KonoSuba: An Explosion on This Wonderful World! is the official prequel anime series to the popular satire series KonoSuba, based on the five-volume manga series of the same name. Explosion also switches up the main cast of characters, putting the popular magical girl Megumin in the spotlight and exploring her native Crimson Demon Clan in great detail.
Even if KonoSuba: An Explosion on This Wonderful World! is technically an isekai anime, it doesn’t handle itself like one. Isekai is normally told from the viewpoint of an ordinary person who got reincarnated to a new world, hence the title, but Megumin is native to this world and takes most of it for granted. This allows Explosion to focus on character building instead — a refreshing change of pace for the genre.
The Explosion Anime Makes Megumin More Than a Parody Magical Girl
On the one hand, even the original KonoSuba anime found time to give its four main characters some personal depth to make them more sympathetic and compelling, most of all for Megumin herself. Still, KonoSuba spread itself thin by focusing on a handful of main characters and poking fun at the isekai subgenre itself, so spinoff series like Explosion can deepen these characters one at a time to make this isekai story even better. The original anime and the Legend of Crimson movie did a fine job developing Megumin’s character, such as her wacky friendship with Yunyun and her family’s poverty, but KonoSuba: An Explosion on This Wonderful World! promises to dive even deeper into who Megumin really is.
At heart, Megumin is a lovable parody of magical girls with her chunibyo personality and her stubborn, exclusive use of explosion magic, but she’s more than a shallow gag character. Megumin actually received the most character development in the original series. Now, Explosion will flesh her out even more, from her inspirations and insecurities to her relatable struggles and emotional core as a protagonist. Isekai characters are often shallow because the genre is more about the world and its phenomena than the characters, but Explosion will reverse all that by making Megumin the star and a native to this world.
By this series’ end, Megumin may be an even better Best Girl by going above and beyond with her development as a wizard and as a person. Amusingly, a parody anime franchise like KonoSuba is in a position to do character development better than most “normal” isekai, suggesting that the mainstream isekai industry is taking itself too lightly and not tapping into its true potential. It may be funny to see characters reborn as talking swords or even vending machines, but making one relatable, sympathetic girl with explosion magic is clearly the better route to take.
The Explosion Anime Avoids Most of Isekai’s Biggest Problems
Isekai anime can be great fun, and outstanding series like Overlord, That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime and Re:Zero are all a credit to the genre. However, the isekai industry is facing more and more criticism for its many perceived faults, from ludicrously long, self-explanatory titles to isekai’s extremely formulaic nature to distasteful fan service and worst of all, its poorly handled depictions of slavery. It has become so easy to criticize, parody and stereotype every aspect of isekai, but KonoSuba: An Explosion on This Wonderful World! dodges almost all these issues by starting from the opposite side and exploring its fantasy world through the eyes of a native.
Some in-universe elements of isekai may persist, such as RPG elements and fantasy monsters, but those were never problematic for isekai. Instead, second-rate isekai anime suffer when they keep falling back on worn-out ideas like a shut-in gamer getting reborn in a game world, cheap wish fulfillment harems or a quest to slay the demon king, all of which are absent from Explosion’s story. Megumin is a native-born magical girl on a personal quest to prove her worth with explosion magic — a goofy but relatable underdog whose arc has nothing to do with exploring the world or wish fulfillment.
Megumin is as different from Kazuma Sato as an isekai protagonist can be, all because she can take this world for granted and was never meant to be a self-insert. She is her own person, and that promises to give Explosion a more cohesive, purposeful narrative that’s all about one girl’s quest for greatness and validation, not aimless wandering in a world of elf girl harems and OP shenanigans. In fact, Explosion and its heroine are isekai in name only — and that’s for the best.
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