Fun Fact: Ascendance Of A Bookworm was originally going to be just a fantasy story. But the author realized that in order for the main character to do and have the knowledge she needed, she needed to have the knowledge of someone from our world.
That story kinda needs the protagonists obsession with books in order to drive about 80% of all the conflict in its plot which is only possible due to being from our world where the idea of readily available books isn't insanity. Another 15% of the drama comes from the lack of common knowledge the protagonist has for her known reality. Such as how nobles can act with complete disregard to the lives and wellbeing of commoners and how it is expected for the mayor to sell orphans in order to buy food in winter. Basically I don't think the point of making Main from our world was just to give her useful knowledge as the entire story is contingent on her otherworldly perspective.
@@everythingisscience658 You make sense. (All just a guess from here on) I'm guessing the idea of making it a fantasy, and then switching it to be an isekai was an early draft sort of thing. Maybe the author had built her world first and then started drafting the story and then figured it out. I don't know.
This's a story that is meant to be isekai. One issue I have with Isekai is often the fact that the hero came from "our" world is nothing but an add-on with no real weight or meaning. There should be a reason that the hero is not of that world, not just a little flavor text but an actual way that the story works better with (or works because) this factor. And this isn't just true of Isekai. Any major aspect of the heroes should be made into something truly significant beyond merely providing a perspective for exposition.
@@broEye1 Yeah, I love it when the MC being from another world is believable and actually plot relevant. The believable thing is another big problem for isekai what with all the OP MC's.
This trope was so fascinating to me as a kid, I was like “wow, these people can go to otherworlds. I wish that was me!” and now whenever I look at these shows now, I still think “I wish that was me”.
Side note "The executioner and her way of life" takes a dark twist on ALL of those isekai tropes by focusing on the point of view of characters ALREADY living in the fantasy world and what they think of all these overpowered but emotionally unstable teenagers popping up randomly in their world. (Namely: Fuck this, we've already had four close brushes with the literal apocalypse, never again.)
Is it just me, or are isekai with female protagonists almost always more interesting than their male-lead counterparts? Ascendance of a Bookworm, My Next Life as a Villainess, So I'm A Spider...Even The Saint's Magic Power is Omnipotent, easily the most straightforward female-lead isekai I've seen, provides more novelty than most isekai with male protagonists. Is it just selection bias? (IE, I only hear about the good stuff and the most boilerplate trash, with dude heroes being part of the template)? Is the male-lead isekai average just weighed down by all those cheap hikikomori wish fulfillment light novels? Or is it the reverse, where authors who want to do something novel are more likely to pick female protagonists?
@@timothymclean You pointing this out had made me realize just how much of the isekai that I like actually has a female protag. Really makes me wonder if it really is a selection bias or the authors writing the female protag isekais are actually putting in more work for whatever reason.
@@timothymclean Writers either want to tell a story or make a cashgrab. If the latter, there's no reason not to make the protag male for easy self-insertion. Therefore the only time the protag is female is for when a story wants to be told.
@@timothymclean That's not quite true. Male led isekai tend to be more popular, thus female led isekai needs to be above a quality treshold to be popular. There's plenty of garbage below the surface, if you know where to look. The villainess sub-genre in particular has a lot of terrible entries.
Then theres the Never Ending Story, where the main character gets so blindsided by his magical escapism he starts becoming the villain without even noticing it.
I was going to post a comment on if anyone knew of a story where the protag got into a sterotypical isekai scenario, but DID want to and tried to go home- but the Neverending story is another good subversion of that concept- the MC basically becomes the worst sort of overpowered isekai protagonist, but the ultimate point of their character arc is rejecting that power fantasy, accepting who they are and returning to the real world, Fantasy is great but you can't LIVE there- too bad none of the movies end up covering that part.
@@SkyfishArt The first Movie ends with the MC flying around on Falkor in the real world- basically the whole movie he was getting sucked into the story, and it ends with him Abandoning the real world and embracing fantasy- the second has a similar message, ending with the boy facing a mundane fear, and the one movie where he is in fantasia with wish powers, they drop the real issues of giving a kid in a fantasy land whatever he wants, in favor of a more obvious villain and very bland characters. Basically none of the film adaptations of the story did the whole "OP Isekai protagonist" thing that Canon Bastion did, much less the character growth he got by moving past that
@@SkyfishArt the original book had Bastien's ability to imagine and dream as a very powerful thing when he gets sent into the book world in the second half of the story. But as he changes things, broad swatches of the world are altered and often not for the better but for the whim of a 10 year old and what they think is best. Combine that with him slowly forgetting his original life, which in turn reduces his creative power and shrinks the world, threatening to destroy it, and you get a thoroughly "nice job breaking it, hero" isekai story
Narnia is kind of an interesting blend. The kids don't seem anxious to go home for the most part and are always sad to leave but at the same time Aslan makes it clear the point of Narnia was to help them live in their homeworld. Great video as always, Red!
Except for one of the books ending with the kids being told they died in a train accident (if I remember correctly, mightve been some other kind of transportation accident?) and getting to "live" in Narnia for the rest of time.
@@ryannmarshall3033 To be fair that was less Narnia and more actual Heaven. Like, all the good christians who didn't die walked through a door and wound up there while all the devil-worshippers/not-white-people-don't-think-about-it-too-much died in like a flood and fire and stuff.
Anyone ever realize how absolutely terrible it would be to have have lived a full life as royalty, than be transported back to being kids and normal people. Aslan did them no favors with this happening.
Gotta say: I love that you have used the word "grounded" rather than "realistic." It's a much more effective word for communicating that the thing is sensible and understandable, relatable in a way _like_ the real world but without having to have the same _rules_ as the real world. Great video!
yeah. "realistic" can depend a lot depending on well everything to the point of trying to be "realistic" feels ironically more fictional than well normal fiction grounded conveys the element of "trying to be closer to reality but still not enough"
@@ianr.navahuber2195 Judging from the shows that were usually hailed as "realistic" until the cows came home with vertigo, that's pretty much a codeword that translates to "how much can I tilt the scales to the characters' disadvantage before the scales break". Or "grimdark", for short. Heck, I'd argue that for all of its edge, Berserk WAS grounded/realistic in certain aspects, because while there was much cruelty in it, not ALL of the people in that world enjoyed kicking puppies with orgasmic glee.
I can’t remember what video it was from, but I’ve also seen the term “believable” used-specifically, “fiction doesn’t have to be *realistic,* just *believable* ” within the confines of its own world.
One day I want to see an isekai where the character just keeps going deeper. He gets hit by a truck, and wakes up in a magical fantasy land. While on his quest to defeat the demon lord, he gets hit by a wagon and wakes up on a spaceship. While on his quest to overthrow the tyrannical emperor, his ship crashes, and he wakes up outside a town in the wild west. While hunting down the notorious outlaw, he gets thrown off his horse, and wakes up in a cyberpunk dystopia, and this cycle continues. You might need a few extra elements to make the show compelling beyond being funny the first few times, like an overarching plot where they actually figure out what's going on and find a way to break the cycle. And maybe they can bring some of their skills/equipment with them to the next world, and while they never have time to get the best stuff, something that's weak in one world can be great in the other, but then weak in the next, so they have to adapt (i.e. the laser they gave him in the sci-fi world is easily the most powerful weapon on the seven seas in the pirate world, but isn't very impressive compared to even some of the basic spells they teach in the wizard world)
I had an idea like that except the big bad evil guy has the ability. Evil guy dies, causes chaos for whatever story reason, dies and repeats. The protagonist in turn has to die, undo the chaos as fast as they can before offing themselves so they can keep chasing the evil guy without falling behind.
There's a light novel series with the English title 'I Saved Too Many Girls and Caused the Apocalypse' that sort of does that. The main character is the designated understudy for heroes in various genres and thus gets dragged into three or four different plotlines at the same time. He usually swaps items and weapons around to solve the issues (laser gun to deal with dragon, protection spell to dealy with meteor crash, et)
I SAW THE TITLE AND THE FIRST THING THAT CAME TO MIND WAS CORALINE I kept watching and thinking, wait are they not going to being up CORALINE? So then I scoured the comments to see someone mention it
I actually really like stories where the character stays in the otherworld. To me it doesn't neccassarily have to be a bad message as the message doesn't have to be 'Ignore your problems and escape into fantasy forever' but rather 'you don't have to be satisfied with an unfulfilling life. Instead strive to become the person you were meant to be'.
One theme I would like to explore is; "Is it really an escape from reality when you are grasping for a reason to live?" Some people would find that depressing but I would find it hopeful if not comforting...
That is true. It's something I started to wonder when O realized that fantasy worlds that are just as real as the grounded worlds the character is originally from, why is it bad to stay there? I think it's bad if a person abandoned all their family that still cared about them in the grounded world but other than that staying in the other world is fine.
The “Science of Discworld” books feature a neat reversal of this: our “Roundworld” is a mundane otherworld, running on science and logic, rather than the rules of narrative that Discworld runs on.
I'd argue that science is genuinely amazing, and more people should appreciate it. Somewhere out there is a magical version of me saying people should appreciate magic.
All this talk about magical otherworlds has left me with one burning question on my mind: Is Futurama an isekai? An ordinary (and, if we're being honest, generally below average) guy is just going about his life, when, at seemingly random, he is launched into a fantastical world he doesn't understand. Now, he has a bunch of new friends and (eventually) starts a relationship with a girl who by any metric seems way out of his league. There's also the fact that Fry, despite being just some guy, is frequently sent out on 'deliveries' (quests) by an eccentric old 'scientist' (wizard) to save the world and/or universe.
