Damn. Next time I teach writing I am DEFINITELY using this story as an example. The most important element a story can have is internal consistency. People will put up with just about anything as long as it's consistent. It's impressive -- and really OBVIOUS to see -- how the story maintains it's internal consistency even though it admits right at the start that the world is broken. It's also very funny.
Trapped in a Dating Sim, aka Mobuseka, begins with a man who's been blackmailed into completing a bad videogame for his little sister. The game is a dating sim that's been put out by a company that typically only makes fighting games. The company didn't know how to make a dating sim, made a bad one, and then tried to compensate by stuffing it full of what they do know how to do, which is both fantasy and Mecha fight scenes -- think a really bad Sakura Wars ripoff by someone who didn't know what they were doing.
Every gamer out there has run into a similar game, made by someone who didn't know what they're doing and stuffed full of what they were good at as a distraction. And every gamer has at least watched someone hate-play a game to completion.
Then, dazed by a weekend spent in front of the videoscreen, our guy falls down a flight of stairs, dies, and to his horror wakes up as a minor background character inside the game. At first our guy Leon is content to live out his days making snarky remarks in obscurity, but then he acts to protect himself and others, changing the game in the process. It also becomes clear that someone else is changing the game as well, with less concern for the consequences.
The world is still a badly-designed mishmash put together in a slapdash fashion by people who didn't know what they were doing. Instead of trying to distract you from that fact while hurriedly fixing things behind the scenes the story leans into it, and that's where it becomes interesting. Internal consistency is the glue that holds a story together, but in a well-designed world like Ascendance of a Bookworm it's hard to see that glue. But this isn't a perfectly designed custom world like Bookworm. This is a jalopy built out of mismatched parts. Internal consistency is obviously the only thing holding it together, so the viewer is able to see just how important that feature is in storytelling -- and especially for comedy.
The show points out the problems with all the genres it plays with. Dungeon design is stupid, and the characters in dating sims are often petty and cruel, acting like they're perpetually emotionally stuck at age 13. (Such people do exist. Dealing with them is just as horrific as it sounds.) One of my favorite parts of the show is how actions that are seen as praiseworthy inside the dating sim scenes are often viewed quite harshly by mature adults, who punish them accordingly. In the same light, Leon the main character can be seen as selfish and brusque, or as a grown man acting quite understandably when continually forced to put up with middle school bullies.
Comedy is a genre where most shows fail before the end of the first episode. Five episodes in, Mobuseka is still engaging and funny. Let's hope it keeps balancing all it's mismatched parts on the thread of internal consistency.
