The Devil Is a Part-Timer!

2 comments on Hacker News

1. NeutraldragontamerSep 24, 2024

   Have you tried watching something like OddTaxi?

   It's a bit social commentary (not very heavy but you can feel it). But I don't think it's about loneliness or relations much at all (I guess the Walrus and the Nurse Llama have a bit of a romantic fling but I don't consider it a major part of the show).

   I'd say one of the major villains is someone who has fallen into the stereotypical gachapon gamer / whale / hikkomori type shut-in that sounds like you'd enjoy him as a villain.

   So rather than catering to that demographic, OddTaxi skewers it by clearly marking that character as villainous.

   It's just a solid Film Noir murder mystery, except the main character is the Taxi Driver with damn near perfect memory and facial recognition rather than a proper detective. It takes some time and discussions with various people around town to figure out the murder plot, but I was quite satisfied by it.

   It's a dry show with a lot of talking. The bulk of the show is just the Walrus / Protagonist picking up customers around town, talking with them for 5 minutes and dropping them off.

   But it's those discussions alone that leads him to the murder plot. It's really fun to see how everyone around town was so close to the murderer.

   -------

   I agree with you that there's a genre of anime that celebrates or dramatizes the Hikkomori / shut-in type (ex: Re:Zero, Jobless Reincarnation). But at this point, the Hikkomori is a stock character, just one tool to tell a story.

   There's a lot of different uses of the "emotionally stunted Hikkomori" (ex: Anohana is the Hikkomori who through the drama of a Ghost coming back to talk with him, he gets pulled out of it and emotionally heals).

   But anime and anime culture is above all, about stock characters that are borrowed, remixed, and turned into something new in the next story. The emotionally-stunted Hikkomori can become the hero in Re:Zero, the antagonist of OddTaxi, or a source of Comedy in Devil is a Part-Timer.

   Frieren seems to cover a lot of Hikkomori Tropes (emotionally stunted character who is suddenly learning how to deal with emotions as she interacts with humans). So I think you're right in that she's seemingly related to the trope. I don't think I thought of her like that before but it seems to match up more-and-more that I think of it. She has all the markings of a Hikkomori in terms of attitude and even story progression (Himmel had to convince her to get up and try)

2. NeutralMachaJan 19, 2021

   Yeah, I subscribe to Crunchyroll, Netflix, Prime Video, and Funimation. Or in other words, 100% of services with streaming anime available in my country. To be fair, seasonal anime gets a good coverage with those. Netflix's player is pretty good, but the rest vary from meh to awful (I have never successfully changed the timestamp in Funimation's player without playback crashing within the next minute).

   But back catalogues availability is not so good. Crunchyroll and Netflix have the most popular stuff like Naruto, Code Geass or Evangelion but literally nobody has, say, The Devil is a Part Timer in my country.

   Movies? The SAO movie got a physical showing in my country, the Made in Abyss movie actually did show up on a pay per view non-region locked streaming service and... that's literally it.

   Soundtracks? It might be on Spotify. This week. But maybe not next week. I've no fucking idea, but the constant appearence and disappearence of soundtrack songs from my playlists has even caused me to stop moving spotify.

   So for movies and back catalogues, my only "legal" option is to ship DVDs/Blurays and a region locked player from the US, or maybe sometimes I can get stuff from the UK in my own region. For soundtracks, even that is not usually an option. Does that legally entitle me to pirate it? No. Do I care? Not really, I feel I've tried my best