Probably? For all intents and purposes, Fry *dies* and doesn't go back to his old world. Wouldn't say it's a power fantasy, but it definitely falls within the periphery.
There is also an aspect of prophecy in Futurama too. Fry is frozen into the future because he is the only being in the universe that can stop the brain swarm. Since due to some time travelling, he is is own grandpa. Leaving him without the "delta brainwave" that leaves everyone else at the mercy of the brains. Fry even has a few chances to remain in the 20th century. The first time is when he learns the truth about his freezing. But decides to let events play out as they did because he sadly feels more at home in the future. The second is when he uses the time correcting timecode to escape the nude scammers. Only to mess around with the code, creating a time duplicate and getting frozen again. Meanwhile his time duplicate stays in the 20th century until learning that HE is Lars. Either way, Fry will always go back to the future. Because that is where he belongs. The episode where his ex girlfriend freezes herself and arrives in the 30th century demonstrates that. She feels so out of place while Phillip is completely fine.
I'd say it counts. As far as Fry's family in the 21st century is concerned, he disappeared and is probably dead. We even see this in the show's flashbacks.
Here's some ideas for Trope Talks that I think would be cool: -Found Family -Tragic Backstories -Orphans -Tokenism -Final Battles -Combat Therapy -Symbolic Superpowers -Hated Superpowers (Blessing Turned Curse) -Political Intrigue -Cycles -Sibling Dynamics -Disfunctional Families -Princess in a Tower (sheltered and naive)
I'd love to see Red cover the "Hero complex" and "Chronic Hero syndrome" tropes, as well as any that follow the same theme. Both are about the character striving to be the hero of the situation, but one is more out of want to be the hero while the other is more because they feel they have to be. The hero complex is often where the person is actively seeking heroism or recognition, be it because of reward, ego, or so on, and are, and some like Syndrome from The Incredibles and the Reverse-Flash will even go as far as to cause problems just so they can resolve them and be the hero. Chronic hero syndrome on the other hand is often more out of a genuine desire to help rather than fame or reward but they also tend to feel an overwhelming and often destructive sense of responsibility. You got Adora, Midoriya, Spider-Man, Superman, etc. They feel they have to help people and right wrongs as much as they can, often because they have to power to do so and thus no one else can and usually they'll blame themselves when things go wrong.
That’s what I love about “my life as a dating sim villainess” our protagonist is 100% aware of what will happen in the future in the story and does everything in her power to NOT let that happen. Heck, she learned how to grow crops at a young age because in one of the 2 endings she’s exiled from society. THIS GIRL GOT GOALS!
That's a bit of an exaggeration. The only reason she succeeded in avoiding her doom flags is because she innocently stumbled into making everybody else fall in love with her (not some big plays on her part), but she's so dense she doesn't even realise it. I mean come on, her big brain plays were summoning earth bumps with magic if she were to be chased and throwing toy snakes at people for the same reason.
the best part of that show/manga is that she derails the entire story from the get-go before the protagonist even arrives, just by being a good person in place of the villainess. "i am GOING to be a good sister to you and there is NOTHING you can do about it". And then she steals all the romance flags for other characters with the protagonist. its great
Honestly, on the never returning home thing, I tend to feel that a lot of portal fantasy tends to kind of neglect *actually giving characters any reason to want to return*. The original world is not only boring, not only does it have nothing going for it - characters straight up have no positive relationships, no family they're actually attached to, no friends in their original world that they miss, nothing. Only bad things happen. At that point, it feels almost mean-spirited to make them go back. It feels like watching someone finally escape a terrible personal situation and move away to a different country to make a completely new start, only for someone to go "no, you should go back and fix your shitty original situation, grab those bootstraps you lazy bum" and punt them back.
There are some cases where the protagonist wants to live a quiet and easy life, but since they can't return, they try to carve it out on the new world. Of course that fails, but I quite like it
I feel like there's a feeling, even among people who are seeking out escapism stories, that the real world is the place they have to go back to. IE even if you don't like your life at the moment, there's still the sense that you have to go back eventually. Like at some level you know that never going back just isn't an option. Or would be giving up and be a failure at some level.
two shows that have done that well recently is the owl house and amphibia, and the reason why is honestly dead simple. family. neither are over yet and both have it slightly differently, but fundamentally its a case of "yeah my mom (and dad in amphibia) is there and not here and I ain't willing to never see them again without so much as a goodbye" as well as the fact that the circumstances they left being nothing horrible (kinda mucked relationships with friends in amphibia's case and going to a crappy summer camp for the owl house) Its a case of properly leveraging the fact that the main characters are kids to give the desire to find a way back home (if only temporarily again they haven't finished yet so unclear how it all shakes out) a reason that is properly convincing to the audience.
And on top of that, if the character has no reason to doubt that their otherworld is just as real as where they came from, or at the very least, no reason to think that being there is harming them in any way, then I don't even see how the "escapism is bad" angle could possibly be applied. If moving to a real fantasy world that's more to your liking is escapism, then I don't see how improving your life in any way isn't also escapism. "What? You hate the cold so you moved to a warmer climate? Escapist weakness, you should have grown as a person and learned to enjoy the cold." No reasonable person would say that, people move all the time to improve their lives in various ways IRL. So why would moving to a preferable alternate dimension be any less valid?
gosh i remember watching the cat returns and being so mad at the protagonist for wanting to return to the human world. they tried to add stakes by having her slowly turn into a cat but i saw that as a bonus lmaoooo
It's slightly more balanced in the original story where the kingdom of cats is their actual afterlife, at least. Becoming a cat is great, becoming a dead cat not so much
@@lifefindsaway7875 The "respawn" point isn't even a thing -- it's a video game, of course he gets to respawn. Mario didn't need an Animus system to rescue Princess Peach. As far as "why he can't kill civilians"... sure, it's *a* solution to that question, but it's hardly the only one. He's an assassin, a member of a secretive order on an even more secret mission. Killing people willy nilly would just compromise the mission, so a "mission failed" for that is perfectly reasonable from a video game perspective.
@@lifefindsaway7875 It's less about using the animus framing device to justify video game-ness and more about the modern day plot is boring as hell. I want to climb towers and stab people wearing fancy armors, not walk around in a lab!
I like how Pokémon Mystery Dungeon does it, since the protagonist, typically a human from the “normal” Pokémon world, doesn’t remember anything more than their name and that Pokémon don’t traditionally talk. This is a handy lampshade for people who know Pokémon media but not PMD, easing the player up to a world with no humans at all, while also making the anxiety of returning to our own dimension something of a non-issue since the protagonist can’t remember what they left behind. But the REAL best part is the built in emotional sucker punch of, “Yay, we saved the world!- Wait, why am I glowing!??? WAIT” Seeing the various ways PMD games play with the human-turned-Pokémon inevitably being sent back to regular PokéEarth is always interesting. Sometimes they just come back through the power of friendship, and sometimes it’s a whole post game quest to get them back! It’s always a little different and we’ll worth the play.
PMD actually plays with the magical otherworld concept a suprising amount. PMD1 ends with the PC returning due to the bonds they've formed with others. PMD2 Subverts this with the PC no longer able to return to the world they're from, because that world was a bad future they prevented. PMD3 gives the PC a way to freely travel between the human and pokemon worlds And Super... Super is just cruel, not just with the PC having no way out of the pokemon one, but also by effectively killing off their partner that was their one emotion connection to the world.
@@starmangalaxy2001 Will admit, still haven't finished Super and have been trying to avoid spoilers despite how long the game's been out (PMD is the one series I insist on going into blind), but I've seen enough to know generally where it's going, and honestly, unless they can really sell the finale, I'm not going to be that impressed. But I haven't really been impressed with it anyway... I'm not going to go into everything I found wrong with it, but it's in my opinion probably the worst entry in the series.
This is why I think PMD is are the best pokemon games conceptually. Any main line series game that tries to tackle moral and emotional complexity will always inevitable be undermined by the fact that we are complicit in animal fighting (see black and white) but PMD doesn't have that structural problem because its gameplay doesn't actively fight against the story AND it removes humans from the picture (since they are only in text).
This is partly why I like crossover fanfiction, because you can pluck characters from a familiar world and chuck them into what to them is a magical otherworld, but to the reader is just a different familiar world. If it's well executed, you get all the benefit of watching a fish out of water fumbling around this new and weird universe, while still having the comfort of the reader knowing both of these source universes and having a baseline to build changes off of.
Amen to that. I love me a great crossover, granted the two franchises have enough in common to make sense. Hell, I'm writing a For Honor and ATLA fic with this sort of concept, where the remains of a destroyed continent inhabited by peoples greatly inspired by medieval cultures with fantasy elements, cross the sea to find another land also populated with nations inspired by other cultures with their own magic stuff. Can't wait to develop it further.
I really enjoy xovers where a fan of either works doesn't need to know the other to enjoy the story. A great one in mind is *A War of Bloody Evolution* by _RedrumSprinkles_ on ffn, which is a cross between *Warhammer* and *RWBY.* Never even heard of *Warhammer* before, but the way the writer crafts the story makes it easy to get into and enjoy without readers needing a lot of knowledge of either franchises.
@@em5522 Just out of curiosity is it Warhammer Fantasy, Warhammer 40,000 or Warhammer Age of Sigmar that's used for that fic? Admittedly each setting would probably work with RWBY.
