How Isekai Made Fantasy Into Sci-Fi
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ANIME SHOWN:
0:12 - Star Trek: The Next Generation & The Lord of the Rings
0:20 - Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
0:26 - Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
0:46 - Star Wars
0:51 - Star Trek: The Next Generation
0:58 - Star Wars: The Phantom Menace
1:09 - Star Wars
1:26 - Star Wars: Visions
1:45 - The Lord of the Rings
2:15 - Star Wars: The Clone Wars
2:26 - Star Wars
2:47 - Space Adventure Cobra
2:23 - Little Witch Academia
2:28 - Cowboy Bebop
2:30 - Space Dandy
3:50 - Studio TRIGGER
3:56 - Space Adventure Cobra
3:57 - Steins;Gate
4:01 - Cowboy Bebop
4:04 - Darling in the Franxx
4:08 - Trigun: Badlands Rumble
4:14 - Digimon Adventure
4:24 - Unreal Engine 5 Demo
4:30 - Final Fantasy VII
4:39 - .hack//SIGN
5:09 - Tekken & DOOM
5:16 - Sword Art Online
5:36 - Rising of the Shield Her
5:43 - Log Horizon
5:47 - Final Fantasy XV
5:52 - Sword Art Online
6:00 - Star Wars: Visions
6:09 - Sword Art Online
6:12 - Rising of the Shield Hero
6:22 - Konosuba
6:26 - Goblin Slayer
6:42 - Is It Wrong To Pick Up Girls In A Dungeon?
6:52 - Sousou no Frieren
7:16 - Little Witch Academia
7:28 - Sousou no Frieren
7:39 - Mushoku Tensei
7:48 - Persona 5
7:57 - The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya
8:09 - .hack//SIGN
8:22 - Sword Art Online
8:32 - Kusomega
8:38 - Goblin Slayer
8:42 - Little Witch Academia
8:45 - Space Dandy
Isekai has been both scifi and fantasy since Mark Twain had Hank transported via crowbar-kun from the US to medieval Britain in "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court". Lovely video.
The blue hexagon looking shield magic in Frieren kind of nails home the points you made. It's slightly jarring but also blurs the aesthetics between sci and fantasy like the way the rest of the show does.
And they even go so far as to explain why defensive magic is tiled, and why it's tiled that way in particular.
Hexagonal energy fields have to be one of the things I hate most in all of media, right up there with glowing free floating runes. Flow field phenomenon don't do that, especially not on curved planes.
@@osakanoneI’ve been thinking about this a lot because Frieren’s killspell to me is sort of an offensive version of the same problem. A spell that’s just a fuck you bullet is kind of boring and is a bit of a dead end if you want to make an interesting magic system.
Luckily, I don’t think Frieren’s magic system needs to be all that complex. The fights are very visually pleasing with great animation, and they’re also very fast fights and ultimately aren’t the main part of the story. If this were a shonen fighting anime the killspell would suck but it’s ultimately a show that comments on the passage of time. Frieren’s kill spell also serves that theme well too, being a spell that originated by demons and then was reversed engineered after the demon king was killed. It’s funny to think a spell that was essentially criticized in Harry Potter by avid fantasy fans actually serves itself very well in Frieren.
There has actually been an ongoing conversation about this subject in the Anglophone fantasy community for decades at this point, particularly surrounding the term "hard fantasy." Apparently the term originally referred to fantasy works set in a version of the real world which adhered rigorously to historical and anthropological fact while introducing magical and mythic concepts appropriate to the culture of that time and place, but by the '90s had expanded to encompass works which treated magic as if it were a science with strict natural laws; the latter was further informed through the '00s by Brandon Sanderson's concept of "hard" and "soft" magic systems, with the former erring towards clear, logical, highly internally consistent rules, and the latter being more obscure or abstract in their mechanics and focused on inspiring awe in the reader. All draw direct parallels to so-called "hard science fiction" in different ways, but as with that term, there's a fair bit of debate as to how useful these distinctions are in the first place, with such authors as Michael Swanwick, himself arguably a hard fantasy writer, basically calling the distinction confusing and a bit useless as early as 1994. (Incidentally, I actually wonder how much of Swanwick's work is available in Japanese, given that his 1993 novel The Iron Dragon's Daughter is straight up a fairly modern iisekai, and I wouldn't be surprised if Frieren's author were a fan given certain parallels.)
