Meanwhile, I'm just over here waiting for the one that does the entire show in status boxes. There's actually at least one, and I think more than one, isekai told more or less entirely through boxes. I want that as an anime, a manga, an everything.
Just about my entire life I've been primed to interact with media through blue boxes, and I want to see this brought to an apotheosis. I am here for the system apocalypse coming down upon media.
Reincarnated as a spider manages to do something like that in a fairly fun way. 99% of the show is literally just the MC levelling up as a spider and trying to overcome status effects... But it's strangely compelling, especially as they switch between the MC's self perspective (as a cute spider) and the perspective of random adventurers (seeing giant monstrous spider)
Proto-isekai predates Tolkien; the general conceit predates english, showing up in mythologies and old literature all over the world. It's not even a little new in terms of story beats, so trying to point out when exactly one trope or another involved with it showed up is something of a fool's errand, especially if you're not like literally a history/literature major or somethin'.
Yeah it's not that hard to find stories which could be classified as an isekai, like Dante's divine comedy where you have a self-insert MC getting isekai'd or a Conneticut Yankee in King Arthur's court which managed to do the whole "I teach a whole bunch of medieval yokels how to industrialise with my big brain 21st century knowledge" despite being published in the 19th century.
However when I mean isekai in the context of anime... I mean a very, very specific thing, which has been contributing to the isekaification of the entire medium.
-Main character is off-hand mentioned as coming from somewhere in Japan in the opening scene. This is never brought up again.
-Main character either has no defining character traits, or else has some superficial trait like "he's fast," or "he copies his enemies."
-Harem of love interests who all clearly express strong sexual desire for one another but get flustered at the thought of holding hands and so never develop any relationship at all.
-Adventurer's guild with ranks. MC is overpowered but decides to participate in the ranking system for reasons (??
?).
-We have to defeat the demon lord. If the MC is the demon lord, they don't actually do anything evil, and the only reason people call them the demon lord is because they've got horns.
-If the MC has changed gender or race as a result of being Isekai'd, they will never bring this up again after episode 1.
-Video game mechanics, right down to hit points, mana points, levels, class levels, pre-set skills and ability points.
And then you have shows which try to be like this format - who cut out the whole opening line saying "oh yeah MC is from Japan" but otherwise are indistinguishable from this exact format of isekai.
Something like "The hero is overpowered but overly cautious" does this formula down to a T, complete with an overpowered main character with one defining char trait (he grinds before facing an enemy). "She professed herself pupil of the wise man," - also similar problem, in that the MC makes an amazing old wizard character and then turns him into an uwu moe girl and then persists with their defining trait being an overpowered summoner who has to deal with the usual isekai format of ranking up, gaining the respect of colleagues in the workplace. The only thing it does different from the format is that
thousands of players got isekai'd at the same time, so you occasionally get really cool moments when the players bump into each other and reminisce on their old lives, but they don't dwell too long on that to go back to the format. "Is it wrong to pick up girls in a dungeon" is so painfully this format that it's unwatchable.
Some ones which break the format a bit:
"A guy who reincarnated as a fantasy knockout and a ____" - main character is transformed from a neet into a beautiful girl and has to defeat the demon lord all the while trying to avoid
not falling into a relationship with his best friend. Breaks the format, it being an isekai is actually relevant to the plot and they continue to actually explore the fact that the char just reincarnated and lost his identity basically every episode.
Overlord - the fact that the MC comes from such a miserable dystopian shithole and being the last player in his guild in a dying MMORPG is always relevant to the story, and perfectly in line with the theme that in his old life he was the last remaining man in the guild, a skeleton left behind. And in the fantasy world he is literally the skeleton that goot left behind.
Reincarnated as a spider - no harem. No plot. MC is a spider. That's all you get, that's all you need.
The Dungeon of Black Company - the fact that the MC is from our world is very relevant to how he uses the forces of labour exploitation to amass riches for himself, very much in the vein of a Conneticut Yankee in King Arthur's court.
Gimgar Ashes and Illusions - an incredibly high quality and completely straight take on fantasy isekai with video game mechanics, class levels and the full works. It's incredible how slow and atmospheric this one is, and you have to watch it to really see how bizarrely possible it is to play it straight that everyone is living in a world run by video game mechanics but it feels believable and internally consistent. The main cast are underpowered as hell, and even a fight with a single goblin is intense - the
goblin wants to live and is not just treated like a walking sack of XP. The main characters feel the guilt of taking a life, and every fight is a fight to the death they might not walk away from.
I don't think there's anything inherently shite about the format. "Reincarnated as a sword" is the most generic shit possible but it's decent and the MC's adorableness hard carries the show. The trouble is though that this specific format is basically when 99% of new anime just do a checklist ticking exercise and call it a day, and all of the fantasy animes which used to take inspiration from Tolkein or Dragon's Quest are instead just copying
other generic isekais of this format who are
copying each other too. It's like the meme isekai city with the red walls and river running through it: you have the power to make anything, and yet you make every single city into Friuli.
Friuli is a good city.
But why make every city into Friuli
This is especially egregious when just tweaking even one thing in the format is enough to differentiate you from the rest. E.g. Welcome to Leadale is another one which as generic as it gets. But the main character is female, no harem, and her three NPCs now treat her as a mother. The elements of the format work in favour of the story rather than exist as a "oh yeah this is a thing" off hand mention
Dragon Quest in general did have a genuinely huge influence on japanese culture, though, especially the fantasy and fantasy adjacent stuff that would later inform a lot of the things going on with isekai. It's not exactly isekai in any sense (well, some of it isn't, parts of the monsters line explicitly is at a minimum), but it was hugely influential on the cultures that would produce the modern forms of the stuff, so it's completely unsurprising you'd see its influence in modern isekai -- you see its influence in great swaths of modern fantasy, period, even outside of Japan where it's particularly loved.
One of the things I love charting is seeing how Tolkein, Dungeons and Dragons, Dragon's Quest, World of Warcraft, Warhammer all fed into each other to create all the things people recognise as fantasy staples today. Like why goblins are goblins now, and not orcs, and why orcs are green and not porcs
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Topic: I like anime, do you like anime? (Read 3144814 times)