Undertale is one of these stories, and each of the main routes utilize different tropes of the genre. The neutral routes are the "Learn lesson, return home" standard hero's journey. Our protagonist had their adventure and return home with nothing more than their experience and a few keepsakes. The murder route is the power fantasy trope, our protagonist using their power to abuse the world. No lesson is learned. Our hero-turned-villain never goes home. Though, ending with *destroying* the world is an approach I haven't seen elsewhere. The pacifist route is the "Return home, take new friends" with you resolution. It's considered the "true" ending to the story, and ultimately the most satisfying one.
plus there's a definite use of game mechanics being acknowledged in universe. Flowey as a character is even an example of that sort of trope, someone who uses their disregard for others and foreknowledge for their own benefit.
In a sense, destroying the world is kind of the inevitable conclusion of any Isekai power fantasy, right? No matter what, eventually you've exhausted all the possibilities, eventually you get bored. And then even more bored. Whatever value you might have attached to anything and anyone in the playworld gradually begins to crumble under the weight of accumulated boredom. Eventually, the realisation hits you; This isn't a power fantasy. It's a prison. Suddenly, all that ennui that was built-up turns into seething hatred for the entire, fake, world that is keeping you trapped and killing you slowly. "Not if I kill you first".
And then comes Deltarune, which combines the two worlds of the original story into a new world, and adds an otherworld to that, which retells the original story but also ties in to a whole new story, which breaks down and recontextualizes the lore of the first story, and that's just the first two chapters!
15:33 We need more stories where the PoV hero is a life-long resident of the Otherworld and the villian is isekai-ed in and tries to take over with the mentality of "With the power of spoilers and a rampant disregard for other people, I'm UNSTOPABLE!"
@@jeffbenton6183 so regarding the protagonist of the owl house, Luz Nocera, she's a happy go lucky young girl who is obsessed with fantasy and magic who by accident is transported into a fantasy world full of witches and demons, she starts out with the mindset that you mentioned, treating said world like her personal sandbox and believing that she'll be special,a "chosen one" so to speak , and that she'll get to live the life of a young adult fiction novel. However, gradually, trough a lot of failures and fuck ups, she'll mature and grow out of that mentality, forming real connection with the people of the fantasy world and even finding a second family. As for the villain, this is spoiler: The villain is a which hunter from the 16th century who has found himself in the same fantasy world,but has a distain for all witches, believing that they are monsters and wanting to kill them all. He says that he wants to "kill witches to protect humanity from the treat they pose" but it's pretty evident in the story that he does it because he wants glory, to be recognised as a" hero who saved humanity" and obtain the title of "witch hunter general".
I was expecting Red to discuss the subversion of this trope: reverse isekai. Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid was the first thing that comes to my mind whenever I think of it.
Everyone always mentions girls waking up with perfect makeup, but what about the guys waking up perfectly shaved? It's like they can turn their hair off and never deal with razor burn again.
I don't know why, but after seeing this all I can think of was in the new batman where you can see most of batman face, and he has the exact same stubble as he does when he's bruce. Those cops are horrible detectives.
@@willieoelkers5568 well when you are trying figure out someone's secret identity, and you have 3 types of men shaved, stubbel and bearded it loweres your suspects and when the little fan boy cop is all over Bruce and he never seems to shave ( plus same color of beard hair) either it just seems to bring in the suspects. I think in old batman had Batgirl wear a red ponytail when was really blonde. Just to throw off suspicion. Just an observational quirk.
^y’know? This is completely fair. ‘Cause the “perfect hair&makeup” generally isn’t a Female Convenience/Power Fantasy, it’s a Male-Gaze Fantasy of having a conventionally hot girlfriend who’s beautiful all the time and never has morning breath.
@@anonymousfellow8879 I mean most people in fiction are what we'd consider perfectly made up, also being way more attractive than normal is a common power fantasy. So I don't think it's just the male gaze.
I wish someone would bring up A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, cause it’s a classic example of the “normal person gets transported into an otherworld” being used to convey important themes instead of being used for cheap power fantasy or audience projection. The entire book is basically written as a satire of medieval romance novels (romance in the artistic sense, not relationships) and the beliefs/behaviors which Mark Twain believed they engendered in the white southern upper class prior to and during the Civil War. He believed that these stories (especially those written by Sir Walter Scott) with their romanticization of war, glorification of nobility, and positive depictions of caste societies helped validate southern plantation owners’ views of themselves as the heirs to a long, cultured history of chivalrous and heroic white aristocrats, in stark contrast to the greedy, cruel, racist tyrants that they actually were. To that end, Twain decided to write a story where a grimy, low class, “uneducated”, “uncultured”, northern yank gets sent back in time to the kingdom of Camelot and uses his basic 19th century knowledge to show up every other major character, creating “miracles” with science, winning historical battles with modern tactics, etc. Eventually he takes over all of Britain, fully modernizing and industrializing the Isles. In this story, the fact that the main character is someone from the real world being transported into a fantastical otherworld is an important plot element. The whole point of the story was to satirize the antiquated attitudes of rich southerners by portraying a low class northerner (whom these southerners would have looked down on and resented) basically wiping the floor with the chivalric knights that these southerners to some extent drew inspiration and a sense of identity from. This story needed a normal person from the real world to be transported into an otherworld. Had the story been entirely set in the otherworld it would have been indistinguishable from the very medieval romance novels it sought to satirize.
I mean, it's also pretty anti-Catholic, and doesn't pull any punches about that. But yeah, very much a "you are not a chivalrous hero, and the Good Old Days weren't actually that good" kind of book.
That nod in the beginning: “Speaking in clear, unbroken sentences without stumbling or losing their train of thought” Made me wonder how much reading fiction has impacted my self esteem in expressing complex thoughts to other people 😅
I think a great example is Link's Awakening. In that game the big twist is that all of Koholint Island is just a fantasy concocted by both Link and the Wind Fish. That means all the people Link grew attached to will cease to exist when the story is over. This really forces us to acknowledge that we do have to move on from this fantasy, otherwise we will be trapped in it. It might be a great experience, but we have to confront reality, even when it hurts like hell. (In other words: MARIN!!!😥😭)
Not just that, but there is active ancient prophecy in-game that the world will end when the Wind Fish awakens. So the world is sort of a lucid dream, as the Wind Fish is aware that they are dreaming, as the Nightmares try to prevent you from waking it up.
In regards to the NOT returning home type ending, there is an additional approach that's taken in a classic Swedish children's book "The Brothers Lionheart". It is werry isekai like in its format where the titular brothers die in our world and end up in a fantastical world, where they have new physical skills, and a prophecy of them defeating a evil knight who controls a dragon. But at the end, after vanquishing the dragon, they both end up dying and seemingly going to yet another magical otherworld, possibly hinting at a chain of rebirth between worlds. Something in a similar vein happens in a webtoon called "Mage & Demon Queen" where a later antagonist is a summoned hero that's supposed to kill the Demon Queen, but he is recurringly summoned to different worlds where he defeats a demon lord with the goal of returning home, only to then be summoned again. And this is his third otherworld, and he has already gone on two journeys and is thus really strong, but also somewhat dismissive and jaded to others perspective, only focusing on his goal of going home.
I actually had to write an essay about a story with an "other world" for one of my college writing classes! I ended up writing about how Into The Spider-Verse subverts this trope by having the "other world" be the main character's world and having other characters as well as their world come to the normal one. I ended up getting extra credit on it!
It’s also interesting in that the other world is actually just an otherworld to a fictionalized fantastical reality The MU is based on our world, but fantastical and superhero-y The world in spider verse is exactly like it except subtlety different The only differences are a few characters being different people, backstories being changed, and some logos being different
Honestly a lot of the isekai heroes never returning home have less to do with the literary aspects and more with the fact that almost every one of the stories are unfinished or even outright canceled.
Also because quite a few people (I'm one of them) actually hate it when the protagonist abandons his friends and/or loved ones from the Isekai world to return home. (Escaflowne!!!!!!!!)
Considering most of these series are made to keep going until the author burns out or people stop buying them, not to tell a self-contained story, that tracks.
I feel like Amphibia is a series that does this trope really well, both the real world and the fantasy world are explored in interesting ways, allowing the characters and the audience to feel nostalgic about the old world where they came from while also showing how the protagonist grows from the experiences in the magical world.
Really appreciate how Amphibia and The Owl House take the idea. Not other are both of the other worlds actually DISTINCTLY THEIRS (like the settings don't feel like half-considered copy/pastes of others), but both series make a major narrative thrust about how important the real world actually was in shaping the characters' circumstances and everything they ran away from. Both series have a major dramatic hook on why escapism taken too far can actually be dangerous and emotionally devastating but also have numerous episodes highligting what makes their settings interesting. In Owl House it's used to contrast the heroine from the main antagonist and in Amphibia it's used to contrast the three main Earth girls and how their drastically different personalities created differing roles for them in different parts of the world.
One of my favorite scenes from Narnia is where Digory says "try me" when the Pensivie kids tell him that he wouldn't believe them he has an idea of what the kids went through, and wants to hear their story in detail. He misses Narnia and magic despite having grown up, and not being able to go back.
Parallels his speech to them at the end of the book, where he tells them "Don't talk about this except with other people who've had similar adventures. Oh, they're out there. You'll get to recognize them. There's a sort of look..."
@@earlwajenberg I kinda wish in stories where there are multiple protagonists would do something like that more often. The older generation of heroes recognizing when the younger generation is about to/just experienced their journey and taking a vested interest in what their successors did.
Though, of course, when that was written, the Magician's Nephew was still years away - there's no hint that Professor Kirke had ever been to Narnia, let alone having been present at its creation in the first book.
You missed a variation: The real world the character starts out in turns out to be the fantasy world, and the world they go to turns out to be the real world (e.g. Amber is the actual real world, and Earth is just a fantasy world where gunpowder works).