I think the distinctions are subtle and mostly aesthetic, and the left brain "rules based view" of the universe tends to mean hard magic systems approach scifi and by the same token, right brain "wholistic and vibey" soft scifi tends to approach fantasy because it's less concerned with explaining rather than just presenting the story.
One interesting explanation on genre differences I saw on twitter I think worth mulling over was that "in scifi the characters' inner struggles reflect the nature of their world" and in fantasy "the world reflects the inner struggles of the characters." Cheers.
The source of the distinction that fiction is inner struggle reflect the world vs fantasy is world reflects inner struggles. Comes form a essay by Stephen R. Donaldson. Author of "The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever" and many other fantasy novels.Titled Epic fantasy and the modern world (www.stephenrdonaldson.com/EpicFantasy.pdf). It is a interesting read.
When you talked about how magic being treated like science the strongest example that came into my mind was the Nasuverse. Having read Mahoyo recently, Nasu describes a lot of things closer to how a mechanic explains a car or something, comparing magic sources to engines, stating that magic circuits can overheat. It definitely has to do with how much he loves mecha and sci-fi.
Fate certainly could've played a hand in the gamification of fantasy tropes! Probably why it's translated so well to successful games (well, non-novel games I mean).
Wow, never thought of the Nasuverse like that. Thats one thing I always like about the Nasuverse, it did try to actively explain its magic systems, studies, academics, branches and how spells operate while near everyone just use it a tool in stories, no different that a sword. It made its form of magic just as much part of their stories as the characters. I am dismayed that FGO has severely muddled everything.
Talking about genre terms and what they mean is always a nightmare honestly. Had so many conversations about it, I think some people just care too much about needing to fit every show into a genre without wanting genres to be too vast so they constantly make new ones. Like with all the different isekai variantions you mentioned. Or how people wanna call Madoka Despair girls or cute girls doing dark things or something else dumb when its just magical girls.
I think genres are important, but I also think they can become outdated and lose their use. For example it's handy to know whether something was adapted from a webnovel because that tells you a lot about its style, but that certainly won't be true forever. "Web novel" only feels like a unique culture because it's still small and insular, but it's just a format. Kinda like people in the US used to think of "anime" or "comic books" as a genre.
I missed Digibro, so much. This channel feels like reuniting with a old friend
Welcome back!
I literally had a dream about this a few days ago. In this dream it was revealed to me that a show is fantasy if it follows the "old = cool" rule, and is sci-fi if it follows the "new = cool" rule. So, if it has powerful ancient magic, ancient artifacts made by ancient demons who are in turn students of even more powerful more ancient demons, ancient artifacts forged eons ago by ancient blacksmiths using ancient ores and stuff, then it's fantasy. And if it has protagonists who win because their cool new cutting-edge technologies are more cutting-edge than the antagonist's are, then it's sci-fi.
You can see how it correlates with whether we know how magic functions or not. If people know how magic works, they can optimize it, improve it, and so new magic will be more powerful than the old. If they don't, they can only pass it from generation to generation, and it will gradually become weaker and weaker.
So, Star Wars can be considered fantasy because it has ancient knight orders of jedi and sith and ancient magic that can destroy newest imperial space stuff, and Frieren (more like Midren 5/10) has aspects of both because, on the one hand, it has legendary ancient mages like Frieren herself, Serie, and Flamme, who are so powerful because they are ancient, and in the last episode Fern gets to learn cool very ancient spell; but on the other, there was a whole subplot about zoltraak or whatever and the magic arms race, which even looked sci-fi coded with hexagons and stuff, as the other commentator has pointed out, and how human mages are generally becoming stronger with time.
Really glad you mentioned Kusomega! I really liked how delineated all the magic types were, and I'd love to see more if you ever publish it!
The whole premise of this video is broken by mainly focusing on anime.
Fantasy has been doing the whole "magic as a justified natural element" for decades, the most popular series doing that from the top of my head being The Wheel of Time and anything Brandon Sanderson wrote.
