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Good video. I looked in the description for the names of these shows, but I'll just jump around in the video to find that fire mage girl again. Thanks!
While I have a hard time how Kirito is written, the general subject of SAO is great (reality, in both material and consciousness). In recent chapters it has been better since sides characters find solutions by themselves. SAO got a weird power creep too since it's an older licence, but we begin to see everyone got its limits. So it's not only the character, you need to actually write something interesting too.
SAO is very much above average compared to the imitators. Some of the story arcs have staying power, even if the general series as a whole has lots of bland aspects. It's much the same with Mary Sues - the original Mary Sue was far more nuanced than the characters we call Mary Sue these days.
I'm sad that he's probably gonna change the thumbnail because it's SOO good. Unironically one of my favorite parts of this channel is how much effort and thought goes into these thumbnails. I wish we could get a thumbnail archive 😂
One way to spice it up could be a different kind of protagonist. Imagine a comedy Isekai where a professor of medieval history got reincarnated your standard JRPG setting and get's increasingly frustrated that nothing works how it actually did in medieval Europe.
@MistaZiggyHe would pribably so passionate , he gets himself in trouble, make a fool of himself and involved in intruiges. That would be fun by barely getting out of trouble . And needs a good companion, maybe a dude but i get if people want a straightforward irritated elf woman or the likes , maybe an orc
Really hate it when the MC is just stoic to the culture too, like slavery, abuse, racism, etc. And they react like it's a normal thing in their world but then react so negatively to nepotism and politics like it's new to them.
Not to mention stories where the MC feels like a tourist, and then never grows past that. For as much as I liked watching The Water Magician, Ryo is by far the least interesting character that in nearly every scene with him, I just wanted the camera to focus on someone else. He’s not a human, he’s a plot device at best.
isekai like pandering to losers so they make their characters complete losers as well said losers wouldnt have what it takes to make a positive change also some of those freaks that consume that slop are into filth like slavery and all that its gross
Funny how SAO, the show that started the permanent staycation in a fantasy/video game world craze, was a story about people *fighting to escape the fantasy world* .
It’s a fantasy world, but it’s not fantasy, as you can see fantasy means something you find that you want to escape to without problems, difficulties, or something so if a fantasy where to have difficulty, it’s not fantasy at all
@CatfriendlySnoopy A fantasy is a creation of the mind, period. Everything else is inconsequential. A fantasy without an option to escape is called a hallucination. SAO is a Science Fiction about people fantasizing about being in a fantasy world. Effectively it's the Matrix movie, except in the Matrix people fantasized about a normal world.
Mr Maternal Cellar, I am writing to inform you I will be taking legal action against your restaurant. I was promised in your seasonal menu "I cant believe its not isekai!" , and as someone with a crippling allergy to Isekai, I was relived. Imagine my surprise when a 2006 Ford F150 came through the wall to my left and sent me to another world. I will be preceding with legal action after I defeat the demon king in 2000 chapters following a 2 month hiatus and at least 12 unnecessary hot springs episodes. You have been notified, John Isekai
Sorry it seems you signed up for Che Garbage plus and accepted the EULA, therefore you can no longer take legal action against Mr Basement. Fuck you and have a pleasant day.
i think this is part of why "non human" isekai often have a better reputation, because their things that cant really work unless your shoving a human mind into something non human, a story following a NATIVE non sentient giant spider is very different form shoving some school girl in it
They failed with the water magician intro. Ryo actually had a good life he was happy with. He wanted a slow life because his father believed in not overworking yourself. It also did a really bad job of conveying that he spent 19 years in that cabin. Working out and practicing with his magic every day. The light novel even calls him a meathead.
@King_jide they have the assassin hawk evolution but that's really it to show the passage of time. And it may have been in the same episode, I can't remember. Sure he is doing more things with magic but if you're used to the usual isekai progress then that's the next day... The only hint is when he leaves with Abel it cuts to False Michael and you get the eternal youth reveal.
Isekaitis has escalated from occasional outbreaks into an outright plague. Thank you for educating us on how to address the symptoms and live with the condition, rather than struggle against it!
We have reached the point where authors have to reincarnate people into Onsens and vending machines to call attention to their work. I think the end might be in sight.
@leandronc try Re:CREATORS, a reverse isekai that summons popular, viral or influential fictional characters accross any media (LN, WN, manga, video games, anime and even just illustration) into the 'land of gods' (modern day japan).
There's a book called "Oh Boy, I Got Reincarnated As A Farmer." And something from it that really stood out to me is that the Main Character actually has a strong reaction to being summoned to another world and being told he can't go back. The first is that, out of rage, he beats the priestess who summoned him with a stick. But more strongly, sometimes later, he doggedly tries to get EXP from killing stronger and stronger monsters despite being told that's not how his class works. After managing to kill a fairly strong monster, his familiar, who had been helping him, looks at him sadly and gives him a "I'm not going to help you kill yourself," and leaves him. Then it's revealed that this wasn't just him being hard-headed; it was him thinking that just if he were able to live out his Video Game fantasies, he could almost deal with the fact that he would never see his family and friends again, and he has a brief breakdown. And we are shown he is someone whose life was a bit of a mess, but he was just managing to turn it around when he got sent to the other world, adding insult to injury.
@whiteclover1643 then you haven't seen any, because if you had you'd know that having a companion DISAGREE with the protagonist and not just nod along or having a protagonist that makes MISTAKES is just way beyond what the typical trash isekai author can write.
@whiteclover1643 I guess that depends on what you consider typical isekai garbage. To me, it passes because it avoids some of the more annoying tropes. There's what I said above, and things like how his genre knoweldge both helps and hinders him, and while he does find an exploit (very common in this sub-genre) instead of it being a thing that gives him immediate benefit, like normal, the first book is mostly him setting it up and just barely pulling it off once near the end.His success is presented as something only he could do as a result of his specific characterization, unlike a lot os Isekai, which really want you, the viewer, to feel like you could have done it too in the MC's shoes.
Become magician, research portal magic. go back home. Existential crisis averted. Alternatively, get rich, pay magician, see above. Never saw much sense in that particular question.
@RoyThomas-c7h i dislike this channel and agree with some things u said, but what u suggest about isekai is very reductive too no? 'these stories exist for a very specific purpose' - thats not a good way to analyse the genre either. its surely better to consider why specific artistic ideals across specific works emerged the way they did (very different to focusing on cultural pressures and the webnovel ecosystem!) than to reduce all isekai works to some kind of balm for a society you suggest is fundamentally defined by being 'exhausting' and 'alienating'. calling all foreign media shit cos of ur moralising western pov is lazy and culturally supremacist, yea, but so is just repeating the point that western circles treat foreign media badly - as if thats all that matters, or all there is to say! - or using some over-abstracted sociopolitical lens to view isekai as a symptom and diagnose a societal problem. i think its better to either (1) suggest room for actual art historical or literary analysis (of which theres already lots of scholarship, but obv not on youtube) or (2) touch grass cos western criticism doesn't mean shit to japan anyway liking ur comment anyway tho cos i rly dont like this geoff guy
Most Isekai anime are a weird power fantasy because they were created for escapism. Isekai is popular because so many people hate their lives and wish they could just be reborn into a new world so they can start over rather than having to face the problems in their real life. It's honestly really sad when you think about it ):
It's sad too because you can have power fantasies and even escapism that still talks about issues in the real world and how to deal with them yourself. The video even brings this up which I liked
@MaeIsOkay When I came across my first one. I thought it was going to be that kind of structure. You are transported to another world or back in time, at first it seems great then the consequences start to appear. Most Isekai could cut out the past life and just be a standard story for their chosen genre.
For me, I'm not really fond of the message that Isekai anime and manga give that dying = being happier. That they get killed, and they're put into an ideal place where they can be happy. It gets pretty dark when you think of it like that.
Another thing that bothers me is how none of them ever question how they reincarnated into a game. If I reincarnated into Skyrim, I'd have some deeply horrifying existential questions (E: This comment gets so many replies I am using it to promote Akiba Maid War)
Log Horizon was probably the best version of that I've seen. Having _everyone_ playing a popular MMO suddenly find themselves in the game creates so many new angles and stories to consider. Seeing the folks who can't reconcile their situation and get themselves killed over and over again because they get a tiny glimpse of their old life before respawning is exactly the horror sauce that situation deserves. Would recommend, assuming you haven't seen it already.
That's something I thought about, actually, with The Elder Scrolls. I don't know about the first two, but Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim all start with the player "waking up". The body they're in is established as having existed before then, but there's only a vague indication in the rest of the game as to what that body is before you inhabit it (Morrowind tries to get you to play a Dunmer, Skyrim tries to get you to play a Nord). Either way, you're always in a place that comes off as new to you, and no-one seems to be able to identify you until you consciously and verbally give them your name, and they visually point out your race. Either way, you always seem to wake up with some degree of restraint applied, and you immediately realize that it might be best to just sit back and learn about the surrounding individuals' perception of you before you go and accidentally prove them right. That's why Lokir is there in Skyrim, so the Dragonborn can see that now is not a good time to freak out about all the new stuff that seems completely alien to them. There's a setup for, if it *_is_* an isekai, why you aren't outwardly reacting. But some NPCs comment that you look uneasy, during the tutorial phases.
My favorite Isekai story ever is the one where a teenage boy ends up in another world, and doeant gain new powers, and wanta to go home. But at the same time.grows close to the locals, even fallingin love, yet still tries to go home. Yet after a long journey comes to the conclusion that thelove he has for the new people in his life is too preciousbto give up and decided tonlive with his new family. And the story is... an episode of Adventure Time XD
Finn never stops trying to get home though in that episode. Even when he is an old man who has his family with him, he's still searching for the entrance to take him back to his own world. And when he finally dies at the end of his life, he immediately forgets everything he had or did in the other words like waking from a dream. That whole episode made me sad.
@RoyThomas-c7hBro, I didnt dismiss the genre at all. I literally said it was my favorite Isekai and it was a lead up to a punchline. I enjoy Isekai anime sometimes too. I was just makinf a joke. Just chill, dude 😂
@RoyThomas-c7h relax bro it ain't that deep, that fact is that most isekai are just badly written and repeat the same story beats with the same bland "insert character here" and fetishized girls. There are golden ones like Magical Knight Rayearth, Escaflowne , Bookworm in another world and etc. But the Garbage definitely outweigh the gold in terms of sheer volume and how much is still coming out.
isekai is basically the fanfiction of every teenage writer where they put their OC in their favorite story. The problem is that 99% of these isekai forget the 'isekai' part after about chapter 1 or 2. Also 99% of the female protagonists are either a princess or a noble while the male protagonist have some kind of super-power above everyone else. Both are always mary sues. And I do mean ALWAYS. Even after reading more than 40 diferent isekai manga, manwa and whatever variant of a graphic novel you can name, none of them have a protagonist that was not the very definition of mary sue.
The other side of the isekai coin is absolute peak like mushoku tensei, where the mc goes under crazy character development, and deeply grows as a person
The _funniest_ isekai seem to be the ones where the guys are explicitly characterised to be idiots in the original world, and don't magically become _not_ idiots in the other world. Konosuba and Isekai Ojisan come to mind.
But Kazuma is actually a genius in the new world. It's just that idiots in the new world that bog him down by association. What Kazuma doesn't magically stop being when he enters in the new world is a lazy degenerate.
@DKNguyen3.1415 kazuma talks a big game but he himself is also pretty stupid and impulsive. Like the entire succubus scene with not realizing it's all real, or putting his sword on his back... not realizing it make going through doors awkward, and instead of just adjusting how he carries it the dude just makes it shorter lol. Kazuma is just lucky.
@TheBiggestMoneyBoy kazuma's really smart, but only in specific areas. he can turn his dysfunctional team of idiots into a highly effective strike force when pushed, he comes up with a lot of good ideas, and he has a brutal sort of common sense that lets him bull through scenarios other people would get stuck on. however, his deductive reasoning sucks, he's too prideful for his own good and his empathy is close to nonexistent. high intelligence, low wisdom, is how it'd be described in dnd terms
When the best isekai I've seen in recent years is about a Chinese tactician being reincarnated into modern-day Tokyo and helps a girl achieve her dream of becoming a popstar
@meganmartin3373If Inuyasha can be an Isekai with a time travel-based framing device, then Ya Boy Kongming can be a *Reverse* Isekai with a time travel-based framing device.
@MCArt25Isekai don't come from video games, they're just an extremely watered-down version of old fantasy world transportation stories that decided to adopt shallow D&D mechanics to replace the actual worldbuilding with while never engaging with the actual D&D part in any meaningful way.
@b.h.4249No, it predates those all together. Its literally exploring another world. which has roots in classic adventure the odyssey to jules verne to literally pre superman Barsoom / John Carter of Mara.
Reincarnated as a slime made me appreciate isekai as a genre with potential because it's about the main character mostly doing things to improve the world, not their own life.
He also goes out of his way to help other humans who were forcibly removed from Earth because, as any right-minded adult would, he doesn't like the idea of children being kidnapped and used as disposable weapons of war.
Rimuru's character would be so different if he WEREN'T a 40 yrs old guy from real world Japan (for one, Vekdora would never learn the sacred texts of Manga), he immediatly connects with Shizu because they're both from the same background, and Rimuru's lack of knowledge of this world (like wuen he first started naming monsters) is fairly recurrent At least up until where i am on the manga
true, AND while Rimuru is fairly OP, the REAL conflicts are usually ones that cannot be solved with violence, and in which their insane power even ends up being a down side.
My personal biggest problem with Isekai is the lack of dichotomy involving the old and new life of the protag. I want to see what they do differently to change what they didn’t like about themselves in the previous life.
The thesis is too often "Actually there was nothing wrong with me, I was only a loser because of everyone else around me" (which is probably what a lot of their audience wants to hear)
YES! Not only the lack of contrast, but also the "why is this even an isekai?" problem. Faraway Paladin is a decent little fantasy story, but there's genuinely no impact from his past life.
I'll use this phrase to describe isekai slop: you could literally grab two of their leads, make them switch places, and their respective stories would play out exactly the same way
@RoyThomas-c7h Yes I have seen those series (Re Zero is goated) and my argument doesn't fall apart because that is true for Kirito or Bakarina clones, which is most isekai leads
Not only did Red Ranger Becomes an Adventurer in Another World remind me why I started watching isekai, it also made me love Power Rangers/Sentai again
@ethanpays5382 I loved it because of that. Red isnt the most overpowered character in the fantasy world The other main characters can hold their own Red going to the fantasy world isn't treated as the end. Its pretty much the next season of his Sentai series His world and the fantasy world are connected in so many ways. From his teammate living 1000 years in the past to an egyptian Kamen Rider
Red Ranger in Another World is literally the ONLY isekai where I read the synopsis on MAL/LiveChart and actually wanted to watch it despite it being an isekai. It felt like a shining light in a very bleak genre.
That thumbnail is wild. I had to zoom in to be sure you hadn’t snuck Kirito in there a couple of extra times in new outfits, but nope! It was a different guy every time. What a world.
Yeah i knew about the whole kirito clone joke but dang i was surprised and had to click on this video when i saw takumi there too like dang i aint think about the fact he might be a kirito clone too 😭
My problem with Isekai is how easy it actually is to make a story that would be unique. *Literally just set it anywhere else but overused JRPG fantasy world.* Isekai to space opera. Isekai to fantasy version of cold war. Isekai to age of exploration. Isekai to post apocalypse. Isekai to dinoland. Isekai in candyland. Each and every one of them poses different conflicts to tackle and different dynamics with the natives of that world, the story practically writes itself. It's not that Isekai writers are "out of ideas", it's that they never even tried. EDIT: ALOT of people are missing the point I'm making. *Yes* just using a unique setting will not automatically make an Isekai good. A bad writer can take the golden idea of the century and still turn it to crap. My point is *the major issue of Isekai isn't limited to the fact that it's crap writing, but the absolute refusal to break out of the mold of the same crap writing. The first step for Isekai to be better is for writers to be willing to not make the 9999999th Kirito clone with his harem of cardboard cutout waifus.*
Funny thing is most of unique settings that you mentioned actually exist as an isekai manga. I don't exactly remember the names but I vividly recall reading them except dino and candy one.
@Bombardier15 How I would just LOVE a W40K anime, can make it like the old shows where there was no set story just the overarching lore and they can have fun there. One episode Imperium of Man, next Orkz, Eldar etc...
23:50 this is something that the eminence in shadow actually does super well. cid is completely capable of getting back home to earth, and he actually does, in one arc, but there's an apocalypse that happens in the meantime and he drags an old acquaintance with back to his new world with him.
I really miss pre-SAO isekai. Even ascendance of a bookworm, which everybody likes to point out as a fantastic example of an isekai, is an older story, it was a light novel first. 12 kingdoms, red river, Fushigi yuugi, inuyasha, .hack, kanata kara, rayearth, ashi girl, all wonderful and very unique stories. Isekai even used to be more likely to be a shoujo than a shounen and that's when it was at its best, IMO
Water Magician is a particularly awkward case because the light novels actually do go into his backstory, with two important aspects that were cut from the anime. The first is his life before had him as the VP of his parents’ company after they both died. It’s a few pages, but establishes him well enough. The second is that he spent 20 years in the forest alone, having a single conversation with something that talks back in that entire span, so his social skills atrophied and he’s been kind of stuck in his own head. It is held back by some of the most awkward narration I’ve read though. But yeah, he could’ve easily been the Parry Everything protagonist and very little would’ve changed. The only thing that Water Magician has as an isekai specifically imo is that there were other people also sent into that world, with a bit of a mystery as to what they’ve done and if any are around currently.
