Fiction is often an exercise in the art of escapism, providing distraction from the routines and difficulties of everyday life. The most extreme form of this escapism is a desire to leave this world altogether in search of a more exciting, fantastic life (pun intended). Therefore, tons of stories over time have revolved around characters living in the real world finding themselves entirely different places. Japan developed its own tradition of portal fantasy calledisekai,which roughly translates to “other world”, and in modern Japanese culture, it’s omnipresent. But that wasn’t always the case.
Isekaihas roots that go back centuries, and elements of it have been present in anime and manga for several decades. It wasn’t until the 1990s, however, thatisekaibecame a significant part of the greater fantasy genre, with series likeInuyasha, Magic Knight Rayearth,andDigimon Adventurebeing popular examples. It was the 2000s, however, that truly set the stage forisekai’s eventual dominance. Part of this was due to the aforementioned series, but in reality there was a much bigger culprit: the internet.
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How Isekai Exploded
The increasing ubiquity of the internet in the early aughts set in motion two trends which would build the foundations forisekaias we know it today. The first was the massive spike in popularity ofMMORPGs,which inspired series like.hackand the web novel version ofSword Art Online.The second was a single website launched in April of 2004: Shosetsuka ni Naro, or “Let’s Become a Novelist”, often shortened to “Naro”. Naro is undisputed hub of free light novel publication in Japan. Users have written and shared nearly a million free novels on the site since its publication, and users inspired the concurrentFamiliar of Zerobegan to submitisekaistories to the site en masse after its inception.
Over time, many of the site’s most prominent novelists would see their work picked up for publication as light novels, and eventually receive anime and manga adaptations. Indeed Naro is responsible for a frightening percentage of well-knownisekaiworks, including the vast majority of those which have become anime over the past decade and a half. These include, among others,titanssuch asLog Horizon,Mushoku Tensei,Re:Zero,Overlord,That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime,KonoSuba,The Irregular at Magic High School,andThe Rising of the Shield Hero.
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All of these series are fantastic, and they stand along with the popular but flawedSword ArtOnlineas emblematicisekaititles. They stand on their own merits, and their quality warrants their adaptations into manga and anime form. Here’s the problem: success always spawns imitations of lower quality. And for each one of these series, there are severalisekaistories which somehow find popularity despite being heavily flawed in their premise, narrative, and/or characters.
This is at its worst whenisekaimixes with theharem genre, creating at-best forgettable and at-worst nauseating outings likeArifuretaandIn Another World With My Smartphone.While sometimes executed masterfully, as in the case ofOverlordorThat Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, isekaistories are also often rife with completely overpowered protagonists who face no real stakes. You could argue that this is a logical conclusion of the escapism that spurred onisekaito begin with, but in most cases a world without challenge is also a boring one. It takes an extremely talented author to overcome that.
Isekai’s Future
Many of these weaker seriesalso get anime, and since the mid-2010s this has often been at the expense of more traditional fantasy fare.Isekaiis consequently facing somewhat-justified backlash as a genre due to its oversaturation in Japanese culture, as well as by fans of Japanese culture abroad. It’s harder to argue that admittedly good slice-of-lifeisekailikeAscendance of a BookwormandRestaurant to Another Worldare encroaching on traditional fantasy, but with the more straight-forward scenario of “guy or girl gets hit by Truck-kun, dies, and gets godlike powers in another world”, things are definitely getting stale.
That said, if this article has demonstrated anything, it’s thatisekaiis not a fad, and it probably won’t be going away anytime soon. But it does need to be scaled back or addressed more creatively. Thebestisekaiof the past several years have attempted to either subvert or ignore the tropes established by earlier entries in the genre. Those tropes will be well-enough represented as the series that did it right continue to receive periodic adaptations, and eventually (ideally) end. And while imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, it may not be the best approach for authors seeking to cash in on the enduring popularity of series from the early 2010s.
Theisekaigenre doesn’t need to die, but it does need to be reborn in a less caricatured form. That’s already starting to happen, but the process needs to accelerate. Anime studios in particular should also be much more selective about the number of isekai they’re willing to adapt in a season, and authors who want to writeisekaiwould be wise to bank on trying something different. The sooner those changes are made, the better things will look for fantasy and sci-fi anime and manga as a whole.