What deferentiates fantasy and scifi is not how magic is treated, it's the existence of magic at all. If it has a technological source, you can put it closer to the scifi genre, if it has a mystical source, you can put it in the fantasy genre.
Frieren is fantasy without the shadow of a doubt. Technology didn't bring magic to this world, it's just a natural occurence there.
This video is odd because there are great examples of the line between fantasy and scifi being blurred on a fundamental level in litterature.
For example in the Mistborn or Stormlight Archive series by Brandon Sanderson. Those are at their core Fantasy, but the people in those worlds use magic to power technology to the point of reaching space-travelling capabilities.
Or another series where people basically have reached our technological level, but powering their tech with the magic source of their world (iPads and TVs that work of those worlds' magic principles)
THIS is where the line gets very blurry.
Frieren is not ambiguous, it's fantasy through and through.
That magic gets treated like a science doesn't make it scifi, it makes it a hard magic system, as opposed to LOTR or Harry Potter which play lose with their rules, making them softer magic systems.
I'm sorry if this comment turned out mean or antagonistic, but what is said in there is baffling to me because it completely misses the basics of fantasy and how the genre has evolved in the past 30 years.
All Frieren has done is making anime magic into classic modern fantasy.
But even other animes had hard rules on how magic was used, like Nen in Hunter X Hunter. This is far more interesting example to use when discussing the line bewteen fantasy and scifi in anime because Nen can be used as technology.
But it's still pure fantasy.
Another great example in Japanese RPG is the Trails series, where technology is powered by magic. That's still fantasy.
The reverse argument is also true by the way. It's not because something looks magical that it makes it fantasy.
The Three-body Problem trilogy is scifi through and through, and yet most of what the aliens do is basically magic to the humans (unfolding a protons' dimension into 2D to code a computer on it, hard 90° turn with their spaceships, etc.). But it is still scifi.
The core difference here is that we have the guarantee that those elements have an explanation possible within OUR world's rules. Physics, math, etc. Even if it's speculatory in nature, it is still something we ponder with no added element.
Same goes for stories that delve into the possibiltiy for alien life and how they work like Project Hail Mary. It brings a fantastical element to our reality, but justifies it within the constraints of our universe. Scifi isn't about what we are sure is possible, but an extrapolation of what we imagine could be possible in the future with sufficient technological advancement (for example, what if humanity finds a way to build a druve that doesn't waste fuel and propels us at near relativistic speeds ? And what if we found out that aliens came to the solar system deep in our past ? Well, you get The Expanse, which is still pure scifi)
In Fantasy, we expect an explanation within the OTHER world's rules. What makes sense with their resources, and if magic is part of that, that's closer to fantasy.
It is also good to remember that the very first Science Fiction story is Frankenstein.
Which basically has an act of "magic" powered by science, still to this day. And it's not explained deeply either in the novel like you imply scifi operates.
Scifi's "job" isn't to describe reality, it's to extrapolate the concepts of reality to see where they would lead given a push in a certain direction or another. But the basis is always our world's mechanics.
There has definitely been a massive increase in hard-magic systems and very "explanatory" fantasy, from the evolution of species to explaining magic, for better or worse.
I think D&D was a big part of that. I mean, you literally have to explain how the magic works in order to play it.
@@LimeyLassenYes, DnD being what inspired the whole genre of video game RPGs means that this is essentially connected to what Trixie said in the video.
You also have to understand how magic works (at least how you use it) in a video game for the same reason.
Not to mention that tabletop is very "isekai coded". Or the other way around? Isekai is tabletop-coded?
Because tabletop RPGs like DnD are literally about "entering" another world, and immerse yourself in them as someone else. Who half the time is just yourself, but you know magic, lets be honest (my friend called it, "playing as yourself with a bigger nose").
Or at the very least, as a character you personally created.
One of the key appeals of isekai of cause is exactly that: imagining yourself as the one who got transported there and who gets to use magic now (which is why so many isekai protags are so boring, they're just "the writer but with a bigger nose" ).
And when people imagine themselves as the ones in that world, they want to know what they are doing. How they would actually use the magic.
And I like to say: Iseaki writers are their own biggest fans.
They are the ones who would like to enter those worlds they created more than anyone else.
At least most of them.