If you were paying attention, anime-onlies like myself picked up on the 20-year time skip. The god that sent him to Isekai'ville mentions that protag-kun is actually immortal due to getting lucky with a unique skill, so we won't see him age. Then he was in that cottage long enough to grow an orchard from seed. That takes a minimum of 10 years to get fruiting trees from scratch, usually longer, depending on species. So when I saw all the trees growing outside the cottage, that was my queue that more than a few seasons had passed. Also, you know, the series synopsis just straight up tells you that twenty years pass in the first episode. Although I'm not sure why they'd skip out on his backstory. It's been overdone, but "I burnt out working as a corporate drone, I want that farm in the countryside" is understandable enough. We really are just hairless apes and need our connection to nature (greenspace) and physical labor to feel fulfilled. Concrete jungles and spreadsheets just don't make sense to monkee brain, which leads to a lot of ennui and restlessness in the modern world. So it works well enough that a corporate city-slicker would want a fresh start returning to nature.
Well, so far in water magician he hasn’t collected a harem yet so that’s a plus. And I guess he’s not being pursued by a whole bunch of girls that he doesn’t realize are interested in him. And he doesn’t have a video game panel. Other than that, it’s bog standard
also conveyed in the light novel is that Ryo was a history major in university before he had to drop out to work his parent's company. and that history was his second choice cause he wasn't able to get into physics like he wanted. this tiny tidbit explains so much of how he interacts with magic as a system that I am in awe that they didn't mention it until the most recently translated section of the light novel (j novel club, v5, pt15, 20250820). like, the fact that his first choice for a career was in physics is so important. you don't leave that stuff for near the end of v5!
That second aspect reminds me of "So I'm a spider, so what?" She's just super energetic in her own head, but barely says a word or even emotes from other's perspective.
I'm liking Water Magician because of the supporting cast. Once the protag meets other people, the story isn't about him anymore, I don't care about him as much, I care about the side characters.
MY main problem with modern isekai: No Endgame, No direction, no stakes. Digimon Adventure worked because 1.) they wanted to get home 2.) each step of the way is a learning experience. 3) the stakes grow once they learn that their original world is also at stake and they are the only ones who can save it.
Then you shouldn't watch this video. Literally complains about no endgame in Arifureta, of stuff that is complete(in the books) but just hasn't been animated yet.
yes. the part of isekai is the learning experience. once the character learn all they can about the new world they isekai part fads and now if feel our characters not longer in another world but they seem like they now like the natives.
I love sci-fi, and have the Apocalypse Hotel in a watch list. The problem is, that glimpses of what I've seen so far just show slice of life moments. Like "Planetarian" seemed to have similar premise, but much more striking atmosphere. So i watched it instead of Apocalypse Hotel. Would be happy if someone can explain what I'm missing. Or overall could sell this anime to me.
@RMMinc it is a bit of slice of life, but its also much more. Its hard to describe because of the whole scope of the show. Its a comedy slice of life with a melancholic tone around it all. But also theres mecha battles, a murder mystery that plays out exactly the opposite way you'd expect it to play out. Its a show that's hard to predict what will be going on 10 minutes from now. So while yes it isnt wrong to boil it down to slice of life, technically. It is also incredibly reductive, it is not like your traditional slice of life story. If you have the time, give it the 3 episode try. If youre not at all interested then that's cool. Its a show that basically every episode was atleast ad good if not better than the previous ones.
@RMMincglad i could help and hope you like it or atleast give it a chance. Theres really nothing else ive watched out of the 350 anime ive watched ti completion(i keep a running list) that felt quite like it. Closest was probably humanity has declined for overall vibe but even that is not very close.
Honestly, my main gripe with Isekai is that it's always getting blasted into the same kind of RPG Maker-ass Fantasy setting when the possibilities for worlds to drop into are (theoretically) infinite. Why not an Isekai where MC-kun is blasted into a Stonepunk setting with dinosaurs and prehistoric shit? Why not space fantasy for once like Phantasy Star? Isekai can be a huge exercise in creative world building but, intstead, it's just the same setting with maybe a different kind of narrative here and there. I just don't get it.
Ideal Sponger's Life miiiight be for you In one of the latest chapter MC's wife, queen regnant of vaguely medievaelish totally not Almo-Castille (now with dragons), muses over little glass marbles frog leaped into existence by her husband, painfully aware that she's sitting on proverbial genie in a bottle and that WHEN these marbles become known and commonplace ersatz for gems in magic tools, they WILL redefine EVERY aspect of her world, from commerce to industry to warfare.
The Isekai part is because its pure wish fulfillment. Japanese life sucks, and there's no way to break or even challenge its cruel social norms (School and work). So they just rely on escapism to pass the time. The fantasy part is because writers are too afraid to try anything "new". The stigma of failure is just that deep. Writers go with whatever sells best, then make their own twist on it. • Zero no Tsukaima and Sword Art Online set the mold for Fantasy settings. • Shield Hero set the mold for Slave-Party • Reincarnated as a Villainess set the mold for Villainess isekai • Slime-tensei set the mold for Kingdom builder isekai
There's a lot of murim too, but there's still quite a few original worlds, My clone is the space bug king has kinda both, well, it's a space fantasy, and the mc gets projected into an alien bug on a distant planet. (It's still kinda slop though, but at least both sides matter, even if it's mostly one sided on the bug part because his human body is trapped in a cave.) I'm not the demon god's lackey has the mc as a librarian in legally distinct Arkham (Lovecraft, not batman) Demonlord 2099 has the demon lord in cyberpunk (though it's loosely isekai, since it's in the same world) The zenith, the strongest murim martial artist gets trapped in stone, and awakens in an alien tournament with humans being the weakest species in the tournament. (Again, same world "isekai") I became an evolving space monster, the mc reincarnates as a tyranid/the thing/xenomorph in a science lab Becoming a Special Unit Mage in Another World, the mc is in a modern world but with magic and he's handling interspecies relations, because that's one of the few ways you are allowed to legally use magic without dealing with the wizard guild (and since he's using unconventional magic, they are a pain in the ass) Convenience Store Worker From Another World, the mc sees a really good offer to work as a cashier, and it turns out it's because it's accross worlds (and nobody with magic really wants the job) "All rounder", "dead life", and "the ultimate shut-in" (again, arguably) zombie Apocalypse Alice in borderlands, trapped in a death game Musket girls, napoleonic war-era
Villains are Destined to Die sort of has a "I want to return" element to it, which is pretty refreshing! I'm hoping they turn it into an anime. I honestly kind of miss the stories where the protagonists had something back in the real world. Or where they didn't initially want to go back, but the lessons learned in the Alternate World gives them the knowledge, skills, and confidence to face the real world.
The original Digimon did it right. The kids went back to the world because they both needed to and wanted to. 2020's ends with Tai staying back for no very clear reason, and I guess his mother just has to live with only one child, who in her mind, is probably nuts when she tells her mom about what happened.
@The_Wosh well in the second series he does show up again while Gummymon kidnaps an age regresses children trying to find his friend oof so there's that then Digimon movie changed its plot an stuck two other specials onto it lol it even has all star why lol
@jackkatz8604This actually reminds of Data Squad/Savers where Marcus/Masaru chose to go back to the Digital World with Agumon, leaving his sister, mother, and father (who he just reunited with after being trapped in the Digital World for years).
I think my favorite remark on current isekai trends goes something along the lines of this: the protagonist doesn't want to fix the system, they just want to be the one that exploits it. A world with game mechanics they get to exploit the hell out of (and notably no other person in that world also has) and a good reason to not have to go back to their original position of feeling exploited on account of having died in that previous world... well it is a rather specific and worrying wish fulfillment.
That's kinda what the isekai idea always was. You take the knowledge you got basically for free in the modern world, and make it infinitely valuable in another. And to achieve it, lives of everyone in such a world should be very miserable.
This is probably why I don't like the 'the class gets isekaied and everyone but the hero gets good powers so they bully him out' isekai-- because then it flips to 'hahaha I'll show them all, now _I_ am the bully' and aside from the fact that the original bullies tend to be written as if the protag just lives rent free in their head 24/7, it never lands well with me.
@RMMinc on the other hand you do have city builder isekai where the protagonist gets a position of power and uses their real world knowledge to fix the wrongs of society. girl isekai also very often have a "and i'm gonna fix all this poverty/inequality" subplot. isekai are power fantasies, but not everyone has such a self-centered power fantasy. some people's power fantasies are "what if I could make society good for everyone" slime isekai is that and it's pretty popular.
One Isekai I would recommend is Moonlit Fantasy. It has some of the OP MC elements, but the way they write Makato is really good. They also call out the Incel Self Inserts through another of the summoned heroes who got summoned around the same time as Makoto. This guy (forgot his name) mind controls a bunch of women, and when it fails, he crashes out like Chris Chan.
You know what would be an interesting concept? An "Isekai" where the protagonist doesn't actually get Isekaid. Like, basically, they have an accident, but survive with some mild brain damage that gives them delusions of grandeur, a massive confidence boost and some hallucinations so they THINK they are in a different version of the world. And their sudden personality change completely changes their situation and how they interact with their surroundings, in a dark comedy way. Suddenly, no guy is too scary to provoke, no situation serious enough to not be sassy and no cute girl too intimidating to try something. Hijinks ensue.
So like a modern Don Quxioute (misspelled?)? The original was way more of a critique of the chivalry tale genre and wanting to live it than it's represented today
@zeyface6366 I haven't seen it, but from what I know of Konosuba it's got some Quixotic vibes, though it doesn't have the "not-actually-isekai'd" setting that I think would be essential for a true don quixote of anime
@zeyface6366 That would probably be a solid angle. I mean, you COULD also give it a happy ending with the protag fully recovering and actually learning a lesson (didn't the original Don basically end up in permanent home care?), but this wouldn't massively change the core concept. A guy who THINKS he is an OP protag-kun fighting a gas station with a sandwich (or something along those lines) while talking to his imaginary companion (let's say a pink sheep) has lots of potential no matter the tone.
@Rusty_Spy But the Yakuza player characters are actually accomplishing something, right? This reminds me of for example the game No more heroes, with the protag being a bit of a weirdo loser, but because he is ACTUALLY winning and doing stuff it has a completely different vibe than Don Quijote. Still comedic, but just because excentric, not delusional.
After watching both the Elvis and the Priscilla biopics, I’d be down for that. Maybe he realises early on that another guy like the colonel is trying to use him as a meal ticket again. Maybe he realises that he’s entering an unhealthy power dynamic and treating a young girl the way he treated his wife. Maybe he loses the weight or has several episodes realising he’s having to go cold turkey from the drugs.
30 years ago, "oh no, Iv fallen in to another world, Iv got to find my way home." Today, "oh Im in another world, that is a relieve, cant imagine it is worse than the real one."
@arturoaguilar6002 Deciding to stay or leave is an active expression of character-agency. Usually is the climax of a lot of tension, char relationships, and personal growth. The chars now who don't even seem to wonder about their old lives feel more bland & adrift for not making any sort of decision (or feeling any way about the choice being taken from them).
@MergedAmigo To be fair I think it is because in a lot of modern isekai, the MC dies in our world and is reincarnated in the new world. So returning to our world in not even an option, even if they wanted to.
Some of my favourite mecha anime is isekai. In fact, Aura Battler Dunbine is THE FIRST isekai. And even outside of anime - one of the biggest fantasy series I read as a kid was an isekai (Witchworld by Andre Norton). Both examples actually USE the element at the foundation of the genre - it's not just an excuse to have a blank-slate self-insert protagonist.
The "What is the Isekai in this show actually needed for?" question has been a favorite of mine for a while now to quick identify the simpler fun series from more comprehensive stories - I like both but you really need to be in the mood for the latter, IMO. But this test sometimes don't work so good; Re:zero was one that slipped me up by looking like its opposite on a surface level overview. "We wanted any regular earth nerd, for this story, that's enough." and "We needed this exact earth nerd - for this story, that's everything." is a difference that ain't obvious in a quick first pass, I guess.
@RoyThomas-c7h The pot calling the (hypothetical) kettle black honestly. I'm not trying to frame this as a clapback/ad hominem schlock filled rant but all the things you're criticizing Thew and OP for in this post are things you're doing too, downplaying an entire video library of essays he's written about this specific genre and this latest one dealing with the problems this specific genre has in its current oversaturated format down to "reducing". The original commenter as well as Geoff Thew don't need *your* approval or arbitrary metrics for what makes good critique and what makes something "pretentious, pseudo-intellectual gatekeeping nonsense" as it were since your post comes off as eager to throw out everything both of them are saying. Not every story needs to justify its premise, no. But if hundreds of stories are starting the same way in the name of "efficiency" and only exist for wish-fulfillment and escapism with the vast majority of them not really iterating on the ones that have come before and the series that do widely being held up as "the good ones" in public conscious, it feels to me like the point of the video and the comment flew over your head and you're just engaging in the same schtick you're accusing these two of. The critique serves its audience just fine without your condescending taxonomy. But I'm not going to tell you to fuck off and come back when you have something interesting to say because that'd be ah, gatekeeping. Thank you for adding to the discussion.
@RoyThomas-c7h Alright, so this is a very angrily worded comment so I'm a little scared I'm sticking my hand in a hornet's nest by responding, but there's also clearly some thought been put into it so hopefully this leads to some reasonable discussion. I suppose the first idea I want to respond to is your second point, the idea that it is "arrogant" to believe that "the necessity of the Isekai element is some profound metric for quality". This is true in principle, but also in my opinion ignores the purpose of Geoff's criticism and misses the forest for the trees. I am of the opinion that any storytelling element can be useful in producing a storyteller's desired effect in the right context, and the blank-slate Otaku everyman protagonists of many modern Isekai can, in some stories, serve a similar purpose to the amnesiac protagonists that are common in many video games: to give the audience a surrogate through which to experience the story. This is a valuable thing to do, presuming you have a story actually worth experiencing. You use the word "efficiency" to describe this style of storytelling: However, efficiency is ultimately a measurement of the ratio of value of information communicated to effort expended by the reader. Using tropes and shared language to quickly get across your own ideas to your audience is efficient, using tropes and shared language to communicate the nothing other than the tropes themselves is the opposite: it's easy for the audience to read and absorb, but it also doesn't communicate almost any valuable information to the audience, it just demonstrates tropes they already knew. Now, as I have stated before, I am not of the opinion that the premise-justification question is some kind of foolproof metric for judging the value of every work, and I do think it is a little gatekeepy of Geoff to present it as such in some parts of his video. However, there is value in critiquing tropes within a genre, and the fact is that doing so requires some degree of generalization. Yes, the fact that an isekai doesn't justify its premise doesn't 100% indicate that the resulting show is written by someone who is mostly just copying tropes. However, poor premise justification in an isekai does indicate that the protagonist's background is likely to be underdeveloped. A poorly developed background for the protagonist generally indicates that the protagonist themselves is likely to be poorly developed. A poorly developed protagonist indicates that the supporting cast is likely to be poorly developed, and a poorly developed cast generally points towards a story that doesn't provide much of value to it audience. None of this is definitive proof of a story being poorly thought out, of course: smoke doesn't always indicate fire in the real world, but nonetheless you should still probably be wary when you smell burning. It is worth noting here that when I use the term "value" here, wish fulfillment is included in that umbrella. I think there is value in a story whose primary purpose is to provide a story in which an audience-surrogate protagonist does all manner of things that make the audience wish they were in the protagonist's shoes. However, there are better ways to provide wish fulfillment than just regurgitating tropes. Give us well-choreographed action scenes, a likeable and interesting supporting cast (generally including likable and interesting love interests), and/or an engaging plot to navigate through. Make the wish one actually worth fulfilling.
@RoyThomas-c7hYou haven't said anything really, just gave a vague "m'western can't understand the complexities of SUPERIOR JAPANESE SLOP so stfu with your 'criticisms' and 'analysis'". Like have you most of these series? They're slop. They KNOW they're slop, so they don't try to be anything else. They play to precisely the same beats as the other slop because they know that's what makes the slop appealing, and that's fine because they're slop! But that doesn't make them interesting or exceptional or even good, it just makes them effective. If you like slop, good on you and you enjoy that, but don't pretend it's anything else and don't get mad when people call it what it is.
Ascendance of a bookworm is my favorite LN by a wide margin and clears your litmus test with ease. Myne's time as Urano informs everything about her reaction to her new world and the foundation of her two major character motivations. There's the really obvious one where her love of reading to the point she was just about to start her career as a librarian motivates her to try getting access to the few books her new world has and create more. The really touching one for me was that her regret at not recognizing and appreciating her mother's love for her in life leads her to be fiercely protective of the family she finds in her new one. Even when there's not necessarily and new information about her past life beyond a relatively early point (30+ book series mind you), her personality is so firm that it creates tension and conflict with characters that people born into the world just wouldn't
I've been meaning to get into the LN after I finish what I'm currently reading, the first 3 seasons really got my attention (thank you WIT for picking it back up for s4)
@XeconisI strongly recommend reading the books. Fittingly it's the best way to experience the series right now. The early seasons don't really do the show justice, but my hopes are high that WIT will bring part 3 to life!
It's the only LN series I've been able to get through, honestly. The prose is a MASSIVE step up from any other LN series I've tried to read. It feels much more like reading a book than the staccato stream-of-consciousness ramble you get so often from the genre
@fingersfomgerd2413Oh for sure. Bookworm as a whole has a much more coherent structure and story compared to the many other LNs, which are mostly still pulp fiction at their core. The translator was also really good and worked closely with the author to get things right. The only time he missed the weekly translation window was when he got struck by lightning lol
The biggiest Problem with isekai is the Lack of Fantasy of the Publishers. There are a Lot of creative authors with New Stories but the Public will never read them.
