Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation – 07 – May I Have This Dance?

Winter comes to Roa, and while Eris continues to excel in swordsmanship and earns praise from Ghislaine, she’s just as hopeless as ever with her academic studies. Nevertheless, she’s persevering. While she’d once throttle Rudeus if he told her her answers were wrong, she now simply puts her nose back to the grindstone to find the right answers.

One night, while inspecting his shamelessly realistic statuette of Roxy, Rudy gets a visit from one Edna Rayrune, who tells him about the particulars of Eris’ upcoming birthday party. She’ll be presented as a potential match for a lad form another noble family, whether she wants to be or not—it’s just the way this society works.

As such, she’ll need to perform a dance at the event, and it will have to be perfect, or she’ll bring shame on herself and the Boreas and Grayrat families. Bottom line, Edna wants to take some of Rudy’s tutoring time to spend Eris’ dancing lessons. Rudy is all too willing to get some free time, which he soon uses to explore the world’s other languages.

Winter turns to Spring, and Edna returns to Rudy, having made no progress with Lady Eris. Thus, the inevitable happens: Rudy tracks Eris down in her usual hiding spot in a barn and tells her he’ll help with her lessons by being her partner. While she reacts violently, she also accepts the offer. But in every lesson, Eris always ends up going faster than the music’s rhythm, resulting in their spinning out of control.

In between his dance lessons with Eris and brushing up on the beast god language with help from Ghislaine, Rudy finally gets a letter and package from Roxy, who is amazed he is tutoring the daughter of a lord, and also very much not appreciative of the creepily accurate statuette of her now in the possession of her perverted prince student, who she must immolate regularly.

Within the package is a hand-written textbook in the Demon God language with which Rudy is having the most trouble, despite being young and picking languages up much faster than an adult would. He says he can’t thank Roxy enough, but he could have done so easily by simply not distributing that statuette!

Eris’ big day arrives, and while she looks the part and greets her first suitor properly, their dance goes haywire fast, leaving her face down on the ground as all of the assembled nobles murmur about how the Boreas family is “doomed” with someone like her as their asset.

This is when Rudeus steps up to the plate, asks Eris for a dance, and tells her to close her eyes and not think about dancing, but to think about sparring. As we’ve seen in the past two episodes, Eris is a natural at swordsmanship, including pacing, body control, balance, and footwork. In other words, she’s already good at dancing, just not the usual kind you’d see in at a social function.

With Eris trusting in Rudy and Rudy trusting in her, the two captivate their audience with a gorgeous and lively performance. By the time Eris opens her eyes to see how well they’re moving, she can’t help but smile as widely as possible. As has been the case with their sparring scenes, the dancing is wonderfully staged and animated.

The party is more of a success than Rudy had expected; he captures the attention of several lovely single ladies, and draws the gentle ire of Philip, who’d still prefer if Rudy didn’t draw too much attention to himself—likely for political and strategic reasons.

That night, Rudy, Eris, and Ghislaine have a private after-party where he presents them with wands, as is traditional for a magic teacher to do. Eris, it should be noted, wants one of his statuettes. Ghislaine also gives Eris a gift for passing her swordsmanship lessons: a gold ring that supposedly keeps wolves from attacking you at night.

Rudy wakes up to find Eris asleep in his bed and defenseless, but before he can try anything sleezy he spots the ring and her wand, and decides not to do anything. He credits that with the ring doing it’s job, but I’d also like to think he felt a genuine pang of morality.

He then makes his way up a tower to the sound of Lord Sauros raping one of his beast-woman servants, another instance of Mushoku Tensei taking an unblinking look at the injustice, inequality, and inherent brutality of this time period, when a lord could do as he pleased with members of lower rungs of society. Rudy seems to shrug it off as just The Way Things Are.

After the servant runs off, Sauros points out a strange red orb in the sky with two sets of Saturn-like rings, telling Rudy that whatever it is, it’s not necessarily “a bad thing.” It’s a very awkward way to end the episode, but I’m sure we’ll see more of that orb next week. Until then, we continue to take the good (Rudy and Eris dancing, Ghislaine teaching Rudy) with the bad (Philip, Sauros, and Roxy’s prince)

Read Crow’s review of episode 7 here!

Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation – 06 – Calculating Change

After a major shakeup last week, MT slows down as we remain in Roa for the duration. Rudeus learns that while he played a vital role in protecting Eris, Ghislaine is to be given all credit for reasons related to the intricate politics of the Greyrats and the land they rule. He meets Phillip’s father Lord Sauros, the ruler of the Fittoa region of the Asura Kingdom, which includes the city of Roa.

Rudy immediately sees how much Eris both takes after and imitates her grandfather, from their penchant for punching to the way they cross their arms. As for Eris’ mother, let’s just say she doesn’t seem too fond of young Rudy—particularly the way his gaze lingers on her bosom.