Hmm, Kingdom Hearts could be said to be doing this with Quadratum basically being Shibuya. The fact that Sora’s art style is more in line with modern FF games when in Quadratum in the KH4 trailer while we see Donald and Goofy still in the usual KH style at the end also demonstrates that divide.
1:52 Greatly appreciate how Red felt no need to specify whether she meant 'neighbours who *are annoying* ' or 'how best *to annoy* one's neighbours '- We've all seen you, Bilbo
On the note of staying forever, the most healthy take I've seen is what I'd describe as 'I fucked up in the normal world, I'll do better this time' - basically, their life was miserable before, but that was the result of their choices, and they're aware of that fact. They're not just staying in the magical world because it's fun and with magic, they either can't go back or the life they've built is better because they're more motivated to live a good life. Examples being 'I killed slimes for 300 years' where the protagonist died from overwork, and chooses to be an ageless witch who just lives in a cottage in a field, or Reincarnated as a Slime where one of the protagonist's main requests upon dying was just to have someone to talk to in his next life - the fact that this wound up being a nigh-omniscient agent of the world and later, a city full of people was happenstance and his own hard work respectively.
I remember reading a manga (can't remember the title) where the protagonist was an evil queen of a fantasy world who didn't care about her people. When her people executed her, she got reborn in our real world and decided to make up for her sins by becoming a doctor. Then she died again in a plane crash iirc? And woke up as her old self (but years before her tyrannical rule) and continues to be a doctor
I think the classic "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" gives the best "Over-powered" reasoning even if it does ignore the limits of medieval machining. Also, a reminder that bathroom scenes can be powerful when they are included ala "All Quiet on the Western Front" and GoT.
Modern definitely-isekai parallel: Ascendance of a Bookworm, where the bibliophile heroine reincarnates in the body of a sickly peasant child after a bunch of books fall on her in an earthquake. She uses all of her modern knowledge to make books common enough that she'll be able to run a bookstore, like she wanted to do before dying of books. It's good for a lot of reasons that don't really fit in a comment.
I had a funny idea an Isekai protagonist who’s cheat ability is that they have been Isekaied over and over again and they have several lifetimes of skills to draw upon. No special cheat magic abilities, but just them having years of experience to draw upon.
this is what Quickly Wear the Face of the Devil does - MC was yeeted through countless worlds before the beginning of the story when he gets rid of system that forces him to play along the original story of the story world he got yeeted into. He realises that the system's big boss is using these worlds to collect energy and since he's *very* pissed at it, he yeets himself through some more worlds where he does the best to totally fuck up the original story and get the energy that boss system would normally get so he can go home. Ok he technically has a bit of a cheat because the author made him a top level hacker in the real world but that can also be shoved into the "he has experience with this" box
@@misamisaa4547 Darn, seems it's purely a manga... for now. The concept sounds good, but I require it to be an anime before I can watch it with one of my best friends that's hugely into isekai.
Spoiler Warning for Cautious Hero: This is actually why Seiya is overly powerful. He was Isekaied before, yet when he was returned home and his level was reset as a normal person again, his base stats remained higher. So the second time he's isekaied at the start of the series, he starts at level one and can train his stats even higher.
If you're interested, you kind find that by looking into genres dealing with quick wear/quick transmigrations, particularly ones that utilizes infinite flow.
The fact that Red actually mentions Fushigi Yuugi (even if only as a background example) is so cool, it's an amazing story that really deserves more attention. Also, in regards to the Inuyasha "where'd all the magic go" question I have a personal theory that most of Rumiko Takahashi's works take place in the same world, where magic USED to be plentiful but is now pretty rare because of human expansion and technology, and people who still possess super-human abilities tend to become either martial artists or monks/magicians making a living through founding schools
Fushigi Yuugi hits all the isekai harem power-fantasy boxes and through various portal and reincarnation shenanigans manages to hit every type of ending at some point. I don't know why it doesn't come up more in discussions about the genre. Escaflowne is also pretty classic otherworld from the same era. A lot of heroine escapist fantasy at the time.
While watching this, I couldn’t stop thinking about Marcy Wu from Amphibia. She and her friends ended up in an otherworldly because she wanted to literally escape reality due to the news of her family moving. I think it’s a very interesting insight into the trope because it does acknowledge that the adventures in Amphibia helped the protagonists grow, but doesn’t deny that the reason they got there in the first place, while well intentioned, was still selfish from Marcy’s part
Coraline was my first experience in this trope. Honestly, it was a great story and one that actually kinda helped me as a kid, since Coraline's real world looks so bleak when we first see it. Then, over the course of the movie, she learned to cherish what she's got in the real world, because the people there are the ones that care about her, even if sometimes, it doesn't feel like it Good comes with bad, you can't have one without the other. The bad things are what make you genuinely appreciate when things truly do go your way, and I've yet to find a story that encapsulates the feeling that Coraline presented.
I have to say...I've always felt like the going back part doesn't make sense in a lot of "otherworld" stories. You can define it as escapist, but that really only tracks if the otherworld isn't real. The moment that we establish that the otherworld is an actual place, the paradigm shifts. Sure, if the protagonist was happy in their previous life, then going back makes sense, but in a lot of these stories they weren't. The idea of "learning to appreciate your circumstances" doesn't make a lot of sense if those circumstances were genuinely miserable, and especially not if the protagonist doesn't _need_ to accept them any more. Meanwhile, the protagonist has this new set of circumstances, where they have status, acceptance, are possibly financially well off and almost certainly well connected, and where they have typically already resolved the biggest problem that world faces, ushering in an era of relative stability and peace. If we accept that these worlds are, within the context of the story, real - that is to say, if we discredit the "escapism" argument, because the character is not choosing a fantasy if the world is "real" - then going back seems to be making the message that it's normal and correct to let the life we've become accustomed to hold us back. Give up your progress, your growth, and your success, because family and friends are more important, or simply because that's "not where you belong". From a realist perspective, the "Dorothy Gale approach" makes much more sense. Rather than letting the love for the family she left behind hold her down, she ultimate uses her new position to lift the people she cares about up. In taking them with her, she teaches the lesson that as good things happen to you, as you succeed, you bring what you care about with you, but it's okay to leave the things you've moved past behind. To me, it seems that unless there is some core flaw of the otherworld that prevents the protagonist from accepting it as a permanent circumstance, this should be the expected goal. Not going back to a worse set of circumstances, but of retrieving the things they left behind that are still worth keeping. With the "keep the portal open" route as an acceptable backup for those who can't take everything they care about with them. There's nothing wrong with visiting your old home town now and then, but giving up your successful career to move back in with your parents and work at the local McDonalds is just weird.
I feel like I resonate the most with your take the most from what I’ve read in the comments- and that may be bc of my life experiences that I relate this way. But I agree that the hardships of the “normal life” often dictate what the “Other world” represents. When the “Normal life” is better comparatively to the other world, it makes sense that going back would be the goal. But when the “Normal life” is miserable, or unfulfilling in some way, and fulfilment is found in the “Otherworld”, I feel like we’re growing backwards if we go back to the “Normal life” to apply all the lessons learned all over again.
This is why I'm REALLY dreading that Owl House will take that route. I'm pretty sure Terrence is self aware enough to KNOW that Luz moving back to Earth permanently is the worst possible outcome for this story on several levels. But the cliché ending would be devastating there. I think Red's commentary is specific to the "real world protagonist escapes into a work that is literally fiction in universe" variant. As that's the one with the most parallels to the experience of an audience member
agree, in settings where we've established that the magical world is real, it becomes the equivalent to a foreign country. It has its own people, history, rules, culture, etc and the protagonist has the decision to move there full time, visit a lot, or return home once and for all. And much like visiting an actual country, even if they choose to return home, they might do so having grown from their experiences and taking bits of that country back with them (new ideas, items, words, etc). In that case, deciding to stay in the fantasy world would be equivalent to visiting a foreign country and deciding to immigrate there. And if that country clicks for you and you have opportunities there, why wouldn't you move there full time? I think its a matter of perspective. Red, I suspect, was viewing those other worlds under a lens of escapism (its key to the entire trope after all), but what if they might be better viewed as an analogy for world travel? Maybe the magical elements are metaphors for the sometimes magical experiences of going someplace you've never been? What if the monsters are the fear, uncertainty and genuine risk that comes from visiting certain places? And the protagonist acquiring magic or tools that help them survive in that world, synonymous with learning that place's language and culture so you can better navigate? Is making a fantasy world as a metaphor for real world travel strictly necessary? No, but then what is strictly necessary when we're talking about literature? And if you're like me, and you don't have the money or opportunity to travel, fantasy worlds are really your only option. Escapism, sure, but sometimes that escapism is exactly what you need.
Honestly this is one of the reasons why I never really liked Final Fantasy Tactics Advance's story and how it tries to spin an "escapism is not healthy!" story. Like, it's not a magical otherworld. One of the kids whole-ass rewrites reality itself with a magic book and replaces it with a new one. Also two of the three kids' lives are utterly miserable. Mewt gets snowballs with *rocks* inside it hucked at him, his mom is dead and his dad is a chronic drunk who can *barely* hold down his job. And the hero's younger brother is chronically ill to the point where he has to go to the hospital on the reg and can no longer walk. ...And, in spite of this magical otherworld being actually real (in that the real world itself was turned into this place), and the suffering he knows that two of his loved ones have waiting for them in the normal world...The hero literally asks out loud "Why don't you want to go home......? :( " Like...If it was a story about the dangers and ethics of playing god with world-changing magic, or the powers that maintain that otherworld being dangerous entities manipulating the kids so they could keep that world going, it could have had a real interesting angle... But nope, purely a story about 'escapism bad'. ...Which is fine for some of the characters who just needed some confidence to stand up to the bullies. But man do I feel for the younger brother, who really got the short end of the stick. :(
One bend on this trope I've seen recently is "Isekai, but multiple people get sent there over time" which results in an entire _culture_ of Isekaied real-world people in the actual Isekai world, complete with meta-commentary and references to things nobody else (including those who died earlier in the real world) know of - mostly internet culture.