What always bothered me about all the modern isekais is the RPG mechanics. Stat screens, levels, skill systems. They made sense in .hack and SAO because they literally took place in videogames. But in most of them theyre just a modern person in a classic fantasy world so theres no justificstion for them beyond "sao had them."
Yeah, same, that drives me fkn mental in Solo Leveling. Why is “the system” necessary? Why couldn’t he have just received the powers from a conceptual entity (like he literally did) and skip the video game bullshit entirely? It makes absolutely no sense in the context of the existing power system. None of the other Hunters can see this “system”, they just have their powers and that’s that. It sticks out like a sore thumb, but we gotta have it in there because the “me like video game, me play video game, me need video game to understand power system” mongoloids eat this slop like candy.
Two things I HATE in Isekai (or fantasy) anime is the concept of a Status Window and Levels like a RPG. "How strong are you?" Protagonist opens floating 2D sceen. "My level is 99 and all my stats is at max".
Watching fushigi yuugi a couple years ago and being absolutely enthralled at the way the world of the book and the real world interconnected (like her brother reading the book she was in and being able to communicate with her about his findings about the book's origin) has ruined me for modern anime. in summary, watch old shojo isekai
Similarly with Magic Knight Rayearth! I’ve read the manga and the isekai premise gets addressed in the second half, with how earth relates to Cephiro and why the pillar system exists. Not to the same extend as Fushigi Yuugi, but better than most modern isekai’s
Vision of Escaflowne is also technically an isekai, with small, but significants links between the worlds. And where the MC doesn't change totally when isekai'd. Damn, even old shonen like Tenku Senki Shurato are technically isekai.
@thecommoner2090agreed, theres whole sections of the show where i was like noooooo dont focus on the romance, focus on the guys trying to find the book's original author I HAVE TO KNOW
My takeaway is that the problem with modern isekai is that most of them now are about people with extreme power starting with zero emotional or social attachment to the societies they fall into, and often uproot the lives and order of the people living there for their own personal gain, so often times the authors don’t flesh out the actual setting and characters because they don’t really care about them as much as the things the hero can do to them. They are stories about billionaires, basically.
@RoyThomas-c7h I think it's more of a prison guard mentality than anything else. Can't let the poor downtrodden worker get some escape fantasy. They must suffer in their dreams as well.
@RoyThomas-c7hThis whole take is bad, but two major things to point out: 1. Worldbuilding and developing the setting and minor characters of a world isn’t a Western literary standard, it’s basic fantasy writing. Trying to justify bad writing as a different culture is pure racism. 2. This is a subjective opinion, but while I don’t think the genre tropes are necessarily flaws, they are hackneyed, considering we have had at least one isekai anime every single season since 2013.
I think Isekai's are also so popular, as a statement in between the lines. And what is this statement? *_" Earth is filthy. I have given up on earthly society and if I have to go on living... or have to live again... I want to do so ONLY in another world/universe, on another planet. "_* Why the overpower? Same reason ppl have stated their full abandonement of earth. All you can do here is feel powerLESS. You are a plaything of an anti-family society that has already gone global so you can't escape it anywhere, is run by psychotic corporations that everybody trys to s°ck up to, everything is owned by frauds, l°ars, tra°tors and general pieces of sh°°. With the few expecations being unable to make a big difference. Isekai... is in a way always to 50% an "eff you too", to Earth and to your own former powerlessness. At least in most cases. Sometimes you have sh°° like Re:Zero where the protagonist is so powerless compared to everyone else, you think it's a fet°sh at this point. And no season is complete without Subaru dying in the most terrifying, brutal, gore'y and painful way yet. Expecations serve only to proove the rule though. :D An Isekai without a way to ultimate power is not a complete one. At least in most cases. Konosuba is different. The friends truly are part of the journey.
Hi, my name is Debo, and I am a slop Isekai addict. I've been one for too many years to count now. Thank you for having me and I look forward to next season's slop. Bit aside, I've come to realize that slop-Isekai is definitely a guilty pleasure of mine. I enjoy the crappy ones for how crappy they can be and comparing them to each other. Idk why, but I find fun in it lol. But I will say, it makes it so much better when you stumble onto a good one! Haha!
6:48 Exactly why I fell in love with the Twelve Kingdoms series more than a decade ago. I think you're almost guaranteed those kinds of questions and plot points with almost all pre-SAO isekai cause the genre didn't have all these seemingly inescapable tropes and cliches to fall back on back then.
@tresher5 I agree, I've seen it a few times like this where referencing DCC comes out of left field or is at least off topic or out of context. But that's what makes it fun, the impression that the creator REALLY wanted to talk about Matt's series and couldn't wait for a smooth segue to do it
He did say comforting escapism has it's place. I agree Campfire was a good example of an easy to digest, "uncomplicated" (for want of a better word), Isekai. But I would almost re-classify it as "Slice of Life" with an Isekai 'd protag
23:05 Yeah, the most recent ones I can think of is Owl House, Amphibia, and the Minecraft Movie, and none of them are even Japanese-made, let alone anime.
Is it so much to ask for more reverse-Isekai, especially ones that don't come off as Japanese Tourist Board propaganda films? Re:CREATORS remains king of the type and it's sadly kind of forgotten. I'd love to see a "scientific expedition" from another world to a normal-ass small town and we get to see some gonzo anthropology. How about double Isekai where neither world is Ours? That show with a title like "Hero, marry me!" "I refuse!" or similar fit the bill, but that's the only example I can think of. I don't need "twists" like "the protagonist is reincarnated as a kitchen appliance", I want proper variations on the genre. You know, _effort._ [edit] The number of replies giving examples rather illustrates my point: there aren’t a lot of them and the ones that do exist tend to be well regarded.
Dragon Ball is basically the Reverse Isekai you are asking for. MC is transported from a world that was science and futuristic to a world that is full of magic, demons, and dragons. That world he is sent of to just happens to be Earth. He also has no memory of his life prior to Earth due to well brain damage lol. Gets more powerful as the series goes on because of a rare trait only a few beings have in the universe. I.E. Being a Sayian. Which allows him to level up his abilities "Power Level" with transformations and techniques he learned along the way.
I just want someone to make A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court into an anime. Or at least make it required reading for anyone who wants to make an isekai. It is basically the original version of this type of story as a whole (man out of time, man out of place, as in outside of where/when they come from). It really hits so so many of the tropes people love in isekai and aside from being a break from all the jrpg inspired stuff, maybe seeing how a true master handled this concept will light a fire under some people. (Twain even gave it a sentence for a title ffs.)
I think the elf might also be isekaied as well from what I remember the angel saying. But I’m guessing we’ll only get more of that later on. My Isekai life, I think it’s the one with the really cute slime ending song, actually goes over why MC is the way he is. But it’s been a while, it might have been due to a black company that overworked him.
Thank you for putting what I've been feeling about isekai into words! It makes me so happy to come across someone who understands the frustration of coming across these self-gratifying stories that only provide surface-level content
Yeah, a lot of stories that focus on the main character decades after they have been isekaied don't clear the bar, because usually they gave up on returning. Though something can still be said even if the old world doesn't matter. One that comes to mind is library of heaven's path, the mc did his usual isekai mc behavior and realized too late he isnt OP and is now a washed up teacher on the brink of getting fired. Academy's undercover professor is a great example of bad isekai great story imo, currently the only relevance isekai has is the mc casting spells weirdly and using fictional characters like sherlock holmes as his covers Another type I really like is fantasy worlds where the legendary heroes have been isekaied people and characters have fragments from the other world, like the one where the mc makes a relaxing foot bath and self cleaning toilets out of the old ads he found. "I picked up the world's strategy guide" is also a good take on the genre, where a girl gets the strategy guide and uses it to help the hero (and runs into trouble because she knows stuff she shouldn't and isn't limited by text prompts)
I like plots that reward a guy for the effort he puts in. Most of these are basically the male version of a Mary Sue; the payoff is weak because the obstacle was small.
@RoyThomas-c7h just because you use big words it doesn't change the fact that most isekai slop is just a dime a dozen copy paste nerd blank slate that fucks all the girls and kills all the enemies and is so cool because he is. But the soliloquy of the permutations in the paradigm of considerations in post-modern, post-truth modernist socratic dialog fails to consider the declining mythocondrial action by unscrupulous and economically powerful actors in a lobby to discreetly and unequivocally destroy the world so that the oligarchy can thrive and make us all indentured slaves.
i feel like “isekai for ~her~” tends to excel at setting up and fleshing out the protagonist in their original world (or perhaps i’ve gotten really good at picking them out), particularly older series like red river, ouke no monshou, silver diamond, and inuyasha come to mind
I'm an old otaku so most of the isekai-before-we-called-them-isekai were female protag-chan centred ones like Fushigi Yuugi, Magic Knights Rayearth, Maze, and Vision of Escaflowne, and they'd spend at least the first episode establishing the life back home before being isekaied, and even then the old world continued to be important. (Of course, almost every series had a minimum of 26 episodes back then so they definitely had room for that.)
The section at the end where you talk about how isekai stopped tackling the matter of "Will the hero/heroine return home?" really hit me in an unexpected way. It was something I noticed myself a long time ago, and this notion that there isn't anything worth returning to in the world that we live in is grim, but in many ways understandable. There have been many times where I see the description (or if they're bold enough, the title) of an anime, or I watch the first few episodes of said type of anime and think, "Oh, I can tell where this is going." But to counteract that sort of hopelessness, I also see the occasional isekai like "Red Ranger from Another World" or "Onmyo Kaiten Rebirth," where I can tell the writers of the story didn't just want to write an escapist fantasy, they wanted to tell some underlying message about being a good person, not giving up, the importance of bonds, or standing up for you think is right even if others are reluctant or disagree. To me, these kinds of Isekai deserve more than love and attention. While I can understand the weight and worries of this world can drive people to yearn for a better world, a better world is only possible by teaching values like the ones mentioned before. To me, the Isekai that are truly great do not cling to the new, fantastical world as a playground for our hero, but are instead the ones that teach our hero that no matter what world we live in, we will still need to act. Even if this world, or next one we end up in, is bleak, we need to fight because there are things worth fighting for.
Funny there is a korean webtoon called "a warrior returns" that shows insekaied heroe returning to a world where they lost everything. Then he goes insane and starts destroying the world.
i absolutely get why a protagonist returning would be rare, i sure as sh!t wouldn't come back to earth if i had access to actual magic, but there is still so much wasted potential in the way they just ignore the original world. i would love to see one that focuses on the original world in some way, like its impact on protag-kun, a quest to bring the things protag-kun cares about to the new world, or even a story about trying to fix the old world with stuff found in the new. just dropping the entire framing device is such bad writing.
Arifureta is one of the few I've seen where getting home to Earth is the main goal from the start. Hajime wants nothing to do with the fantasy world, but clearing the dungeons and defeating Ehit are the only clues he has to how he might possibly get home, so each volume is usually spent working towards one of those goals.
There was a manga where MC gets "isekaid" into sci-fi world that resembles a game he played. I think he later theorized that the new world is real and he was originally inside a simulation based on the fact that earth didn't have computing power to run something like that.
Imo the protagonists being reincarnated (thus unable to return home) with some cheat power is where isekais stopped being about character growth and the hero's journey and instead became wish fulfillment power fantasies.
Digimon is in the genre of older Isekai, so a lot of people don't realize it counts as one. I'm glad you mentioned it at least! It also does something a lot of modern Isekai don't do, in which the problems and personal struggles the characters faced in the real world help inform their behavior in the other world. It never forgets that the real world is the one that the kids want to return home to, regardless of how fantastical the Digital World is. The kids aren't experts either, the Digimon need to guide them unlike most Isekai where the protagonist has meta knowledge. Digimon is cool as an Isekai with the fact the characters even want to return home. The difference being that they choose to go back later in the series because they take on the responsibility to help the other world, but that doesn't mean they want to stay. The goal is always to return home, the Digimon and Digital World just act as ways of developing growth in the characters.
The last point about people not wanting to go back anymore reminds me of Final Fantasy Tactics: Advanced. Marche spends the whole game trying to convince his friends and brother to go back to the real world, really taught me that there is a undeniable quality to reality that needs to be appreciated.
oh THAT'S what Dungeon Crawler Carl is!! It's been getting a lot of traction at my library recently but I hadn't stopped to look at what the actual premise was. Sounds like it's worth the hype!
@RoyThomas-c7h dude. BAD authors/creators are getting belittled. There's plenty of terrible Western LitRPG stories, just like there's plenty of terrible isekai, plenty of terrible romance stories, plenty of terrible sci-fi, fantasy, etc. from literally every culture. A lot, probably a majority, of media is low-effort schlock because creators and readers are both lazy at least some of the time. Most Marvel movies are low-effort schlock and they are still fairly popular and big money makers. Most everybody likes to turn their brain off and consume garbage from time to time. That doesn't make it not garbage. I know that the tasty burger isn't good for me, but it can certainly be delicious. You're going to give yourself a heart attack with all the hate-orade you've been drinking to fly through this comment section ignoring all the good isekai mentioned in the video because you're butthurt the semi-professional shit-talker doesn't like some of the stories you do. You do realize all your comments are actually making him money by driving up engagement, right? Just FYI, I won't reply back to you because you're probably a troll but seriously dude I think you have some unresolved anger issues you might need to address
I started watching the Ugly Mug, Epic Fighter anime and its... its pretty alright, it has cliches and stuff, but the mc is likeable, when he made his goal to help the cute girl in his team to have as much fun in the new world not because of the chance she might fall in love with him but because she had a shitty life before getting isekai'd was very wholesome, and their relationship is very nice, she is an airhead that gets imoressed easily but she reacts to mc as he is her older brother, she sees something cool and he's the first person she goes to show it, its nice... can't wait to see how it gets effed up later on with her falling for him
I actually really enjoyed it. It makes the characters matter by bringing their trauma with them into the isekai, usually through the special notes. It's a well thought out consequence of offering the choice of leaving earth behind for half of your lifespan. Extra points for Karina being pretty much a perfect foil to the level headed and grounded Shigeru.
An isekai I read recently, and I really liked how they handled the reincarnation. The Faraway Paladin. The main character barely remembers his previous life, but he does remember the crushing depression that he suffered, which caused him to live a non-life, shut away from the world. The goddess of reincarnation then gave him a second chance to live a good life, and feeling the immense regret of his previous life, he swears a DnD paladin-style oath to the goddess of reincarnation to live his life to the fullest and then die, while helping others do the same. The reincarnation is not just a way to get him to the fantasy world, but fundamentally a part of not only his backstory, but it is his reason for doing everything. He helps people so that they can live a long life and die content. He feels their pain as his own and tries to soothe their worries, so they don't throw their lives away like he did. He hunts undead to free their trapped souls, allowing them to reincarnate. He embraces the souls of the dead and comforts them as they pass. Literally everything he does ties back to his reincarnation in some way. In a sense, it is even the antithesis of wish-fulfillment escapism. Its message is fundamentally not to turn away from the difficulties of life, but to meet them head-on. As a counterpoint to the main character and his goddess, who is the goddess of reincarnation and change, there is Stagnate, the god of undeath. Stagnate is nominally an evil god, but they are not malevolent. They represent stagnation, as their name implies. They were once a good god of death, but tired of seeing happy lives cut short, and as such decided to create a world free of suffering. A stagnant world of the undead. They, in a way, represent the main character's past life. They, too, shied away from the cruelty of life and sought an escape, rather than actually dealing with life. But just like how the main character's stagnant life caused him suffering, Stagnate also inadvertently causes suffering to the people they seek to save.
It's amazing, but the anime is a real let down. The core of the faraway paladin to me is the internal struggle to the right thing even when it's difficult, the anime on the other hand has a large focus on the action scenes.
Also, about the bookworm one, while she died, she still misses her mother and cried about it, like, you know, a real person missing their parents would. She considered having a good life with a job she loved. It's definitely the contrary of "Got hit by a truck to escape my shitty life !!! YOUHOUUU !!!!"
This theory also explains why "I'm the Evil Lord of an Intergalactic Empire" was suprisingly watchable. The protag has an actual backstory that persistently informs why they act they way they do.
lol it’s actually funny. Because he does try being evil but his past has him going against that at times. Like with the whole enriching his people so they make more. If they make more he can get more taxes. But if he taxed them higher while they’re poor he gets less. Which is how he justified to himself why he needs to make them get better jobs, health, education and so on. Also after this he discovered a love for hunting pirates because it’s basically open season on them but not many bother. He likes going after them because MONEY. With his world so poor is makes sense why he pursued it. Kinda similar to reincarnated as a mob? Which finally got a second season.
@Fujoshi1412 Same author than Reincarnated as a Mob Character, so the likeliness is natural. And that last one does go ham on the past lives of the protagonist and their relatives.
12:30 - that is a banger line, my dude! And applicable to ALL kinds of character writing, honestly! "It's impossible to drawn an arc, if all you know is where it ends." And writers shouldn't feel bad if they do, at the start, only have the end in mind... You just have to give a bit MORE thought to MAKE one! Writing backwards is a valuable tool!
@RoyThomas-c7h HAHAHA, buddy! Pal. Dude. Go touch grass, my guy. Ya know what? I was about to give you a whole emotionally-dense explanation of why your central premise is wrong - I wrote that comment expecting it to be read by the watchers of this vid, English-speakers, not the actual Japanese writers being critiqued... But my church's livestream is starting rn. You're not that important compared to real life people I could go chat with.
@RoyThomas-c7h Yeah, I don't wanna debate you?? Duh. You haven't shown any basic kindness or respect or humility. You're throwing verbal punches, demanding a fist fight, and I'm just gonna pat you on the shoulder with a head-shake of pity. Sure, call me a coward for not fighting back, but like... Maybe you're just hungry? Have you eaten yet today? Oh hey, it's lunchtime here. I'm gonna go eat a sandwich.
