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I see the word "cheat" or "skill" in the title, I'm out. That's just a basic rule

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I'm just happy I won't have to think about KamiKatsu again after this column. Now let me go check my e-mail to see about our Streaming Review assi-

Lmaooooooo

Shame that TWIA has relegated all isekai anime to one single TWIA at the start of the season and with people that more or less just hates isekai. Guess these shows will never be talked about again Crying or Very sad

Woozy wrote:

Shame that TWIA has relegated all isekai anime to one single TWIA at the start of the season and with people that more or less just hates isekai. Guess these shows will never be talked about again Crying or Very sad

I don't think most people truly hate isekai anime, it just seems like the formula has worn out for many, especially when there is nothing unique to find. Add a minimum of 5 or so isekai each season and it is easy to understand the burnout. The truly good and unique/noteworthy isekai do get talked about eventually though.

That said, I love isekai and despite that I find myself not knowing how to talk about most of them because I have already said the same things atleast a dozen times before.

I love certain isekai (Re;Zero), and have a more ambivalent but still passionate relationship with some others (Mushoku Tensei), but most isekai just seem like weirdly empty dreck, devoid of feeling, effort, or ideas. That's probably not even an isekai-specific thing, really; it seems inevitable with any genre that publishers fixate on as copy/paste-able money-printing. Especially if, commercially speaking, they're right.

zztop wrote:

Until you realize that nearly all Korean-written isekai romance fantasies involve its protagonist reincarnating/transmigrating into novels. It's always a written work whether it's a webnovel, published novel, or even fanfiction. Which also informs how the meta-narrative used by Koreans can be different from the Japanese.

I'd be very interested to learn whether modern Korean isekai has the same kind of fanfic roots as its Japanese counterpart, because this really makes it sound like it does.

Megumi Chisato wrote:

I've always said that isekai is more of a premise than a genre, and many of these so-called "isekai" series wouldn't be any different if the protagonists were straight-up born in the fantasy world to begin with.

That's sort of both the main problem with isekai, and the reason there's so much of it. Even calling it a premise feels like too much, because you can take basically any fantasy story and slap "reincarnated" on it without changing anything, and many isekai feel like they've done just that. If it's not a fantasy, no problem, just make it a "reverse isekai." The name encompasses everything from Konosuba to The Chronicles of Narnia. It's hard to say anything specific about something that broad, and it's easy to produce it in huge quantities.

The real problem, for anime, is more what they choose to associate with isekai, rather than what it inherently means. Because even though you could use the trope in practically any story, it's most frequently used for "dejected male dork reincarnates into fantasy world and now all the ladies want him." There's twists and parodies on this, of course, like Konosuba, but the basic premise is still obvious. Not coincidentally, all the ones they're complaining about in this column are in that category. Ultimately, the way we look at it is sort of backwards--these sorts of trashy sexualized wish-fulfillment shows aren't getting green-lit because isekai is trendy, they're being produced because there's always been a market for stuff like that (what was once called harem/ecchi) and that sort of thing fits perfectly with the basic isekai self-insert concept.

The real problem is that we keep conflating literary fantasy like Raeliana with... uh... whatever the hell KamiKatsu is, by calling both "isekai." We need a more specific term for the latter. Ecchisekai?

I wouldn't call myself an isekai fan. If the genre disappeared tomorrow I wouldn't be especially sad. Yet I've also come to appreciate the low stakes comfortableness of generic isekai. After a long hard week of work it's nice to settle down with a drink and turn on some predictable isekai fluff, of which I have no expectations of being good, so I can never be disappointed, only occasionally pleasantly surprised. Like KamiKatsu. Is it bad? Yes. Has it made me laugh harder than any of the actual comedy anime that's come out this season? Also yes. Will I gleefully watch every episode while I completely forget about much better shows like Heavenly Delusion? Very yes.

zztop wrote:

Until you realize that nearly all Korean-written isekai romance fantasies involve its protagonist reincarnating/transmigrating into novels. It's always a written work whether it's a webnovel, published novel, or even fanfiction. Which also informs how the meta-narrative used by Koreans can be different from the Japanese.

