I love needlessly long manga titles.
My cat launched a nuke and to stop it I married my plumber!
The Misfit Of Demon King Academy: History’s Strongest Demon King Reincarnates and Goes To School With His Descendants.
Googled it and this one is real in case anyone is wondering
And there are people like “this is the single best manga I’ve ever read” and it’s the most generic ridiculously overspecific title and premise in history
https://www.theouterhaven.net/2021/10/new-light-novels-title-is-196-pages-long/ Trollian light novel title
It’s from AnimeMaru, which is (was?) basically the Anime Onion.
However, “Mukuwarenakatta Murabito A, Kizoku ni Hirowarete Dekiai sareru Ue ni, Jitsu wa Motteita Densetsu-kyuu no Kami Skill mo Kakusei shita” (The Villager Who Was Abandoned, Was Picked Up by an Aristocrat and Awakened a Legendary Divine Skill) is an actual series which has an anime announced.
Japanese web pages are like this too. If you look up articles (not really newspaper stuff, but just random web articles), the title always goes on about a sentence more than what we’d expect in the west. I just searched for “horror movie history” and got “What was the first horror movie and its origin? Try to think about works that have had a big influence”, whereas we’d expect a title more like “origins of the first horror movie”.
Isekai is “normal fantasy setting” but you must explain everything to the MC, which is useful because you had to find a way to explain that shit to the audience anyway.
Yeah Tolkien should’ve made Lord of the Rings an Isekai because I didn’t understand the fantasy and I want everything in the world of Middle Earth hamfistedly explained to me.
Isekais are just lazy writing. Even for manga which are often already relying too much on exposition.
Portal fantasies aren’t exactly new.
The Chronicles of Narnia, Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz are classics that aren’t generally considered lazy.
Isekai tend towards the lazy, self-insert escapist portion of portal fantasy, sure. Most don’t have great writing. But keep Sturgeons law in mind - every genre has a few gems in a sea of turds.
There was an original framing story about an Anglo Saxon sailor who finds the straight road and ends up in Valinor.
Tolkien kinda has something like that in story with the shire being fairly disconnected from the outside world. It still allows for some exposition, but also fits much better into the themes and flow of the story.
That’s just being lazy. Just incorporate all that into the story organically, like everyone else has to.
Frieren is currently doing this perfectly
My favorite example of this is Redline. There’s exposition, but it’s basically all in the form of news broadcasts about the racers.
Redline is wonderful.
How is explaining things to a character that doesn’t know them inorganic? If anything that’s a lot more natural than characters just going out of the way to explain things everyone in the universe already knows. It’s just another way of letting the audience know what’s up, it’s not horrible and evil and lazy just bc some anime you don’t like do it
Or, and hear me out on this, you could not rely on infodumping and sprinkle your worldbuilding into the background. Y’know, make the world feel like an actual lived in setting by showing and not telling.
If an isekai isn’t also doing that already that’s just the writers being lazy. I haven’t watched a lot of isekai, but as a plot device it’s just a more escapist flavor of outsider character, something used in lots of speculative fiction as an excuse to explain major events or broad strokes of worldbuilding.
Maybe isekai is just really bad for replacing more interesting world building with exposition or just having really shallow worlds, that seems accurate from what little I’ve seen and heard. I just don’t think clueless outsider characters are a bad storytelling device when used in tandem with environmental storytelling and other less expository world building techniques. Obv showing is a lot better than telling for 99% of situations, but in settings or stories that need some exposition I think explaining stuff to an ignorant character is far from the worst way to do it. Though isekai and similar stuff is usually too escapist for me, and I prefer most stuff just being in its own setting without those kinds of strings attached
Isekai is “normal fantasy setting”, but it has RPG babble all over the place, and it’s the favorite game of the MC.
plus the MC’s internal monologue can keep relating outsider fantasy concepts in fun ‘downhome’ kind of ways. Fireball is just like a truck! or something.
If a protagonist isn’t affected by what they left behind, the isekai is failing its genre. That’s why Moshuko Tensei (Jobless Reincarnation) is one of the best isekai. Not because the MC is likeable, but because he is haunted by what he left behind and is influenced by the personality he formed in his “home world”
That is absolutely correct. It allows you to take a lot of the exposition the narrator normally has to do in order to explain things to the reader and integrate it in dialogue/narrative itself, and the protagonist doesn’t have to be a child/amnesiac/etc to ask obvious questions.