I'm reminded of "The Executioner and her Way of Life" that throws a lot of the conventions you talked about into the woodchipper... Namely the "Isekaied blank slate" for the audience to relate to, turns out to be more than a little psycho... and even more quickly turns more than a little Dead. Because he WASN'T the Protag-kun at all... just a random nobody to use for an exposition dump as to how screwed up the world he had been Isekaied into had become due to people like him
It's hilarious how many people got mad at that show and review-bombed it after their precious self-insert Protag-kun got brutally offed. They have hundreds of isekai that cater to them, yet when one decides to go in a direction that doesn't, they throw a temper tantrum. It's pathetic.
Some people I've asked said it started fine, but goes down the spiral of increasingly relying on typical power fantasy tropes with an added dash of yuri bait.
@calamelli209 I think I saw a similar reaction to "This Ultimate Next-Gen Full Dive RPG Is Even Shittier than Real Life" on My Anime List. A lot of reviewers seemed to not get that it was meant to subvert the idea of an Immersive full-dive game actually being all that fun, and subvert the idea of a guy who's a bit of a loser dropping into a dangerous fantasy world and quickly becoming the man. The reason I say this is that most of the complaints were about the game world being presented as unfun and the MC being presented as pretty useless until he starts improving himself as a person. I saw one guy recommend SAO, saying, "It's the same but better."
It's a surprisingly obvious problem. I've written a couple Tumblr posts about it. (Not as long or detailed or well-cited, but they're about the same problem.) If it's such an obvious problem, why don't light novel authors solve it? Well...solving it would require changing something that reliably gets thousands of people to buy and consume your work, and replacing it with something that _might_ get tens of thousands of people to consume it if you do it well and get attention at the right time, but probably it'll just make hundreds of people crazy for your story. And you can't pay rent with a few hundred sales per book.
@plantcrone9662Audiences and people who like art. There's a palpable difference between a mediocre story, designed to be purchased and consumed and forgotten by as many people as possible, and a good story, one that can change how you look at the world if the right person finds it.
@RoyThomas-c7h Lad, pointing out terrible drawn-out tropes isn't Western elitism, it's just people noticing a boring trend. It's fine if you or others enjoy these shows, but it's also fine for people to critique them to since their end goal is to see the medium improve.
Seconding. I have an idea for an isekai that I wish I could focus on and write, and Geoff's videos discussing various problem and cliches with the genre has had me thinking about what to avoid and how to avoid it, what to do instead. Not to toot my own horn (since, as I said, I haven't actually sat down and written the damn thing yet) but I already had the 'Compare the MC's old life to their new existence' covered before watching this video. Still, there's some stuff to chew on here.
Thank you! I am writing a litrpg story at the moment and hadn't given nearly enough thought about what is being left behind! Thanks to you I now have a checklist!
@Froschemints You know that 1. Some people just don’t want to be in relationships and 2. Some people can have an actually good personality, and just aren’t in relationships. Things could just not work, so they’re alone. Why are you like this?
So there’s a moment in the third book of Dungeon Crawler Carl where the Guide and Surrogate Father Figure that had been helping Carl and Donut gets pissed and hits Carl. Carl, IMMEDIATELY flashes back to his abusive bio father hitting him as a child. He very quietly swallows all those feelings and just gives a quiet warning “Don’t ever hit me again.” I was so shocked by that moment. The narration had mentioned there was SOME abuse in his past (His mother would lock him in the basement for hours if his father’s friends came over. This is said just as a throwaway line to explain why he’s good at FROGGER of all things) but this was DIRECT. And not only that but it’s the first sign that Carl had made that Surrogate Father connection subconsciously before he could ever say it out loud. The book starts out sort of pretending that it’s wishful fulfillment fluff while slowly and subtly feeding you the strong foundation. It’s so good you guys. It’s funny and heartfelt and it genuinely has me worried about how it’ll all end. Above all else it’s about overcoming trauma, pain and the indomitable human spirit. “You will NOT break me.”
@RoyThomas-c7hGirl, wut. lol All that to yell at someone who’s up to date on LN Re:Zero and Mushoku Tensei and reads garbage RoFan Isekai FOR FUN. Take this weird tirade elsewhere lol
Oh man. Dungeon Crawler Carl is so, so good. When Donut gets a chance to say what she really thinks about her former owner... I genuinely cried. And anybody who has listened to or read the books will understand why it hurts so much when she asks "Why doesn't it hurt?" The audiobooks are absolutely phenomenal.
My main gripe with modern isekai is that these stories just don't end properly. Even the best of them have few (usually one) interesting arcs in the beginning and then plateu into meandering mess which goes on and on endlessly without resolution or even a meaningful story progress.
So far the only isekai series I've finished reading is That Time I Got Reincarnated As A Slime. There are a handful of others that I am in the middle of but yeah, so many are like you describe. Some really neat idea or a good set of characters that is good enough for a story or two but nothing more. But then it goes on for 623 volumes. Related thought: Has any isekai that started as a novel or manga ever gotten a complete anime adaptation? I'm at a loss. Best I can come up with are a couple that apparently plan on being complete adaptations but aren't there yet.
You can thank the light novel/web novel system for that. These stories put super high emphasis on the beginning so they can hook the readers in, because very few people will pick up a story that already has like 50 chaps merely due to the fact it's a chore to keep up with, light novels/web novel's success can be determined from how well the first few volumes/chapters do. The memetic long titles are used as clickbait exactly for this purpose. Issue is even if they got lucky and managed to hook an audience group, most light novel/web novels also need to be updated regularly to stay relevant, same way as every social media works. It's why the writers are never given time to make a long-term plan of where their story should go and so even if they started "unique" a la Slime or Shield Hero, after a while it just become the same old boilerplate plot because the writer has to keep releasing chapters even if they're out of ideas.
@oboretaiwritingch.2077 It isn't like that is a problem unique to isekai or Japan. It is a problem with episodic and/or serialized storytelling in general. One TV episode, one volume of manga, a volume of a book series, one season even, whatever... Just take the first 4 minutes of Terminator 2, the Future War segment right at the beginning (to use an example of hooking people done well. Just how many people continue to watch Terminator movies just because they got hooked there?). Or just use the Terminator setting as a whole, aside from the first two movies and The Burning Earth (absolutely gorgeous comic from 1990), the rest is garbage. What you can really blame this on more than anything else is people funding known properties (or to say it in a way that is less kind, people are cowards). A sequel usually takes home a minimum of 3/5 of the previous installment as a rule of thumb. As long as that fraction remains profitable, people will dump money into it. Even when the ideas have run dry. That take can come directly or indirectly (like ad revenue). In a world where likes, views and online clout matter as much as they do, simply being popular can be enough and popularity breeds popularity as they say.
I think a fundamental issue with modern isekai is that they've abandoned the core concept of older isekai: getting home. (I went all ADHD and wrote this before Geoff mentioned it, so read on as an addendum, rather than addressing the unaddressed.) In the vast majority of older "our world to fantasy world" stories, getting home is at least the beginning point of an isekai'd person's journey. Sure there's stuff like Narnia where they quickly get swept up in the world and prefer it over their homeland, but those books do focus on children who don't consider that implication very strongly and orphans no less. They are grounded in their conditions and decide to stay because they at least have each other and are royalty there. Most older isekai though are fundamentally about getting home and not staying in the cool fantasy world. I think as time wore on and Otaku became more misanthropic and depressed, but also capitalism reached the end of its shitstained chrysalis, the desire to return dwindled. Modern Isekai are often webnovels or light novels, with low barriers to entry and desperate marketing strategies rather than artistic integrity. They want to reflect the demands of the audience. But as Geoff says, a character who does not want to return home is a character without a home, and that begs the "why" question that so few of these slopfests are unwilling to answer. The why can be a societal critique, a political one, a social one, or it can be something vulnerable and personal and difficult to write (grief, entitlement, anxiety, neurodivergence, etc). If you don't put in the work, though, there is no "because" statement beyond "because he's a nerd and being one sucks". Which is basically bullshit these days, nerds have never had it easier. One great example is Shining Tears X Wind. Not a good show, but at least had a well defined protagonist. Souma is a piece of shit early on with an unrequited crush on his classmate who is also isekai'd with him, alongside his best friend and romantic rival. Without spoiling he does some fucked up shit to try and impress her and get them home before she fully rejects him, and it's only after he respects her decision and consent that his lil harem starts to form and he slowly goes from the shitty rival character to the hero of the story. Without realizing it (partly because they didn't develop the romance enough unfortunately) he falls in love with one of his party members and is heading home at the end of the story before seeing her crying and deciding he will stay, actually. Not just because he loves her, but because he is the only isekai'd character (there are 5 others) whose life and character improved by the experience instead of was put on hold by it. It feels very earned when he stays behind and wishes the best to his old friends. It's cool that way and if this specific arc sounds nice I'd give it a watch. You need to address why you're not going home and if the answer is "because I don't feel like it" then you need to address why you're character is so destesting of their home or why they're selfish enough to not care about the people who presumably care about them.
Be careful what you wish for though, you might just get it. Look at Forspoken's protagonist. Frey has a horrible life on the streets of New York, constantly getting in trouble with the law and other street thugs. In contrast, when she gets to Athia and helps the natives of the fantasy world with her superpower, they gradually warm up to her despite the initial hostility. Why then does Frey still desire to go back to New York as opposed to settling in a new home where she is actually valued? What part of her life back in New York did Frey miss? Don't know. Be careful what you wish for.
This is why Log Horizon works, yes, part of the appeal is the cast wants to go home. Is that really brought up, no but it’s on everyone’s mind considering the ‘respawn equals loss memories’ thing. Shiroe realized that it could take years to get back home and made the Round Table as a measure to make the world they are stuck in as best as it could.
@RoyThomas-c7h This is one of the most self-righteous and pseudy comments I've read in a long time lmao. Real they targeted gamers stuff well done. Don't invoke orientalism and narrative imperialism to defend your cultural fetishism in the future, you're embarrassingly out of your depth
@RoyThomas-c7h While I think you put up a decent effort in countering OP's comment, I think you could have done yourself a lot of favors by making your rebutle slightly less about racism, and a little more forcussed on the substance of your argument.
One thing I love about Reincarnated as a Slime is that Rimuru is looking for a way for other people to go back home. Like he understands that the kids that were summoned need to be with their parents
My DM kinda hates that series, because Rimuru does end up getting quite a lot of blood on his hands and he isn't even really called out for it, neither by characters within the show, nor by fans of it.
Huge thanks to Rosetta Stone for sponsoring this video! Get a lifetime of language lessons for over 60% off: partners.rosettastone.com/mothers-basement5zw
Yo, Geoff!
Can you do The Hottest Trash Animes of Summer 2025 real soon, yeah!?
That segue with rent actually made me laugh 😂
Good video. I looked in the description for the names of these shows, but I'll just jump around in the video to find that fire mage girl again. Thanks!
@NerdyMusicChef Yes, Linus would be proud.
Heads up: the video title appears to be "VO + Music"
It's no coincidence that the best isekai are the ones WITHOUT a Kirito clone protagonist.
this is mostly true
Nah theyre still Kirito they just discovered what hair dye is.
While I have a hard time how Kirito is written, the general subject of SAO is great (reality, in both material and consciousness). In recent chapters it has been better since sides characters find solutions by themselves. SAO got a weird power creep too since it's an older licence, but we begin to see everyone got its limits. So it's not only the character, you need to actually write something interesting too.
SAO and it's impact on anime is devastating
SAO is very much above average compared to the imitators. Some of the story arcs have staying power, even if the general series as a whole has lots of bland aspects.
It's much the same with Mary Sues - the original Mary Sue was far more nuanced than the characters we call Mary Sue these days.
The thunbnail picture with Kirito side eyeing 12 Dollar Store off-brand Kirito clones is amazing.
That’s 17 dollar store kirito clones thank you very much
I'm sad that he's probably gonna change the thumbnail because it's SOO good. Unironically one of my favorite parts of this channel is how much effort and thought goes into these thumbnails. I wish we could get a thumbnail archive 😂
They literally all look the same. It's actually blowing my mind.
Yo, he's like "who the f*ckin' hell are you guys?!
@goodhelmetjunior Ah yes, inflation. If only we could get hit by a truck and be somewhere else.
One way to spice it up could be a different kind of protagonist. Imagine a comedy Isekai where a professor of medieval history got reincarnated your standard JRPG setting and get's increasingly frustrated that nothing works how it actually did in medieval Europe.
He starting ranting that tomatoes, white rice, corn, potatos etc werent medieval europe prefered food.
Would he be wrong genre savvy or would his knowledge be revolutionary to the world realpolitik that he becomes Henry Kissinger?
@MistaZiggyan advisor to the largest empire in the setting n stirring up conflict around the continent? Count me in.
@MistaZiggyHe would pribably so passionate , he gets himself in trouble, make a fool of himself and involved in intruiges.
That would be fun by barely getting out of trouble . And needs a good companion, maybe a dude but i get if people want a straightforward irritated elf woman or the likes , maybe an orc
@heitorpedrodegodoi5646White Race? That took a sharp turn
Really hate it when the MC is just stoic to the culture too, like slavery, abuse, racism, etc. And they react like it's a normal thing in their world but then react so negatively to nepotism and politics like it's new to them.
Not to mention stories where the MC feels like a tourist, and then never grows past that. For as much as I liked watching The Water Magician, Ryo is by far the least interesting character that in nearly every scene with him, I just wanted the camera to focus on someone else. He’s not a human, he’s a plot device at best.
They only react if it negatively affects them
isekai like pandering to losers so they make their characters complete losers as well said losers wouldnt have what it takes to make a positive change also some of those freaks that consume that slop are into filth like slavery and all that its gross
Reason why Skeleton knight is my favourite jap isekai novel
Funny how SAO, the show that started the permanent staycation in a fantasy/video game world craze, was a story about people *fighting to escape the fantasy world* .
It’s a fantasy world, but it’s not fantasy, as you can see fantasy means something you find that you want to escape to without problems, difficulties, or something so if a fantasy where to have difficulty, it’s not fantasy at all
@CatfriendlySnoopyFantasy as in fantastical, not fantasy as in a humans fantasy.
@CatfriendlySnoopy A fantasy is a creation of the mind, period. Everything else is inconsequential. A fantasy without an option to escape is called a hallucination. SAO is a Science Fiction about people fantasizing about being in a fantasy world. Effectively it's the Matrix movie, except in the Matrix people fantasized about a normal world.
@roller4312that’s exactly it!
It's funnier to me that SAO popularized Isekai and ended up not being an Isekai
Mr Maternal Cellar, I am writing to inform you I will be taking legal action against your restaurant. I was promised in your seasonal menu "I cant believe its not isekai!" , and as someone with a crippling allergy to Isekai, I was relived. Imagine my surprise when a 2006 Ford F150 came through the wall to my left and sent me to another world. I will be preceding with legal action after I defeat the demon king in 2000 chapters following a 2 month hiatus and at least 12 unnecessary hot springs episodes.
You have been notified,
John Isekai
"relived" *chef's kiss*
2000 chapters? Are you sure you are not trying to find one piece or something?
Sorry it seems you signed up for Che Garbage plus and accepted the EULA, therefore you can no longer take legal action against Mr Basement. Fuck you and have a pleasant day.
A light novel as well? This is a criminal offense
There needs to be a RUclips comment hall of fame, because this would be in it.
love how this articulates and expands on my own isekai test method: asking "would this story be better if it wasn't an isekai?"
I swear gigguk mentioned something similar a long time ago.
@shadowreaver752same here man same
There are so many that I forget are actually isekai and not just fantasy, with how little the isekai aspect matters. Looking at you, Faraway Paladin.
I have been struggling to answer that regarding Civilization of Ruin
What do you think só Far?
i think this is part of why "non human" isekai often have a better reputation, because their things that cant really work unless your shoving a human mind into something non human, a story following a NATIVE non sentient giant spider is very different form shoving some school girl in it
They failed with the water magician intro. Ryo actually had a good life he was happy with. He wanted a slow life because his father believed in not overworking yourself. It also did a really bad job of conveying that he spent 19 years in that cabin. Working out and practicing with his magic every day. The light novel even calls him a meathead.
So they skipped all that in the anime?
@King_jide they have the assassin hawk evolution but that's really it to show the passage of time. And it may have been in the same episode, I can't remember. Sure he is doing more things with magic but if you're used to the usual isekai progress then that's the next day... The only hint is when he leaves with Abel it cuts to False Michael and you get the eternal youth reveal.
@sunflash2maybe I'll give the novel a try. Where do you read it.
Note: it should be a free website.
@King_jide Anna's archive
@sunflash2 Imma go check it out. Thanks btw
Isekaitis has escalated from occasional outbreaks into an outright plague. Thank you for educating us on how to address the symptoms and live with the condition, rather than struggle against it!
Just wait, after market saturation, all we have to do is wait for the next big trend then Isekai's will be like the Space Opera's before them.
We have reached the point where authors have to reincarnate people into Onsens and vending machines to call attention to their work. I think the end might be in sight.
@GargoyleDragon Isekai needs its own Evangelion, to deconstruct it into near non-existence, like what happened to the mecha genre.
@leandronc
try Re:CREATORS, a reverse isekai that summons popular, viral or influential fictional characters accross any media (LN, WN, manga, video games, anime and even just illustration) into the 'land of gods' (modern day japan).
