The Problem with Isekai

Isekai is a Japanese word that loosely translates to "different world." Technically speaking, any story that takes place in a world other than our own would be an isekai story by that definition. But we don't go around calling One Piece or Pokemon isekai anime. Instead, the anime community defines an isekai story as a story in which a character or a group of characters is transported from our world into an alternate one, wherein the story focused on how they either escape back to our home world or adjust to life in a new world with its own rules.

I feel like the appeal of isekai as a concept is self-explanatory. The real world may indeed be a vast and wondrous place, but it is also extremely familiar to all of us who live in it, and the troubles that come along with living here serve to distract us from the beauty of the world. But an alternate, parallel world? We don't have the burden of familiarity and troubles there. All we see is a vast world of possibilities, and that's exciting. And as a genre? The very concept of creating a new world is full of possibilities! Every new world will be entirely unique, limited only to the creators' imaginations.

So why does every isekai anime look the same nowadays?

Spoiler, it's Sword Art Online's fault.

Every modern isekai anime I have seen (and by modern, I mean released in the 2010s) has the same basic setup: Some shut-in anti-social nerd is transported to a fantasy world that is either based on a video game or runs on video game logic, goes on some adventures, and inevitably attracts a harem of sexy anime girls who follow him around and talk about how awesome and nice he is. Now, I will freely admit that I haven't seen EVERY isekai anime in the past decade (if only because you cannot pay me enough money to make me consider watching a show with the title "In Another World with my Smartphone"), so I may be wrong about these trends, but every screenshot I've seen has had casts that look nearly identical -- one male protagonist (and maybe a male friend if you're lucky) surrounded by at least three beautiful anime girls -- with the most generic fantasy backdrop you can think of. Even this season's Rising of the Shield Hero, which looked like it might break the trend when four male protagonists are all transported to the generic fantasy world at the same time, just splits its cast off into different groups that can never interact, and each group noticeably has more cute girls than male characters.

And it's not like I have a problem with cute anime girls either. I would love to have a cast full of interesting female characters in a fantasy story, but when the girls are treated as interchangeable props for the teenage boys in the audience to imagine pursuing a relationship with as they project themselves onto the male lead, who is often the most bland and boring character of the bunch by design, so as not to interfere with the adolescent power fantasy that he provides. 

If you don't see the problem with this picture, let me remind you that only one of the girls in this shot is an adult and most of them are technically the guy's slaves.

And I meant what I said earlier, too. I lay the blame for this trend of boring adolescent power fantasies that treat their female characters as eye candy dominating the isekai genre entirely at Sword Art Online's feet. Before it debuted in 2012, the isekai genre was both less prevalent and more varied than what we see today. Pre-SAO isekai stories included the likes of Marchen Awakens Romance, Inuyasha, Digimon Adventure, The Vision of Escaflowne, Spirited Away, Dot Hack, and Magic Knights Rayearth, and elements of isekai story-telling can be seen in shows Yu Yu Hakusho, Hunter x Hunter, and Yugioh, which featured alternate worlds in some of their story arcs. All of these stories have the similar elements of a character being transported to another world, but the world's were all wildly different. Some of them are based on video games, sure, but others take inspiration from traditional western fantasy novels like The Chronicles of Narnia and Alice in Wonderland, Japanese mythology, or even mecha anime. Stories are targeted at a bunch of different target audiences, from children to adults, and the closest thing to a harem in this pre-SAO era is Escaflowne, and even that is just a love triangle between the female protagonist and two prominent male love interests, a far cry from the harems of modern isekai.

When Sword Art Online came out, it was just another unique variant of the concept of an alternate world. While video game worlds had been approached by the genre before, the stories had up until this point been restricted by the games of the 80s and 90s: typically action games and the wasteland look that defined how the internet was imagined by fiction writers when it was new. SAO is the first major isekai anime to use an MMO setting and really target gamers as an audience and had the advantage of coming out right when the internet was coming into its own as a legitimate streaming platform. In the end, it didn't even matter how good or bad it turned out to be (and SAO is terrible, by the way): Sword Art Online appealed to a niche that had been ignored previously and came out at just the right time for it to be more widespread than any of its predecessors. Its monumental success was, in hindsight, inevitable. And when such a bad story had the right elements to become massively successful even today, why wouldn't future shows be influenced by it?

Now, to say that all modern isekai sucks because every show takes notes from Sword Art Online would be grossly inaccurate, nor would it be fair to say that every show is exactly the same. Overlord has a character transported into the world of an MMO, only instead of escaping he is forced to play into the role of a maniacal super-villain and launch a campaign to conquer the new world so as not to anger his NPC cohorts who expect that behavior of him and would probably murder him if they suspected that he ever sympathized with humans or, even worse, was human himself. Log Horizon has the same basic setup of dozens of players trapped in an MMO, but uses that setup to transition into a political story of the characters forming their own society and government and learning to properly coexist with the NPCs who are native to that world. Re:Zero aims to deconstruct the genre by showing that the invincible nerdy isekai hero is not the great guy that his fans and harem claim that he is, and Konosuba satirizes the whole genre and makes the whole idea into a farce that better resembles western sitcoms like It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia or How I Met Your Mother than any of its isekai contemporaries. 

But the bad far outweighs the good here, and even the good isekai stories of the modern era all borrow heavily from the same video game and RPG roots that Sword Art Online does. And there's nothing wrong with that on paper. But when almost every new isekai show has characters talk about classes, skills, and level grinding, it creates a sense of fatigue. It's hard for me to accurately cover Rising of the Shield Hero and what makes it unique on the weekly roundup when I constantly see experience points flash on the screen every time Naofumi kills a monster. If you asked me to explain how the magic and skill systems of Death March to the Parallel World Rhapsody, That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime, Shield Hero, and Konosuba all differentiate from each other in specific terms, I don't think I'd be able to answer you, and I've watched all of those shows fairly recently. And while I'll be the first to say that surface level elements like that don't matter when compared to the quality of an anime's production, story, or characters, to say that it doesn't matter how eerily similar all these shows are would be a lie. Everything starts to blend together when they all take inspirations from JRPGs and MMOs, and nothing can actually stand out that way to all but the most dedicated of fans. I mean, the heavy use of game logic in fantasy shows is so widespread that I forgot that Goblin Slayer wasn't an isekai while I was outlining this post, and I only watched that a couple months ago!

I guess what I'm saying is that isekai as a genre is unnecessarily limiting itself when every story tries to chase after the same trends that SAO established and continued to capitalize on. That sort of thing is, to an extent, inevitable in fiction. Like it or not, Sword Art Online has established itself as an influential and relevant franchise, and the only other shows I could think of that has a comparable influence on modern anime would be Shonen Jump juggernauts like Naruto and One Piece. But if isekai is going to escape the rut that it's currently in, then it has to put down the controller every once in a while and take inspiration from a different source. Why not an isekai where a character is sent to an interstellar society of multiple alien planets? Or one in a post-apocalyptic desert world? Or a world where giraffes have become the dominant species? The possibilities that can arise from the simple premise of a character being transported to a completely different world are practically endless, and all I want is to see more creators take advantage of that and show what their imaginations can really do without having to define themselves by what has come before.

Also, I want more people to watch Escaflowne.