Sounds like So I'm A Spider, So What? The main cast is a whole classroom of people who end up getting transported into the Isekai Otherworld but also end up being placed in a whole host of different roles in the Otherworld. From generic fantasy monsters to different races that are warring. Our main protag is a girl who becomes a spider and uses her new skill set to become God. Typical Isekai setting, really.
I don't actually want to reveal the story for possibly-legitimate personal reasons, but I will say that, while it isn't IASSW, it is currently going through a story arc focused on someone who is a Spider, so what?
I'm surprised that Red didn't talk about Digimon. Where the main characters go to another world, save it, come back to save their world, and then decide to go back to save the other world again. Heck, Digimon Tamers (season 3) spent 25 episodes in the normal world before they decide to go to the Digital World on a rescue mission. Digimon has played around with the Isekai trope a lot.
Digimon is an interesting case. Every AU in the canon is based around a Digital World that needs saving, but it isn't always a main setting of the stories. The almost entirety of Frontier and most of Adventure takes place on the Digital World, in 02 the cast visits the Digital World in almost like an extracurricular activity and Tamers spends only a third of the season in the Digital World. The thing about Digimon is that, while the portal fantasy is an important aspect, it's not the main focus. The main focus is the bond between the Tamers/Chosen Children and their Digimon partners. Most of the times, the Digital World is just the place where the Digimon live, it's just a means to an end. It's not dependent on the portal fantasy aspect of it either, it can also work in the Real World -- the entirety of Ghost Game so far has taken place in the Real World. Still, Digimon is the reason why I'm quite fond of this trope.
@@BG12sofia This is actually my personal favorite take on this because it actually links the other world to the known world thus explaining not only why our hero(es) are getting involved in the first place but why they will never fully escape the 'real world' since the worlds clearly influence each other. My go to example of this sub-genre besides Digimon is Kaijudo: Rise of the Duel Masters where our hero was technically *born* in the other world but was brought to and raised in the known world by his mother since she only fled to the other world to escape a villain and returned home once it was deemed safe enough to do so. It was on becoming a teen in the human world that he and his friends accidentally discovered the other world via a monster coming into the human world. This in turn leads them into joining an organization formed to protect both worlds with the aforementioned villain being an ex high ranking member of said organization who went rogue, attacking the hero's father who was another high ranking member which is what lead to the hero being born in the other world in the first place.
Isekai more has to do with the surrounding troupes of the story than just the other world plot line. I don't think digimon really fits the isekai tag line because of that. Tamers is GOAT though.
A common theme in these stories is having the main characters refer to these other lands as fantasy and how abandoning the ‘real’ world for them is bad. I understand symbolism for the reader sake but in the story, these fantasy lands are real. They do exist and are only fantastical in that they operate under different laws then our world. It’s not escapism or running from reality when your fantasy land is a literal place. Referring to our world as the ‘real’ world ceases to make sense once it’s made clear that the fantasy world actually exists.
Yeah, this was actually a problem I struggled with in creating a sort of deconstruction isekai. Basically the protagonist's friend ends up in fantasy land and refuses to leave, because from his perspective he's in a fantasy land where he doesn't have to work, everything he wants is given to him and he's the king/chosen one. The protagonist wants him to return to his family but his friend retorts by saying something like: "Of course YOU can say that. You already have everything you want, good grades, a lot of friends you can rely on, what do I have? Nothing. Here, everything I want is given to me. Why would I want to leave?" Because when there IS an actual fantasy land which you CAN go to, why wouldn't you? Why wouldn't you escape to somewhere that is objectively better?
@@mariustan9275 In a way, a character choosing to stay in the fantasy land is no different from a real person just moving to a better place. You wouldn't say they're making an unhealthy decision just because they moved to escape their abusive family, toxic community, dead end job, or general unhappiness. Just because they have some things to unpack in therapy doesn't mean the decision to leave wasn't a good and reasonable one.
@@Arzamol5 Yeah, that's what I think of too. You can justify this if the character in question manages to make a new life to move away from their mistakes, but it also feels like a jerk move because you left without telling any of their friends or family. If they were abusive thats fine but if not in the OG world they're still going to be worried.
I've been thinking the same thing. The anti-escapism thing might be justified if their *only* motivation for wanting to stay is satisfying some superficial power fantasy, or avoiding some problem back home that they could solve with the right life lesson. But if the character's quality of life is better than they could realistically achieve in what they call the "real" world, then staying is a perfectly rational decision. Especially if they end up making new friends in Isekai-ville - those relationships are just as valid as any other.
I like how The Owl House handles this, because at one point in the story Luz considers staying in the human realm or "the real world." permanently, and this is framed as a bad decision for her as she would essentially be cutting herself off from her friends and loved ones in the other world when she's at her lowest point. I haven't seen that take used in this genre before, and it makes sense.
"Even if it is breached, it would take a number beyond reckoning - thousands - to storm the keep." "Tens of thousands." "But my lord, there is no such force-" Isekai:
@@aflyinfaux1447 eat a bar of soap and wash the hands you typed that name with- this is a family friendly channel. We may be nerds, but we have *standards.*
I appreciate that theirs an Isekai character named Rudeus that has a legitimate explanation for why he has such unusual skill and magical prowess as a kid. He was literally reborn in another world as in he started in a new world as a baby. He was already aware of himself and had all his previous experiences and memories and decided much earlier than most people would to practice magic with the determination that kids don’t have. So by the time it was recognized he had been practicing for maybe 10 years. He was freakishly strong because his adult brain came up with a plan and goal much sooner than other people would and practiced all the time
Isekais are partially responsible for getting me to move thousands of miles away from my toxic childhood home and start a new life in a foreign (to me) land. Its only "escapism" until you actually escape
@@Manuelomar2001 That's not the point. While many of us might dream of the _fantasy_ elements of it all, the desire to escape a terrible situation is just as important a part of the fantasy.
@@nullpoint3346 But are you being proactive in the really real world, or are you just accepting that your reality is terrible, and retreating into the fantasy in your mind to pretend it doesn't exist, forever?
@@phastinemoon What? They weren't saying anything like that. They were pointing out that Mike was stating just that escapism as a need only exists for as long as you feel that need to escape (such as into the fantasy setting of a book). But once you DO escape (either by moving, changing the life situation, etc.) then you aren't experiencing escapism because you HAVE escaped. You just did it in the real world for realsies. It doesn't have to involve anything fantastical at all. And I'd bet they were being proactive, having done as they said: moved away from a bad situation to one where they are, apparently, doing better.
which, on the other hand, doesn't rule out running out of any meaningful story anyway and/or ending up in essentially a cliché copy of the real world. Not that there aren't good fanfics, but it's far from guaranteed to get one randomly.
Yep. That's what happened to me. I fell down that rabbit hole and I'm NEVER going to find my way out. Don't do fanfiction, kids. It's a drug more addicting than heroin. Help me.
Hear me out: A story where the main character switches from the real world to the magical world when the fall asleep, or from the magical world to the real world through the same process. To anyone else, it seems like they are a heavy sleeper who just woke up, while to them they are living two lives in completely different worlds, maybe bringing random things with them between worlds during some of the switches. Alongside this, day in the real world is night in the fantasy world, and vice-versa. They feel fine waking up in each world, and would also be unable to avoid switching because everyone can only go so long without sleeping. Then the readers would be invested in both worlds, and maybe something will begin to threaten both worlds so the main character has to do something about it in both the real and magical worlds
As a person whose earliest memories involve my family moving to an entirely different country in pursuit of a better life, leaving some family members behind in the process. I've never really understood why fictional characters are so invested in returning to a place that seems to leave them miserable. Moving literally every year during my formative years as my mother chased jobs that would allow her to support two sons as a single mother probably don't help in that regard. To me, if going somewhere else allows you to find personal fulfillment and better meet your mental, physical, and emotional needs as a person, why exactly shouldn't you just stay there? So the stories where the protagonist, who has spent an entire story not only having adventures but making powerful genuine bonds in the Otherworld, chooses to stay there if anything make more sense to me than the alternative. Especially since the ones who go back just seem to... slot back into the same life they found unsatisfying in the first place with no real attempt to make major change to it? Won't they just be miserable again in like a month when the rejuvenation from their magical holiday wears off? Like why don't they ever decide to move to another city, or country even?
As a general rule, the thinking is that "The real world is safer to live in". And thats as far as the author thinks it through, so the MC wants to return home. I don't know how any author can genuinely think this, what with the dystopian nightmare of living in a word where the entire planet is no more than 60 seconds away from nuclear hellfire cleansing the planet of life at the whims of about a dozen meglomaniacs weighing down on anyone who returns to the real world compared to theit fantasy worlds where they already dealt with whatever the worst threat of the century was- surely the fantasy realm is safer.
That's very true. My family moved countries as well when I was 11, and it was kind of an isekai of its own, we'd be on a new place with great opportunities and a chance of a better life, and a better, less hostile culture towards my family. My question is, if the place is definitely better than your original place, why the hell wouldn't you want to stay? I had to go back to my home country a decade later due to visa issues, and honestly? It kind of sucks, you feel very displaced and kind of alien, I mean, I've accustomed to so many different things in the new country, made friends and did a lot of my education there, and now after return the culture clash and the dissociation is real.
