For all of the different visual and animation styles the series has showcased, and for all its crazy reincarnation scenarios, the most persistent truth throughout My Ribdiciulous Reincarnation is how stone-faced Goddess is. Even when hints of emotion creep through in her words and attitude, her expression has never changed. Since Pale-Haired Emotionless Girl has been a common anime trope for 30 years now, and since she has functionally served as the series’ Straight Man (er, Woman), this has been easy to pass off as just another standard anime gimmick. However, in the series’ biggest surprise revelation, the last episode demonstrates that this has actually been a critical plot point all along. Actually, that’s an understatement; getting Goddess to smile is the plot of the series, and not only is nearly every single thing in the series calculated to make that happen, but it also quite literally proves to be the key to saving the universe. But hey, if you’re going to spend the whole series trafficking in absurdity, why not make the climax of the series equally absurd?
It turns out that the chaos creatures we’ve seen glimpses of over the past couple of episodes is actually the accumulation of bad karma Goddess collected over the eons in her duties as a celestial enforcer, so deadening her emotions wasn’t the only side effect of that assignment. (This calls into question the efficiency of the system created by the Creator God, but that’s kinda beside the point here.)And the key to offsetting that reality-destroying threat isn’t Goddess’s strength; it’s her smile. You could look at it as regaining her emotions being a way of striking the balance, but however the exact mechanics work (this series never lets itself be mired in specifics), the Creator Gods has projected that everything is doomed if he can’t break her out of her emotional doldrums, and thus he sent the protagonist to her. Turns out he wasn’t just randomly being silly; entertaining Goddess, and ultimately winning that smile from her, was his ulterior motive all along. Granted, he probably would have tried to do that even without Creator God’s entreaties, but it shows why Creator God was much more tolerant of the protagonist’s antics than the lesser gods (who clearly didn’t know anything about this) were. It also shows that there was a guiding force behind all those odd reincarnation choices rather than just random chance.
This all comes to a head in the protagonist’s final reincarnation, where the other gods force him to the front of the line to reincarnate as a hero who will save the world under the presumption that this will finally leaving him dying satisfied at the end. But they have thoroughly underestimated the person who spent his time as a human on Earth seeking out Goddess based on a vague memory, so even with his memory supposedly wiped, he calls out for Goddess with his final breath. Stunningly, this results in one of the season’s most intensely emotional moments (something I never thought I would say about this series!), thus earning the screen shot shown above and triggering the world-saving finale.
Of course, this series being what it is, that isn’t the only reincarnation, but there’s only two in play this time:
| Episode | Reincarnation | Animation Style | Producer |
|---|---|---|---|
| 11 | A Pretty Girl Heroine Who’s Demoted to Third Place by the Yuri Harem Hero Protagonist, and the Main and Sub Protagonists Take All the Traditional Tropes for Their Personalities, While the Ones Who Come In Later in the Story Have Far More Impact, so by the Time We Reach the Middle of the Story, She’s Kept Off-Screen and Referred To by Name Only, and by the End of the Story You Don’t Even See Her Name Anymore. | Mostly three-color stills | Sayaka Yamasaki |
| 12 | Hero who saves the world from the Demon King | filtered traditional | not listed |
Sayaka Yamasaki is a manga-ka probably not well-known to the anime community since her key works have been turned into live-action shows rather than anime (Haruka 17 and Siren are examples), but she did also do the artwork for a short-run manga called Telepathic Wanderers that I reviewed a couple of decades ago, and the art style here is very reminiscent of that. It is colored only in black and white with pinkish highlights for much of its segment but shifts to blue highlights when the scenario suddenly gender-swaps in the middle. (And yes, that means it turns from blatantly yuri to blatantly BL for a while.) And that’s far from the only ridiculous thing that happens in it. By comparison, the segment in episode 12 is not only vastly more conventional but also played utterly straight (in every sense of the word!).
Is this the end for My Ribdiculous Reincarnations? While there are endless additional possibilities for crazy reincarnations, the concept does feel like it’s run its course, and the plot that we didn’t know the series always had has come to a satisfying conclusion with the end of episode 12. There’s also only one source light novel (which leaves me curious about which of these scenarios are anime-only). Hence this season was probably always meant to be a standalone. That’s fine, because the series has capably executed its concept in providing one of the most absurdist works of anime since Pop Team Epic. It’s getting a very low rating on Crunchyroll and a mediocre one on MyAnimeList in large part, I think, because its animation approach is too unconventional, but I consider it to be one of the season’s hidden gems overall.
Overall Rating: B+
USA Anime 