Review: THE RUTHLESS COMMANDER AND HIS REINCARNATED WARHORSE

 There's still not a lot of BL isekai out there, but this particular one stands out by virtue of having one of the wackiest premises I've seen.

THE RUTHLESS COMMANDER AND HIS REINCARNATED WARHORSE (Shouwaru Boukun Kishu to Nagasare Senba), based on the light novel by Sakashima with art by Nomoto Narita.  First published in 2019 and first published in North America in 2023.

PLOT:

Deep in a forest, a young foal is born.  Once he was a modern-day Japanese man, but now he's enjoying the freedom and simplicity of life as a horse.  Then one day he encounters Lieutenant Commander Felix, a strict but handsome young soldier.  Felix takes this horse (now named Aleksei) for himself, and Aleksei commits himself to becoming his loyal steed.  When the two are attacked by bandits, Aleksei undergoes a strange transformation that allows the two to become closer than ever before.

STORY:

It's easy to make vulgar jokes when it comes to this manga, but I don't think that's terribly fair.  For a good portion of it, it takes its outrageous premise as seriously as reasonably possible.  That being said, it commits two fatal blunders.  One is almost expected when it comes to light novel-to-manga adaptations; the other is unique to this particular book.

Like all too many light novel adaptations I've reviewed on this site, Reincarnated Warhorse has a major case of telling instead of showing.  Much of the story is told through Aleksei's internal monologue, and that's kind of a necessity when your protagonist is a horse.  What's much less necessary is having him spell out all of Felix's good qualities.  Narita could easily skip over all that monologue and show us how strong Felix is meant to be and how good he is as a military leader.  They could more organically incorporate Felix's backstory as the scion of a noble family into conversation.  It wouldn't even be outrageous for a horse to be witness to such things in a military camp!  Doing this would have gone a long way towards communicating this information (and through it, Aleksei's growing fascination) in a more organic matter.  I don't even know why they bothered with the reincarnation angle at all, beyond having an excuse to give a horse an inner monologue in the first place.

Then there's the issue that's also a major spoiler: Aleksei becomes a real boy a third of the way into the book.  Obviously Felix and Aleksei could not actually romance one another as different species so this turn of events is not unreasonable.  Weirder still, we learn that Aleksei can transform back and forth at will for reasons that go completely unexplained.  The weirdest thing of all was the feeling of betrayal I felt at this plot twist.  If they weren't going to commit fully to this premise, why even bother? I'm not asking for on-page man-on-horse action, I'm just asking for this manga to deliver what the title promises for as long as it's reasonably possible.  

The concerns don't stop there.  Everyone around Aleksei takes his transformation in shocking good stride, which is odd for this otherwise un-mystical premise.  There's also the fact that Aleksei's naivete about sex gives the dynamic between him and Felix a mildly exploitative edge, one that's not helped along by his human self being a rather tiny dude of indefinite age.  There's also no thought given to the place or setting of the story.  Felix's uniform would suggest this is set sometime in the 1800s and the use of the name "Aleksei" would suggest an eastern European setting, but there are bandits who are still using wagons and bows and arrows straight out of the middle ages and Felix's pants have zippers (which saw virtually no use in clothing before the 1910s).  I don't need meticulous detail, but I do ask for a little effort and consistency.  In the end it devolves into little more than a string of sex scenes.  If the writer wanted that with the trappings of old-fashioned conflict, they could have just written a story about a hunky yet stern commander and his loyal twink of a servant.

ART:

Narita certainly had a challenge before them by virtue of having a horse as a protagonist.  Horses are some of the most notoriously hard animals for artists to draw, and you can find countless examples in anime and manga.  Aleksei and his family are rendered fairly well, although for the sake of the audience he's given weirdly large, expressive eyes to make his face a little more recognizably human.  The human designs are quite well-executed as well, if a bit bland and flat due to Narita's minimal use of shading. The smutty scenes are largely censored, so expect a lot of cut-aways to blushing faces, mostly featureless torsos, and white voids where the dicks should be.

PRESENTATION:

I do at least have to commend the effort put into the cover, even if I don't entirely understand why most of the book jacket is colored with the sort of neon orange one associates with safety equipment.  Underneath is a dull grey cover that itself is covered in various little sketches of Aleksei in horse form.  That's one way to be discrete about reading a BL manga about a horse in public!

RATING:

Reincarnated Warhorse has an outrageous premise that it simply couldn't live up to.  It's not a bad-looking book, but the story itself is weak and way too reliant on narration and increasingly tedious sex scenes.  If you want an isekai-based BL, you're better off sticking with Bean Counter.

This book is published by Denpa Books under their Kuma imprint.  It is currently in print