灰(はい)と幻想(げんそう)のグリムガル(Grimgar of Fantasy and Ash) is an Isekai about a group of adventurers who are bad at existing.

It was (and might still be) compared to Konosuba as they both ‘“deconstruct”’ the isekai, except that Grimgar takes a more cynical/human approach. This is a highly unfavorable and unfair comparison…because Konosuba is significantly better than Grimgar in almost every way, including cynicism.

The biggest pluses of the series are the background artwork and character interactions are mostly fine. The few actions scenes that are there are alright too.

However! The series is really slow and it takes forever for anything to happen. Pacing is the main issue, but there are a few more problems.
The anime has a lot of montages with music where no dialog occurs at all. Or really anything of substance. The one upside of these sequences is that the music is alright.

All of this gives the anime a very relaxing feel…though it’s probably intentional, I don’t think it was a good idea due to the aforementioned pacing issues.

I found episode 2.5 – the special – to be the most enjoyable part of the show, though I wouldn’t say that reflects well on the rest of it.

There is also a pretty big elephant in the room that I should acknowledge: themes. It was said straight to me once that this show is one of the better Fantasy shows out there specifically because it doesn’t depict the ‘goblins’ or other creatures as pure evil and actually treats them as nuanced. This was one of the moments that helped radicalize me.
The series pays lip service to a more nuanced interpretation of ‘evil’ Fantasy races in one of the action scenes, where the adventurers attempt to kill a goblin and fail big time at it. The main character has a whole internal monologue about how the goblin just wants to live and is clearly fighting tooth and nail to survive because it’s a living creature and we’re oh so sad about this.
For future reference, this is a perfect example of mentioning a theme instead of actually exploring it. Because this is the only time in the whole series where anything like this happens and it’s extremely jarring. None of these ‘moral issues’ ever come up again. Keep in mind that in a later episode, the adventurers sneak into a Kobold settlement, engage in theft and murder of the local inhabitants and then leave…the whole time they don’t care about what they’re doing at all. What sort of a dark world do we live in where the life of a goblin is favored over the life of a kobold?

Anyhow, a counter-argument I may receive is that “sure, this isn’t great, but at least it’s trying” though this reveals a few other issues. I’m realizing now it might be smarter to split this off and put it somewhere else, but whatever.
First of all, this is working off of the assumption that “nuance = good; pure evil = bad” which is a shaky foundation because whether you have one or the other really depends on what type of story you’re writing. Injecting nuance into a Fantasy race doesn’t automatically make a story better, it just makes it more complicated.
Second, this isn’t trying, this is mentioning something and calling it a day. This is worse than if it tried.

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