@leandronc hoped it might be one's isekai idea but haven't heard anything about it in years
There's a book called "Oh Boy, I Got Reincarnated As A Farmer." And something from it that really stood out to me is that the Main Character actually has a strong reaction to being summoned to another world and being told he can't go back. The first is that, out of rage, he beats the priestess who summoned him with a stick. But more strongly, sometimes later, he doggedly tries to get EXP from killing stronger and stronger monsters despite being told that's not how his class works. After managing to kill a fairly strong monster, his familiar, who had been helping him, looks at him sadly and gives him a "I'm not going to help you kill yourself," and leaves him. Then it's revealed that this wasn't just him being hard-headed; it was him thinking that just if he were able to live out his Video Game fantasies, he could almost deal with the fact that he would never see his family and friends again, and he has a brief breakdown. And we are shown he is someone whose life was a bit of a mess, but he was just managing to turn it around when he got sent to the other world, adding insult to injury.
That's kinda interesting. Any anime currently or on the horizon?
Sounds like typical isekai garbage
@whiteclover1643 then you haven't seen any, because if you had you'd know that having a companion DISAGREE with the protagonist and not just nod along or having a protagonist that makes MISTAKES is just way beyond what the typical trash isekai author can write.
@whiteclover1643 I guess that depends on what you consider typical isekai garbage. To me, it passes because it avoids some of the more annoying tropes. There's what I said above, and things like how his genre knoweldge both helps and hinders him, and while he does find an exploit (very common in this sub-genre) instead of it being a thing that gives him immediate benefit, like normal, the first book is mostly him setting it up and just barely pulling it off once near the end.His success is presented as something only he could do as a result of his specific characterization, unlike a lot os Isekai, which really want you, the viewer, to feel like you could have done it too in the MC's shoes.
Become magician, research portal magic. go back home. Existential crisis averted. Alternatively, get rich, pay magician, see above.
Never saw much sense in that particular question.
Kinda sad how a lot of it boils down to "Hey maybe if you write your characters as if they were people your story wouldn't suck so much"
@RoyThomas-c7h You should go write a thesis instead of arguing with half baked comments.
@crazydragy4233and also not dick ride the Isekai genre.
@RoyThomas-c7hDamn, you really love your slop.
But unfortunately the Japanese would rather want the same generic waifus rather than try a new story.
@RoyThomas-c7h i dislike this channel and agree with some things u said, but what u suggest about isekai is very reductive too no? 'these stories exist for a very specific purpose' - thats not a good way to analyse the genre either. its surely better to consider why specific artistic ideals across specific works emerged the way they did (very different to focusing on cultural pressures and the webnovel ecosystem!) than to reduce all isekai works to some kind of balm for a society you suggest is fundamentally defined by being 'exhausting' and 'alienating'. calling all foreign media shit cos of ur moralising western pov is lazy and culturally supremacist, yea, but so is just repeating the point that western circles treat foreign media badly - as if thats all that matters, or all there is to say! - or using some over-abstracted sociopolitical lens to view isekai as a symptom and diagnose a societal problem. i think its better to either (1) suggest room for actual art historical or literary analysis (of which theres already lots of scholarship, but obv not on youtube) or (2) touch grass cos western criticism doesn't mean shit to japan anyway
liking ur comment anyway tho cos i rly dont like this geoff guy
Everyone gangsta til the protagonist gets reincarnated into The chernobyl zone
"I got reincarnated as a s-rank nuclear zombie boss in chernobyl"
So basically Stalker if it was an Isekai
@TrlDMC.1 "monolit aughh"
Most Isekai anime are a weird power fantasy because they were created for escapism. Isekai is popular because so many people hate their lives and wish they could just be reborn into a new world so they can start over rather than having to face the problems in their real life. It's honestly really sad when you think about it ):
It's sad too because you can have power fantasies and even escapism that still talks about issues in the real world and how to deal with them yourself. The video even brings this up which I liked
@MaeIsOkay When I came across my first one. I thought it was going to be that kind of structure. You are transported to another world or back in time, at first it seems great then the consequences start to appear. Most Isekai could cut out the past life and just be a standard story for their chosen genre.
For me, I'm not really fond of the message that Isekai anime and manga give that dying = being happier. That they get killed, and they're put into an ideal place where they can be happy. It gets pretty dark when you think of it like that.
it's not weird at all and escapism is good.
@ZahnwehZombie dying does equal being happier. obviously.
Another thing that bothers me is how none of them ever question how they reincarnated into a game. If I reincarnated into Skyrim, I'd have some deeply horrifying existential questions
(E: This comment gets so many replies I am using it to promote Akiba Maid War)
Log Horizon was probably the best version of that I've seen.
Having _everyone_ playing a popular MMO suddenly find themselves in the game creates so many new angles and stories to consider.
Seeing the folks who can't reconcile their situation and get themselves killed over and over again because they get a tiny glimpse of their old life before respawning is exactly the horror sauce that situation deserves.
Would recommend, assuming you haven't seen it already.
Overlord some what does it but his existential questions is the fact the MC is now a Demon Lord Skeleton forced to run an evil conquering empire
That's something I thought about, actually, with The Elder Scrolls. I don't know about the first two, but Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim all start with the player "waking up". The body they're in is established as having existed before then, but there's only a vague indication in the rest of the game as to what that body is before you inhabit it (Morrowind tries to get you to play a Dunmer, Skyrim tries to get you to play a Nord). Either way, you're always in a place that comes off as new to you, and no-one seems to be able to identify you until you consciously and verbally give them your name, and they visually point out your race.
Either way, you always seem to wake up with some degree of restraint applied, and you immediately realize that it might be best to just sit back and learn about the surrounding individuals' perception of you before you go and accidentally prove them right. That's why Lokir is there in Skyrim, so the Dragonborn can see that now is not a good time to freak out about all the new stuff that seems completely alien to them. There's a setup for, if it *_is_* an isekai, why you aren't outwardly reacting. But some NPCs comment that you look uneasy, during the tutorial phases.
For game isekai’s, a cool trope could be subtle and random glitching or inconsistencies that could hint at some existential horror.
If you isekai'd into Skyrim you'd either achieve CHIM or erase yourself in the process of trying to achieve it.
My favorite Isekai story ever is the one where a teenage boy ends up in another world, and doeant gain new powers, and wanta to go home. But at the same time.grows close to the locals, even fallingin love, yet still tries to go home. Yet after a long journey comes to the conclusion that thelove he has for the new people in his life is too preciousbto give up and decided tonlive with his new family. And the story is... an episode of Adventure Time XD
Also….. (spoilers)
Konosuba
Finn never stops trying to get home though in that episode. Even when he is an old man who has his family with him, he's still searching for the entrance to take him back to his own world. And when he finally dies at the end of his life, he immediately forgets everything he had or did in the other words like waking from a dream. That whole episode made me sad.
@RoyThomas-c7h how about you gain some real reading comprehension before you come back and spread bullshit
@RoyThomas-c7hBro, I didnt dismiss the genre at all. I literally said it was my favorite Isekai and it was a lead up to a punchline. I enjoy Isekai anime sometimes too. I was just makinf a joke. Just chill, dude 😂
@RoyThomas-c7h relax bro it ain't that deep, that fact is that most isekai are just badly written and repeat the same story beats with the same bland "insert character here" and fetishized girls. There are golden ones like Magical Knight Rayearth, Escaflowne , Bookworm in another world and etc. But the Garbage definitely outweigh the gold in terms of sheer volume and how much is still coming out.
isekai is basically the fanfiction of every teenage writer where they put their OC in their favorite story.
The problem is that 99% of these isekai forget the 'isekai' part after about chapter 1 or 2.
Also 99% of the female protagonists are either a princess or a noble while the male protagonist have some kind of super-power above everyone else. Both are always mary sues. And I do mean ALWAYS.
Even after reading more than 40 diferent isekai manga, manwa and whatever variant of a graphic novel you can name, none of them have a protagonist that was not the very definition of mary sue.
The other side of the isekai coin is absolute peak like mushoku tensei, where the mc goes under crazy character development, and deeply grows as a person
The _funniest_ isekai seem to be the ones where the guys are explicitly characterised to be idiots in the original world, and don't magically become _not_ idiots in the other world. Konosuba and Isekai Ojisan come to mind.
But Kazuma is actually a genius in the new world. It's just that idiots in the new world that bog him down by association. What Kazuma doesn't magically stop being when he enters in the new world is a lazy degenerate.
Also Eminence in Shadow.
The point of the isekai-ing is that Cid was batshit crazy on Earth to begin with.
@DKNguyen3.1415 kazuma talks a big game but he himself is also pretty stupid and impulsive. Like the entire succubus scene with not realizing it's all real, or putting his sword on his back... not realizing it make going through doors awkward, and instead of just adjusting how he carries it the dude just makes it shorter lol. Kazuma is just lucky.
Kazuma has the advantage of not being as dumb as everyone else around him.
@TheBiggestMoneyBoy kazuma's really smart, but only in specific areas. he can turn his dysfunctional team of idiots into a highly effective strike force when pushed, he comes up with a lot of good ideas, and he has a brutal sort of common sense that lets him bull through scenarios other people would get stuck on.
however, his deductive reasoning sucks, he's too prideful for his own good and his empathy is close to nonexistent.
high intelligence, low wisdom, is how it'd be described in dnd terms
When the best isekai I've seen in recent years is about a Chinese tactician being reincarnated into modern-day Tokyo and helps a girl achieve her dream of becoming a popstar
Ya Boy Kongming!
Technically speaking, that is the _same_ sekai.
I'm desperate for a season 2. Let our girl get to summer sonia
@meganmartin3373If Inuyasha can be an Isekai with a time travel-based framing device, then Ya Boy Kongming can be a *Reverse* Isekai with a time travel-based framing device.
Yesss Papiri Komei is lots of fun, the live action turned out well too.
The best part of this video is that it also simultaneously proves that fantasy which forgets where it came from is also bad.
isekai never forget that they come from videogames, though
@MCArt25Isekai don't come from video games, they're just an extremely watered-down version of old fantasy world transportation stories that decided to adopt shallow D&D mechanics to replace the actual worldbuilding with while never engaging with the actual D&D part in any meaningful way.
@b.h.4249Heck, the video game aesthetics could make so many of these things get considered as science fiction with a DnD fantasy coating.
@christopherbennett5858 Trapped in a Videogame and Isekai are 2 different genre's
@b.h.4249No, it predates those all together. Its literally exploring another world. which has roots in classic adventure the odyssey to jules verne to literally pre superman Barsoom / John Carter of Mara.
Reincarnated as a slime made me appreciate isekai as a genre with potential because it's about the main character mostly doing things to improve the world, not their own life.
Also the main character is actually his own character.
He also goes out of his way to help other humans who were forcibly removed from Earth because, as any right-minded adult would, he doesn't like the idea of children being kidnapped and used as disposable weapons of war.
Rimuru's character would be so different if he WEREN'T a 40 yrs old guy from real world Japan (for one, Vekdora would never learn the sacred texts of Manga), he immediatly connects with Shizu because they're both from the same background, and Rimuru's lack of knowledge of this world (like wuen he first started naming monsters) is fairly recurrent
At least up until where i am on the manga
true, AND while Rimuru is fairly OP, the REAL conflicts are usually ones that cannot be solved with violence, and in which their insane power even ends up being a down side.
Tensura is actually rlly mid. Try Rezero or LoTM.
My personal biggest problem with Isekai is the lack of dichotomy involving the old and new life of the protag. I want to see what they do differently to change what they didn’t like about themselves in the previous life.
I think you’ll like this video
The thesis is too often "Actually there was nothing wrong with me, I was only a loser because of everyone else around me" (which is probably what a lot of their audience wants to hear)
YES! Not only the lack of contrast, but also the "why is this even an isekai?" problem. Faraway Paladin is a decent little fantasy story, but there's genuinely no impact from his past life.
Re: Zero is the only one I can think of where this actually happens.
Mushoku Tensei (one of the most senior isekai) also has this, which is what got me started in the genre.
I was reading the manga in maybe 2018 or so.
I'll use this phrase to describe isekai slop: you could literally grab two of their leads, make them switch places, and their respective stories would play out exactly the same way
Also, nobody would notice anything wrong.
Chances are you also couldn't visually tell them apart
@Duke_of_Lorraine sure you could... by their chest.
@RoyThomas-c7h Yes I have seen those series (Re Zero is goated) and my argument doesn't fall apart because that is true for Kirito or Bakarina clones, which is most isekai leads
@Duke_of_LorraineIncluding his harem
Not only did Red Ranger Becomes an Adventurer in Another World remind me why I started watching isekai, it also made me love Power Rangers/Sentai again
I really enjoy the Red Ranger Isekai cuz it felt different from other Isekai
@ethanpays5382
I loved it because of that.
Red isnt the most overpowered character in the fantasy world
The other main characters can hold their own
Red going to the fantasy world isn't treated as the end. Its pretty much the next season of his Sentai series
His world and the fantasy world are connected in so many ways. From his teammate living 1000 years in the past to an egyptian Kamen Rider
Red Ranger in Another World is literally the ONLY isekai where I read the synopsis on MAL/LiveChart and actually wanted to watch it despite it being an isekai. It felt like a shining light in a very bleak genre.
That one a good one to watch
I somehow forgot about this when reacting to this video, but Red Ranger Isekai is an amazing show thanks for reminding me...
Just started the vídeo. My problems:
- extensíve names that looks like a synopisis.
- same thing always
- fanserviced harem
That thumbnail is wild. I had to zoom in to be sure you hadn’t snuck Kirito in there a couple of extra times in new outfits, but nope! It was a different guy every time. What a world.
Yeah i knew about the whole kirito clone joke but dang i was surprised and had to click on this video when i saw takumi there too like dang i aint think about the fact he might be a kirito clone too 😭
I have a feeling that this episode was made because he wanted to show off the new Dungeon Crawler Carl comic. 😂
Reading the books… what?
@kingcowt1it’s on the app or website webtoon
@kingcowt1 A webtoon recently launched.
Pretty good comic
@kinman3051 Agreed
My problem with Isekai is how easy it actually is to make a story that would be unique. *Literally just set it anywhere else but overused JRPG fantasy world.*
Isekai to space opera. Isekai to fantasy version of cold war. Isekai to age of exploration. Isekai to post apocalypse. Isekai to dinoland. Isekai in candyland.
Each and every one of them poses different conflicts to tackle and different dynamics with the natives of that world, the story practically writes itself.
It's not that Isekai writers are "out of ideas", it's that they never even tried.
EDIT: ALOT of people are missing the point I'm making. *Yes* just using a unique setting will not automatically make an Isekai good. A bad writer can take the golden idea of the century and still turn it to crap. My point is *the major issue of Isekai isn't limited to the fact that it's crap writing, but the absolute refusal to break out of the mold of the same crap writing. The first step for Isekai to be better is for writers to be willing to not make the 9999999th Kirito clone with his harem of cardboard cutout waifus.*
A Warhammer 40K inspired setting is literally RIGHT there
Also Cyberpunk, and Alternate Timeline
Funny thing is most of unique settings that you mentioned actually exist as an isekai manga. I don't exactly remember the names but I vividly recall reading them except dino and candy one.
But that requires the author to do more research than look up hot elf ladies and spoof Dragon Quest...and that's hard ig
You underestimate just how braindead is most Isekai writer
@Bombardier15 How I would just LOVE a W40K anime, can make it like the old shows where there was no set story just the overarching lore and they can have fun there. One episode Imperium of Man, next Orkz, Eldar etc...
23:50 this is something that the eminence in shadow actually does super well. cid is completely capable of getting back home to earth, and he actually does, in one arc, but there's an apocalypse that happens in the meantime and he drags an old acquaintance with back to his new world with him.
I really miss pre-SAO isekai.
Even ascendance of a bookworm, which everybody likes to point out as a fantastic example of an isekai, is an older story, it was a light novel first.
12 kingdoms, red river, Fushigi yuugi, inuyasha, .hack, kanata kara, rayearth, ashi girl, all wonderful and very unique stories. Isekai even used to be more likely to be a shoujo than a shounen and that's when it was at its best, IMO
Ya know, I think you've nailed it the most succinctly, modern isekais are definitely "more shounen than shoujo" and it hurts the writing soooo much
God, .hack is so good.
Now and Then, Here and There. FMA03 with the reverse isekai.
Aura Battler Dunbine was also an Isakai!
oooh, Red River/Anatolia Story! hell yeah, that was all about getting Yuri back home for the longest time
Water Magician is a particularly awkward case because the light novels actually do go into his backstory, with two important aspects that were cut from the anime. The first is his life before had him as the VP of his parents’ company after they both died. It’s a few pages, but establishes him well enough. The second is that he spent 20 years in the forest alone, having a single conversation with something that talks back in that entire span, so his social skills atrophied and he’s been kind of stuck in his own head. It is held back by some of the most awkward narration I’ve read though.
But yeah, he could’ve easily been the Parry Everything protagonist and very little would’ve changed. The only thing that Water Magician has as an isekai specifically imo is that there were other people also sent into that world, with a bit of a mystery as to what they’ve done and if any are around currently.
If you were paying attention, anime-onlies like myself picked up on the 20-year time skip. The god that sent him to Isekai'ville mentions that protag-kun is actually immortal due to getting lucky with a unique skill, so we won't see him age. Then he was in that cottage long enough to grow an orchard from seed. That takes a minimum of 10 years to get fruiting trees from scratch, usually longer, depending on species. So when I saw all the trees growing outside the cottage, that was my queue that more than a few seasons had passed.
Also, you know, the series synopsis just straight up tells you that twenty years pass in the first episode.
Although I'm not sure why they'd skip out on his backstory. It's been overdone, but "I burnt out working as a corporate drone, I want that farm in the countryside" is understandable enough. We really are just hairless apes and need our connection to nature (greenspace) and physical labor to feel fulfilled. Concrete jungles and spreadsheets just don't make sense to monkee brain, which leads to a lot of ennui and restlessness in the modern world. So it works well enough that a corporate city-slicker would want a fresh start returning to nature.
