ninjas. On top of that, through the monologuing, Eminence effectively tells us not to get invested in the supporting cast, by making them the butt of the joke. As for the jokes, their execution is mostly dissatisfying, Cid’s intentional loss in the season one tournament being a clear example. The concept is fine: he’s trying not to be the main character, so he has to lose his match, but he can’t resist trying out every one of his lovingly rehearsed death animations. Unfortunately, his non-stop monologuing spoils the punch line, and it’s the same animation each time, and it goes on much too long. By season two, the comedy is practically perfunctory: Cid does something stupid for a stupid reason; the harem misinterprets that as a Machiavellian scheme, making them look stupid; and it all works out anyway because of a blatant plot contrivance.
Every episode is mildly enjoyable, delivering competent action-comedy fan service sprinkled with general anime weirdness. It’s not particularly outrageous stuff; once again, if the goal was to parody either fantasy, harem romance, or anime in general, then it didn’t go far enough. In a season with Ragna Crimson, Cid the school shooter looks downright tame. At least put the jiggly ninjas in danger! The paradox of general anime weirdness is that it always appears more outrageous in a story that takes itself more seriously. Future Diary shot up several schools, and it never stopped being funny. Indeed, Survival Game Club, in addition to being much funnier than The Eminence in Shadow, also somehow takes itself more seriously and appears more outrageous for it.
The Eminence in Shadow does fill a need: it is the perfect fantasy series for people who are embarrassed about enjoying fantasy. (Compare KonoSuba, the perfect fantasy series for people who hate fantasy.) You get to watch an overpowered main character battle a demon cult alongside a harem of busty ninjas, complete with screen-rattling finishers, Japanglish one-liners, and hypnotizing jiggles — and if anyone breaks into your house and accuses you of enjoying fantasy, you can tell him no, it’s bad and you hate it, but this one is bad on purpose: it’s a deconstruction of the genre, a commentary on the audience. When I said “Delta is best girl,” I was being ironic! Mystify your intruder with semiotics, and he may never suspect that you secretly do enjoy women’s breasts.
Or you can just tell him to leave. It is possible to enjoy genre fiction without layers of ironic detachment: I’m told Gladstone enjoyed Treasure Island (although he might have drawn the line at Future Diary). Of course the fantasy genre has its well-documented foibles. It has been two centuries since Carlyle admonished the ordinary poet, forever seeking in external circumstances, in some past, distant, conventional heroic world, the help which can be found only in himself. And how far have the critical sciences advanced in that time? What novel insights do they offer us? “OP MC! Power fantasy! Wish fulfillment!” Stop breaking into my house. None of that is notable. Heroic fiction predates written language: Achilles was overpowered. Don Quixote parodied heroic fiction in 1605. Dante wrote a self-insert isekai during the actual middle ages. Two centuries ago, every title was a paragraph long. There is nothing new under the sun, including lazy criticism. You can make any story sound stupid by describing it in a stupid way; that tells us nothing about the story, although it does tell us something about the critic. In every case, it is the execution that counts, and not a plot synopsis.
In short, the fantasy genre was not a problem in need of solving. Like any other genre, it has its tropes and its conventions. Think of them as writing prompts: channels for an author’s creativity, rather than limitations on it. They guide the audience, too. Tell us that a Japanese teenager has been reincarnated as the demon lord’s step-sister’s panties, and we understand immediately: we’re settling in for the real story, about being true to your harem of busty wolf-girls or something else we can all relate to.
The most derided tropes can serve a story well. I may be the only one who enjoyed it, but let me point out that Isekai Cheat Skill has an excellent theme: a good-natured boy with low self-esteem from being kicked around all his life has to learn to let himself be happy when things take a turn for the better. That’s why he doesn’t have to earn his overpowered abilities: because it serves the story to make him feel like he’s cheating. Now tell me: why is Cid overpowered? What narrative purpose does that serve? Or is it enough that the series has drawn our attention to the mere existence of the trope?
I do understand what The Eminence in Shadow was trying to achieve; I don’t just care enough about tropes to care about subverting them. I care about meaningful conflicts and character growth, but I didn’t get that. I’ll settle for well-crafted jokes with a side of general anime weirdness, but I didn’t really get that either. In the end, what I got was an alibi for enjoying genre fiction, which is one thing I didn’t need two seasons of. Eminence is an overcomplicated, self-indulgent fantasy series from which a patient viewer may be able to extract a kernel of mildly enjoyable action-comedy fan service.
Originally published on my Substack.