Eris asked Lord Sauros to ask Rudy to teach her magic, but Rudy insists that Eris learn to ask for things on her own, and Sauros agrees. Rudy is shocked when the “proper” manner of asking him is for Eris to hold her hair like drooping beast person ears and say “nyan” after every sentence!

A month of tutoring passes. Eris learns to summon fire, and is all about sparring with Rudy, since she always mops the floor with him. Honestly, the animation is so good I could watch her beat him up all day. Her reading, writing, and math lessons, on the other hand, leave much to be desired. Whenever she’s tired of learning, she runs away; when he catches her, she punches him.

One of these times, she falls asleep in a barn, and Rudy sees fit to try to assault her by copping a feel and then attempting to steal her underwear. After two straight episodes of behaving himself, it’s disappointing to see him reverting to his baser ways. At least he gets immediate comeuppance: a brutal beating from Eris in the barn, and again when they spar and she doesn’t hold back.

One day during lessons, Eris simply snaps, and it dawns on Rudy: he hasn’t given her any time off. So the two of them and Ghislaine head out to Roa to see the sights and shop. While Rudy takes notes about the prices of goods in different parts of the market, a merchant who can tell he’s from the Lord’s manor presents him with across a fancy aphrodisiac that costs the equivalent of a million yen.

Rudy also checks out the magical tomes, and Eris, feeling generous, offers to buy him one. When he learns she’d simply get the money from her gramps, he offers her another lesson: only give gifts with money you earned. She learns how little he makes compared to her Sword King bodyguard, while he says they’ll ask her dad to start giving her an allowance.

As the sun starts to set, an odd shadow dances across the buildings and streets, and for the first time since arriving in Roa, Rudy spots a massive floating fortress in the sky. Eris and Ghislaine tell him it’s the fortress of the Armored Dragon King Perugius, hero of humanity who along with twelve servants defeated the Demon-God Laplace over four centuries ago.

It’s a lot of world lore suddenly dumped on us at once, but it’s nevertheless intriguing, and I hope we one day get to explore that fortress with Rudy. Until then, the tutoring continues back at the manor. Eris casually presents him with the vial of aphrodisiac which she bought with her allowance as a gift to him. The catch is, she doesn’t know what it is, and insists he tell her.

Once he lets slip that it’s an aphrodisiac, Ghislaine is on to him, and has no qualms about restraining him while Eris tries to tickle it out of him. The vial eventually breaks, and it’s a good thing too—I was dreading either Ghislaine or Eris suddenly becoming love-drunk. Still, my distaste for the insistence on keeping Rudy a pervert affected my score.

Check out Crow’s episode 6 review here!

Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation – 05 – Taking the Tsun with the Dere

Via a handwritten letter from Paul instructing him to read it out loud (Ghislaine can’t read), Rudeus learns about his new job as academic and magic tutor to a nine-year-old girl in the city of Roa, for whom Gislaine is both bodyguard and sword instructor. It’s a five-year commitment, ending when he turns 12, and in that time he’s forbidden to contact home.

Paul did this because he suspected Rudy and Sylphie might enter a co-dependent relationship that would be harmful for both of them. He also tells him the young lady is “fair game”, but hands off Ghislaine, whom he mentions having bedded previously. Fortunately, this is all we hear of Paul this week, and presumably for the next five years of Rudy’s life.

Rudy takes this sudden change in his life extraordinarily well for someone who had not only become comfortable in his previous life holed up in his room, but also became comfortable in his home village with Sylphie. He realizes one can become too comfortable, and life too easy. If this job will help pay academy, tuition, he’s game.

Upon meeting Phillip Boreas Greyrat, Rudy learns he’ll be under the employ of his father’s cousin (i.e. his cousin once removed), making his daughter, Eris, his second cousin. And while Phil says his daughter is “a bit willful”, that hardly does her justice. Rudy bows as a noble should, but is immediately dismissed as too young by the fiery, ultra-tsun Eris.

Eris brooks no back-talk, as when Rudy asks what age has to do with tutoring her, she slaps him across the face. He slaps back, but far from cowing her, she pounces and starts beating the shit out of him until he has to push her off with wind magic. She then chases him around the manor.

Despite this first interaction, Rudy isn’t ready to give up, which impresses Phil (at this point, all other tutor candidates quit). Rudy can see the challenge his father has laid out for him, and knows full well he’ll be laughed at if he turns tail and runs home.

More than that, Rudy has had his fill of being beaten up from his previous life. In his position as tutor he’s going to teach the intense, violent Eris that violence should never be the first resort, and one can’t get too comfortable committing it.

