Isekai anime are no stranger to controversies, but there are a few releases in particular that have become notorious among fans for how far they really push the envelope of what they can get away with. With so many new Isekai anime releases hitting screens every few months, the idea of this genre has expanded to include all sorts of twists on the core format. While they still have a regular person transported to a new fantasy world, many of these shows take on an extra layer in order to stand out from the rest of the fact.
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For one reason or another, there are seven major Isekai that have sparked some big controversies over the years among fans. But it’s not always for the reason you’d think at first. Some of these shows just faced a bad luck and a fan backlash, some of these shows were extremely sexually explicit, some took on darker subjects with minors involved, and others were just altogether uncomfortable. Read on for a breakdown of some of the most notably controversial Isekai releases out there.
7). The Beginning After the End
With the overwhelmingly negative response to the first season of The Beginning After the End from fans, you’d think it was filled with some of the most egregious anime materials out there. It was so poorly received that it got a fan petition with nearly 60,000 people signing hoping for the anime to restart with a different studio. But ultimately, this controversy wasn’t about anything in the show itself.
It was just fans of TurtleMe’s original webcomic hoping for a more standout anime adaptation than they got. They had their hopes up so high that any version of the show would be found lacking in comparison. It’s definitely the worst kind of controversy as it was fans turning a mole hill into a mountain, but unfortunately that gets it a spot on this list by default. The negativity around it was far too loud to ignore.
6). Do You Love Your Mom and Her Two-Hit Multi-Target Attacks?
These rankings are definitely going to vary for anime fans considering how comfortable you are with certain subjects. To try and get to as close to objectivity as possible, it’s important to weigh how that uncomfortable material stacks against how good of a story or production it is. For example, if you don’t really mind incest, then Dachima Inaka and Pochi Iida’s Do You Love Your Mom and Her Two-Hit Multi-Target Attacks? won’t bother you too much as it’s a son getting transported to another world with his mother.
His mother is the one that gets all of the Isekai cheat powers and weapons, and he can only watch from the sidelines while she’s worshipped and goes on the adventure he wanted to star in. Their relationship isn’t negative or anything, but the motherly aspect of the lead character really gets amped up. There are scenes where the two get into fully nude embraces, and she’s continually sexualized through her son’s eyes. You can’t even enjoy the cheesecake without feeling icky because of that. Outside of that, it’s just kind of bland otherwise.
5). Now and Then, Here and There
Now and Then, Here and There has a lot of seedier elements built into it that put children in danger, but it’s all in service of offering a terrifyingly grounded world in the midst of war. When Shu tries to save a mysterious girl, he ends up being transported to an entirely new version of Earth being ravaged by a deadly war. There’s a dictator controlling the military, this world is fighting over the last available resources, and children are forced into the war and regularly die in brutal fashions.
The anime doesn’t shy away from the grim realities of a war torn society, and it’s through the lens of children that makes it even harder to stomach. Abuse, exploitation, slavery, and more abound, but it’s all in service of a truly fantastic story at the end of the day. It’s got controversial subjects in with minors at the center of all of the danger, but it all fulfills a purpose. It never feels like it’s doing things just for the shock factor, and ends up much lower on this list because of that.
4). Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation
Compare that to Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation, which is built with that shock factor in mind. A shut-in suddenly dies after going through some terrible life events, and wakes up in a new fantasy world. His perverse nature carries on into his new life, and comes through at a very young age as he lusts over his new mother and other women in his life. It’s for this reason that the series really rubbed fans the wrong way when it all first began. But the hollow and early perverse nature of Rudeus ended up becoming a huge part of his overall journey as a growing hero.
The anime uses this to dig into the why he’s so egregious at first. The second season even has Rudeus dealing with erectile dysfunction for an entire cour of episodes, and with it sees him realize that all these perverse aspects about his personality were just veiling a terrible self-esteem that he needed to get over. It’s another series where a 30 something year old mind tends to lust after minors due to his poor sexual development in his first life, but watching its many episodes then breaks it all down in an increasingly intriguing manner.
3). The Rising of the Shield Hero
The Rising of the Shield Hero is another show that started out extremely aggressive in its ideas, but has mellowed out to expand into a very interesting world in its later seasons. But fans are likely only going to stick around for the first season as Naofumi quickly gets into owning slaves shortly after the anime began. He’s brought to another world as a summoned hero, but because he’s the Shield Hero he’s thought of as less than by the kingdom and shunned by society.
He’s accused of sexually assaulting a woman, thus decides to vow revenge. He can’t fight on his own (as his weapon is only good for defense) and ends up buying a child slave to use as a soldier in battle. He gets his revenge in the first season and ultimately softens up over the course of the series from that point on, but it’s a lot tougher to get fans to jump back into the anime after such an extreme start. And with that core idea of revenge being settled so early on in its run, it does kind of raise questions of why slavery needed to be so central to the anime in the first place.
2). How Not to Summon a Demon Lord
How Not to Summon a Demon Lord ends up combining both slavery and full-on nudity into its package. It’s honestly one of the best shows on this list if you’re looking for cheesecake in your Isekai anime releases, but it’s still got those seedier elements. Diablo is a gamer from another world who’s brought into a fantasy world as his game character, but a mix up in the summoning ends up making two girls his slaves instead. But it’s also just slavery in name only, if that makes any sense.
The trio have a respectable dynamic between them, and the series has quite a few sweet episodes. But even then the controversy stems from how heavily the show had been censored. This was even more true for the second season as it ramped up those more explicit elements even further, and was even taken off of YouTube and other platforms for a time. Even with all of that in mind, there’s one show that somehow goes even further and still got to air on TV.
1). Harem in the Labyrinth of Another World
The 2020s went through a period where some very extreme anime ended up on our screens, and fully licensed by international distributors. These shows bordered on being full-on “adult,” and Harem in the Labyrinth of Another World is one of those cases. Passione is a studio that knows what they are good at when it comes to offering heavily explicit materials, and if you’re looking for that you’ll find it in spades here as its main character steadily buys slaves in order to build his dream of having a harem.
Not only does it use slavery as one of its core elements, the “payoffs” to any adventure are increasingly explicit adult scenes. There are probably no other reasons needed to explain why this is such a controversial series (even when cede episodes are heavily censored), but that’s the show it’s setting out to be. It’s not using any of this to further a grand narrative or say something important, it’s just explicitness for explicitness sake. Controversy for the sake of controversy.
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