Since the national policy this time around has basically been “pretend it’s not happening”, there have been relatively few anime delays because of the seventh Covid wave (despite it being the largest yet).  But if enough people are too sick to work, a production can’t function – no amount of denial can change that.  So I assume things must have gotten pretty bad at Atelier Pontdarc – bad enough that not even ordering people to come to work even if symptomatic (which is pretty standard procedure here these days) could “mask” the problem.

As such, Isekai Ojisan was on an unscheduled two-week break.  There’s been no official announcement yet on how that lost time will be made up, but for now we have Episode 5 at least.  I continue to find this show pretty funny, despite a bit of a guilty pleasure vibe sometimes.  I know it’s plucking low-hanging fruit at times, and it’s certainly pretty sexist.  But funny is funny, and the fact is that the tropes it’s sending up are wildly sexist in the first place.  As such I think we’re in a bit of a grey area in how one might take Isekai Ojisan in that sense, but it continues to have excellent aim with its comedic arrows.

It helps that Ojisan is who he is – he’s not putting on any sort of act.  In point of fact his behavior towards the women in the cast – either in our world or the other one – really isn’t sexist at all.  And, ironically, the fact that Elf and Mabel are so upset about it is the sexist part.   After a brief exchange with Fujiyama-san about baseball, Uncle proceeds to spin the tale of how he was almost assassinated.  By Mabel, in fact.  She’s been rendered homeless by Uncle’s act of defeating the blaze dragon without using the God-freezing sword, which basically invalidated her entire reason for existence.  Bounced out on her ass by the surly villagers (choosing not to be a dog) she roams the world trying to avoid work – and stalks Ojisan waiting for her chance to kill him.

In truth Uncle was trying to do a nice thing giving Mabel that ring – I mean, she quite desperately doesn’t want to earn a living.  It’s just that he really is that clueless – he has no idea.  And that means he has no idea why Mabel is so upset after he makes it clear the ring is just an item for her to pawn and fund her NEET lifestyle.  Again we see that Takafumi has no problem spotting what Uncle can’t see in the other world, despite having an equally large blind spot in his own.

The conversation between Mabel and Elf (after Ojisan has been frozen) provides our first real clues into what’s really happening here.  Mabel in fact refers to “Japan Bahamal” as being the place where Uncle came from – and she knows this because it’s where the legendary hero of 400 years earlier (a samurai of some sort) came from too.  He got offered a wish and wishes for a sword that could slay God, but Uncle remembers no such welcome on his own arrival.  In par that’s because his welcome from God was in Mandarin (wrong region code).  Once Takafumi runs it through his translate app we find out it was a store welcome message (complete with the Bic Camera jingle, which they didn’t even bother to disguise).

Unfortunately for Uncle he inadvertently made a wish in that moment – to speak the language of the guys who were kicking his ass – thus wasting his chance for something even more powerful.  But it seems to have worked out pretty well for him in the end.  It’s all pretty silly to be sure, but it works.  This is pretty culturally specific comedy I think – not Japanese so much (that there is an element of that), but that you have to have enough overlap with the pop culture and social circles the humor is aimed at for it to have any impact.  I do, so it does – and as long as a comedy keeps making me laugh it’s easy to stick around.