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scans_dailyIsekai, literally ‘another world’, is probably the most popular subgenre of speculative media in Japan currently. It’s a collection of stories with a similar premise – a normal Japanese person is magically transported into a fantastic world where their mundane talents and knowledge sets them apart from the locals and allows them to obtain greatness they wouldn’t have otherwise. Think of it as ‘Alice in Wonderland’ meets a power fantasy. The genre can be traced at least to the 90s, with hits such as ‘Magic Knight Rayearth’ or ‘Vision of Escaflowne’, but it’s current verion, heavily focusing on game mechanics and power fantasy aspects, was codified by ‘Sword Art Online’, a novel series in publication since 2002. Like every popular genre, most isekai stories look like carbon copies on each other, but there are a few interesting ones that subvert certain genre conventions, making them accessible to audience otherwise unfamiliar with it or at least not fans of isekai. I invite you to take a look at some of my favourite series. Please note that several of them run on something I call ‘first episode’s surprise’, where the subversion of expectations is supposed to be a secret, but it happens very early on in the story and the narrative cannot be discussed without spoiling it. Furthermore, one cover features partial male nudity in a suggestive pose.
Title: Female Executioner and her Way of Life (also known as Virgin Road)
Author: Mato Sato (story), Nilitsu (character designs), Ryo Mitsuya (manga)
Media: novel series, manga series, anime series (all ongoing)
What is it about: Menou is the titular executioner whose job is to hunt and kill Japanese teenagers transported into her world. Why would she do such a horrid thing? Every otherworldly visitor has an immense magical power that practically make them living weapons of mass destruction, and power misuse in the past rendered whole countries uninhabitable. Menou’s most recent victim, a girl named Akari Tokitou, has the power to rewind time, and after she uses it to safe Menou and a group of civilians Menou starts having second thoughts about killing the girl. Bonus: it’s a girls’ love story, so yes, we the readers are meant to ship Menou and Akari.
Title: Ascendance of a Bookworm
Author: Miya Kazuki (story), Yuu Shiina (character designs), Suzuka, Ryo Namino and Hikaru Katsuki (manga)
Media: novel series, manga series, anime series (all ongoing)
What it is about: Urano Motosu is a young librarian who was crushed to death by by a bookshelf during an earthquake. Soon after, she is reborn as a young girl in a fantasy world where books are very rare and expensive. Desperate not to give up on her beloved hobby, ‘Myne’ decides to make books herself, but first she’ll need to overcome the mysterious disease that killed the original Myne. Compared to other examples in the genre, this story is low on supernatural elements and high on everything related to production and upkeep of historical books.
Title: My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom!
Author: Satoru Yamaguchi (story), Nami Hidaka (character designs and manga)
Media: novel series, manga series, AU manga series, manga anthology, anime tv series (all ongoing)
What it is about: A teenage fan of the romance visual novel ‘Fortune Lover’, known only by her nickname of Monkey Girl, dies tragically and gets reborn in the world of the game – as the villainess. Fortunately, she starts as a child, and with her radically different personality and scores of kindness and compassion she manages to unintentionally make most of her peers fall in love with her. This is the most famous example on my list, and a genuinely funny and charming story featuring a rare bisexual harem scenario – the group of teens in love with Catarina includes three female and four male characters (one of the latter being her adoptive brother if such a thing bothers you).
Title: I’m in Love with the Villainess
Author: Inori (story), Hanagata (character designs), Anoshimo (manga)
Media: novel series (main story completed, spin-off ongoing), manga series (ongoing)
What it is about: Rei Oohashi is an office worker who overworks herself to death and gets to be reincarnated as the heroine of her favourite visual novel, ‘Revolution’s’ Rae Taylor. A perfect heaven? Not really, because Rei is in love with the game’s villainess Claire Francois, a noble whose fate in the original French Revolution-inspired game world is always grimm. ‘Rae’ tries her best to give Claire a happy ending she deserves, preferably together with her. Think of it as a perspective flip of the more famous Villainess story.
