The rise and rise of isekai is the most important thing to happen to anime in this decade.
Not that the concept of isekai is new to this decade of course. Stories about people being dragged away with the fairies or kidnapped by the gods are as old as storytelling itself. Even if we limit ourselves to anime, there’ve been series Like Rayearth, El Hazard, Escaflowne, Fushigi Yuugi, Garzay’s Wing coming out decades before the current isakai boom. So what sets the current crop of people being transported to another world from the older kind?
Formula.
Like so much that’s bad in anime, you could blame it all on Sword Art Online. There had been other stories about people trapped in a videogame before (.Hack), none was such a monster as SAO turned out to be, both in Japan as over here. It came out at just the right time, as streaming had become mainstream and it had everything a proper wish fulfilment series needed. You had the protagonist, a video game nerd the sort of people who watch anime could easily identify with and the setting, a fantasy video game world ala World of Warcraft, but in virtual reality, which a lot of the people watching it would give their eye teeth to be trapped inside in of. Add a handful of potential love interests and ultimately quite a nice romance between Kirito and Asuna. And while it’s often treated as if it was the worst anime series ever, it had a certain quality to it. The first story arc was what hooked people on the series and while everything went downhill afterwards, it pointed the way forwards.
And again, while it wasn’t the first, Sword Art Online also popularised and made mainstream what I call the Otaku Industrial Comples. It started as a self published web novel, was cleaned up and rewritten as a series of light novels, then finally got manga and anime adaptations. If you look at any isekai series published after SAO, you see the same route over and over again. And for every one that got an anime adaptation, there are zillions more that remained as web novels.
The way these series are created, largely by fans for fans with the most popular taken up and getting light novel and manga adaptations before being turned into anime, shapes them intimately. The reason that all those isekai animes seem the same is because that is what survives this meatgrinder. Readers and publishers both aren’t looking for originality or quality, they just want more of the same, variations on a formula, some clever new hack on an old story, as long as it’s not too different.
So what you get are variants in set up, where the protagonist’s gimmick may be different but the worlds are all the same and the stories all follow the same pattern. You got your over powered protagonist, either reincarnated into or transported to a fantasy world shaped by Japanese RPG tropes, usually with some sort of demonic overlord threatening humanity, but where the bulk of the story is made up by the hero becoming an adventurer, complete with guild issued card. Sometimes the hero is just supremely overpowered that nothing is a challenge, sometimes he has a hack power everybody else thinks is worthless, sometimes he is a demon lord himself, or a sword, or a hot springs, but in any case he’ll become an adventurer with a team of powerful but not too powerful female team mates. Who often are some sort of slave, but happy slaves as he is a good master.
You expect all this to be mined out as quickly as any other subgenre suddenly becoming popular and spawning a host of imitators, but so far it hasn’t burned out yet. There were about half a dozen isekai series in last season alone, few of them particularly interesting. and next year will be more of the same.
To be fair, I don’t actually mind reading or watching the occasional mindless isekai series myself. There is actually something comforting watching this sort of unchalling, by the numbers series, where you know the hero will always win, no challenge will be particular difficult and if anything else, there will always be some cute girls to look at. But what I’m really looking forward in isekai is the rise of a new subgenre, not yet present in anime: the otaku girl who finds herself reincarnated in the world of her favourite boys harem game, as the villainess. There have been several light novel and manga series using this gimmick in the past couple of years and they’re all more interesting than the usual isekai story. Especially My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom!, where the protagonist reincarnates as the six year old villainess and sets about evading her bad ends, without ever realising she’s building herself a harem in the process. the anime version comes out next year: I cannot wait.
This is day twelve of Twelve Days of Anime 2019.
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