I think fate is an arguably even better example. Sure, it's not the focus of the story, but it's behind every plotpoint and is very deeply explained in each case. Magical circuits are literally an extension of your naturally occuring nervous system, and the only way for a mage to graduate from glorified card tricks is by transferring those parts to the next generation. It's an incredibly strict, rigid, and predefined system.
I love the bridge between science fiction and fantasy, so this is a good thing that I'm happy to see more of!!
You HAVE to read Book of The New Sun, It is an incredibly profound excercise in breaking this false Sci-Fi/Fantasy dichotomy! It's also a truly great piece of literature, in a rare way for genre fiction.
Really good video, labels are such a weird part of media and people interact with them in such different ways that there's always so much to think and talk about when in comes to them (although personally I'm in the "trying to fit things into labels kills creativity and expression" camp and prefer to not think about them too much).
Nice. This is the digibro I remember. I feel comfortable again. Thanks for the help finding a cool anime.
still called Trixie over here, glad you enjoyed the show
In western literature and media, a general thought about the difference between fantasy and science fiction is the difference in the availability of technology. In fantasy, there is limited technology which leads to a greater individual struggle. In Sci-fi, there's plenty of technology and resources to go around, allowing for easing of individual struggle and time for recreation. This allows for a more egalitarian political structure. Additionally, the availability of resources affects utopian vs dystopian separation. In dystopian stories, a few entities hoard resources to advance their own interests rather than the interests of the many. In utopian stories, resources are spread across the greater population, allowing for a softer form of capitalism we have yet to realize in our own world. Stories with an outlook of "magic = science" replaces a lot of the industrial mechanics with industrial magic, and I agree that the modern trend towards magitech lends itself towards a sci-fi aesthetic.
So as an example, Konosuba would fall under a more utopian fantasy story. There are rudimentary, pre-industrial technologies that hinder advancement but also enough money and resources to allow for a relatively easy lifestyle and some upward mobility. Star Wars is (for the most part) a utopian sci-fi story, with civilians mostly having the resources needed to live well. The political structure might swing back and forth, but we're rarely shown poverty on a mass scale (and even then we're not shown much violence towards the impoverished).
From what I've seen, Frieren is very "magitech", which lends itself towards a sci-fi aesthetic. The townsfolk we are shown indicates less individual struggle, which seems utopian. We don't really see dystopian fantasy in anime often, but I'd put Dungeon Meshi leaning towards it (at least regarding the shorter-lifespan folk).
Just came over from ygg. Sorry I was late. Thank you for continuing to make videos
Welcome!!
Fantasy: crazy shit we have no explanation for.
Scifi: Crazy shit we have an explanation for.
The former also usually is set in an old setting, almost always middle ages-era Europe, and has magic and dragons and goblins and elves and all that, where the latter is almost always set in the future and involves interplanetary travel and lasers and awesome tech.
I think much of this is also because of the trend of "realism in fiction".
Essentially, people like to write, and consume, fiction that feels "grounded" and "realistic".
That stuff doesn't just happen for thematic reasons, but that there are logical and historical forces at play.
This has been a thing in many of the genre inspiring classics such as Dune or LotR, but not every writer is skilled enough to invent a complicated web of politics and history, and then on top of that convey those to the reader/viewer without being boring.
So in absence of that, explaining the mechanics of magic is the next best thing.
Not to mention that as a writer, it you often come up with worldbuilding ideas while figuring out the magic.
"If the magic works like X, then Y has to be commonplace in the world. This means Z has to be a political force" etc
Additionally, I suspect that the deep connection modern fantasy anime/manga have to shonen plays a role in this.
At least since HxH, probably already since Jojo, explaining the exact limitations of a character's powers are important for fights to work.
If you have no idea what magic can do, then a fighter could pull any power out of a hat like 50s Superman.
The more you know about the rules, the cooler it is when a character either abuses those rules to win, or breaks them entirely with their special power.
Of cause, those systems themselves are often inspired by video games themselves. HxH famously so.
Especially the type of needy audience that loves creating some OP strategy in a video game to beat an extra hard boss, is also the audience intended for most fantasy anime, especially isekai.
And now I want to get into TTRPGs, the precursor to video game RPGs.
Games literally about immersing yourself in a fantasy world as yourself, or a character you created yourself.