Title: To My Demon King Evelogia
Author: Kaziwara Io
Media: webcomic (ongoing), ONA miniseries (complete)
What it is about: Hoo boy, how do I describe this series? First and foremost, it’s porn with plot where the main focus is on a relationship between a barely pubescent boy and a masochistic young man, with the power dynamics you’d expect from such a couple flipped on its head. The story starts with Toshiaki Ushito, a low level crook whose foul mouth landed him an early death… and an immediate resurrection as Gozu, a professional assassin in a fantasy world hired to kill a cute boy. However, said boy is young version of Demon King Evelogia, a game villain who happened to be Ushito’s first crush. Determined to safe Evelogia, the pair run away and start a chaotic roadtrip where their selfishness and Gozu’s jerkassery forces originally tragic characters to take their destinies in their own hands, paradoxically crafting a better world that Eve doesn’t really want to destroy.
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Date: 2022-04-19 03:19 pm (UTC)Then we got to the last one.
"First and foremost, it’s porn with plot where the main focus is on a relationship between a barely pubescent boy and a masochistic young man"
... .... ... what.
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Date: 2022-04-19 08:37 pm (UTC)"Ascendance of a Bookworm" sounds interesting though.
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Date: 2022-04-19 11:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-04-20 10:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-04-21 12:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-04-20 11:02 pm (UTC)I'll always have a soft spot for Digimon even though I've never touched one of the games. Granted some of those later seasons were more reverse Isekai.
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Date: 2022-04-19 10:57 pm (UTC)Executioner felt like it was vaguely original in terms of worldbuilding... But also extremely familiar, it's not a bad thing neccessarily (though there's just so much good stuff this season that I'm not watching the anime, just not enough time when there was a ton of stuff that grabbed me) but the entire "lesbian female assassin" thing is a weirdly specific subgenre.
"Most unique" is kind of an interesting thing, and also how you define "Isekai", like, I would definitely call Now And Then, Here and There one of the most unique isekai just for it's unflinching depiction of child soldiery. Or even Magic Knights Rayearth for the famous final season twist. But both of them are older and at least Rayearth has of course had a ton of imitators (but tehn again, so has Bakarina)
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Date: 2022-04-21 01:04 am (UTC)1. Seeing a genre evolve and adopt new trends in real-time. It's kind of fascinating to see what takes and what doesn't take. One successful isekai has the protagonist die by a truck and has adventurer guilds, now everyone's riffing on that. One isekai is about being the villainess of an otome game, other writers start going "Ok, how can we add a twist to that", even though otome games usually don't have villainesses.
2. The amateurishness of it. It's a pretty easy to get into genre that originates from self-published fiction on the web, so you'll get voices that you normally wouldn't get. At least not until they had more years of polish and practice.
3. The pure Id. There are few other genres that drop the pretenses about being pure wish fulfillment than isekai.
That being said it's not my favorite genre in the world. I get tried of the same repetition of JRPG universes and the wish-furfillment can get ugly. There are a few decent ones here and there. Enjoy Four Leaf on webtoons, and while Your Throne isn't an isekai it is a riff on the villainess stuff. I enjoyed So I'm a Spider although I wouldn't call it good, especially since the anime collapses on itself near the end. I do wish for an Isekai critique, that'd be kind of interesting, but the closest we have to that right now would be the first bit of Executioner and Kieron Gillen's Die.
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Date: 2022-04-21 04:15 am (UTC)Wait, are these real examples?
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Date: 2022-04-21 05:02 am (UTC)I wouldn't recommend the former as the protagonist is a creep, but I would recommend the latter, it's fun, cute, and inoffensive.
Both of them got big and then isekai afterwards turned to variations of that.
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Date: 2022-04-21 09:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-04-21 10:41 pm (UTC)I think the difference between isekai's trucks and stuff like Yuyu Hakusho is what they represent to the genre. Before Isekai were coming of age portal fantasies, similar to Narnia. Escaflowne, Magic Knights of Rayearth, Digimon etc, were about getting sucked into another world and having to find your way home. Once the characters overcomes their challenges, they return to their own world a more mature person.
