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This Week in Anime - Are This Season's Isekai Anime Any Good?

After reading over some of the thread, I think there's also a strong argument to be made about people viewing older series through rose-colored glasses.. A lot of these older isekai shows would probably be a lot more heavily criticized by the naysayers if they came out today. Whether it's the fact .hack animes doesn't resemble any actual MMO either or it was filled with incest jokes and fanservice. Inuyasha being filled with stuff like naked Kagome or Miroku's perverted antics as well and no one cared. It's easier for people to look back on shows they grew up with favorable memories and forgiveness and be more cynical of modern stuff that's really no different other then it's more popular now and they're probably more jaded. I would genuinely love to see a Fushigi Yuugi remake happen just to see peoples reaction to that show if it came out today. Would it still be called a classic or would people roll their eyes at all the stuff in it and consider it garbage. I mean, I'm just now seeing Gen Z and Gen Alpha people on X discovering Card Captor Sakura and freaking out over things like Terada and Rika, and when Fruits Basket got a remake and movie that also attracted a lot of naysayers due to some of the content in it as well. If some of these older isekai came out today would they still be held up as positive examples or is it all just nostalgia clouding people's memories of these series.

q_3 wrote:

"Isekai" has become a loanword that means something different (more specific) in English than it does in Japanese. Same as "anime" itself.

Also this. I started seeing websites say shows like Frieren was a refreshing take isekai because it doesn't involve being transported to another world. I think people just use it as a stand in for 'fantasy' now. Or the people who say it as some derogatory term to mean a bad show they dislike. So basically it means anything other than isekai to some people.

After reading over some of the thread, I think there's also a strong argument to be made about people viewing older series through rose-colored glasses

I think it's true, they don't talk a lot about "Strange Dawn" for example which was, in my opinion, pretty bad. And "Now and Then, Here and There" would probably offend a lot more people than current isekai series.
Too much production is the problem in the isekai genre, so low tier stories get adapted. Only 10% to 20% of animes are LN adaptations, there are a lot of other things to watch. Some isekai are also manga original stories so they could be better than LN adaptations.

For Now and Then, Here and There, though yes it would certainly get more push back the key is that it is about the... uncomfortable topics rather than them just being world building tick boxes.

I started seeing websites say shows like Frieren was a refreshing take isekai because it doesn't involve being transported to another world.

For Now and Then, Here and There, though yes it would certainly get more push back the key is that it is about the... uncomfortable topics rather than them just being world building tick boxes.

My point is that for those shows, "isekai" still isn't their genre, its a plot point, regardless of the resulting quality.

Absolutely. Theres no problem with including any kind of topic, its the thoughless and shallow usage(and more particularly, the denial from enthusiasts that this is the case) which undermines many narou derived works- though this is far from a unique trait; Dragonball is pretty awful, for example.

The NarouRPG shows we are currently getting in a large volume all cluster much more tightly around a style, set of tropes and worldbuilding than most genres do, and thats the case whether they are specifically isekai or not. Slow life from last season is not isekai, but it is much more similar to Slime/Shield hero/ect than older works which are technically Isekai. The comparison of old works vs new non-isekai works demonstrate that its not "Isekai" that defines the current sub-genre but the shared Narou writing traits.

But if these isekai aren't made, then diehard fans won't be able to buy the figures and official merch of all the new waifus! And executives won't make as much money if people who spend too much time reading power fantasy stories don't buy merchandise! Are you telling me that you'd rather have less derivative and cynically produced anime in a given season, even if it means a group of anonymous people who already have more money than sense will have to take a pay cut???

You should have stopped at "There's no problem with including any kind of topic". It's fiction, the audience will make its judgement. Trash anime is nothing new.

You just have to compare the evaluations on amazon for the Blu-ray of Sonny Boys, an isekai critically acclaimed, and Jobless or DanMachi. People who ask for more high quality product often don't care about them the moment they finished watching. The animation studio need more than that to survive.

Oh, that is the key point in all this. "Isekai" as a plot point, as a trope, is completely harmless, just a thing that happens. The problem is when that simple trope became a genre, because it means enough different tropes were attached to that one over and over to be identified as a whole package.

ANN_Lynzee wrote:

It would just be nice to contain those conversations in either the episode review thread or the series' discussion thread as much as possible so folks can talk about other shows without it dominating the discussion everywhere.

Then, I don't understand why my post was removed from EP. REVIEW: Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation II. I tried to follow the guidelines...

Absolutely, I don't doubt the economics drivers and I don't blame the studios for following demand, but it doesn't change the quality of the content. I can't pretend I'd welcome an industry revolving around gacha, even if the alternative was a smaller industry, but such matters are out of my hands of course..

We are where we are, but the why doesn't really impact on an review of what we are getting- although yes, since good anime is still made and I've no intention of watching hundreds of shows a year, what form the bottom 50% of anime take isn't of great relevance to the individual viewer.

Terraziel wrote:

For Now and Then, Here and There, though yes it would certainly get more push back the key is that it is about the... uncomfortable topics rather than them just being world building tick boxes.

Yeah -- from what I recall, NTHT never tried to make the viewer enjoy its worst depictions, nor to frame them positively, which would put it firmly in a different space than isekai that are criticized for (among other things, of course) optimizing how many T&A shots they can fit into an ostensibly tragic scene.

I have several heavy criticisms to the last few episodes of NTHT and how author decided to deal with certain themes in the end, and really dislike the framing of certain decisions just to what is IMHO push by author of his moral narrative...