The most well know archetype in DnD are wizards. And they are literally magical scientists who study magic from books, as opposed to others who are simply born with it.
Not to mention the game mechanics being very video-gamey (or actually, since they inspired video games, video game mechanics are DnD like instead?).
But I already wrote half an essay, so I will stop here.
Tangentially related, but back in the day I thought Assassin's Creed was so interesting because the moment-to-moment game focuses on historical fiction, but it is very clearly a sci-fi from the onset... and then I think it becomes more fantastical from there on [I think, I didn't play past the Ezio saga].
I don't know if you realize, but you've basically described a hard magic vs soft magic system.
Yeah, the title of this video is meaningless clickbait
@@andreespinoza2105 most of it, but yes. He's observation are valid but he's using his own terminology instead of the proper one.
I might be going mad but she said those terms in the video
Couldn't the Lord of the Rings call other fantasy "soft fantasy" because they don't invest as significantly in the historicity of their languages and cultural signifiers? If anything, I think it is easier to understand this as a distinction between science fiction and fantasy based on how they treat the mechanically distinct aspects of their universe.
Thank you for confirming what I had suspected all along: That it had been Sword Art Online's fault the entire time
Awesome vid topic! I was starting think isekai was becoming a plot device as opposed to a genre, but maybe that’s just its natural evolution in storytelling 😀
I think it started as a plot device, turned into a genre, and then that genre experimented so far afield of itself that it came to more so resemble a plot device again.
Don't really care for genre labels, but the discussion of how magic gets explained or not is interesting to me as a writer who likes to dabble into different magic systems. Too bad I'm too sleepy to really think about it, might rewatch it tomorrow and post my thoughts on Discord.
"Science fiction can be defined as that branch of literature which deals with the reaction of human beings to changes in science and technology."
-Isaac Asimov
Well, the fact how loose science fiction can be with it's fiction sometimes blurs the line between science fiction more than Frieren does. But i don't think treating magic as science is a big departure from fantasy. Magic is often the something you study, Frieren just explores a lil bit, what a hell they actually studying there and adding a bit of the backbone and causality to that vague subject
Oh yeah Kusomega! I liked part 1 and 2, but never saw any more of it. Did you ever publish the rest of it?
If a magic system gets normalised to the point it's integreated into normal life of a Society then it becomes a sci-fi.
But honestly any rule to destinquish sci-fi from fantasy gets arbitrary real fast.
On a conceptual level magic and science are basically the same science is just understanding the patterns and logic of reality and using them to our advantage magic is the same except the laws of physics are a little bit different.
My view is in the opposite in that to me it's Fantasy that's a far broader term and SciFi is in truth a Sub Genre of Fantasy in origin. Star Wars is more like LOTR then Star Trek in terms of the kind of story it's telling regardless of how much superficial mechanical influence there is.
Interesting take on the explosion of Sci-Fantasy
i think shows like fullmetal alchemist or hunter x hunter push against the boundary of sci-fi more than frieren does.
though frieren’s characters take a scientific approach to understanding and discussing magic, the show doesn’t invite viewers to engage with its magic system in a particularly scientific way. it lacks grounding in that range of instantly recognizable concepts floating around the science-y end of academic and popular culture. that is, while the magic system is defined by rules studied by mages who behave broadly like scientists, we aren’t expected to draw on this collective imagination about real advancements in tech, physics, chemistry, genetics, etc.
on the other hand, fma takes great care to ensure viewers understand its magic system as the rearrangement of molecules. it grounds itself in the medieval “science” of alchemy and uses the associated terminology (like “homunculi” and “transmutation”) so viewers reflect on concepts they intuitively understand as scientific rather than supernatural.
3:00
I have to disagree with the assertion that sci-fi requires an aspect of fantasy to tell it's stories. I was reading Orson Scott Card's book on writing sci-fi and he mentions specifically that the stories that gave rise to the science fiction genre were rooted in real world scientific rigor, and the readership of that early stuff was very unwelcoming of concepts that veer away from anything without a basis in contemporary scientific understanding projected into it's logical conclusion. I'm pretty sure the aspect of fantasy that's mixed in is just to make the genre approachable for us normies. Card is a bit of a sci-fi purist too, since he thinks the warp-field of Star Trek is total fantasy.
