YMMV / Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation

• Audience-Alienating Ending: Many fans were angry that the series ends not with the defeat of the Big Bad Hitogami, but with Rudeus dying of old age and entrusting the job to his descendants long before that happens, and a note essentially saying the audience will never get to see the final battle. While some were satisfied that it concluded the story of the protagonist Rudeus, others felt cheated out of seeing the resolution of the overarching conflict.
• Base-Breaking Character: Rudeus. He's introduced as a cynical, perverted creep who spent the vast majority of his life mooching off his parents and didn't even have the decency to attend their funeral when they died, which gets him kicked out of the house, but not before his siblings discover him masturbating to a recording of his underage niece taking a bath, revealing he's also a pedophile. His reincarnation into a fantasy world turns him into a grown man inside a child's body and doesn't hesitate to take advantage of this to feed his perverted tendencies. Some of these include trying to spy on his parents having sex, stealing Roxy's panties and keeping it as a treasure, losing his virginity to Eris when she's but a teenager, and keeping a memento of his first time with Sylphy in the form of their sheets tainted with her virgin blood. All of his actions become the Squick when you remember this is a forty-seven-year-old man. Fans blame this to a Slow-Paced Beginning and explain Rudeus' story is about realizing how horrible of a person he is, and striving to become better, making the story of Mushoku Tensei a secret Redemption Quest for the man Rudeus was in his original world.
• Broken Base: The ending of the Web Novel for many fans - some found it an average ending after all Rudeus had been through and appreciate the fact that he tried his hardest to get to where he did, and feel that his personal journey and development are the real focus of the series, but others deemed it cheap because the hero dies of old age and leaves his job of defeating Hitogami to the future and his kin, meaning we never get to see the epic final battle that was promised. The story of Mushoku Tensei concluding on that note without a Sequel to finish off that particular thread seems unfair.
• Complete Monster: Gallus Cleaner is a smuggler who runs a trafficking ring, kidnapping beast children and selling them off to slavery, while the children under his imprisonment are horrifically abused, with one child getting killed as a result. He knew Rudeus Greyrat and Ruijerd Superdia would rescue the children from his captivity, allowing Ruijerd to kill his own men to distract the authorities from his operation while following Rudeus to the Beast People's village when they arrest the latter. Arriving there, Gallus and his forces lay siege to the village, killing countless innocents, while kidnapping all their children and nearly killing Rudeus and Gyes Dedoldia when they try to stop him.
• Fandom Rivalry: A minor, but increasingly intense one has grown between the series and Re:Zero primarily due to the way the anime versions of both have been adapted. The studio for Mushoku Tensei, Bind, is a joint studio with members from Egg Firm and White Fox. The latter has caused concerns among Re:Zero fans that the anime from the 2nd season onwards (Particularly the winter cour from 2021) has degraded in animation quality, and have since blamed the existence of Mushoku Tensei for it, bashing the series for its controversial themes. Ironically, the authors are good friends and frequently exchanged ideas while writing both stories.
• Fan Nickname: Nanahoshi is often nicknamed "Banana" by fans as a wordplay of her name.
• Just Here for Godzilla: For the 2021 anime, there are viewers who find the writing not to their taste but continue watching for the gorgeous visuals and animation.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Many fans have commented that the last line in chapter 67 of the manga, "No Way, the Transfer Student is a Demon Lord?!", would make a good title for a spin-off, or a different Light Novel series entirely.
  • "Isekai Ghostbusters", referring to Rudeus taking Cliff and Zanoba on a quest to exorcise a haunted house.
• Misaimed Fandom: Many fans who only watched the anime thought Mushoku Tensei is an action packed anime and were expecting more action and travelling in Season 2 just like in Season 1 Part 2. They're disappointed when the majority of Season 2 takes place in the Ranoa Magic Academy and the plot stuck there without much action, not realizing that Mushoku Tensei is mostly a slice-of-life Isekai story.
• Once Original, Now Common: The series is one of the biggest hits on the self-publishing novel website Shousetsuka ni Narou. It was also one of the site's earliest hits, namely being one that first brought attention to what's typically thought of as a Reincarnate in Another World story (not the same premise as Trapped in Another World). That said, looking back on it now will make some readers think it's terribly cliched when Mushoku Tensei was part of the group of stories that helped make those clichés in the first place. Among other things, it's responsible for the Dead Unicorn Trope of "reincarnation via being run over by a truck".
• Popular with Furries: Due to Ghyslaine's nature, her feline features, and her muscular physique, she's instantly endeared quite a lot of people from the furry/kemono circles.
• Popularity Polynomial: This was one of the largest hits of Shōsetsuka ni Narō, popularizing the Reincarnate in Another World trope. After the formula was copied dozens upon dozens of times by other isekai stories, each with their own specific spin on it, it came to be seen as too generic and uninteresting. However, by the time it was finally given an anime adaptation in 2021, new viewers actually found it fresh and interesting due to its Slow-Paced Beginning. The series emphasizes more nuanced consequences of an "average" person being reincarnated in an unfamiliar world, such as what personal flaws from a former life would be carried over and what it would actually be like for real parents to raise a child with the mind of an adult. This made it new and interesting all over again, since most of its imitators would skip or ignore most of that stuff in favor of the familiar tropes and new gimmicks.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: After Mushoku Tensei popularized the Reincarnate in Another World genre of isekai, most of its imitators skipped past the hero's childhood and culture shock of being reborn into a strange world with Past-Life Memories, usually leaping into the Harem or Power Fantasy. When the anime adaptation aired in 2021, the slow burn which focused on character development and worldbuilding became one of its major draws and distinguished it from the many, many isekai that saturated the market.
• Squick:
  • The fact that a baby is looking at you with lustful eyes. The poor mother is a bit confused by him licking after a nursing.
  • Kirishika gouging out Rudeus' eyes just to give him one of her special eyes is this.
  • Rudeus is mentally thirty-four years older than his reincarnated body, which can make a lot of his sexual elements very uncomfortable. Case in point, when he and Eris have sex for the first time, it's technically a fifteen-year-old girl throwing herself at a forty-seven-year-old man. The anime adaptation adds a montage of the two of them growing up together over this scene, which makes it even harder to sit through without immediately reaching for the Brain Bleach.
  • Rudeus cutting up the fabric with Sylphy's virgin blood to save it as a memento of their first time. Fans immediately found it incredibly disgusting. A portion argues that Rudeus had gone through years of traumatic ED until he was cured by Slyphy and their night together meant a lot to him as a result. The other portion, however, find even more disgusting that some people would try to justify it.
  • In the Web Novel, Rudeus' first son Ars ending up in a relationship with his sister (and the boy's aunt) Aisha, with the add-on that Ars lost his virginity to her at ten and ended up impregnating her, especially in hindsight seeing that one of Rudy's biggest regrets in the old world (at least in the Web Novel's continuity) was masturbating to pictures of his own young niece. This got such a big backlash that the chapter was permanently deleted by the author, and he stated he would change things like their ages if he decided to still do this plot in the light novels.

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