Well, so far in water magician he hasn’t collected a harem yet so that’s a plus.
And I guess he’s not being pursued by a whole bunch of girls that he doesn’t realize are interested in him.
And he doesn’t have a video game panel.
Other than that, it’s bog standard
also conveyed in the light novel is that Ryo was a history major in university before he had to drop out to work his parent's company. and that history was his second choice cause he wasn't able to get into physics like he wanted.
this tiny tidbit explains so much of how he interacts with magic as a system that I am in awe that they didn't mention it until the most recently translated section of the light novel (j novel club, v5, pt15, 20250820). like, the fact that his first choice for a career was in physics is so important. you don't leave that stuff for near the end of v5!
That second aspect reminds me of "So I'm a spider, so what?" She's just super energetic in her own head, but barely says a word or even emotes from other's perspective.
I'm liking Water Magician because of the supporting cast. Once the protag meets other people, the story isn't about him anymore, I don't care about him as much, I care about the side characters.
MY main problem with modern isekai: No Endgame, No direction, no stakes.
Digimon Adventure worked because
1.) they wanted to get home
2.) each step of the way is a learning experience.
3) the stakes grow once they learn that their original world is also at stake and they are the only ones who can save it.
Then the remake ruined it all, making it a Tai fest.
Then you shouldn't watch this video. Literally complains about no endgame in Arifureta, of stuff that is complete(in the books) but just hasn't been animated yet.
yes. the part of isekai is the learning experience. once the character learn all they can about the new world they isekai part fads and now if feel our characters not longer in another world but they seem like they now like the natives.
Their is so many that's just, "Slay the Demon Lord."
@BigFootTheRealOne sometimes people comment to put their two cents on this asshole.
Log horizon still being peak is heartwarming
I love how Mother's Basement is still salty about Apocalypse Hotel's extremely lacking popularity. Aren't we all.
I love sci-fi, and have the Apocalypse Hotel in a watch list. The problem is, that glimpses of what I've seen so far just show slice of life moments. Like "Planetarian" seemed to have similar premise, but much more striking atmosphere. So i watched it instead of Apocalypse Hotel.
Would be happy if someone can explain what I'm missing. Or overall could sell this anime to me.
@RMMinc it is a bit of slice of life, but its also much more. Its hard to describe because of the whole scope of the show. Its a comedy slice of life with a melancholic tone around it all. But also theres mecha battles, a murder mystery that plays out exactly the opposite way you'd expect it to play out. Its a show that's hard to predict what will be going on 10 minutes from now.
So while yes it isnt wrong to boil it down to slice of life, technically. It is also incredibly reductive, it is not like your traditional slice of life story.
If you have the time, give it the 3 episode try. If youre not at all interested then that's cool. Its a show that basically every episode was atleast ad good if not better than the previous ones.
its just to niche of a premise man. even slice of lifers tend to lean to modern day settings
@imALazyPandaThank you for the detailed answer
@RMMincglad i could help and hope you like it or atleast give it a chance. Theres really nothing else ive watched out of the 350 anime ive watched ti completion(i keep a running list) that felt quite like it. Closest was probably humanity has declined for overall vibe but even that is not very close.
It's like Kirito is thinking, "I inspired all of these jabronies? Maybe success isn't all it's cracked up to be..."
SAO abridged Kirito would think that
@kingsleycy3450aka the only kirito worth talking about
He was the first jabrony
Yes
@Kagomai15Indeed
Honestly, my main gripe with Isekai is that it's always getting blasted into the same kind of RPG Maker-ass Fantasy setting when the possibilities for worlds to drop into are (theoretically) infinite. Why not an Isekai where MC-kun is blasted into a Stonepunk setting with dinosaurs and prehistoric shit? Why not space fantasy for once like Phantasy Star?
Isekai can be a huge exercise in creative world building but, intstead, it's just the same setting with maybe a different kind of narrative here and there. I just don't get it.
Wish fulfillment for shut ins and salarypeople
Ideal Sponger's Life miiiight be for you
In one of the latest chapter MC's wife, queen regnant of vaguely medievaelish totally not Almo-Castille (now with dragons), muses over little glass marbles frog leaped into existence by her husband, painfully aware that she's sitting on proverbial genie in a bottle and that WHEN these marbles become known and commonplace ersatz for gems in magic tools, they WILL redefine EVERY aspect of her world, from commerce to industry to warfare.
The Isekai part is because its pure wish fulfillment. Japanese life sucks, and there's no way to break or even challenge its cruel social norms (School and work). So they just rely on escapism to pass the time.
The fantasy part is because writers are too afraid to try anything "new". The stigma of failure is just that deep.
Writers go with whatever sells best, then make their own twist on it.
• Zero no Tsukaima and Sword Art Online set the mold for Fantasy settings.
• Shield Hero set the mold for Slave-Party
• Reincarnated as a Villainess set the mold for Villainess isekai
• Slime-tensei set the mold for Kingdom builder isekai
The fact you said rpg maker now makes me wanna see an isekai in a world similar to an rpg maker horror game.
There's a lot of murim too, but there's still quite a few original worlds,
My clone is the space bug king has kinda both, well, it's a space fantasy, and the mc gets projected into an alien bug on a distant planet. (It's still kinda slop though, but at least both sides matter, even if it's mostly one sided on the bug part because his human body is trapped in a cave.)
I'm not the demon god's lackey has the mc as a librarian in legally distinct Arkham (Lovecraft, not batman)
Demonlord 2099 has the demon lord in cyberpunk (though it's loosely isekai, since it's in the same world)
The zenith, the strongest murim martial artist gets trapped in stone, and awakens in an alien tournament with humans being the weakest species in the tournament. (Again, same world "isekai")
I became an evolving space monster, the mc reincarnates as a tyranid/the thing/xenomorph in a science lab
Becoming a Special Unit Mage in Another World, the mc is in a modern world but with magic and he's handling interspecies relations, because that's one of the few ways you are allowed to legally use magic without dealing with the wizard guild (and since he's using unconventional magic, they are a pain in the ass)
Convenience Store Worker From Another World, the mc sees a really good offer to work as a cashier, and it turns out it's because it's accross worlds (and nobody with magic really wants the job)
"All rounder", "dead life", and "the ultimate shut-in" (again, arguably) zombie Apocalypse
Alice in borderlands, trapped in a death game
Musket girls, napoleonic war-era
Villains are Destined to Die sort of has a "I want to return" element to it, which is pretty refreshing! I'm hoping they turn it into an anime. I honestly kind of miss the stories where the protagonists had something back in the real world. Or where they didn't initially want to go back, but the lessons learned in the Alternate World gives them the knowledge, skills, and confidence to face the real world.
The original Digimon did it right. The kids went back to the world because they both needed to and wanted to.
2020's ends with Tai staying back for no very clear reason, and I guess his mother just has to live with only one child, who in her mind, is probably nuts when she tells her mom about what happened.
He does what? Man I'm glad I only watched like 3 episodes of that one
Yeah, things got stupid
@The_Wosh well in the second series he does show up again while Gummymon kidnaps an age regresses children trying to find his friend oof so there's that then Digimon movie changed its plot an stuck two other specials onto it lol it even has all star why lol
@jackkatz8604This actually reminds of Data Squad/Savers where Marcus/Masaru chose to go back to the Digital World with Agumon, leaving his sister, mother, and father (who he just reunited with after being trapped in the Digital World for years).
why go back if the place you are in is objectively better? this is escapist media, its not made to re-imprison you.
Random thought but I just realized something, Mairimashita! Iruma-kun is technically an isekai.
Goated tbh, genuinely helped me when i had depression last year
and that technically makes it one of the best modern isekai.
And it follows in the footsteps of it's parallel universe predecessor: Rosario to Vampire
And depending on how the latest manga arc goes, a Reverse Isekai scenario could potentially happen
@_detritus_ i hate how Irumean virtually doesn't exist am so bummed out I love fics which focus on Irumean
I think my favorite remark on current isekai trends goes something along the lines of this: the protagonist doesn't want to fix the system, they just want to be the one that exploits it.
A world with game mechanics they get to exploit the hell out of (and notably no other person in that world also has) and a good reason to not have to go back to their original position of feeling exploited on account of having died in that previous world... well it is a rather specific and worrying wish fulfillment.
That's kinda what the isekai idea always was.
You take the knowledge you got basically for free in the modern world, and make it infinitely valuable in another. And to achieve it, lives of everyone in such a world should be very miserable.
black companies caused this
Water is good...
This is probably why I don't like the 'the class gets isekaied and everyone but the hero gets good powers so they bully him out' isekai-- because then it flips to 'hahaha I'll show them all, now _I_ am the bully' and aside from the fact that the original bullies tend to be written as if the protag just lives rent free in their head 24/7, it never lands well with me.
@RMMinc on the other hand you do have city builder isekai where the protagonist gets a position of power and uses their real world knowledge to fix the wrongs of society. girl isekai also very often have a "and i'm gonna fix all this poverty/inequality" subplot. isekai are power fantasies, but not everyone has such a self-centered power fantasy. some people's power fantasies are "what if I could make society good for everyone" slime isekai is that and it's pretty popular.
One Isekai I would recommend is Moonlit Fantasy. It has some of the OP MC elements, but the way they write Makato is really good. They also call out the Incel Self Inserts through another of the summoned heroes who got summoned around the same time as Makoto. This guy (forgot his name) mind controls a bunch of women, and when it fails, he crashes out like Chris Chan.
14:32 I'd immediately begin every encounter with saying the enemy is from "Da Bussy Empire" to taunt them
0:58 competitive Pokemon players be like
You need a crown
God that was way funnier than it should've been. I love you.
You know what would be an interesting concept? An "Isekai" where the protagonist doesn't actually get Isekaid. Like, basically, they have an accident, but survive with some mild brain damage that gives them delusions of grandeur, a massive confidence boost and some hallucinations so they THINK they are in a different version of the world. And their sudden personality change completely changes their situation and how they interact with their surroundings, in a dark comedy way. Suddenly, no guy is too scary to provoke, no situation serious enough to not be sassy and no cute girl too intimidating to try something. Hijinks ensue.
So like a modern Don Quxioute (misspelled?)? The original was way more of a critique of the chivalry tale genre and wanting to live it than it's represented today
@zeyface6366 I haven't seen it, but from what I know of Konosuba it's got some Quixotic vibes, though it doesn't have the "not-actually-isekai'd" setting that I think would be essential for a true don quixote of anime
Yakuza Like a Dragon is kinda like that with how it frames it's RPG elements.
@zeyface6366
That would probably be a solid angle. I mean, you COULD also give it a happy ending with the protag fully recovering and actually learning a lesson (didn't the original Don basically end up in permanent home care?), but this wouldn't massively change the core concept.
A guy who THINKS he is an OP protag-kun fighting a gas station with a sandwich (or something along those lines) while talking to his imaginary companion (let's say a pink sheep) has lots of potential no matter the tone.
@Rusty_Spy
But the Yakuza player characters are actually accomplishing something, right? This reminds me of for example the game No more heroes, with the protag being a bit of a weirdo loser, but because he is ACTUALLY winning and doing stuff it has a completely different vibe than Don Quijote. Still comedic, but just because excentric, not delusional.
Tanya the Evil is one that tells you exactly who the MC is prior to being sent across.
I’m surprised isekai hasn’t capitalized on Elvis dying on the toilet as a catalyst for being reborn as a magical bard in a fantasy anime setting.
After watching both the Elvis and the Priscilla biopics, I’d be down for that. Maybe he realises early on that another guy like the colonel is trying to use him as a meal ticket again.
Maybe he realises that he’s entering an unhealthy power dynamic and treating a young girl the way he treated his wife.
Maybe he loses the weight or has several episodes realising he’s having to go cold turkey from the drugs.
6:32 it’s so strange that this kinda of dismissal of plot elements due to the redundancy of the isekai style writing is accepted on such a big scale
30 years ago, "oh no, Iv fallen in to another world, Iv got to find my way home."
Today, "oh Im in another world, that is a relieve, cant imagine it is worse than the real one."
To be fair, some of those old series about finding the way home end with the MC finding a way back home and still deciding to stay.
@arturoaguilar6002 That's still better than modern isekai where 99.9% of them don't even have the thought cross their mind.
@arturoaguilar6002 Deciding to stay or leave is an active expression of character-agency. Usually is the climax of a lot of tension, char relationships, and personal growth. The chars now who don't even seem to wonder about their old lives feel more bland & adrift for not making any sort of decision (or feeling any way about the choice being taken from them).
How far is that off the mark though? 😂
@MergedAmigo To be fair I think it is because in a lot of modern isekai, the MC dies in our world and is reincarnated in the new world. So returning to our world in not even an option, even if they wanted to.
Some of my favourite mecha anime is isekai.
In fact, Aura Battler Dunbine is THE FIRST isekai.
And even outside of anime - one of the biggest fantasy series I read as a kid was an isekai (Witchworld by Andre Norton).
Both examples actually USE the element at the foundation of the genre - it's not just an excuse to have a blank-slate self-insert protagonist.
The "What is the Isekai in this show actually needed for?" question has been a favorite of mine for a while now to quick identify the simpler fun series from more comprehensive stories - I like both but you really need to be in the mood for the latter, IMO. But this test sometimes don't work so good; Re:zero was one that slipped me up by looking like its opposite on a surface level overview. "We wanted any regular earth nerd, for this story, that's enough." and "We needed this exact earth nerd - for this story, that's everything." is a difference that ain't obvious in a quick first pass, I guess.
@RoyThomas-c7h valid but holyy
@RoyThomas-c7h Realest isekai enjoyer
@RoyThomas-c7h The pot calling the (hypothetical) kettle black honestly. I'm not trying to frame this as a clapback/ad hominem schlock filled rant but all the things you're criticizing Thew and OP for in this post are things you're doing too, downplaying an entire video library of essays he's written about this specific genre and this latest one dealing with the problems this specific genre has in its current oversaturated format down to "reducing". The original commenter as well as Geoff Thew don't need *your* approval or arbitrary metrics for what makes good critique and what makes something "pretentious, pseudo-intellectual gatekeeping nonsense" as it were since your post comes off as eager to throw out everything both of them are saying.
Not every story needs to justify its premise, no. But if hundreds of stories are starting the same way in the name of "efficiency" and only exist for wish-fulfillment and escapism with the vast majority of them not really iterating on the ones that have come before and the series that do widely being held up as "the good ones" in public conscious, it feels to me like the point of the video and the comment flew over your head and you're just engaging in the same schtick you're accusing these two of.
The critique serves its audience just fine without your condescending taxonomy. But I'm not going to tell you to fuck off and come back when you have something interesting to say because that'd be ah, gatekeeping. Thank you for adding to the discussion.
@RoyThomas-c7h Alright, so this is a very angrily worded comment so I'm a little scared I'm sticking my hand in a hornet's nest by responding, but there's also clearly some thought been put into it so hopefully this leads to some reasonable discussion.
I suppose the first idea I want to respond to is your second point, the idea that it is "arrogant" to believe that "the necessity of the Isekai element is some profound metric for quality". This is true in principle, but also in my opinion ignores the purpose of Geoff's criticism and misses the forest for the trees. I am of the opinion that any storytelling element can be useful in producing a storyteller's desired effect in the right context, and the blank-slate Otaku everyman protagonists of many modern Isekai can, in some stories, serve a similar purpose to the amnesiac protagonists that are common in many video games: to give the audience a surrogate through which to experience the story. This is a valuable thing to do, presuming you have a story actually worth experiencing. You use the word "efficiency" to describe this style of storytelling: However, efficiency is ultimately a measurement of the ratio of value of information communicated to effort expended by the reader. Using tropes and shared language to quickly get across your own ideas to your audience is efficient, using tropes and shared language to communicate the nothing other than the tropes themselves is the opposite: it's easy for the audience to read and absorb, but it also doesn't communicate almost any valuable information to the audience, it just demonstrates tropes they already knew.
Now, as I have stated before, I am not of the opinion that the premise-justification question is some kind of foolproof metric for judging the value of every work, and I do think it is a little gatekeepy of Geoff to present it as such in some parts of his video. However, there is value in critiquing tropes within a genre, and the fact is that doing so requires some degree of generalization. Yes, the fact that an isekai doesn't justify its premise doesn't 100% indicate that the resulting show is written by someone who is mostly just copying tropes. However, poor premise justification in an isekai does indicate that the protagonist's background is likely to be underdeveloped. A poorly developed background for the protagonist generally indicates that the protagonist themselves is likely to be poorly developed. A poorly developed protagonist indicates that the supporting cast is likely to be poorly developed, and a poorly developed cast generally points towards a story that doesn't provide much of value to it audience. None of this is definitive proof of a story being poorly thought out, of course: smoke doesn't always indicate fire in the real world, but nonetheless you should still probably be wary when you smell burning.
It is worth noting here that when I use the term "value" here, wish fulfillment is included in that umbrella. I think there is value in a story whose primary purpose is to provide a story in which an audience-surrogate protagonist does all manner of things that make the audience wish they were in the protagonist's shoes. However, there are better ways to provide wish fulfillment than just regurgitating tropes. Give us well-choreographed action scenes, a likeable and interesting supporting cast (generally including likable and interesting love interests), and/or an engaging plot to navigate through. Make the wish one actually worth fulfilling.
