adapting an off-the-cuff rant I made on the glorio chat podcast when that 'magical revolution x genius princess' isekai show came up
(originally posted January 16, 2023)
...because I guess this is today's cohost discourse or some shit
Much has been said on the subject already by intelligent people who take a more holistic view of things that isn't necessarily limited to anime trash, but anime trash is what I know and so that's what I'm talking about here. Like, we've completely moved beyond "the other world" being a place like Narnia which is fantastical and allegorical and meant to facilitate a character's emotional growth, you know I'm here to shit on isekai (modern), not necessarily isekai (classic).
isekai is an exposition shortcut
Remember how everyone used to (mostly rightfully) dunk on amnesia as a convenient storytelling device which allowed worldbuilding to be communicated to the viewpoint character as though they were a total newcomer to the setting? Same shit, different name.
In a similar ballpark, why bother putting in the work to write a viewpoint character with a specific character and personality when you can just make them [ORDINARY HIGH-SCHOOL STUDENT / SALARYMAN / GAMER] and then all the readers will just say "wow they just like me frfrfr"?
isekai (in its modern form) is an inherently parasitic genre
This is already kind of a problem with any popular genre, but is especially bad with isekai because of its premise of "going to another world". If you want an increase in perceived agency, then the protagonist generally either has some kind of privilege that makes them inherently more powerful than other people (noble title, "cheat skill", etc) or they are bringing in some kind of outside knowledge about the workings of the world (often both, to maintain the ease of the aforementioned exposition shortcut).
For the latter to function, the world needs to be one familiar to the viewpoint character, so an isekai (modern) can't just be a completely new world that operates by its own rules and has its own culture, it has to be a world that's just like a fantasy game, just like a romance novel, just like a dating sim.
Or, as has emerged over the past few years, just like other isekai. Hence, summoned to a game world not as the hero, but the side character; in an otome game not as the protagonist, but instead The Villainess; to a world of magic, but without spells. Certainly, any genre has imitators and those intending to subvert the usual tropes, and that isn't inherently bad. But because isekai series are so "single gimmick that can be summed up in the title", everything focuses around those one-off gimmicks that get repeated over and over.
So now there are shows like The Magical Revolution of the Reincarnated Princess where the premise is literally, "what if we took Stock Isekai Premise H (modern tools with magic isekai) and Stock Isekai Premise Q (villainess isekai) and then made them kiss?" The particulars of the actual story barely matter (I'm sure they're fine, I expect it's fun enough and the characters are cute and will sell well, etc. etc.) because the core thrust of its existence is rooted so deep in isekai as a wider framework that I personally find it to have zero appeal.
Which leads into how the common refrain for some of these somewhat higher profile shows is...
"the isekai barely matters, it's not important to the story"
There's often a grain of truth to this assertion. Much of what people consider the best isekai seem to barely acknowledge that the protagonist is a spectre from Earth possessing a person in another world. But then you're telling me one of the elements so core to the story that it's usually in the title is so unimportant that it might as well not factor into the premise? Then why is it fucking in there in the first place?
A fantasy series about a world of magic where the protagonist can't use magic and thus studies magical tools could exist on its own. A political drama about a betrothed noblewoman being shunned by society as her marriage collapses could exist on its own. These don't inherently need to involve characters being from Earth to function as premises. Yet, here we are.
Why are these things isekai? Because isekai is popular. Why is isekai popular? Because everything is isekai now. What, are they gonna make a fantasy series and not use the easy tricks that give the audience dopamine and make the worldbuilding fundamentally simpler to write? Deprive themselves of such an obvious advantage that has no apparent downsides other than turning off assholes like me who will complain about it online?
This is why I call isekai (modern) parasitic, cancerous. It's a framework which latches onto other genres and drains them to feed itself. I'm sure plenty of it is perfectly good, but I refuse to watch it out of principle in the same way that I refuse to play gacha games.
(I'm about a third through Aura Battle Dunbine and it does slap, though)
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