"The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces."

  • Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Preamble

There is a certain kind of politically serious work that disguises itself as nothing. I've Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level - hereafter Slime 300 - is, by general critical consensus, a cozy isekai anime about a witch who collects an adoptive family of magical girls and occasionally eats mushrooms with bad side effects. This consensus is catastrophically wrong.

In actuality, Slime 300, when consumed with appropriate theoretical rigor, is the most sustained and formally inventive critique of capitalist alienation I have ever laid my eyes upon. Wittgenstein, in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, wrote that "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" - and the show takes this seriously, communicating its most devastating critiques of capitalist social relations entirely through what it refuses to address. Whether any of these critiques are intentional is completely beside the point.

Azusa, a Japanese office worker, dies of exhaustion and is reincarnated as an immortal witch into a pre-industrial agrarian fantasy world. She decides to spend her new eternal life doing nothing particularly demanding. This, for a start, is the most radical political act depicted in anime since Neon Genesis Evangelion's protagonist refused to get back in the robot.

Episode 1: "I Maxed Out My Level" - The Suddenly Visible Proletarian

The first episode of Slime 300 opens, structurally, with a death. Azusa's karoshi is the show's first constitutive political gesture. The terminal point of capitalist accumulation - the worker so thoroughly subsumed by the production process that the body itself is consumed - and we ask: what comes after?

The answer is delivered by a goddess in the register of divine comedy. Azusa is reincarnated as an immortal witch in a pastoral highland fantasy world, living on a hill, not far from a small village called Flatta. After registering with the local adventurer's guild, she promptly sets herself up as a subsistence laborer. She kills slimes - low-level magical creatures, the fantasy equivalent of a data entry task - for pocket money. She eats. She sleeps. Three hundred years of this, ad nauseam.

Here the show's first theoretical masterstroke: The revelation that Azusa has, through three centuries of modest systemic mass murder, somehow maxed out her stats and become the most powerful being in the world. She did not intend to accumulate power, but it had happened anyways. With no capitalist overlord to siphon off the profits of her labor, she herself has become an archon of capitalism, so to say.

Within hours of Azusa's level becoming known, adventurers arrive at her cottage to challenge her. The market has noticed surplus value sitting unextracted in a highland cottage, and it sends its representatives. This cottage, I should note, is located in a landscape without apparent property law, outside the city, beyond the reach of any formal governmental structures - a liminal space that corresponds, quite precisely, to the pre-enclosure common land that Marx describes in the chapters on primitive accumulation in Capital Vol. I. Azusa has been laboring on the commons, and the commons cannot be permitted to persist once its productivity has been demonstrated.

Enter Laika. The red dragon who arrives to challenge Azusa is the show's figure for old aristocratic capital - the hereditary landowner, the one whose claim to dominance is backed by centuries of inherited power rather than by the competitive market. Laika is arrogant in the specific way that old money is arrogant: she arrives assuming the outcome is already settled, that her bloodline confers her the victory. Here, Slime 300 completely flips the script on us, presenting us with a question never before asked: what if the aristocrat falls victim to primitive accumulation, not the laborer?

The fight is kept short. Laika is defeated by Azusa, and a new system of capitalist exploitation is born. Struck by such an overwhelming display of power, Laika submits her wealth and labor to the newly born bourgeoisie in exchange for knowledge and protection. The old aristocratic capital is defeated and immediately reintegrates herself into the productive household as domestic labor. She cleans. She cooks. She maintains the cottage - making herself necessary at the level of household reproduction, in the intimate domestic sphere which Marxist-feminist theory from Silvia Federici onward has identified as capitalism's most important hidden zone of unpaid value extraction.

Episode 2: "Along Came the Daughters" - The Commodity Anthropomorphized

The second episode presents us with the perhaps most ingenious representation of false consciousness and class consciousness.

Falfa and Shalsha are slime spirits - entities condensed from the accumulated souls of all the slimes Azusa has killed across three centuries. They are, to be precise, the embodied residue of Azusa's labor, like effluent pooling in the estuary of a long industrial river. Byproducts of her work made conscious and given faces, which in the language of the early Marx means they are the objectification of her labor, returned to her as alien subjects.

This is the only logical conclusion of commodity fetishism. Marx argued in Capital that the commodity, under capitalism, appears to possess an independent existence and social power that actually belongs to the human labor congealed within it - that we mistake the thing for the subject. Slime 300 asks the ingenious question: what if the commodity actually did become a subject? What if it showed up at your door claiming to be your daughter?

Falfa wants to call Azusa "mother." She wants nothing more than to be held. Falfa's love for Azusa is not ironic or coerced - it is the love of the produced thing for the producer, a metaphor for the deepest possible form of false consciousness. She does not remember being killed. She does not resent the centuries of slaughter. She craves maternal warmth from the person who extracted her out of existence. The exploited has fully internalized her own exploitation. When I first saw the show, I mused to myself, the worker loves the factory. A gross misread. Falfa represents the grain that loves the mill.

Shalsha is the complete inversion of her sibling. The younger twin came not to embrace Azusa but to kill her. The sisters represent two sides of the same coin, the opposite ends of the spectrum of proletarian thought. Shalsha has developed a specific, targeted form of magic effective against exactly one type of person: the capitalist ruler. She has spent all her life learning a discipline whose sole application is revenge against the person responsible for the mass murder of her people. This represents the emergence of class consciousness: the recognition that one's suffering is not random or personal but systematic, that it has a specific agent, and that the correct response to that agent is organized resistance.

Shalsha's class consciousness is then immediately and thoroughly destroyed by Laika.

The aristocratic capital figure, who in the first episode was herself defeated and domesticated, intercepts Shalsha before she can reach Azusa and defeats her without breaking a sweat. The nascent revolutionary is put down by the system the exploiter has put in place. The old bourgeoisie, now integrated into the household, performs the function of suppressing proletarian consciousness on behalf of the system's primary beneficiary. Laika cleans the house and crushes uprisings. She has become the NKVD.

After being defeated, the slime sisters are subsumed into the capitalist system.

Marx and Engels argued in The German Ideology that the family is the original cell of bourgeois society, the first social form in which the division of labor appears as natural rather than as historical. The household Azusa has assembled by the end of episode two - witch as matriarch, dragon as housekeeper, slime spirits as daughters - is not a commune. It has the form of a commune, in that it involves non-standard kinship structures and a collective domestic arrangement. But it reproduces, perfectly, the hierarchical distribution of roles that Marxist-feminist theory identifies as the kernel of capitalist social reproduction: the ruler at the top, the domestic worker integrated but subordinate, the children embedded in a relationship of structural dependence.

There is one further detail of note in this episode. At the very beginning, Laika alerts Azusa to the fact that the magical barrier around the village of Flatta is weak, and advises her to strengthen it. Azusa erects a new magical ward and infuses it with her own moral system, directing it to incapacitate 'all beings who are wicked at heart'. What actually constitutes an ontologically wicked being, is, of course, completely up to Azusa. Her magic immediately knocks out a thief, much to the joy of the villagers, who have long accepted Azusa as an all-powerful guardian deity of sorts. Azusa has become judge, jury and executioner.

If Laika is an analogy for the NKVD... then Azusa, without a doubt, represents... well, let's get to that in part two.