A lot of the time, the character would stay in the other world of it wasn't for their family, loved ones, or pets being in the other world. For people with "living atachments" for lack of a better term, abandoning everyone they care about is not as appealing. Now if you have someone like Harry Potter, the only people he cares about were in the "magical world." Technically the muggle and magical "worlds" aren't physically seperate, and it's a "hidden magical world" trope. Still, we see in the movies, and in the books, that Harry would have 100% abandoned the muggle world to live in the magical world.
Usually because they ended up there against their will, the unfamiliarity of the new place makes it look much more hostile/dangerous than the familiar world, and/or there is something/someone in the familiar world too important for them to leave it behind.
Returning to a bad situation with zero change is just bad writing. If the main character is meant to go on a journey and grow, they cannot come back the as same person who left. At it's most basic, this could mean one of two things. 1. They resolve to change their Real World situation because they now have something they didn't before. 2. They have gained a new appreciation for their Real World situation and realized it's not actually as bad as they thought. Note: #2 hinges on the prerequisite that the Real World situation is not terribly flawed, but that the character's initial perception of it was. If it actually is genuinely terrible, we've swung back around to bad writing again.
Rick: "Do you two want to stay here forever?" Morty: "Why does it have to be forever? Can't we just go home during the weekend or go back to do laundry? "
One of my favorite Isekai stories is “Ascendance of a Bookworm”, because the isekai’d character really shapes the world around her by recreating things from our world to make life easier for the lower class in her new world, which, in combination with her near-deadly high levels of magic, *really* catches the attention of the magical higher class…
It's also the _only_ Isekai I have ever seen where the protagonist bows their head in apology, only for the NPCs to be all, "WTF is this?" In the other ones, bowing is universal. As a Westerner, I find it jarring.
@@sempersolus5511 To be somewhat fair, universal symbols westerners use show up pretty often in their fantasy media as well so I think it's a pretty normal thing for writers to do in general.
Isekai is probably the strongest argument when comparing Digimon to Pokemon. Yeah, they have similar concepts of "fight monster with other monster to win" but HOW the characters interact with the setting makes a world of difference (pun intended).
In terms of interesting otherworld construction with respect to both straight worldbuilding detail and how the otherworld relates to the mundane world, Digimon Tamers is pretty exceptional, and not just for a kids' show. But it was also the brainchild of Chiaki Konaka, an extremely interesting and inventive writer in general, so that's not really a surprise I guess.
Also, far better character writing! Look me in the eye and tell me that you could ever see Pokémon tackling the family drama of divorced parents and how it impacts their kids.
I don't think the disconnect of the heroes wanting to stay in the otherworld is an unsolvable problem, but rather that the vast majority of isekai don't even *try.* There's a lot of potential space to play with the interaction between an otherworld and the mundane world without necessitating the hero returning afterwards. I feel like the *really* unhealthy angle is the way modern culture *vilifies* escapism. Demanding we set aside silly dreams of actually being happy and just accept our place under a corporate boot.
God, agreed. It feels like escapism isn’t allowed in favor of gritty and bleak so often. Like, don’t get me wrong, I love me some darkfics or TLOU games, but also, there isn’t anything wrong with a desire to escape a shitty situations to a fantasy world. Is it really any worse than fantasizing about leaving a shitty situation via a lottery win or attracting the affections of someone with a more realistic power to get you out somehow?
Your comment makes me wonder if there's a story where the hero checks off all the boxes of an otherworld/isekai, but then when the adventure ends, they have to manage their status, their harem, their wealth, and everything else that comes with escapism and power fantasies every day for the rest of their life.
@@FREEK777ful "Yay I'm the king now!" "Great, here's all these forms to fill out, at least 15 complaints from spoiled brats, several impatient diplomats from countries that range from minor to 'DON'T PISS THEM OFF', and you're also the high-commander of our army" "shit, I'm the king"
@@FREEK777ful There kinda is? It's called 'How a Realist Hero rebuilt the Kingdom'. Basic plot is the main character got Isekai'd not because he has some fantastic super power, but because of his management skills. The king isn't a good administrator, and *knows* he's not a good administrator, but doesn't really have anyone he trusts to do a better job of it, so summons someone with that ability, and promptly abdicates in favor of the person who clearly can do the job better so the former king can. His 'super OP power', such as it is, primarily involves being able to animate multiple quills to fill out paperwork faster, at least at first.
I very much agree with Red on this point. But this is my first time reading a response from someone who disagrees, so for what it's worth I really appreciate a different point of view on this trope.
Regarding the escapism of a character staying in the otherworld forever: If their real reward is more the friends they made along the way and they stay there more to be with those people than it doesn't feel as much like pure escapist fantasy to me. A story like that could be rewritten to work in the real world; in real life you can visit another place, meet people you like, and decide to move there, the otherworld just adds fun magical elements to the plot. If the reward the protagonist gets by staying in the otherworld is getting to be hero-king of the world with fame and riches and power, that feels more totally escapist to me. There's no real-world equivalent to that story you're just spicing up with magic, it's something that can only happen with magic.
curently slowly working on a story where the hero gets abducted to another world where high fantasy magic is used like technology and finds it much more enjoyable and peacful then our world despite the on going conflict with the demons who abducted him in the first place only reason he wants to find a way back home is to let his loved ones know he's ok that is until he finds out the earth has been invaded by the same demons who have been causeing trouble in this other world and leads the charge of knights to go back to earth to save the day only to find while its been two years for him it's been five years for everyone else, half of mankind is dead, banished to other dimensions or enslaved, multiple citties and nations destroyed, his younger sister is now the same age as him, his parents are dead, and the humans working with the demons are being lead by his childhood best friend who has now become a mad tyrant. This isnt the earth he left behind this isnt home anymore as the time that was home for him has long since pased not just beacuse of the disaster and changes that have hapened on earth while he was gone but his time in the otherworld has changed and matured him. The earth he returned to isnt his home anymore its the otherworld now as thats where he has more friends and a life now which is why even after saveing earth and opeing travel between the two worlds he chooses to stay in the otherworld as thats where his home is now.
One of my favorite of this genre does something akin to this. The character ends up in the world by DYING, but still spends most of the series yearning to return to earth. Eventually he comes to terms with his own death, and realizes that his family will have to carry on without him. Along with *that* realization is another, that the people he has met in the otherworld need him just as much as his family on earth did. In the end, the story isn't that he decided to stay in the otherworld because it was better, rather he accepted his place IN the otherworld and devoted his energy to that, rather than getting home. Edit: By request, the series is the Celestine Chronicles. Be forewarned, its quite lewd, but genuinely well written mythology mash-up fantasy
"luxurious apartment on student salary" is something that gets me about various Russian classics. In that main characters are mostly students who are struggling to make ends meet (I mean, some go to murder to get money). But they also have a maid at their house who makes tea and stuff. Pretty sure this is actually based on reality and not the same situation as Red has mentioned but it still feels weird.
Sounds like the TV show Friends but with a maid (twenty-somethings living in ridiculously large apartments in New York City that would cost an arm and a leg in the real world to rent despite some of them struggling for cash).
@@akl2k7 Yeah, though part of the reason for that is due to the limits of filming technology at the time, they wouldn't have been able to fit a camera, lights and all in a smaller space. Though the main thing is that the capitalist class ignores the plight of workers.
I would love your take on the book version of Howl's moving castle. Spoilers for the book: Howl is actually a Welshman from our world who uses the grounded magical world of the POV character Sophie as an escape. When he takes Sophie to our world we see his sister is literally 2 steps away from declaring him trash and disowning him. He has accomplished more in Sophie's world but he is still a self-proclaimed coward.
I loved that twist! It made the real world feel more magical, seeing it from Sophie’s pov. And Howl is EXACTLY the type of character who would find himself in a magical otherworld and say “screw reality! I have magic powers and a magic house!!!!” And I love him for it …. Brb, gonna go reread that book
@@AskMia411 I know right! I was so surprised the first time I read through and then I could not believe I didn't see it coming. I also need to reread the book. I see something new every pass through.
@@abloodcorpse3318 no ones, I just want to be a city coyote and eat babies in a video game while on the lamb. As a coyote, its a reference to one of the best player in the game, the outside.
@@quitkid8727 well, its a reference to pocket dimension and a game called the outside, sorta like an alien game you play. My favorite place is the city as a floofy coyote. Where Its like gta 5 on the lamb. I dream of being the actual floofy. A real doozy. You see he was a poggers player who survived for a long time as a evil coyote under the lamb; creatively deciding places to take a stand. He lasted his whole lifetime and actually 7 years past what he was supposed to die. One of the best pro's in the coyote and city meta. Its better than you think a shocker tool that looks like a dog but you may be more vicious as part of your build. Imo a little under meta that could surprise the bigger humans.
I think while a lot of isekai focuses on “power fantasy,” others used the related idea of your skills being useful or there being a place for you in that world even if it isn’t “look how awesome I am and how much everyone loves me.” This is because as I see more of the genre there are many shows where the protagonist is not the chosen one, but a humble shopkeeper or some other minor figure who finds peace in the calm nature of everyday life. While the power fantasy aspect might be running away from your problems, I also see the other end as a form of therapy, where you are able to slow down and enjoy the simple life with your buds, away from the endless grind of modern corporate society.