Well in an isekai hentai they explain jack shit why the MC needs to cum in all those women. Just that they are obsessed and he “frees” them.
I had the idea for some Don Quixote style story where your average isekai fanboy gets summoned to another world, and it’s the job of a member of the royal guard to protect this guy. The fanboy is a delusional, socially inept, weak lech who is convinced he’s the main character of an eroge, and the knight (the actual protagonist) has to try and keep this idiot from getting himself killed (like explaining that peeping on the princess while she’s bathing would most likely result in execution, not a “meet-cute”). Hijinks ensue.
Kyo Kara Maoh had the most unique transportation imo. Bullies gave MC swirlies and he got sucked into another world through toilet
I’m actually surprised there aren’t Isekai where the protagonist gets send into another in the future
What about an Isekai that gets thrown into our world from a fantasy one
The Devil is a Part Timer does that.
Which is especially funny because it was ahead of its time with the anime. It came out like 4 or 5 years before the isekai genre really went wild, but it took years to finally get the second season.
There’s a whole subgenre called “reverse isekai” that does exactly that.
That’s kinda what I meant, but I was thinking more of sci-fi/cyberpunk genre
There is one but it’s getting sent to the past instead of future. Inuyasha.
Depending on how you view things however, the secondary protagonist (Inuyasha) gets sent to the future
Isn’t that Parallel Paradise?
The only ones I know involve the protagonist going to a post-apocalyptic future, like 7 Seeds or in a sense Dr.Stone, or from the past to our present like Thermae Romae. I don’t think there’s any real series from the present to a Cyberpunk/Sci-Fi future, the only one I know of is a hentai (I heard the plot is actually decent, but it’s still porn in the end).
Neil Gaiman: nervous sideglance meme
An excellent deleted comment said “Star Wars is incestuous.”
Not the Luke / Leia thing. The sequels. The first movie is shamelessly a blender full of George Lucas’s favorite things. The sequels draw from all kinds of fiction, especially foreign movies that all these nerd-ass 70s directors loved. They were doing their own thing, shaped by a wide variety of influences. Even the prequels were a pastiche of bygone dramatic storytelling techniques, most of which were bygone for good reason, and some of which were just thinly-disguised racism. But you can see trashy jetpack serials in Phantom Menace as clearly as you can see trashy jungle adventures in Indiana Jones.
The Star Wars sequels were made by people whose only influences were Star Wars. Or at least Star Wars and the inevitable avalanche of movies directly rooted in Star Wars. It’s just a tangle of self-interested ideas that only works for people who also grew up mired in that monoculture. Anyone else is unsure why they’d care about these characters in this situation. Or they have uncomfortable questions about how this setting hasn’t changed in forty years. The middle one at least tried to use Star Wars as a critique of its own status quo, and that just made everyone mad.
Anime c. 2010 was deep in a phase where the primary influence for new creators was old anime. If you’d grown up with it and other stuff, you could be Anno, and deconstruct tropes into some really poignant… trolling, frankly, but that’s just Anno being a cock. But if all you know is how things are then that’s how you’ll figure they’re supposed to be. Everything was set in a school and lightly dusted with superpowers because that’s just how stories do. There was no recognition that the original projects picked magic as a metaphor for some difficult coming-of-age thing that made a familiar setting both a useful framing device and an ironic contrast. And apocalyptic stories (which may also somehow be set in interminable high schools with magical realism) aren’t reflective of any cultural concerns for the future or an excuse to reflect on current biases by isolating them from our modern present. They’re just cool to look at and a neat place for explosions to happen to bad guys.
Isekais aren’t the worst this has been - but they’re the most obvious this has been. It’s a frankly cheap gimmick for establishing an audience-insert main character who’s inherently different and superior in some way. On some level I applaud the blatant directness. But when fffucking everybody does it, even in settings where there’s really not a reason for the protagonist to be from elsewhere or Like You But, it reveals how many people think that’s just decoration. They do not understand why a story does this. They may not recognize it as a choice. Like getting Wizard Of Oz’d is just the paper you write the words on.
Basically, isekais are the useless “nobody:” of anime. They’re a symptom of a deeper problem where people can’t communicate ideas except in relation to prior examples. And what else do we expect, when the people who grew up writing Doctor Who fanfiction take charge of Doctor actual Who?
Would sell good.
