It’s real fuckin bad. Inb4 capeshit, isekai trash. It’s bad for specific reasons, and my main point of contrast is the legitimately excellent Harley Quinn cartoon show.
Spoilers for the whole thing after this point but don’t worry it sucks anyway.
Suicide Squad Isekai
I just watched the whole (10 episode) season and while it starts out fun it just gets worse and worse as the season goes on until I was groaning my way through the last two episodes.
Our titular Squad this time is made up of Harley Quinn, Clayface, King Shark, Deadshot, Peacemaker, and Rick Flag. Harley is the best the show gets but she really can’t carry it by herself. Her overall attitude and manic facial animation is very fun. Unfortunately, her dub voice is just a standard amerikkkan accent with none of that Fran Drescher voice she should have. Clayface is almost as good as he is in the Harley Quinn cartoon, but he’s giving Michael Jackson impersonator more than actor. King Shark gets major character assassination, he’s reduced to being barely able to speak. I’m not a manga reader so I don’t know if that’s accurate to the comics but it sucks shit. Deadshot is fine, doesn’t really stand out in either direction. Peacemaker and Rick Flag are the same guy and the guy they both are is a boring guy who sucks.
The worst part though is the plot. After a pretty standard setup of Joker abandoning Harley, Amanda Waller sends her and the squad to the isekai world to set up a beachhead for amerikkkan imperialism to set up some classic colonial resource extraction, making this a GATE type isekai rather than a truck-kun type. They find humans and orcs fighting, respectively representing “the kingdom” and “the empire.” After beating up the orcs they get thrown in prison by the humans, which is a plot beat that gets repeated four or five times across the ten episodes.
In prison they meet a bunch of orcs and also Rick Flag who came in with a previous Suicide Squad. Everybody but Rick has bombs with 72 hour timers in their heads meaning they have to visit Waller’s GATE every three days.
They break out of prison but then just kind of hang out there until the human knights show up, then go have a meeting with the kingdom’s obviously evil queen. There’s a fun bit that lasts exactly one scene of Rick having learned the local language from the orcs in prison and talking like a delinquent which offends the knights but they get magical language comprehension in the very next scene. Real lack of urgency despite constantly talking about their time limit.
The queen sends them off to conquer a castle in exchange for their freedom which they already had because they broke out of her prison but then just let the knights cuff them all again for the audience with the evil queen. It’s a very stupid contrivance to move the plot along. The castle is being held by a bunch of wolfmen controlled by the Ratcatcher who is some kind of c tier DC villain I guess? Anyway, he was part of the first suicide squad that Rick came in with and is now serving the empire. They beat him up and wreck the castle, and the queen throws them back in prison, which they don’t bother to break out of this time. The entire rest of the plot has them either on a mission from the queen or in her prison.
We learn that the beastfolk and the elves “betrayed” the kingdom for the empire. Was this because the queen was obviously evil and super racist against nonhumans? No, it was because two separate guys from that first suicide squad both had mind control macguffins which they used on all the beastfolk and all the elves respectively. We never get a single line of dialogue from either a beastfolk or an elf they only ever serve as silent mind controlled hordes which can be killed by the dozen.
Every time this show sets up something potentially interesting it immediately turns around and ruins it. At the end we find out that the evil queen actually isn’t doing a human supremacy and was actually killed and replaced by a lich at some unspecified point in the past so all her evil was because the lich just loves death. Nothing to examine, nothing to think about, just killing for the sake of killing.
After they beat the evil lich we get a post credits scene of Joker standing over the corpse of the emperor of the empire they’ve been fighting all season long. This is, by the way, the first, last, and only time we see said emperor, or for that matter any representative of the empire who isn’t an isekai’d DC c lister. Joker says to himself “you’re welcome, Harley. Isn’t being in an isekai fun? That regular world sure was boring.” Which is a sentiment Harley had never at any point expressed.
No Poison Ivy, no Harlivy, no emotion, no plot beats that ever mean or amount to anything, just a sequence of pointless battles over nothing. The only real positive is that Harley looks like she’s having fun in the pointless battles over nothing.
When the same tired retread of boring regular world assholes trampling over and dominating an isekai world is declared to be the “fun” and not the boring.
The isekai world is even smaller and less interesting on its own than in your typical isekai slop.
It sounds like it was just a place for the Main Characters to stomp around and feel powerful over “npcs.” So tired of that shit.
They’re already capes they can do that in their own world. What they could do with the isekai world would be reexamining the hero and villain roles and what they mean in the context of amerikkkan capitalist imperialism. But the show steadfastly refuses to approach that in any way.
Have you seen the Harley Quinn cartoon? It’s actually good because it does have heart and is willing to examine that kind of thing (and has the OTP, Harlivy)
I did see the Harley Quinn cartoon and I like that it went places with the characters instead of constantly looping back to the old status quo, or worse, fucking origin story reboots.
Pretty much every mainline isekai trash show could have done that too that too but the way to reel in the otaku and get their money is to pander to their “this time, I will wear the boot” fantasies instead.
The best I’ve ever seen an isekai anime handle it is the tensei slime anime, which is all about making a moderately prosperous society in all respects from the “monster” races of the isekai world and defending it against crusading human kingdoms.
There’s also the John Brown Isekai web novel which is exactly what it says on the tin. Chapter 1 he kills a generic isekai anime protagonist expy and frees his slave and it escalates from there.