@RoyThomas-c7hYou haven't said anything really, just gave a vague "m'western can't understand the complexities of SUPERIOR JAPANESE SLOP so stfu with your 'criticisms' and 'analysis'". Like have you most of these series? They're slop. They KNOW they're slop, so they don't try to be anything else. They play to precisely the same beats as the other slop because they know that's what makes the slop appealing, and that's fine because they're slop! But that doesn't make them interesting or exceptional or even good, it just makes them effective. If you like slop, good on you and you enjoy that, but don't pretend it's anything else and don't get mad when people call it what it is.
9:55 Re:Zero is so good I frequently forget it's an isekai because I'm focusing on the plot.
Ascendance of a bookworm is my favorite LN by a wide margin and clears your litmus test with ease. Myne's time as Urano informs everything about her reaction to her new world and the foundation of her two major character motivations. There's the really obvious one where her love of reading to the point she was just about to start her career as a librarian motivates her to try getting access to the few books her new world has and create more. The really touching one for me was that her regret at not recognizing and appreciating her mother's love for her in life leads her to be fiercely protective of the family she finds in her new one. Even when there's not necessarily and new information about her past life beyond a relatively early point (30+ book series mind you), her personality is so firm that it creates tension and conflict with characters that people born into the world just wouldn't
I've been meaning to get into the LN after I finish what I'm currently reading, the first 3 seasons really got my attention (thank you WIT for picking it back up for s4)
Just you mentioning Myne's relationship with her family is making my eyes qater dude, fuck!
@XeconisI strongly recommend reading the books. Fittingly it's the best way to experience the series right now. The early seasons don't really do the show justice, but my hopes are high that WIT will bring part 3 to life!
It's the only LN series I've been able to get through, honestly. The prose is a MASSIVE step up from any other LN series I've tried to read. It feels much more like reading a book than the staccato stream-of-consciousness ramble you get so often from the genre
@fingersfomgerd2413Oh for sure. Bookworm as a whole has a much more coherent structure and story compared to the many other LNs, which are mostly still pulp fiction at their core. The translator was also really good and worked closely with the author to get things right. The only time he missed the weekly translation window was when he got struck by lightning lol
The biggiest Problem with isekai is the Lack of Fantasy of the Publishers. There are a Lot of creative authors with New Stories but the Public will never read them.
1:45 in and I feel attacked.
Ugly mug is actually decent. It's literally attacking isekai tropes.
I liked it too
What always bothered me about all the modern isekais is the RPG mechanics. Stat screens, levels, skill systems.
They made sense in .hack and SAO because they literally took place in videogames. But in most of them theyre just a modern person in a classic fantasy world so theres no justificstion for them beyond "sao had them."
Yeah, same, that drives me fkn mental in Solo Leveling. Why is “the system” necessary? Why couldn’t he have just received the powers from a conceptual entity (like he literally did) and skip the video game bullshit entirely? It makes absolutely no sense in the context of the existing power system. None of the other Hunters can see this “system”, they just have their powers and that’s that. It sticks out like a sore thumb, but we gotta have it in there because the “me like video game, me play video game, me need video game to understand power system” mongoloids eat this slop like candy.
To this day the adaptation of the Twelve Kingdoms has been one of the best I’ve seen ever.
"A pair of pants"
I would totally watch an anime about a sentient pair of pants
Two things I HATE in Isekai (or fantasy) anime is the concept of a Status Window and Levels like a RPG.
"How strong are you?"
Protagonist opens floating 2D sceen.
"My level is 99 and all my stats is at max".
I don't even mind a stats screen to be honest. What I do mind is there is the concept of levels because that is stupid.
Watching fushigi yuugi a couple years ago and being absolutely enthralled at the way the world of the book and the real world interconnected (like her brother reading the book she was in and being able to communicate with her about his findings about the book's origin) has ruined me for modern anime. in summary, watch old shojo isekai
Similarly with Magic Knight Rayearth! I’ve read the manga and the isekai premise gets addressed in the second half, with how earth relates to Cephiro and why the pillar system exists. Not to the same extend as Fushigi Yuugi, but better than most modern isekai’s
Fushigi Yuugi, my childhood! ❤
Vision of Escaflowne is also technically an isekai, with small, but significants links between the worlds.
And where the MC doesn't change totally when isekai'd.
Damn, even old shonen like Tenku Senki Shurato are technically isekai.
Miaka's brother and his friend were literally more interesting to me than the fantasy world in that show.
@thecommoner2090agreed, theres whole sections of the show where i was like noooooo dont focus on the romance, focus on the guys trying to find the book's original author I HAVE TO KNOW
My takeaway is that the problem with modern isekai is that most of them now are about people with extreme power starting with zero emotional or social attachment to the societies they fall into, and often uproot the lives and order of the people living there for their own personal gain, so often times the authors don’t flesh out the actual setting and characters because they don’t really care about them as much as the things the hero can do to them.
They are stories about billionaires, basically.
@RoyThomas-c7h I think it's more of a prison guard mentality than anything else. Can't let the poor downtrodden worker get some escape fantasy. They must suffer in their dreams as well.
@RoyThomas-c7h nice chat gpt comment
@RoyThomas-c7h That's a lot of words for "I'm a loser and I need to feel important"
@RoyThomas-c7hThis whole take is bad, but two major things to point out: 1. Worldbuilding and developing the setting and minor characters of a world isn’t a Western literary standard, it’s basic fantasy writing. Trying to justify bad writing as a different culture is pure racism. 2. This is a subjective opinion, but while I don’t think the genre tropes are necessarily flaws, they are hackneyed, considering we have had at least one isekai anime every single season since 2013.
I think Isekai's are also so popular, as a statement in between the lines. And what is this statement? *_" Earth is filthy. I have given up on earthly society and if I have to go on living... or have to live again... I want to do so ONLY in another world/universe, on another planet. "_*
Why the overpower?
Same reason ppl have stated their full abandonement of earth. All you can do here is feel powerLESS. You are a plaything of an anti-family society that has already gone global so you can't escape it anywhere, is run by psychotic corporations that everybody trys to s°ck up to, everything is owned by frauds, l°ars, tra°tors and general pieces of sh°°. With the few expecations being unable to make a big difference.
Isekai... is in a way always to 50% an "eff you too", to Earth and to your own former powerlessness. At least in most cases. Sometimes you have sh°° like Re:Zero where the protagonist is so powerless compared to everyone else, you think it's a fet°sh at this point. And no season is complete without Subaru dying in the most terrifying, brutal, gore'y and painful way yet. Expecations serve only to proove the rule though. :D
An Isekai without a way to ultimate power is not a complete one. At least in most cases. Konosuba is different. The friends truly are part of the journey.
I like
campfire cooking in another world with my absurd skill😊
Hi, my name is Debo, and I am a slop Isekai addict. I've been one for too many years to count now. Thank you for having me and I look forward to next season's slop.
Bit aside, I've come to realize that slop-Isekai is definitely a guilty pleasure of mine. I enjoy the crappy ones for how crappy they can be and comparing them to each other. Idk why, but I find fun in it lol. But I will say, it makes it so much better when you stumble onto a good one! Haha!
6:48 Exactly why I fell in love with the Twelve Kingdoms series more than a decade ago. I think you're almost guaranteed those kinds of questions and plot points with almost all pre-SAO isekai cause the genre didn't have all these seemingly inescapable tropes and cliches to fall back on back then.
17:30 Bocchi the Witch
Thank you for reminding me to rate failure frame with a failing grade.
Geoff is a member of the Court of Princess Donut?! Mongo is NOT appalled! So glad you love the series too!
I keep loving seeing people i watch on RUclips be revealed to be new crawlers and trying to share the good cookbook.
@tresher5 I agree, I've seen it a few times like this where referencing DCC comes out of left field or is at least off topic or out of context. But that's what makes it fun, the impression that the creator REALLY wanted to talk about Matt's series and couldn't wait for a smooth segue to do it
Only once have I seen an isekai protagonist prefer older women, ignoring women his biological age, because the protagonist used to be an old guy.
Thats definitely a fantasy story. Even real world men ignore their age and try to get younger women.
well, men like young women. it's just kinda... normal.
@nathank2289Considering the number of women who prefer older men, it makes sense.
@YARGGG_GG When I'm talking his biological age, I'm saying he was a kid at the time.
Edit- Although he still preferred mature women when he was older.
@nathank2289 A lot of men prefer older women. Although by older, I mean like late twenties or early thirties, which was the women this guy was into.
I don't care if it's garbage. I loved that one that was just about some guy cooking meals for himself and his magic dog and using earth ingredients.
Campfire cooking in another world, I love it too it is so cosy and comforting,
Ooh, this has to be like the most enjoyable isekai ever..
Watched it with my little cousins 6 and 8 years old and they absolutely loved it..
Just because was kinda generic does not mean is garbage.
He did say comforting escapism has it's place. I agree Campfire was a good example of an easy to digest, "uncomplicated" (for want of a better word), Isekai. But I would almost re-classify it as "Slice of Life" with an Isekai 'd protag
Ah yes a guy want "normal life" only cook japanese food and have pet wolf called fenrir
23:05 Yeah, the most recent ones I can think of is Owl House, Amphibia, and the Minecraft Movie, and none of them are even Japanese-made, let alone anime.
11:11 That "chouto matte a sec" made me spit-take my coffee 😭
Is it so much to ask for more reverse-Isekai, especially ones that don't come off as Japanese Tourist Board propaganda films? Re:CREATORS remains king of the type and it's sadly kind of forgotten. I'd love to see a "scientific expedition" from another world to a normal-ass small town and we get to see some gonzo anthropology.
How about double Isekai where neither world is Ours? That show with a title like "Hero, marry me!" "I refuse!" or similar fit the bill, but that's the only example I can think of.
I don't need "twists" like "the protagonist is reincarnated as a kitchen appliance", I want proper variations on the genre.
You know, _effort._
[edit] The number of replies giving examples rather illustrates my point: there aren’t a lot of them and the ones that do exist tend to be well regarded.
God, all of those descriptions sound so good.
Dragon Ball is basically the Reverse Isekai you are asking for.
MC is transported from a world that was science and futuristic to a world that is full of magic, demons, and dragons. That world he is sent of to just happens to be Earth. He also has no memory of his life prior to Earth due to well brain damage lol.
Gets more powerful as the series goes on because of a rare trait only a few beings have in the universe. I.E. Being a Sayian. Which allows him to level up his abilities "Power Level" with transformations and techniques he learned along the way.
Oh wait Centaur World would be a double isekai.
@WalmartBrandJesus Thank you for the novelty of assuming I'd never heard of Dragon Ball.
I just want someone to make A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court into an anime. Or at least make it required reading for anyone who wants to make an isekai. It is basically the original version of this type of story as a whole (man out of time, man out of place, as in outside of where/when they come from). It really hits so so many of the tropes people love in isekai and aside from being a break from all the jrpg inspired stuff, maybe seeing how a true master handled this concept will light a fire under some people. (Twain even gave it a sentence for a title ffs.)
I actually forgot water magician was an isekai, thats how poorly established that was.
I think the elf might also be isekaied as well from what I remember the angel saying. But I’m guessing we’ll only get more of that later on. My Isekai life, I think it’s the one with the really cute slime ending song, actually goes over why MC is the way he is. But it’s been a while, it might have been due to a black company that overworked him.
If I am thinking of the same isekai... I think his whole class was isekaid
@Fujoshi1412 My Isekai Life offended me by just being a rip off of By the Grace of the Gods, but more bargain bin isekai slop instead of iyashikei XD
Thank you for putting what I've been feeling about isekai into words! It makes me so happy to come across someone who understands the frustration of coming across these self-gratifying stories that only provide surface-level content
It's important to remember that a bad isekai can still be a good fantasy, but even if that's true that doesn't mean it wasn't a bad isekai.
Yeah, a lot of stories that focus on the main character decades after they have been isekaied don't clear the bar, because usually they gave up on returning.
Though something can still be said even if the old world doesn't matter.
One that comes to mind is library of heaven's path, the mc did his usual isekai mc behavior and realized too late he isnt OP and is now a washed up teacher on the brink of getting fired.
Academy's undercover professor is a great example of bad isekai great story imo, currently the only relevance isekai has is the mc casting spells weirdly and using fictional characters like sherlock holmes as his covers
Another type I really like is fantasy worlds where the legendary heroes have been isekaied people and characters have fragments from the other world, like the one where the mc makes a relaxing foot bath and self cleaning toilets out of the old ads he found. "I picked up the world's strategy guide" is also a good take on the genre, where a girl gets the strategy guide and uses it to help the hero (and runs into trouble because she knows stuff she shouldn't and isn't limited by text prompts)
I like plots that reward a guy for the effort he puts in. Most of these are basically the male version of a Mary Sue; the payoff is weak because the obstacle was small.
Gary Stu
@RoyThomas-c7h just because you use big words it doesn't change the fact that most isekai slop is just a dime a dozen copy paste nerd blank slate that fucks all the girls and kills all the enemies and is so cool because he is.
But the soliloquy of the permutations in the paradigm of considerations in post-modern, post-truth modernist socratic dialog fails to consider the declining mythocondrial action by unscrupulous and economically powerful actors in a lobby to discreetly and unequivocally destroy the world so that the oligarchy can thrive and make us all indentured slaves.
i feel like “isekai for ~her~” tends to excel at setting up and fleshing out the protagonist in their original world (or perhaps i’ve gotten really good at picking them out), particularly older series like red river, ouke no monshou, silver diamond, and inuyasha come to mind
BOOKWORM!!!
Sorry, I know it's not old in the way those are, I just always wanna plug my fave
(though it does take quite a while to flesh out her backstory, you get hints very early)
holy shit Red River mentioned! What a fucking pull.
I'm an old otaku so most of the isekai-before-we-called-them-isekai were female protag-chan centred ones like Fushigi Yuugi, Magic Knights Rayearth, Maze, and Vision of Escaflowne, and they'd spend at least the first episode establishing the life back home before being isekaied, and even then the old world continued to be important. (Of course, almost every series had a minimum of 26 episodes back then so they definitely had room for that.)
Honestly, the sage's power is omnipotent was a beautiful and interesting Isekai and I'm gonna watch it again
I was waiting for the audible sponsorship and it never happened
Good on you I f****** love DCC
The section at the end where you talk about how isekai stopped tackling the matter of "Will the hero/heroine return home?" really hit me in an unexpected way. It was something I noticed myself a long time ago, and this notion that there isn't anything worth returning to in the world that we live in is grim, but in many ways understandable.
There have been many times where I see the description (or if they're bold enough, the title) of an anime, or I watch the first few episodes of said type of anime and think, "Oh, I can tell where this is going."
But to counteract that sort of hopelessness, I also see the occasional isekai like "Red Ranger from Another World" or "Onmyo Kaiten Rebirth," where I can tell the writers of the story didn't just want to write an escapist fantasy, they wanted to tell some underlying message about being a good person, not giving up, the importance of bonds, or standing up for you think is right even if others are reluctant or disagree. To me, these kinds of Isekai deserve more than love and attention. While I can understand the weight and worries of this world can drive people to yearn for a better world, a better world is only possible by teaching values like the ones mentioned before.
To me, the Isekai that are truly great do not cling to the new, fantastical world as a playground for our hero, but are instead the ones that teach our hero that no matter what world we live in, we will still need to act.
Even if this world, or next one we end up in, is bleak, we need to fight because there are things worth fighting for.
Funny there is a korean webtoon called "a warrior returns" that shows insekaied heroe returning to a world where they lost everything. Then he goes insane and starts destroying the world.
i absolutely get why a protagonist returning would be rare, i sure as sh!t wouldn't come back to earth if i had access to actual magic, but there is still so much wasted potential in the way they just ignore the original world. i would love to see one that focuses on the original world in some way, like its impact on protag-kun, a quest to bring the things protag-kun cares about to the new world, or even a story about trying to fix the old world with stuff found in the new. just dropping the entire framing device is such bad writing.
Arifureta is one of the few I've seen where getting home to Earth is the main goal from the start. Hajime wants nothing to do with the fantasy world, but clearing the dungeons and defeating Ehit are the only clues he has to how he might possibly get home, so each volume is usually spent working towards one of those goals.
There was a manga where MC gets "isekaid" into sci-fi world that resembles a game he played. I think he later theorized that the new world is real and he was originally inside a simulation based on the fact that earth didn't have computing power to run something like that.
Imo the protagonists being reincarnated (thus unable to return home) with some cheat power is where isekais stopped being about character growth and the hero's journey and instead became wish fulfillment power fantasies.
Digimon is in the genre of older Isekai, so a lot of people don't realize it counts as one. I'm glad you mentioned it at least! It also does something a lot of modern Isekai don't do, in which the problems and personal struggles the characters faced in the real world help inform their behavior in the other world. It never forgets that the real world is the one that the kids want to return home to, regardless of how fantastical the Digital World is. The kids aren't experts either, the Digimon need to guide them unlike most Isekai where the protagonist has meta knowledge. Digimon is cool as an Isekai with the fact the characters even want to return home. The difference being that they choose to go back later in the series because they take on the responsibility to help the other world, but that doesn't mean they want to stay. The goal is always to return home, the Digimon and Digital World just act as ways of developing growth in the characters.
The last point about people not wanting to go back anymore reminds me of Final Fantasy Tactics: Advanced. Marche spends the whole game trying to convince his friends and brother to go back to the real world, really taught me that there is a undeniable quality to reality that needs to be appreciated.
5:59 TBATE does this so perfectly by making the life lived before integral to the overall plot
oh THAT'S what Dungeon Crawler Carl is!! It's been getting a lot of traction at my library recently but I hadn't stopped to look at what the actual premise was. Sounds like it's worth the hype!