I don't think I ever fully connected those dots together in my head but it makes complete sense since there was a part of me that had an incling for a long time. Ur whole section on the blurred line between sci-fi & fantasy to me illustate we may be too limited in our scope in how we've portraytor imagined these. U ever think those ideas for VGs in isekai LNs ever actually get picked up or ever will get picked up if not? I think the point u make on how anime seems to evolve by mostly takin from itself unlike other parts of the world is a point that makes things seem so much more incredible & interestin
I respect how hard you contorted yourself for this clickbait. Science Fantasy has been a thing for a while, it's what Dune is. Either way, nah, Frieiren is neither sci-fi nor isekai. Good keywords for the algorithm tho.
I think the big difference in fantasy anime of all kinds is whether the magic system is hard or soft. Hard or soft referring to how much the magic gets explained and how closely does it follow the rules of the world. Magic can exist but not seem to have a strict structure, or it could exist but to cast a spell you need an item or there's a specific ritual that needs to be done. D&D has a more hard magic system with there being different schools of magic and different ways that magic can be cast. From what I remember from the movie, Lord of the Rings has magic and there may be some unspoken rules about how it can be used, but it more or less goes unexplained and unexplored because the magic of the world is only a small part in the story of the one ring and destroying it.
I guess if someone were to sit down and really examine it then sci-fi could also be explained as either hard or soft, but I don't watch a lot of sci-fi anime, so I can't speak on the matter too much. I've seen Planet With and that's probably as close as I'll get to something being "sci-fi".
this is interesting, i've never thought about it like that!
actually, i'm curious how you would slot hard fantasy into these things; i'm thinking worlds like the grisha books. if you haven't read them, they justify people's healing/harming powers, elemental control powers, etc. by explaining that they can psionically control the atoms themselves, but it's all steeped in a fantasy aesthetic/setting that places it firmly in the fantasy genre for most.
In my opinion the use of video game logic in Isekai to explain fantasy magic, kind of takes away from the magic. It also comes off as bad writing since the author is relying on the viewers understanding of video games to avoid having to create a unique magic system. It also causes a disconnect where video game elements don’t feel like a part of the world but merely layered on top.
I much prefer how magic is depicted in shows like Frieren or The Ancient Magnus Bride. In how magic is a natural part of the world that can be studied in a scientific way.
I think the use of video game mechanics in a fantasy setting only works in cases like SAO or Log Horizon where it is a explicitly a video game.
I was just thinking recently about how some subgenres can be very hard to concretely define (anyone who tells you they can clearly define denpa or sekai-kei is a filthy fucking liar, and I say that as someone who considers herself a fan of both!), but yeah, I guess the lines are blurry no matter what genre you're talking about...
❤
i wonder if magic as sci fi is really such a recent thing in anime, the fate visual novel series and the expanded nasuverse feels very much like the most definitive version of what if magic worked as sci fi, the lore of its setting being so intricate and the logic behind every single element being so well explained within the novel it is more often a detriment to its own pacing than anything. even going as far as all the servants having video game like stats. genre labels have always been stupid and maybe we should blur the lines between genres far more but i do wonder where the line exists from hard fantasy to sci fi. Most people would consider star wars and gundam sci fi despite having many elements that arent fully explained or are straight up fantasy opposed to other sci fi that tries to keep its technology only within the real of realism. Yet id hesitate to call either fantasy as much as id hesitate to call fate or frieren sci fi. Maybe im just trapped in genre aeshtetic notions but i have always felt the defining line between sci fi and fantasy should be aesthetic because the alternative is far too muddled.
I would add that fantasy becoming sci-fi also has to do with the average person knowing how the world works. Look at Naruto's early chapters and how they explain how charka works, even I've written magic that has an explanation, I think it's because we as modern can separate our understanding of the world from fantasy. It's why fantasy universes have aliens in them now.
Fundamentally, fantasy is about emotions of characters, whereas sci-fi is about the state of things and how stuff works. Fantasy stops making sense if you remove emotion from it, whereas sci-fi stops making sense if you remove the material base. You can also get into ambiguous territory where we attempt a somewhat detached exploration of how emotion works (which is closer to what Frieren does).