Dude, my escapist fantasy as an adult is getting to be a happy nobody doing a peaceful skilled trade in a small city with no violent crime. Bonus points if all my friends and a hot date or two live within walking distance. Real earth and Middle Earth alike are ravaged by wars, and people still swing on you in countries that don't know war. I love me some grimdark, but the real comfort fantasy is escape from everything in the last sentence.
@@CelestialNerd336 My escapist fantasy is living on a peaceful farm in a small rural town with a small collection of livestock and crops to care for, having enough time to make bows and other old weapons. And of course, a close-knit group of friends and family.
Isekai iyashikei is an interesting combination, and as an adult I can definitely see the appeal. Reincarnated into the world of Aria where every dayis calm and beautiful, work is fulfilling without being exhausting, friendships are stable and meaningful, and you don’t have to live in fear of a bad gondola review getting you fired? Yes please.
There's also another similar variant that is kind of a blend between the two, that being situations where you're transported/resurrected into the other world but are only special because of the knowledge you couldn't have gained without having lived in our world. This is admittedly much more rare, and will usually focas on the main character trying to rebuild our world (or something like it) but better this time. A decent example of this, I'd argue, would be Dr. Stone; which is an isekai where the world gets petrified for millions of years, all of Humanities inventions are destroyed by time, and the main characters are all just modern humans who use their scientific understanding to slowly develop a stone age civilization. Admittedly the titular main character has intelligence that borders on being magic, but that's mostly used as an excuse for the writers to come up with interesting inventions which probably took them days to actually research.
The game of Deltarune kinda does this in a very very interesting way. Because not only do you enter the Dark World, and learn about it in a sense, with Kris and Susie. But you, as the player, is also technically in Kris and Susie’s world, the entire game is kinda technically a breaking of the 4th wall, as you/we, as the player, takes control of Kris, the character. Forcing them to go on this journey and do things against their will. The Snowgrave route in Chapter 2 is a great example of this (I actually haven’t done it so mainly going off of what I’ve read and heard), the other characters comment on how Kris looks and acts after the second fight with Berdly in that route. And in the normal route, after beating ‘secret’ boss, Spamton Neo, and leaving the basement, Susie stops and actually goes “are we seriously NOT gonna talk about what just happened” and then a little later notices that Kris has goosebumps and asks if they’re ok. If they player answers Yes, Kris doesn’t say anything, but the others comment on how they look (Kris is clearly NOT ok). And if the player answers No, then Ralsei will comment and technically ask again as Kris is actually shouting/yelling. I think that is a really fascinating take on these types of stories.
That hallow feeling at the end of stories where the character gets to stay in the reality where everything is just better for them is all to relatable, but I also find it a little motivating too. It kinda gives me a certain drive to make the reality I live in a little more and more like the reality I find ideal, one step at a time.
This video kinda highlights why I love how the owl house handles Luz wanting to go back home It starts with her choosing to stay in the demon realm because she had the choice of going back if she needed and knew her mom wouldn’t worry because she was supposed to be away at camp anyways. Then the season 1 finale happens and the portal is broken. Suddenly the plot is about trying to get back home. She’s starting to get worried about her mom because she was supposed to be back from camp at this point. And finally Yesterday’s Lie and the episodes after. She gets to see her mom again and explain what’s been happening. Luz sees how her mom’s heart breaks when she realizes that Luz chose to stay there back in season 1. Almost every episode after she talks about how much she wants to see her mom again. “Reaching Out” especially enforces how this is affecting Luz. Even tho she made a flower and sent it off with Amity, it’s not the same. They manage to establish why Luz stays in the beginning and why she wants to get home so badly after while still keeping it completely believable. She’s only 14, of course she’d want to stay in her escapism world and switch to wanting to see her mom once reality sets in!
Really? To me, right now it seems like Luz would rather stay in the magical world than go back Earth, or at least try to come up with a method where she can somehow live in both worlds
@@floricel_112 A large segment of the fandom is placing our bets on "makes a new portal door and visits regularly". There's a whole doomsday *thing* between now and the possibility of her going home at all, mind, but after that it's probably free game. Besides, she Amity she'd show her around Gravesfield. Gotta make that happen.
2:05: And sometimes they'll do the exact opposite of the exact opposite, which is not the same thing at all! (I'm thinking of reverse isekai like "The Devil is a Part-Timer" or "Enchanted," but we could probably spend all day reversing the premise in one direction or another without using the dame premise twice.)
I'm surprised Red never mentioned Re-zero in this video: - A protagonist goes to another world because he died - finds out he can't run from his personal problems by going to a fictional world - deals with actual mental health issues and sets a realistic reason for why the protagonist doesn't want to go home In conclusion, I highly recommend this show!!
The real world equivalent to staying in the otherworld forever I can think of would be moving to another state/country you visited for work/studying abroad because you found it happier even if it meant leaving behind family in your hometown. And even when it just represents an escapist fantasy, I can't fault a story for that if it's the logical outcome.
Exactly! It feels more mature and rewarding when the isekai protagonists initially wants to go back to the cozy old life they knew but over the series grows to love the new world and decides to stay there. I completely disagree w/ her.
I partially agree but usually if you move somewhere, you will be able to communicate with your family and friends you've left behind, and see them occasionally. Not so if you are in a whole other world. There are situations where it'd make sense and stuff but the decision to never see any of the people you knew, or any of the previous world ever again is a much heavier decision than moving town.
@@Ucatty2 that's not the devastating response you think it is. Like I said, there are situations in which staying makes sense, one of which being if your life was bad in your old world. However, I was explaining that it is not an equivalent choice to moving town. It is a decision that some people would make, but it is a very weighty decision
I mean...I feel like if a story makes a bad or unsatisfying decision because it's the logical outcome of the story, it still deserves _some_ fault for making _that_ the logical outcome. Not necessarily true in this case, but I've seen the Thermian Argument used in much stupider situations.
I think re:zero is an interesting case of "protagonist leaves behind a world they have nothing to care about in" because subaru is one of the people who was reading the stories about power fantasy isekai, and thinks he ends up in one at first. But we see that he actually ends up in hell world. Also, its more than just a frame for the "real story" becuase subaru's experience in the real world actually matters to the story, and has a notable effect on his character
Also there's the tragedy in that it's not until after Subaru is in the other world that he's able to grow and change as a person and reconcile with his parents, but specifically a false version of his parents in a magical trial. And he has to deal with the realization he might never be able to see them again to tell them for real. Re:Zero is really good
The staying there forever aspect can be better used when it changes the characters involved and explores the pain and struggle of never returning home. Re-zero, ascendence of a bookworm and mushoku tensei do this by showing how they had of lot of stuff worth living for but the fact being they can never return or undo those mistakes.
I think one of the most interesting takes on the whole "I have read this story so I know what's gonna happen" is in Beware the Villainess, where the main character ends up in her favourite *whatever the korean equivalent of "shojo" is* novel and... let's just say she changes the story so much that she ends up confronting the personification of the will of the author.
Sometimes it's fun to read/watch the "after story" Isekai. Basically the MC did the whole main plot and now has either returned to the real world, or tries to settle down in the other world. Gives a whole "Now here's the rest of the story" feel
In a sense of karma, I'd like to see an epilogue where the harem lead realizes he still needs to care for his 4+ wives and army of offspring. Yeah, didn't think this through did ya dumb-dumb.
One good use for this trope I can see is that you don't have the "as you know" problem where you have to explain basic world mechanics to your readers that everyone who grew up in this world should know. I'm not sure I can think of a better way to establish things like that.
You then do fall into another problem which is when your exposition is just straight up infodumping to a character, vs. some sort of show don't tell exposition.
Well, all you need for that kind of exposition is a "fish-out-of-water" type protagonist. Which you, for example, can also get with a protagonist that grew up extremely sheltered or imprisoned. Jarod from the show the Pretender comes to mind for me (yes, I'm old).
@@Rhaifha Or start with the protagonist as a child. They don’t need to stay a child for the whole thing, just long enough to have a parent/grandparent/teacher/mentor sit them down and teach them all about how their world works and what details are gonna be relevant to the situation.
It's one potentially useful device, but if it's just for that it's at best cheap and also comes with the danger of making resorting to straight up infodumps for everything seem much more justifiable even when its still be bad storytelling. Any extent of fish out of water can give you a fair jumping off point for why other characters may need to explain certain things and exposing in a world in dialogue or otherwise overly explicitly usually is not a good choice. It's better to use a fair amount of indirect exposition, or incluing/Indirect Exposition spread throughout the story, especially if you have a completely different world to build. In a book this may be in the narrative (As they entered the city through the new gates Luna caught her first glimpse of the bustling crowds and landing platforms.). In comics, movies and such you can tell a lot by what things you show in the background, like putting up pictures involving a zeppelin or showing a train station to set the story in a steampunk/early industrial setting. In just about any medium you have the option of implying things with the dialogue and actions without necessarily coming out and saying it. Things like characters avoiding a certain part of the town, saying that X group could help, bemoaning their issues (people complain about things even when the general problem is known) and so on all can help establish the setting. Now, it does usually pay off to have characters that are more or less knowledgeable about certain parts of the world (or that have different views on them) to be able to get across things that can be hard to explain otherwise, but it doesn't have to be as extreme as knowing literally nothing. Most of the harder to explain parts are also things that characters may not know without necessarily having to be naive beyond belief, entirely isolated or from another world. If you're joining a band of rebels, you may need some introduction to how things work, who's in charge and so on, if you're not from the region there may be social things that don't make sense to you, if you're not a mage you may not get why this magical device that V is building is a big deal or why the weather acting in a particular way may be concerning. What personally would interest me most is seeing the clash of more mundane presumptions. How religion works, aspects of society, what's real and what isn't (Dragons are totally a thing but if you believe in lizard people you're still crazy), weather there's any kind of identification, getting used to a different money system or a completely different economy (IRL figuring out Canadian or US dollar is hard enough, imagine if things didn't have similar worth in proportion to each other as you'd likely find in any pre-industrial place), different relations to distances or places (both in the "This is 200km away, it takes several days to get there" and the "Ok, let's hop onto a shuttle ship to the moon base" direction), different levels of technology (maybe magic enables comparatively advanced communication tech but guns never really took off?)... Hell, give me two different magic systems, or one that doesn't quite work the same for the protagonist (without making them OP) and show the differences there. Those things are a lot more interesting than "UwU I got here, everything is cool and quickly understood, I am super OP and I get a harem!".