After proposing some kind of scheme with Phil to get Eris to accept him as her tutor, we cut to Rudy emerging from a wooden box with bound hands in a grimy dungeon. He wakes Eris up and explains the situation: they’ve been taken hostage by brigands.

When their captors enter and Eris treats them with immediate derision, she’s met with a level of violence she’s unable to keep up with. While she’s bloodied and missing several teeth, she’s still defiant. The degree to which she’s beaten also indicates to Rudy that the false kidnapping plan he arranged may have turned into the real thing.

Rudy is reasonably sure he could overpower the guards, but not sure enough to risk it, and in any case his first lesson as tutor is that might makes right, something he wants to avoid. Instead, he partially heals Eris, bars the door with stone, and busts through the window bars. Eris asks for help, but he’ll only take her with him if she promises not to yell and scream or be violent.

As the baddies bust through the barred door, Eris agrees, and Rudy whisks her off. The moment he’s fully healed her, she’s back to yelling and acting imperious. At this point he bids her farewell, but she soon forms up behind him, saying she was only joking and will honor their promise.

The two take a horse cart back to Roa without incident. The men who race ahead of them on horseback seem like bad news, but Rudy is condient once they’re within Roa’s walls that they’ll be safe. That is, until Eris is snatched up again and one of Phil’s attendants reveals he’s in league with the brigands to exact a ransom.

Rudy halts their escape with Eris by erecting a stone wall in their path and prepares for battle, but he’s outnumbered and surrounded. The baddies offer Rudy a generous cut of the ransom for his cooperation—equal to more than ten enrollments in Magic University with change to spare.

Rudy admits it’s a tempting offer, but if there’s one thing his dating games have taught him, it’s how betraying the girl for money can only bode poorly for one’s affection levels and chances of winning the girl’s heart. So he rejects the offer and launches a massive firework into the sky to blind the baddies, enabling him to snatch Eris out of their clutches.

Rudy is able to get some distance between him and the brigands and lays down suppressive fire magic, but one of the baddies practices the North God Sword Style, which includes deadly sword-throwing. Rudy cannot avoid the path of thrown sword or summon magic fast enough to deflect it.

Fortunately for him, Ghislaine saw the firework and headed for its launching point. Using her immense beastperson strength and speed, she’s able to make it in time to shatter the thrown blade into metal dust and kill two of the brigands in one sensational, fluid, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it movement.

It’s a moment that briefly but powerfully demonstrates the potential of a show as well-funded and lovingly made as Mushoku Tensei—it can match the artistry and badassery of Jujusu Kaisen or Demon Slayer. Rudy is also haunted by the sight of one of the dead brigands, who is headless and robed in blood. He can’t hear, freezes up, and has to be snapped back to coherence by Ghislaine. Compare that to Eris, who is just happy to see her bodyguard and doesn’t really react to the blood.

The intensity of what Rudy just went though stays with him when they return to the Boreas Greyrat home, otherwise none the worse for wear. Rudy deems his plan to be a failure, as in the end things spiraled out of his control and he and Eris could have ended up dead without intervention from Ghislaine. Notably, Eris slaps her father’s hand away when he tries to help her, as she prefers to get up herself.

Rudy turns to leave, but after a few beats, Eris turns back around and orders him to stop, then tells him he has “special permission” to call her Eris—no “lady”, just Eris. When he asks if that means she’ll let him teach her, she turns back around, but it’s clearly not a “no”, and his mood brightens appreciably.

While an archetypal tsundere out of the gate and throughout this episode, I still found Eris’s desire to stand on her own two feet and utter lack of patience for bullshit admirable. Like Rudy when he arrived in the world and to this day, she has a lot to learn, and from reading, writing, arithmetic and magic, Rudy has a lot to offer.

The faux-then-real kidnapping was a worthy means of bringing the two together, and showing us just how awesome Ghislaine is. I’m sad Sylphie gets the short end of the stick, but it should be a fun five years. I’m hoping they don’t fly by too fast!

Check out Crow’s review of episode 5 here.

Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation – 04 – Making It Work

This week, the OP theme is played, but this time over a beautifully somber sequence of the Greyrat household is steeped in the winter of discontent inside while buffeted by the literal snows of winter outside. Zenith is pregnant, which was an occasion for great joy…but so is Lilia, and Paul says it’s “probably” his (it’s definitely his).

It’s at this point that I admit that while checking MAL for Lilia’s seiyu (Lynn), I caught the little factoid that she’s described not just a maid, but Paul’s “second wife”. In hindsight, this complicated my understanding of her precise status up to this point. Turns out Zenith is very much not okay with Paul sleeping with her.

At the same time, Zenith cares a great deal about Lilia, and doesn’t like the prospect of Lilia taking a rough month-long trip to her hometown with hew newborn. Both she and the baby could die. Rudy doesn’t like that either, so he introduces a compromise to keep the family from being torn apart.

