I fucking love isekais. Unfortunately, what I like about isekais (discovering another world and how it relate to our own) is fundamentally incompatible with what most other people like about isekais (discovering another world with the certainty that our world will NEVER be relevant again). That is, I dare say, quite unfortunate. Every day I fight for my life in the isekai tag.
There is an isekai I watched recently though that REALLY scratched that itch, and the name is Amphibia.
The Premise
Amphibia is a show that aired between 2019 and 2022. It’s about one Thai-American kid, Anne Boonchuy, who ends up whisked away in a strange fantasy world filled with, you guessed it, amphibians: talking frogs, toads and newts, who are all bewildered by this weird creature that suddenly showed up in their backyard. The show will follow Anne as she gets to know this new world, grows as a person, and most importantly, tries to find her way home.
Banger takes on isekai tropes
Let's make this clear: Amphibia is not an isekai about going into another world and getting cool powers and kicking ass. Amphibia is an isekai about being lost as fuck. It’s about being in a world you don’t know the rules of, whether it’s about physical rules (ie: what wild animal could kill you here? A fuckton, as it stands) or social rules (ie: sorry girl you can’t apply human logic to frog politics.) The protagonist, Anne Boonchuy, spends weeks in the wild eating moss and fearing for her life, until she finally finds some friendly locals to lend her a hand- and even then, everyone Anne meets react with confusion at best and hostility at worst. Anne is an Outsider to Amphibia. She acts wrong. She looks wrong. It’s going to take Anne a while to adapt to this new world, and it’s going to take this world even longer to accept her.
Another isekai aspect I appreciate: the story will not let you forget than Anne had a whole life prior to this mess. She’s not just a sims spawning into this new world with random knowledge from her original world. Everything she does, in good or bad, can be directly explained by her experience in her origin world. It’s not just “oh let me introduce you to x thing from my world that is objectively better than yours.” It’s “in my world, I used to help my parents cook. Let me show you thai cuisine.” It’s “in my world, I was a bit hyper, so my parents signed me up to Muay Thai. Let me show it to you.” It’s “in my world, the teachers always looked down on me, so I distrust all figures of authority by default.” She’s a character resulting of all the things that had happened to her prior to the whole isekai thing. It also has the neat side-effect of making me more invested in this kid’s quest to go home; I can see that she has friends and family and a whole lot of things to go back to, instead of just “I need to go home because we need a plot somehow.”
You also learn early on that she wasn’t the only isekaiter who ended in Amphibia. That’s great for many reason, but what I personally like is how different these characters' experience of the isekaiting is, and therefore how different their opinion of it is; someone who landed in a richly developed city will certainly have a different view of the world than someone who spent two weeks in jail, for instance. This makes for some very interesting character dynamics. (Most notably, there’s a character I would describe as “your typical modern isekai protagonist,” and another as “not quite Vriska or Catra but definitely kins them both,” and the conflicts that arise from these people taking sides in Amphibia’s frog politics are glorious.)
Speaking of,
The Characters
Anne is the main protagonist of this show. She’s great! She starts of as, well, your typical teenager, which was a surprise to me: I’m so used to soft protags who want to do good that I was genuinely thrown off by Anne’s “fuck authority also I really wanna be lazy and loved” attitude. That’s not to say she’s not a good person, but she certainly have a lot of character development to go through, and boy, is that development stellar.
All the other secondary characters slap, honestly. Even the most minor character have hints of a long, rich backstory. They’re people, with entire lives behind them. Of course, for background characters, you’ll have to make do with hints only, but it’s still really effective in giving you a sense of oh. They all have their own individual journey. In fact, the entire first season is about learning to know the background characters one by one. You will come to love these frogs.
As for the less minor characters, there are quite a few times where I found myself surprised by them, looked back at their previous appearances, and thought oooh I that makes SO much sense (or the other way around, saw a character do shit, learned of their backstory afterwards, and oh THAT’S why you were Like This.) I know I already mentioned it earlier, but man, it’s such a pleasure to see different characters react to the isekai situation. Do you hate it or love it? Do you want to go back to your original world? What are you willing to do for this purpose? Who would you side with in the messy landscape that is this world’s politics? How much of this world and its people do you know, really, how much did you bother to learn, what did you focus on? Everyone has a different answer. More often than not, these answer clash.
Chekov's Armory
Amphibia’s structure is a bit strange. It’s mostly a fantasy sitcom with sides of plot, but it progressively evolves into a shounen anime as time pass on. Maybe you’ll like it, maybe you won’t. I know I initially had trouble getting past the first season for this very reason.
But thing is, even the most innocuous, stupid-sounding episode will introduce important elements to you for later. Maybe it’ll flesh out some background character. Maybe it’ll reinforce someone’s character flaw. Maybe it’ll explain to you some small worldbuilding element.
And all these things? They will be relevant. All these checkov’s guns will fire, often at once, and it might be very painful or really glorious but you will feel the bullet through your guts. It’s absolute stellar writing and I know that towards the end of the show I was constantly pointing at my screen Di Caprio style like “this thing!! I remember this thing!! Holy shit I can’t believe they brought it up again!!” Everything, every little thing is another brick to build up the conflicts and their resolution. It’s grand.
Blood and Violence
Listen if you have some guy get stabbed on screen in your children’s show it will grab my attention. Hopefully it’ll grab yours too!
Final Words
So now you have a good idea of what I like about Amphibia! There’s a ton I didn’t include for spoiler reason (I tried to keep the spoilers here as vague as possible haha but trust me there’s SO much good stuff, especially regarding the isekai aspect & the characters) but it should give you the gist of it. It’s definitely one of the best shows I have watched as of late, and it’s become one of my favorite isekais of all times.
Just a fair warning, though: I mentioned it earlier, but I really do need to emphasize that the show starts off as a children’s sitcom. If you give it a watch, you will have to sit through a bunch of episodes about learning various aesops before you can get to the stuff that drove me wild. So, like, temper your expectations for the beginning haha.