Isekai is “normal fantasy setting” but you must explain everything to the MC, which is useful because you had to find a way to explain that shit to the audience anyway.
Yeah Tolkien should’ve made Lord of the Rings an Isekai because I didn’t understand the fantasy and I want everything in the world of Middle Earth hamfistedly explained to me.
Isekais are just lazy writing. Even for manga which are often already relying too much on exposition.
Tolkien kinda has something like that in story with the shire being fairly disconnected from the outside world. It still allows for some exposition, but also fits much better into the themes and flow of the story.
plus the MC’s internal monologue can keep relating outsider fantasy concepts in fun ‘downhome’ kind of ways. Fireball is just like a truck! or something.
Isekai is “normal fantasy setting”, but it has RPG babble all over the place, and it’s the favorite game of the MC.
That is absolutely correct. It allows you to take a lot of the exposition the narrator normally has to do in order to explain things to the reader and integrate it in dialogue/narrative itself, and the protagonist doesn’t have to be a child/amnesiac/etc to ask obvious questions.
Well in an isekai hentai they explain jack shit why the MC needs to cum in all those women. Just that they are obsessed and he “frees” them.
If a protagonist isn’t affected by what they left behind, the isekai is failing its genre. That’s why Moshuko Tensei (Jobless Reincarnation) is one of the best isekai. Not because the MC is likeable, but because he is haunted by what he left behind and is influenced by the personality he formed in his “home world”
I love needlessly long manga titles.
My cat launched a nuke and to stop it I married my plumber!
The Misfit Of Demon King Academy: History’s Strongest Demon King Reincarnates and Goes To School With His Descendants.
Googled it and this one is real in case anyone is wondering
Japanese web pages are like this too. If you look up articles (not really newspaper stuff, but just random web articles), the title always goes on about a sentence more than what we’d expect in the west. I just searched for “horror movie history” and got “What was the first horror movie and its origin? Try to think about works that have had a big influence”, whereas we’d expect a title more like “origins of the first horror movie”.
https://www.theouterhaven.net/2021/10/new-light-novels-title-is-196-pages-long/ Trollian light novel title
It’s from AnimeMaru, which is (was?) basically the Anime Onion.
However, “Mukuwarenakatta Murabito A, Kizoku ni Hirowarete Dekiai sareru Ue ni, Jitsu wa Motteita Densetsu-kyuu no Kami Skill mo Kakusei shita” (The Villager Who Was Abandoned, Was Picked Up by an Aristocrat and Awakened a Legendary Divine Skill) is an actual series which has an anime announced.
Kyo Kara Maoh had the most unique transportation imo. Bullies gave MC swirlies and he got sucked into another world through toilet
I’m actually surprised there aren’t Isekai where the protagonist gets send into another in the future
What about an Isekai that gets thrown into our world from a fantasy one
The Devil is a Part Timer does that.
Which is especially funny because it was ahead of its time with the anime. It came out like 4 or 5 years before the isekai genre really went wild, but it took years to finally get the second season.
There’s a whole subgenre called “reverse isekai” that does exactly that.
That’s kinda what I meant, but I was thinking more of sci-fi/cyberpunk genre
The only ones I know involve the protagonist going to a post-apocalyptic future, like 7 Seeds or in a sense Dr.Stone, or from the past to our present like Thermae Romae. I don’t think there’s any real series from the present to a Cyberpunk/Sci-Fi future, the only one I know of is a hentai (I heard the plot is actually decent, but it’s still porn in the end).
An excellent deleted comment said “Star Wars is incestuous.”
Not the Luke / Leia thing. The sequels. The first movie is shamelessly a blender full of George Lucas’s favorite things. The sequels draw from all kinds of fiction, especially foreign movies that all these nerd-ass 70s directors loved. They were doing their own thing, shaped by a wide variety of influences. Even the prequels were a pastiche of bygone dramatic storytelling techniques, most of which were bygone for good reason, and some of which were just thinly-disguised racism. But you can see trashy jetpack serials in Phantom Menace as clearly as you can see trashy jungle adventures in Indiana Jones.
The Star Wars sequels were made by people whose only influences were Star Wars. Or at least Star Wars and the inevitable avalanche of movies directly rooted in Star Wars. It’s just a tangle of self-interested ideas that only works for people who also grew up mired in that monoculture. Anyone else is unsure why they’d care about these characters in this situation. Or they have uncomfortable questions about how this setting hasn’t changed in forty years. The middle one at least tried to use Star Wars as a critique of its own status quo, and that just made everyone mad.
Anime c. 2010 was deep in a phase where the primary influence for new creators was old anime. If you’d grown up with it and other stuff, you could be Anno, and deconstruct tropes into some really poignant… trolling, frankly, but that’s just Anno being a cock. But if all you know is how things are then that’s how you’ll figure they’re supposed to be. Everything was set in a school and lightly dusted with superpowers because that’s just how stories do. There was no recognition that the original projects picked magic as a metaphor for some difficult coming-of-age thing that made a familiar setting both a useful framing device and an ironic contrast. And apocalyptic stories (which may also somehow be set in interminable high schools with magical realism) aren’t reflective of any cultural concerns for the future or an excuse to reflect on current biases by isolating them from our modern present. They’re just cool to look at and a neat place for explosions to happen to bad guys.
Isekais aren’t the worst this has been - but they’re the most obvious this has been. It’s a frankly cheap gimmick for establishing an audience-insert main character who’s inherently different and superior in some way. On some level I applaud the blatant directness. But when fffucking everybody does it, even in settings where there’s really not a reason for the protagonist to be from elsewhere or Like You But, it reveals how many people think that’s just decoration. They do not understand why a story does this. They may not recognize it as a choice. Like getting Wizard Of Oz’d is just the paper you write the words on.
Basically, isekais are the useless “nobody:” of anime. They’re a symptom of a deeper problem where people can’t communicate ideas except in relation to prior examples. And what else do we expect, when the people who grew up writing Doctor Who fanfiction take charge of Doctor actual Who?
Would sell good.
