WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Episode 2 of I’ve Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level, now streaming on Crunchyroll.
Anime’s latest big isekai series, I’ve Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level, is hardly a standard power trip. Instead, series heroine Azusa Aizawa has been reborn as the witch of the highlands, determined to live an easygoing life with no particular goals or ambitions in mind. This totally subverts the fundamentals of the isekai genre, but it also raises the question: how will Azusa fill her long centuries in this new world?
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The very title of the series makes it clear that Azusa is in this for the long haul. True to the name, she has been killing slime monsters every day for 300 years without rest, building up XP and money the whole time. Azusa is immune to aging, is level 99 and unbeatable in combat, but what’s even more remarkable is that, despite still having the mind of a mortal human, Azusa never complains about how long everything takes. It seems that, somehow, her intense desire for a normal life has shielded her from utter boredom and frustration, meaning she hardly even noticed three whole centuries flying by.
What is more, the landscape hardly changed in all that time, either. Azusa’s house stayed the same until Laika accidentally destroyed it, as did the nearby town of Flatta and the culture and political landscape of the world. In this realm, change happens very slowly. For example, in Episode 2, Azusa and Laika set up a protective barrier around Flatta, and the town elder mentions that the people had been debating about security concerns for years on end. In another instance, when the seemingly young Shalsha arrives to get revenge on Azusa, it’s revealed that she spent a whopping 50 years training her Smite Evil for the occasion, and she’ll have to charge up that magic for another 50 years once it’s all spent. Nothing around here is done overnight, it seems.
When it comes to visiting another world, the rule is usually that the protagonist will be there forever, whether or not it’s an action series. Often, the isekai hero died in real life and has no way back. Examples include Konosuba’s Kazuma Saito, who was scared to death by truck-kun, and Rimuru Tempest, who was stabbed to death as a mortal man before beginning his adventure. Exceptions exist, usually in video game isekai like Sword Art Online, where Kirito and Asuna can — theoretically — go in and out of these ultra-immersive games at will.
In all these series, the fact that the hero is stuck there forever is often glossed over, since the series focuses mainly on the character’s immediate concerns and actions, such as Kazuma forming his dysfunctional party or Rimuru befriending the monsters around him. The whimsical ways of most isekai make it hard to realize that these heroes have their entire life ahead of them in this world.
In the case of Azusa and Rimuru, they are practically immortal, meaning their lives might never end. A darker take on the isekai genre could show the psychological strain of such a long time period, though fiction often depicts how miserable and lonely immortality could be. In a different version of her new world, Azusa’s 300 years of slime slaying could’ve had her lose herself entirely.
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