This definition works for me. Though, addmittedly, it does end up with surprising ideas like having to classify, say, Trigun as a fantasy and, say, Hellsing as a sci-fi in alternate history subgenre. Because in Trigun (i am talking classic anime series, not really familiar with manga or new series) its all about the emotional drama - nobody actually gives a damn about the power plants or space exploration outside of being vehicles for said drama. Whereas in Helsing the story moves forward regardless of what anyone thinks about it, with character emotes being a side dish (even if a particularly juicy one).
Frieren is an edge case because it outwardly seems to be about the state of things, but the only reason we are exposed to or care about the state of things is because of Frierern's emotions.
Based
Well any fantasy story that fleshes out the science behind it's magic enough basically becomes science fiction, at least in my opinion. It can look like fantasy and still be science fiction, and there's not that much of a difference between the two except that some things in fantasy stories can't possibly be explained.
As long as there's a logical explanation for everything that's happening.... It's science fiction. But by that logic my own life is actually fantasy.
In case my other comment didn't go through:
No, Frieren is not science fiction for whatever reason you think it is.
Now please read more fiction for the love of fucking god. There's this rich history in the West and more of "Science Fiction & Fantasy" and a pantheon of authors have whole bibliographies filled with both.
Brandon Sanderson literally has a series of lectures about world building and magic systems and more, please for the love of god like watch that for some other perspective on the matter from a guy who both as written Science Fiction & Fantasy
One other thing I'll add here is that I had put a recommendation for an essay by Steven R Donaldson called "epic fantasy in the modern world".
It's a 30-some page essay from the author of The Thomas Covenant books describing his views on what fantasy is I think it's well worth the read
If it's done properly then the mixing of genres can be great. Unfortunately, I have grown tired with isekais that tried to hard to explain its world mechanic every step of the way. With anime I expect a good story with character development, NOT getting stuck on a new game tutorial every several episodes. This is just the sci -fi/game version of the Japanese manga/anime habit of trying to explain even the smallest with ridiculous detail. I dumped Slime, Spider girl and Shield Hero from my favourite anime list partly because of them wasting a whole episode or three trying to explain their game world mechanics. I've done this for hundreds of hours in actual games so I don't want to see another inventory or crafting menu in an anime.
So far I love Mushoku Tensei because the "tutorial" scenes are almost non-existent or explained in more of am in world logic and less from a gaming perspective. And Frieren is a gem that blew me away. The whole story feels like cutscenes ripped out from an RPG game folder and stitched up together to become a legitimate fantasy anime series.
Glad you were able to put my problem into a word and “tutorial” is perfect!
yo how do I get on the podcast I def got some opinions lol
You overthinking it... Simple answer. The fact that magic has rules in Frieren does not make it science fiction. Cooking also has its rules and it's not sci-fi..
Sci-fi cooking is just chemistry
@@LimeyLassen but not sci-fi (scientist fiction , fiction is the main word )
Are you Digibro?
Not anymore!
@@WeWatchAnime1 thanks, I hope you have been well!
Fantasy: no explanation or hard rules. Magic just happens. A mage just cast fireball. No explanation on how they learned it or how it works.
Sci-fi: an explained system of abilities. Whether technological or "magical." For example I would say Hunter X Hunter is not sci-fi than fantasy.
Science fantasy fiction
or something like that
analyzing genres is such a pain because they are all so vague.
I see what you're getting at, but I'm not sure I would call isekai based on video games either fantasy or scifi tbh. Video game mechanics lack the mysticism of magic you described in LoTR and which Mr. B Tongue described in his video on magic way back when. But calling video mechanics being explained in-universe scifi is a bit of a stretch too. Barring rare examples like Log Horizon, I don't see that much thought being put into the mechanics and how they affect the world, character or story. Cribbing so heavily from basic bitch video game mechanics just seems like a lazy way to massively simplify worldbuilding. With so many of them in this style, isekai is the only label I need for these kind of shows. Anything more unique that is still technically an isekai - Youjo Senki comes to mind - might as well be in a different genre at this point.
I think you kind of missed the mark: Science fiction speculates on possibilities; fantasy speculates on impossibilities. Scifi is about examining reality: Fantasy is about escaping reality.
what a dumb take
👍👍
Disagree, good video though