@RoyThomas-c7h dude. BAD authors/creators are getting belittled. There's plenty of terrible Western LitRPG stories, just like there's plenty of terrible isekai, plenty of terrible romance stories, plenty of terrible sci-fi, fantasy, etc. from literally every culture. A lot, probably a majority, of media is low-effort schlock because creators and readers are both lazy at least some of the time. Most Marvel movies are low-effort schlock and they are still fairly popular and big money makers. Most everybody likes to turn their brain off and consume garbage from time to time. That doesn't make it not garbage. I know that the tasty burger isn't good for me, but it can certainly be delicious. You're going to give yourself a heart attack with all the hate-orade you've been drinking to fly through this comment section ignoring all the good isekai mentioned in the video because you're butthurt the semi-professional shit-talker doesn't like some of the stories you do. You do realize all your comments are actually making him money by driving up engagement, right? Just FYI, I won't reply back to you because you're probably a troll but seriously dude I think you have some unresolved anger issues you might need to address
I started watching the Ugly Mug, Epic Fighter anime and its... its pretty alright, it has cliches and stuff, but the mc is likeable, when he made his goal to help the cute girl in his team to have as much fun in the new world not because of the chance she might fall in love with him but because she had a shitty life before getting isekai'd was very wholesome, and their relationship is very nice, she is an airhead that gets imoressed easily but she reacts to mc as he is her older brother, she sees something cool and he's the first person she goes to show it, its nice... can't wait to see how it gets effed up later on with her falling for him
I enjoy the show in a casual way, but man the OP is such a bop I played it on repeat for like a week straight when it came out
I actually really enjoyed it. It makes the characters matter by bringing their trauma with them into the isekai, usually through the special notes. It's a well thought out consequence of offering the choice of leaving earth behind for half of your lifespan.
Extra points for Karina being pretty much a perfect foil to the level headed and grounded Shigeru.
An isekai I read recently, and I really liked how they handled the reincarnation. The Faraway Paladin. The main character barely remembers his previous life, but he does remember the crushing depression that he suffered, which caused him to live a non-life, shut away from the world. The goddess of reincarnation then gave him a second chance to live a good life, and feeling the immense regret of his previous life, he swears a DnD paladin-style oath to the goddess of reincarnation to live his life to the fullest and then die, while helping others do the same. The reincarnation is not just a way to get him to the fantasy world, but fundamentally a part of not only his backstory, but it is his reason for doing everything. He helps people so that they can live a long life and die content. He feels their pain as his own and tries to soothe their worries, so they don't throw their lives away like he did. He hunts undead to free their trapped souls, allowing them to reincarnate. He embraces the souls of the dead and comforts them as they pass. Literally everything he does ties back to his reincarnation in some way.
In a sense, it is even the antithesis of wish-fulfillment escapism. Its message is fundamentally not to turn away from the difficulties of life, but to meet them head-on. As a counterpoint to the main character and his goddess, who is the goddess of reincarnation and change, there is Stagnate, the god of undeath. Stagnate is nominally an evil god, but they are not malevolent. They represent stagnation, as their name implies. They were once a good god of death, but tired of seeing happy lives cut short, and as such decided to create a world free of suffering. A stagnant world of the undead. They, in a way, represent the main character's past life. They, too, shied away from the cruelty of life and sought an escape, rather than actually dealing with life. But just like how the main character's stagnant life caused him suffering, Stagnate also inadvertently causes suffering to the people they seek to save.
This is in my top 3 anime, tho I haven't read the manga
That's such a cool idea, thank you for the rec! The thematic consistency being so strong is a real positive!
It's a brilliant show. Underrated perhaps, very good all around.
Love it
It's amazing, but the anime is a real let down. The core of the faraway paladin to me is the internal struggle to the right thing even when it's difficult, the anime on the other hand has a large focus on the action scenes.
Also, about the bookworm one, while she died, she still misses her mother and cried about it, like, you know, a real person missing their parents would. She considered having a good life with a job she loved. It's definitely the contrary of "Got hit by a truck to escape my shitty life !!! YOUHOUUU !!!!"
This theory also explains why "I'm the Evil Lord of an Intergalactic Empire" was suprisingly watchable. The protag has an actual backstory that persistently informs why they act they way they do.
lol it’s actually funny. Because he does try being evil but his past has him going against that at times. Like with the whole enriching his people so they make more. If they make more he can get more taxes. But if he taxed them higher while they’re poor he gets less. Which is how he justified to himself why he needs to make them get better jobs, health, education and so on. Also after this he discovered a love for hunting pirates because it’s basically open season on them but not many bother. He likes going after them because MONEY. With his world so poor is makes sense why he pursued it. Kinda similar to reincarnated as a mob? Which finally got a second season.
@Fujoshi1412 Same author than Reincarnated as a Mob Character, so the likeliness is natural. And that last one does go ham on the past lives of the protagonist and their relatives.
12:30 - that is a banger line, my dude! And applicable to ALL kinds of character writing, honestly! "It's impossible to drawn an arc, if all you know is where it ends." And writers shouldn't feel bad if they do, at the start, only have the end in mind... You just have to give a bit MORE thought to MAKE one! Writing backwards is a valuable tool!
@RoyThomas-c7h HAHAHA, buddy! Pal. Dude. Go touch grass, my guy.
Ya know what? I was about to give you a whole emotionally-dense explanation of why your central premise is wrong - I wrote that comment expecting it to be read by the watchers of this vid, English-speakers, not the actual Japanese writers being critiqued...
But my church's livestream is starting rn. You're not that important compared to real life people I could go chat with.
@RoyThomas-c7h Yeah, I don't wanna debate you?? Duh. You haven't shown any basic kindness or respect or humility.
You're throwing verbal punches, demanding a fist fight, and I'm just gonna pat you on the shoulder with a head-shake of pity.
Sure, call me a coward for not fighting back, but like... Maybe you're just hungry? Have you eaten yet today? Oh hey, it's lunchtime here. I'm gonna go eat a sandwich.
I'm reminded of "The Executioner and her Way of Life" that throws a lot of the conventions you talked about into the woodchipper... Namely the "Isekaied blank slate" for the audience to relate to, turns out to be more than a little psycho... and even more quickly turns more than a little Dead. Because he WASN'T the Protag-kun at all... just a random nobody to use for an exposition dump as to how screwed up the world he had been Isekaied into had become due to people like him
It's hilarious how many people got mad at that show and review-bombed it after their precious self-insert Protag-kun got brutally offed. They have hundreds of isekai that cater to them, yet when one decides to go in a direction that doesn't, they throw a temper tantrum. It's pathetic.
@calamelli209 IKR
Some people I've asked said it started fine, but goes down the spiral of increasingly relying on typical power fantasy tropes with an added dash of yuri bait.
@javonyounger5107 Yeah it had a lot of problems that made it a not so great series... the bait and switch "not your protag" start wasn't one of em
@calamelli209 I think I saw a similar reaction to "This Ultimate Next-Gen Full Dive RPG Is Even Shittier than Real Life" on My Anime List. A lot of reviewers seemed to not get that it was meant to subvert the idea of an Immersive full-dive game actually being all that fun, and subvert the idea of a guy who's a bit of a loser dropping into a dangerous fantasy world and quickly becoming the man. The reason I say this is that most of the complaints were about the game world being presented as unfun and the MC being presented as pretty useless until he starts improving himself as a person. I saw one guy recommend SAO, saying, "It's the same but better."
When we relate more to the skeleton than to the kirito #12, you know there is a problem
It's a surprisingly obvious problem. I've written a couple Tumblr posts about it. (Not as long or detailed or well-cited, but they're about the same problem.)
If it's such an obvious problem, why don't light novel authors solve it? Well...solving it would require changing something that reliably gets thousands of people to buy and consume your work, and replacing it with something that _might_ get tens of thousands of people to consume it if you do it well and get attention at the right time, but probably it'll just make hundreds of people crazy for your story. And you can't pay rent with a few hundred sales per book.
Problem to who? They are popular and make money. Who is this actually a problem for?
@plantcrone9662Audiences and people who like art. There's a palpable difference between a mediocre story, designed to be purchased and consumed and forgotten by as many people as possible, and a good story, one that can change how you look at the world if the right person finds it.
@plantcrone9662People's intelligence and just quality in general.
@RoyThomas-c7h Lad, pointing out terrible drawn-out tropes isn't Western elitism, it's just people noticing a boring trend. It's fine if you or others enjoy these shows, but it's also fine for people to critique them to since their end goal is to see the medium improve.
09:27 holy shit, is that his English voice?
Yes. I watched ReZero in dub. I loved it
As someone writing an isekai I’m glad I got to watch this
Seconding. I have an idea for an isekai that I wish I could focus on and write, and Geoff's videos discussing various problem and cliches with the genre has had me thinking about what to avoid and how to avoid it, what to do instead.
Not to toot my own horn (since, as I said, I haven't actually sat down and written the damn thing yet) but I already had the 'Compare the MC's old life to their new existence' covered before watching this video. Still, there's some stuff to chew on here.
Thank you! I am writing a litrpg story at the moment and hadn't given nearly enough thought about what is being left behind! Thanks to you I now have a checklist!
11:00 And with Japan planning on taxing the single people for being single, yeah, being isekaied to another world to start over sounds very good.
They wouldn't HAVE to do that if they actually had a culture that gave the people some reason to have children. Lust is disgusting, and destroying
A nightmare for every Hikikomori
How about developing a decent personality to find someone?
Noooo I hope the US doesn't take notes 🤢
@Froschemints You know that 1. Some people just don’t want to be in relationships and 2. Some people can have an actually good personality, and just aren’t in relationships. Things could just not work, so they’re alone. Why are you like this?
So there’s a moment in the third book of Dungeon Crawler Carl where the Guide and Surrogate Father Figure that had been helping Carl and Donut gets pissed and hits Carl. Carl, IMMEDIATELY flashes back to his abusive bio father hitting him as a child. He very quietly swallows all those feelings and just gives a quiet warning “Don’t ever hit me again.”
I was so shocked by that moment. The narration had mentioned there was SOME abuse in his past (His mother would lock him in the basement for hours if his father’s friends came over. This is said just as a throwaway line to explain why he’s good at FROGGER of all things) but this was DIRECT. And not only that but it’s the first sign that Carl had made that Surrogate Father connection subconsciously before he could ever say it out loud.
The book starts out sort of pretending that it’s wishful fulfillment fluff while slowly and subtly feeding you the strong foundation. It’s so good you guys. It’s funny and heartfelt and it genuinely has me worried about how it’ll all end. Above all else it’s about overcoming trauma, pain and the indomitable human spirit.
“You will NOT break me.”
@RoyThomas-c7hGirl, wut. lol All that to yell at someone who’s up to date on LN Re:Zero and Mushoku Tensei and reads garbage RoFan Isekai FOR FUN. Take this weird tirade elsewhere lol
Oh man. Dungeon Crawler Carl is so, so good.
When Donut gets a chance to say what she really thinks about her former owner... I genuinely cried.
And anybody who has listened to or read the books will understand why it hurts so much when she asks "Why doesn't it hurt?"
The audiobooks are absolutely phenomenal.
I'm hoping Bound to the Battle God gets an anime treatment one day as well
They all have one thing common , zero plot but full fan service
My main gripe with modern isekai is that these stories just don't end properly. Even the best of them have few (usually one) interesting arcs in the beginning and then plateu into meandering mess which goes on and on endlessly without resolution or even a meaningful story progress.
So far the only isekai series I've finished reading is That Time I Got Reincarnated As A Slime. There are a handful of others that I am in the middle of but yeah, so many are like you describe. Some really neat idea or a good set of characters that is good enough for a story or two but nothing more. But then it goes on for 623 volumes.
Related thought: Has any isekai that started as a novel or manga ever gotten a complete anime adaptation? I'm at a loss. Best I can come up with are a couple that apparently plan on being complete adaptations but aren't there yet.
You can thank the light novel/web novel system for that. These stories put super high emphasis on the beginning so they can hook the readers in, because very few people will pick up a story that already has like 50 chaps merely due to the fact it's a chore to keep up with, light novels/web novel's success can be determined from how well the first few volumes/chapters do. The memetic long titles are used as clickbait exactly for this purpose.
Issue is even if they got lucky and managed to hook an audience group, most light novel/web novels also need to be updated regularly to stay relevant, same way as every social media works.
It's why the writers are never given time to make a long-term plan of where their story should go and so even if they started "unique" a la Slime or Shield Hero, after a while it just become the same old boilerplate plot because the writer has to keep releasing chapters even if they're out of ideas.
@whyjnot420 when this manga ends there must be at least 896 meetings
@oboretaiwritingch.2077and that’s a problem
@oboretaiwritingch.2077 It isn't like that is a problem unique to isekai or Japan. It is a problem with episodic and/or serialized storytelling in general. One TV episode, one volume of manga, a volume of a book series, one season even, whatever... Just take the first 4 minutes of Terminator 2, the Future War segment right at the beginning (to use an example of hooking people done well. Just how many people continue to watch Terminator movies just because they got hooked there?). Or just use the Terminator setting as a whole, aside from the first two movies and The Burning Earth (absolutely gorgeous comic from 1990), the rest is garbage.
What you can really blame this on more than anything else is people funding known properties (or to say it in a way that is less kind, people are cowards). A sequel usually takes home a minimum of 3/5 of the previous installment as a rule of thumb. As long as that fraction remains profitable, people will dump money into it. Even when the ideas have run dry. That take can come directly or indirectly (like ad revenue). In a world where likes, views and online clout matter as much as they do, simply being popular can be enough and popularity breeds popularity as they say.
I think a fundamental issue with modern isekai is that they've abandoned the core concept of older isekai: getting home. (I went all ADHD and wrote this before Geoff mentioned it, so read on as an addendum, rather than addressing the unaddressed.)
In the vast majority of older "our world to fantasy world" stories, getting home is at least the beginning point of an isekai'd person's journey. Sure there's stuff like Narnia where they quickly get swept up in the world and prefer it over their homeland, but those books do focus on children who don't consider that implication very strongly and orphans no less. They are grounded in their conditions and decide to stay because they at least have each other and are royalty there.
Most older isekai though are fundamentally about getting home and not staying in the cool fantasy world. I think as time wore on and Otaku became more misanthropic and depressed, but also capitalism reached the end of its shitstained chrysalis, the desire to return dwindled. Modern Isekai are often webnovels or light novels, with low barriers to entry and desperate marketing strategies rather than artistic integrity. They want to reflect the demands of the audience.
But as Geoff says, a character who does not want to return home is a character without a home, and that begs the "why" question that so few of these slopfests are unwilling to answer. The why can be a societal critique, a political one, a social one, or it can be something vulnerable and personal and difficult to write (grief, entitlement, anxiety, neurodivergence, etc). If you don't put in the work, though, there is no "because" statement beyond "because he's a nerd and being one sucks". Which is basically bullshit these days, nerds have never had it easier.
One great example is Shining Tears X Wind. Not a good show, but at least had a well defined protagonist. Souma is a piece of shit early on with an unrequited crush on his classmate who is also isekai'd with him, alongside his best friend and romantic rival. Without spoiling he does some fucked up shit to try and impress her and get them home before she fully rejects him, and it's only after he respects her decision and consent that his lil harem starts to form and he slowly goes from the shitty rival character to the hero of the story. Without realizing it (partly because they didn't develop the romance enough unfortunately) he falls in love with one of his party members and is heading home at the end of the story before seeing her crying and deciding he will stay, actually. Not just because he loves her, but because he is the only isekai'd character (there are 5 others) whose life and character improved by the experience instead of was put on hold by it. It feels very earned when he stays behind and wishes the best to his old friends. It's cool that way and if this specific arc sounds nice I'd give it a watch.
You need to address why you're not going home and if the answer is "because I don't feel like it" then you need to address why you're character is so destesting of their home or why they're selfish enough to not care about the people who presumably care about them.
Be careful what you wish for though, you might just get it. Look at Forspoken's protagonist. Frey has a horrible life on the streets of New York, constantly getting in trouble with the law and other street thugs. In contrast, when she gets to Athia and helps the natives of the fantasy world with her superpower, they gradually warm up to her despite the initial hostility. Why then does Frey still desire to go back to New York as opposed to settling in a new home where she is actually valued? What part of her life back in New York did Frey miss? Don't know.
Be careful what you wish for.
i disagree with the idea of sticking to a core consept, why put yourself in a box? also why go home when you are in a better place away from it?
This is why Log Horizon works, yes, part of the appeal is the cast wants to go home. Is that really brought up, no but it’s on everyone’s mind considering the ‘respawn equals loss memories’ thing. Shiroe realized that it could take years to get back home and made the Round Table as a measure to make the world they are stuck in as best as it could.
@RoyThomas-c7h This is one of the most self-righteous and pseudy comments I've read in a long time lmao. Real they targeted gamers stuff well done. Don't invoke orientalism and narrative imperialism to defend your cultural fetishism in the future, you're embarrassingly out of your depth
@RoyThomas-c7h While I think you put up a decent effort in countering OP's comment, I think you could have done yourself a lot of favors by making your rebutle slightly less about racism, and a little more forcussed on the substance of your argument.
One thing I love about Reincarnated as a Slime is that Rimuru is looking for a way for other people to go back home. Like he understands that the kids that were summoned need to be with their parents
Just the fact that Rimuru is an actually nice person goes a long way to make that show more enjoyable even though he's still stupidly OP
My DM kinda hates that series, because Rimuru does end up getting quite a lot of blood on his hands and he isn't even really called out for it, neither by characters within the show, nor by fans of it.
@Depressed_SpiderI mean, he does annihilate an invading army of racists in order to ressurect the friends they murdered... yeah... its kinda dark.
@YumLemmingKebabs Not sure if it's okay for us to talk about it, since it's kinda spoilery, but... eh.
@Depressed_Spider I mean, it's spoilers for years ago, so hopefully anyone reading this will have either seen it, or know not to read further.