Modern Isekai stops being about that. There is no portal you can use to return to your world, this isn't a coming-of-age story anymore. You've died in the real world and have no responsibilities, reincarnating in a world designed to fulfill your every desire. Modern isekai isn't about getting stronger to face the challenges of adult life, it's about escaping that life entirely. About finding fulfillment in an idealized world that you were never able to find in the real world.
And that's a fundamentally different story. And you can look at how Isekai loves the RPG genre, where progression is easy and "fair", where you can easily become the strongest thing around by grinding, where the world revolves around the player-characters.
It's also interesting to note that the isekai narrative is moving away from the "neet who dies from a truck", and more to "salary-man working themselves to death in a shitty job without really living" as their inciting reincarnation.
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Date: 2022-04-22 12:14 am (UTC)(The logic is the ONE THING that kept me from listing Adam Strange as an isekai)
I sort of assume the nature of the isekai governs the likelihood of getting back home. If you’re trapped in a video game then you’re probably going to find your way home eventually. If you use some kind of portal I figure your odds are 50/50 (though I’m struggling to think of any where the protagonist didn’t get home). If you died to get there then you’re stuck. Obviously, there are exceptions to every rule.
It makes some sense that isekai would age alongside its audience. A lot of media does that. Different generations are concerned with different things if only because of the pressures put upon them and I certainly don’t see the world the same way as someone rapidly approaching 40 as I did as a teen.
Edit just because the timing of this video seems relevant
https://youtu.be/MedjuejIJ14
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Date: 2022-04-21 09:37 am (UTC)"You get to take one thing with you in your next life"
"I'm gonna take my smartphone"
"I'm gonna take YOU, Miss Goddess"
"I'm gonna take ... my mom"
(I have only seen one of the three but I know the other two exist)
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Date: 2022-04-21 04:30 pm (UTC)What went wrong with So I’m A Spider, So What?, might I ask? I kind of fell off midway through but I enjoyed what I saw.
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Date: 2022-04-21 05:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-04-24 01:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-04-24 02:00 am (UTC)But the people evangelizing it make it sound like god’s gift to comedy and it just isn’t.
It sort of reminds me of the way some people talk about a certain western sci-fi cartoon (that I won’t name because they have one of the most toxic fanbases ever). Its fine but it isn’t nearly as funny (or smart) as the die-hards claim it is and I’ve seen other shows do similar things better.
I do give Konosuba some extra points for mostly following what I like to call the Guy Gardner/ Sterling Archer rule with Kazuma. When Hal Jordan and James Bond are terrible people, they are almost always given a pass and that’s terrible. When Guy and Archer are terrible people, they’re usually called out on it and its hilarious. The show clearly knows Kazuma isn’t a good dude.
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Date: 2022-04-22 02:24 pm (UTC)Which is happening a lot more in anime these days because of overproduction.
I also read the books and they are fine for the most part. The character dynamics of the post-anime are actually really nice. But the books are still kind of amateurish, like one book was a long action set-piece that was like watching someone playing an RPG on twitch, which gets a little dull in book-form.
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Date: 2022-04-22 07:27 am (UTC)Many isekai stories start as self-published online novels on Shousetsuka ni Narou, a fiction archive similar to Fanfiction.Net or Archive Of Our Own. Usually these are first works written by young people, explaining their iddy nature and amateourishness. There have been a few cases where some popular series couldn't be oficially published right away because the authors were still in high school and couldn't work on them full time.
As a critique of the isekai genre, at least the 'running away from your obligations' part, I'd recommend Bolero by Wyatt Kennedy and Luana Vecchio. In the comic, the protagonist is given a key to the multiverse on the condition that she cannot return to the worlds already visited. Turns out the source of her unhappiness is herself, something she cannot literally run away from.