Forum - View topicThis Week in Anime - Venture Into the Dark Underbelly of Isekai
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maximilianjenus
Posts: 2862 |
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the slavery bit at the start made me eonder if a specific Isekai series exist, after all, two of those ideas do.
1) an Isekai where the mc does not (only) inherit the memories of a modern Japanese. person, but instead of a different time period, the 9ne that exist has him inherit memories from a modern Japanese person and from a medieval japanese person, so make the mc inherit memories from a person from a setting that makes that person hate slavery. 2) this Isekai ha the mc needing to kill humans as.she reincarnates as a monster, but she refrains from it because she was a human in her previous life. but the enters the slaves, or actually the slavers, they are so wrong under her eyes that she goes crazy with the killing and it even scalates to fully attacking kingdoms that support slavery. so, an Isekai that looks, relatively normal, we don't get too much info about theca previous life, the they fidn slavers, we learn the mcs previous life hates slavers,and the plot details into antislavery from there. considering how ..ermm....interesting aome plots i have read are ( gender bender rezero, and i mean the mcs gender changes when the save point is used ), that does not feel too weird. |
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meiam
Posts: 3442 |
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Nani?! I'm barely bothering to follow devil despite really liking S1 because so little is happening (the most boring love triangle doesn't get more interesting if you throw a baby into it), while isekai uncle is about the only show I care about this season. Of all the many many many problem with isekai, its fascination with slave girl is really the thing that stand out to me. You can make your story be whatever you want, just make your hero power be that every woman desperately want to bed them, or maybe reincarnate them in a world that only has women and they need to grab man from other world just to procreate. But no, instead it seems like half the isekai are about obtaining slave girl (many underage). Considering they're all more or less built on the idea of giving the reader/watcher their own little power fantasy, it really come's off as pathetic. I did like pharmacy very beginning (omg they actually showed scientist using fume hood!). But the rest of it was just generic "Wow MC-kun, you are so amazing! Here's your private harem for being so great", which just bore me. I did find it funny that the family essentially didn't give a shit about the fact their son personality completely changed and he seem to have lost most of his memory. They didn't even bother visiting him after he got hit by lightning. They must have really hated their son. |
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RockSplash
Posts: 495 |
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It really confuses me how Isekai is how it is. It's almost insane to see something like Bastard and see how beefed the MC is. It still has a lot of trucks that normal isekai do, but the MC is not a plank of wood. I guess that is the appeal. The protagonist needs to be boring because the audience won't be able to self insert. IMO, this is why I have rarely gotten into isekai. It feels like it's trying to make you feel good, before actually writing a good series.
It's weird how non-isekai like the Toaru series also have a harem premise, and quite a few of the same cliches, but it works better because the protagonist actually seems like someone, and the world is something beyond recovering MMO addicts. It sucks because I pretty much love most non-isekai anime, but it just keeps increasing in volume. |
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JR-1
Posts: 70 Location: Southeast Asia |
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The real problem of isekai is they’re for the most part the work of amateurs. Part of the appeal of isekai is that it’s very carte blanche, you can easily find ideas from even people who don’t like isekai like “wouldn’t a twist like this is interesting”, but when someone actually wrote it it becomes more apparent that actually writing it and making it compelling is harder than that.
But, and this is from someone who reads more isekai than I like to admit, that amateurishness is also a big part of the appeal. It makes a sense of shared experience and honesty that is similar to fanfiction. I think it’s very notable that the rise of it as an all-encompassing genre made a considerable amount of experienced manga authors also do it, and even though they’re for the most part are considerably more polished in character writing and world building, they’re still consistently less popular than the originally amateur ones from narou. |
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nobahn
 Subscriber Posts: 5120 |
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I am grateful to Steve Jones and Chris Farris for demonstrating that there are anime out there that I will not miss.
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Gina Szanboti
Posts: 11348 |
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Are the duplicated images (Yuji and the bone slime, and Takafumi's Sega shock) a subtle commentary on the interchangeability of isekai plots?
 The first one did throw me for a second, since I couldn't recall Yuji buying any slaves, though "taming" could be considered slavery-adjacent.
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GhostD
Posts: 1000 |
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First, theres no romance in PWP so don't associate this with the usual harem shows. Second, several people have acknowledged the change in his personality but the only one who gives a lot of thought about it is his dad because he acted like a teacher to him instead of a dad. Third, theres no memory loss involved. If anything the current Farma retains the knowledge of the previous Farma. This makes PWP a little different from other mainstream isekais because spoiler[its basically a recently deceased guy from earth taking over the body of a recently deceased kid from a parallel world] as opposed to being reincarnated into a brand new body or being transported there as themselves. Also the anime skips a moment with his mom due to fanservice but it showed that she does care about him and even the current Farma believes that they're a loving family for the most part. |
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Gamen
Posts: 221 |
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There's a subtle freedom in reading a story vs being told a story that makes stat screens tolerable in books and comics but intolerable in anime: The ability to switch between skimming and reading on the fly.
Don't care about stats? In a book or comic: skip over the inset. Anime? sit there for 15-30 seconds while the protagonist blabbers meaninglessly about their stats, or try to skip over it... and likely get annoyed when you land in the middle of something that sounds important. Something comes up and you suddenly are interested in those stats? In a book or comic, just flip a few pages back. In an anime? it's time to fumble with the seek bar, or the rewind button on the remote! And of course it's not just stats. Don't care for the descriptions of cooking or food porn? Or the literal soft-core smut? technobabble? shallow philosophizing? draw-out action scenes? A novelist can get away with a lot thanks to the reader's ability to modulate their reading speed that is completely unacceptable in animation and live-action. It's really emblematic of the state of the anime industry that there's an audience and money to be made from these low-effort adaptations... |
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Yuvelir
 Posts: 1558 |
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On the bright side, as much as stat screens are an isekai cliche, at least most of them aren't spending a third of their runtime browsing through them.
And eventually they did! |
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FunkyDude88
 Posts: 108 |
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This line of thinking seems more focused on trying to subvert genres and executions than trying to tell a good story. Not to say a good story couldn't be done here, but I grantee if this was the west every two-bit director with a chip on their shoulder would be trying to make a Netflix show or indie game with no other purpose than to express their dislike for a popular genre of media or trope. A series born out of hatred rather than love. Those rarely turn out well. Slavery's popularity isn't hard to understand in these shows. These shows are aimed a guys. A lot of guys would love to have a harem of girls at his beck and call. Seeing so many protagonists getting giddy at the idea of owning some hot slave girls is only natural and expected. They're giving the audience exactly what we want. |
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