It may feel hypocritical, right after finishing Seitokai Yakuindomo and enjoying the hell out of it, to turn around and complain about KonoSuba for having a male lead whose sole job is to tsukkomi the trifecta of women who follow him around. But complain about it I will, because if the former has strong but eccentric girls being funny for the sake of being funny, then the latter has three “talented” invalids, with no purpose other than eye candy and making a dumb bland guy seem more intelligent by comparison, albeit more bland as well. I don’t care that it brings him from outside the fantasy world setting in order to make him, and by extension the show, more self-aware. In a world where every other fantasy series showcases its ultimate self-awareness about fantasy stories with teenage adventurers, the most this can distinguish itself is being more deprecating to its characters.
In a first episode ripped straight from the 90’s classic Yu Yu Hakusho (not that they’ve chosen a bad show to copy by a long shot), the shut-in Kazuma is walking by the road one day in a rare foray into the outdoors, only to attempt to save a girl about to be run over in the street, dying in the process. Whisked away to the afterlife, he finds out that it was a misunderstanding, and the girl would have been alright anyway, but that this seemingly unfortunate scenario will provide him with the opportunity to travel to another world, an RPG land with adventurers, quests, levels, guilds, demon kings, and everything in between. What’s more, he can take any one thing with him on his quest, be it riches, an accursed sword, high-level magic, or, as he eventually picks, Aqua the useless goddess in the corner picking fun at him for dying prematurely and hurrying him along. So off they go, both useless level one adventurers, stuck doing menial chores just to scrape by. Vengeance is sweet indeed.
For a goddess, Aqua does an immediate 180 from composed and heavenly to demented and hysteric, proving herself useless in all but bizarre emergency circumstances and performing party tricks. I find it hard to entertain the argument that her ability to solve major crises by raising the dead back to life, purifying great evil, and flooding the field with immense tidal waves make her a useful and worthy character; more often she is being swallowed by a frog, posturing from the back lines, or causing so much damage that the pair end up deep in debt. She is the centerpiece of every joke, and at some point it is almost sad to see reeling in the shock of her own failings, because not even the authors deemed her worthy of anything better. Then she turns around and brags, screams, and pouts her way across the screen and the moment is lost.
Their two compatriots only fare slightly better, mainly by occupying slightly less screentime. Megumin is a preteen with delusions of grandeur, specializing in (read: only capable of) making a single giant explosion, then passing out for the rest of the day. Her childish fantasies mix with weird sexual innuendoes about explosions and her staff to create a less than stunning image, even if her explosions sometimes get them out of the trouble she got them into in the first place.
The third member is Darkness, the misnomered crusader, cutting a valiant image of flowing blond hair and shining armor to accompany her holy sword, protecting all her friends from in front of the front lines. How can that be reinterpreted as only comedic negatives? She is incompetent of hitting a single sword stroke, but she also gets off on getting hit herself, the most masochistic of all masochists that the world could possibly hold. Putting her in the front lines, absorbing every blow while having her drool and fantasize about the lewd sexual violations that wait at the end of her defeat, shoots beyond demeaning and crosses firmly into disgusting. At one point they even set her up to be sexually assaulted, only to play it off because her masochistic fetishes prevented her from saying no. I almost threw up in my mouth.
The world has monsters, quests, and breasts. We spend the whole season watching these four try and move past the beginner’s town and up to the more important quests, but while the early episodes showing them trying to scrape by and make a living are sympathetic enough, pretty soon they are screwing around for no purpose other than whining about their lot in life. Funny enough, Kazuma dies at one point and is almost sent back to Earth, the world he has longed for the whole show, but in a completely unbelievable sequence he starts crying and realizes that where he really wants to return to is that world, with his friends by his side. Not five minutes later he is back to complaining about the worthless world he lives in. Two episodes later, KonoSuba ends with nothing having been accomplished, a seamless transition into the next season. I deeply regret he didn’t go back to earth and spare us both the useless finale and the season yet to come. I would rather have spent that time watching him be a shut-in out in the Japanese countryside instead.