While an admittedly low bar, I will take the breadth of possibility that can come from "I died and found myself in a book" over "I died and found myself in a game", because a book has the potential for better world-building and broader genre exploration than "game". (Obviously this isn't true for real world games, but no one's getting isekai'd into games like Call of Duty or Ace Attorney so here we are.)

Shay Guy wrote:

I'd be very interested to learn whether modern Korean isekai has the same kind of fanfic roots as its Japanese counterpart, because this really makes it sound like it does.

Likewise.

smurky turkey wrote:

I don't think most people truly hate isekai anime, it just seems like the formula has worn out for many, especially when there is nothing unique to find. Add a minimum of 5 or so isekai each season and it is easy to understand the burnout. The truly good and unique/noteworthy isekai do get talked about eventually though.

There's a lot of good isekai out there

As long as it's made before like 2010 or so. Plenty of great stuff like Magic Knight Rayearth, Escaflowne, VS Knight Ramune & 40 Fire, heck even Digimon Adventure.

It's when we start getting into the Narou-kei stuff that the quality goes down.

smurky turkey wrote:

Part of it has to do with isekai being a coping/escape mechanism for many people. Life can suck at times or a lot of the time for a lot of people and some of them use Isekai to cope. Most isekai shows/manga/novels are basically pure wish fulfillment. Hell, the amount of overworked characters dying due to working too much and going to a different world to have an amazing life there should tell you enough.

Would not the iyashikei genre serve this need better? But there is currently a dearth of iyashikei shows (waiting for Yuru CampΔ season 3).

garfield15 wrote:

There's a lot of good isekai out there

As long as it's made before like 2010 or so. Plenty of great stuff like Magic Knight Rayearth, Escaflowne, VS Knight Ramune & 40 Fire, heck even Digimon Adventure.

It's when we start getting into the Narou-kei stuff that the quality goes down.

When mentioning great isekai, we cannot leave Fushigi Yûgi off the list.

zztop wrote:

Kamikatsu also has a recently started manga spinoff which continues the madness; which turns out the MC has a super-buff, super-strong, and super-brocon older sister who also isekais herself so she can reunite and sex up MC. And of course, Murata Shinya of Killing Bites is doing the art.
https://viewer.heros-web.com/episode/316190246980569863

I can't even......

"Given up" would imply that the genre was ever trying in the first place. Which, well, it wasn't. Crapping out "I Don't Know How To Do Any Sort Of Proper World-Building, So Here's A Premise I Cribbed From 20 Other Stories Smashed Onto Dragon Quest" doesn't make you a writer, it makes you a hack. This entire naoru-kei phenomenon is one big self-indulgent circle-jerk of sad otaku wish fulfillment. I agree with the earlier poster who mentioned how this feels much longer-lived and pervasive than previous anime fad waves; we sure weren't getting 7-10 shows about maids or moeblobs per season, were we? The worst part for me is that classic in-another-world series like Escaflowne or Twelve Kingdoms are now getting retroactively labeled with this same dumb term, even though they have about as much in common with the modern incarnation as a giraffe does with a hedgehog.

Life is too short to watch things with garbage writing, people. Watch good things instead. Or at the bare minimum, own the fact that what you're watching is garbage.

(And yes, before anyone says anything, I'm aware that there are legitimately good examples of the genre out there, things like Ascendance of a Bookworm that place a real emphasis on world-building. But they're the exceptions that prove the rule at this point.)

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Kamikatsu also has a recently started manga spinoff which continues the madness; which turns out the MC has a super-buff, super-strong, and super-brocon older sister who also isekais herself so she can reunite and sex up MC. And of course, Murata Shinya of Killing Bites is doing the art.

https://viewer.heros-web.com/episode/316190246980569863[/quote]

Did you say "super buff older sister"?? As in a MUSCLE WOMAN??

Sign me right up!! I'll be even happier if it ends up getting an anime adaption!

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It's a shame because it's technically on point too. Decent character designs, good framing, and use of light/color. The director worked on parts of stuff like the Revue Starlight movie, Made in Abyss, and Kaguya-sama, so there's some genuine talent here! Too bad the writing doesn't hold up.

That didn't age too well. Seriously, someone should be fired for the second episode of Summoned to Another World. I honestly don't know what was worse, the modern funeral scene in the fantasy world or the Scooby-Doo-esque chase scene through the streets. I hope their embarrassed by what they did.

Emerje