When Zenith tells Rudy that the mood is gloomy because Paul and Lilia were “bad”, Rudy comes to Lilia’s defense: she couldn’t refuse Paul; the fact she’s in his employ aside, he has a “hold” on her that resulted in their illicit night together. That being the case, Lilia doesn’t deserve to suffer for something Paul did wrong.

Moved by her son’s words, Zenith decides that Lilia and her child will stay in the family…because they are family. Rudy knows he only dug Paul’s grave deeper, but it was a grave Paul dug himself, even if Lilia confides to us that she seduced him. Hearing the couple’s lovemaking in the next room created pent-up urges, and one night she left her door open so he’d see her washing herself.

Lilia believes Rudy understood full well that it wasn’t all Paul’s fault, but he forgave her anyway for “giving in to desire” and betraying Zenith. She also knows that by forgiving her and guiding the family to a compromise, Rudy saved her life. She had always been justifiably skeeved out by Rudy—even to the point she feared he was possessed by the devil!—but now resolves to spend her life repaying him—and have her child serve the future Lord Rudeus.

Zenith’s son daughter Norn and Lilia’s daughter Aisha are born, and Paul for all intents and purposes has two wives to care for (and take orders from). Rudy also notices how much more open with him Lilia becomes after the Great Compromise, and learns that she and Paul once studied swordsmanship at the same training hall…where Paul deflowered her…while she was sleeping.

My opinion of Paul plummets with each passing episode. Yet for all of Paul’s many faults (and, let’s be honest, crimes), Rudy respects him because he’s strong…and not just physically, mind you. Paul is also someone with whom Rudy can engage in “guy talk”, not just about women, but how to be a better man. It’s a path full of mistakes and failures, but Paul is hopeful Rudy will learn from them, even if he ends up making more of his own.

Paul discussing how underwhelming rich girl sex is, on the other hand? Probably going too far. But that comes up when Paul asks his son if he’s contemplating going to school, since he’s around the age kids start to go. Paul worries a kid like Rudy will be bullied (while also being confident Rudy could handle it) and questions the utility of him mixing it up with all those spoiled rich kids. Still, it’s ultimately Rudy’s call.

Rudy, meanwhile, starts to sense that Sylphiette could one day surpass him in magical prowess. When he mentions going off to the magic academy to continue his training, Sylphie reacts by hugging him tightly and bawling her eyes out until he says he’s not going anywhere. And why would he, when he has such a wonderful life with her and his family?

Things become more complicated when Paul interrupts Rudy jerking off hugging his pillow by presenting him with a letter from Roxy. She is well, training a similarly perverted young prince while also improving her own magical skills. She thought she’d hit a wall, but learned otherwise with the benefit of time and experience in new places. She writes that if Rudy feels similarly, he should enroll at Ranoa Magic University.

Rudy doesn’t want to make Sylphie feel sad or lonely, but he also doesn’t want to disappoint Roxy. In such a conundrum, he must fashion another compromise, as he did to save his family. He tells Paul, Zenith and Lilia of his intention to enroll at Ranoa, but requests that they pay Sylphie’s tuition along with his. She’s Ranoa material, but her family lacks the funds.

Paul refuses, but not because he doesn’t want his son to have his way. He has three valid reasons for doing so. For one thing, he’s still intent on making Paul into a capital-S Swordsman, and with Rudy’s lack of progress now is not the time to stop his training. Secondly, Rudy is still young, and Paul can’t neglect his parental responsibilities by sending Rudy away. Third and finally, they actually can’t afford to pay for Sylphie as well as him.

Rudy doesn’t argue, or even get mad. He probably knew he’d get a response like this. Instead, he introduces a counterproposal, asking Paul to find him a well-paying job so that by the time his dad deems him ready to go to Ranoa, he’ll have saved up enough to pay Sylphie’s way himself. When Paul tells him that “might not be the best thing” for Sylphie, Rudy acknowledges that, but it will be for him. Paul did tell him earlier to stick with one woman, and Rudy intends to do just that.

Paul accepts this proposal, but exactly what he has in mind for Rudy is left up in the air until an ornate wagon pulls up to the Greyrats’ front gate. Ghislaine, a hulking beast-woman, climbs out, and she’s welcomed by both Paul and Zenith. She’s the first beast-person Rudy’s encountered, and to his credit he doesn’t leer at her or make any unsolicited comments about her.

Paul asks a cryptic question, “What if I told you to stay away from Sylphie?”, then launches into a vicious sparring session, which ends with Paul using an advanced Water-God move on his son, knocking him out. When Rudy wakes up, he’s in the wagon opposite Ghislaine, who tells him they’ll be working together starting tomorrow. Rudy wanted a job…be careful what you wish for!

Read Crow’s review of episode 4 here.