One thing I kinda wished they showed more of in the Overlord Anime was the world the main character was from. Because the game Overlord is based on Yggdrasil seems kinda predatory with P2W mechanics and grindy systems. But when we realize the main chracter is from a world so bad that nature and being able to see the sky are no longer possible in the real world as it exists as a dystopian society, it makes the characters reactions to being isekai'd a bit more interesting why does he like the idea of flying to the sky and looking out at the forest and the world, it also makes us sympathetic to why he would put up with a game with systems that constantly exploit his wallet. Turns out the real world is doing that already and he would gladly fork out his life savings for an actual escape from it.
I can understand the escapism. Life can be hard for a lot of people, and even if getting out from under the kotatsu or out of the hot pool can sting, at the same time being able to curl yourself up in that warmth for brief periods can be very healing for someone who's surrounded by cold. Just like getting up from a sleep in a perfect bed is hard, and much of the day might be spent wishing to get back into that bed, but having had that good night's sleep did help you to be able to face the day. That said, I would certainly say don't make it an isekai unless you're going to do something with that aspect. If you'd face little change outside exposition simply having the hero be a farm boy who was suddenly granted superpowers by a god, then there's little point having him be from our world in the first place.
I've said it in another reply that I think one of the big issues with isekai specifically is the fact that a lot of it (at least in the various japanese media where you can't go 5 feet these days without running into one) is designed as escapism for a bunch of people who don't want life lessons about how the real world can be good too, but also are the people who NEED to hear that.
@@aquamarinerose5405 That may be a portion of their audience, but I seriously doubt whether it could really be said that it's "designed" for denial. It's fantasy, and yes some people embrace the fantasy like it's real, but not all of them. Just because it's designed to allow some indulgence of those fantasies does not at all mean that it's "designed for people who don't want to accept reality". Not any more than a huge portion of just about all kinds and genres of fiction from everywhere worldwide. Escapism is a big portion of fiction and is true of a great deal of all forms, and one could just as easily say that anything with almost any level of escapism is "designed" for people who won't accept the reality of their own lives or the potential for their own lives to have meaning.
The isekai aspect allows for more projection (and possibly more relatability) onto characters because they're from our world, so they're just like us. They can often be author self inserts as well. I'm not the only one who's fantasised about falling into a magical world, right? The difference is that authors sometimes write and publish those stories, and people eat them up. Myself included, to a degree.
You missed one aspect of this trope. The inversion where the POV character is from the otherworld and is transported to our mundane reality. Also, one of my favorite subversions of this trope is when the protagonist is transported to the otherworld, uses their outsider perspective to see how dangerous/dysfunctional it is, then decides they're not touching that mess with a 10ft pole and just leaves to start a slice of life adventure.
@@Howdyasdo Beware of Chicken on RoyalRoad. Guy is reincarnated into a sect in a xianxia world, says screw this and leaves to become a farmer. Only sane response to being dropped in a xianxia world imo
My favorite of example of this is Code Lyoko. Aelita just wants to have a normal life with her new friends. She lost her family to the project to create XANA and Lyoko, but she's been trapped in there. She only gets to interact with her friends through them coming to her or through computers for a long time. Let's just say I can really identify with Aelita wanting to be able to just live a normal life with those that care about her.
The current sets of Isekai are starting to take up premises that remind us that just having even the least combat effective traits and being isekai'd would still be pretty cool. Were you an accountant? Welcome to the fantasy world that desperately needs number crunchers so the kingdom doesn't implode.
I want to see an isekai where we see the aftermath of another character staying in the other world. What would happen if the brother of a person who was isekai'd found him and was very angry because their family missed him or suffered or something. Maybe they can even make it so that the mc sides against their OP brother in this senario and it would be about the mc trying to get powerful enough to defeat this traditional op isekai hero.
To note a very good Otherworld story, I want to mention "The Never-ending Story", but specifically the book there-of. If you know the classic 80s movie, that is only the first half of the story and the second half involves Bastian, the kid reading the book, going on an adventure through Fantasia. However the drive slowly pushing him to wanting to go home is the mechanic of him making wishes, but they have to be deep desires, thus they end up being important to him personally. However the second half of that is for each wish granted, he loses a related memory - like one of his first wishes changes his physical form, thus he forgets that he ever looked like the somewhat dumpy kid he really was. It ends up a journey of self-understanding that leads him to his way home, and his truest friends in Fantasia helping him find his way because they know practically his whole story when he has forgotten it. TL;DR, read the book of "The Never-Ending Story". It is deep, thoughtful and massively more than the movies were (yes, the second movie was loosely based on the third quarter of the book. I however deny that any other movies ever happened).
@@M0ssP1glet Word. I stumbled across the book by literal accident, as I was at a church kids' summer camp and someone left their copy sitting around. I later bought a copy when the second movie came out. That book has been lost along the way, I wouldn't mind a new copy.
"It's almost like... I- going swimming in the winter. The water is heated and the experience is pleasant as long as your in it, but the moment you leave it, reality becomes a lot more unbearable." Somebody isn't a Canadian.
Some spoilers for Amphibia, but I loved what they did with the seasons where you had Anne going to the semi-magical otherworld of Amphibia, then _inverting the trope_ by having the Plantars, the talking frogs, wind up on Earth and that becomes THEIR weird, alien otherworld. Anne is taught by the Plantars how to survive in Amphibia, then she teaches them how to survive on Earth.
I love this trope. For me, the Wayward Children series is a great series that portrays otherworlds as having a will of its own. They pick the children they want to keep and throw out the children when they aren't needed or wanted anymore. So you have kids that were turned into heroes/villains by their adventures and are now desperately trying to find their way back to their otherworlds. Kinda heartbreaking since they are broken tools by their otherworlds.
The Unbelievable Gwenpool is probably my favorite 'character transported into a magical otherworld' story. It sounds like such an awful premise at first glance but the actual comic is so sincere, so creative, so smart about the ways it challenges and undercuts the power fantasy the protagonist thinks she's been put into, and just so consistently surprising and delightful in how it uses the medium of comics and the particular ways western superhero comics function as an industry and even the specifics of how Marvel Comics operates as a business as a meaningful, impactful part of its story. It's an absolute treat and I wish Gwen still existed.
The thing with "Over the garden wall" is that that world exists and isn't just a dream its more like purgatorio. So it kinda fits both dream and fantastical grounded
She said they didn’t have to be non real They just had to feel dreamlike and be less rigidly defined Whatever the unknown was, it couldn’t be 100% real and it couldn’t have been 100% imaginary It was purgatory, or a dream, or something And it happened
8:43 Wait a minute, bullet #2, are you telling me *Superman is an isekai protagonist?* He was transported to another world where he was super powerful by that world's standards.
Ostensibly yes, however the audience is unable to project themselves onto Superman for obvious reasons, and Superman himself doesn't derive anything from being from another world other than his powers. He fits the in-narrative role closely, however his metanarrative role is completely different.
that's an interesting question, does a different planet count as another world? sure, there's physical distance separating the two, but they're still in the same universe
I really like the sub-genre of this particular trope, namely the Reverse-Isekai, where character from the Otherworld end up stuck in the Familiar World (See Devil is a Part-timer)
Yeah. That's another reason why I love Log Horizon, because you only see glimpses. The first episode starts off with the main character already in the video game world, along with every other player that was logged in when the new expansion dropped, and no one has any idea what's going on. Sometimes there's flashbacks, mostly of people sitting in front of the PC and playing the game, and when a character dies, they find themselves in a grayscale version of the real world until they are ready to go back and try again. The NPCs are mostly considered flat and boring by the players, until they slowly realize that those people have lives, hopes, dreams, and so on. Heck, one guy even lives with an NPC, and she is the man in the house, even though he could kill her 100 times over before she dealt 1hp, and he's immortal. Dude has a short temper, is violent, and completely out of her league, and yet she has the balls to boss him around. It's amazing.
@@Stratelier "It was all a dream" mostly falls under this category with the exception of the cases where the dream is somewhat real, like Alice in Wonderland
@@Maxisamo1 alternatively where the "it was all a dream" is used as a deus ex machina to save the characters because things were ending so badly, them being told at the end "it was only a bad nightmare. but it is all right. everything is fine now" is a happy ending (see Grant Morrison's Animal Man run's final arc, or a more bittersweet that still keeps the story going in Young Justice S1 episode failsafe)
"We accept the fact that there may be other worlds out in space, but might there not be other worlds here? Other worlds, in other dimensions, coexistent with this? If there are other worlds parallel to ours, are all the doors closed? Or does one, here or there, stand ajar?” ― Louis L'Amour, The Haunted Mesa "Duh. Books." ― Me, My Recliner
When you live in a society with extremely high pressure. There's really no “healthy” way out. Unless you decide to cut ties with the people around you who have that common value, 99% of your family and friends. Or straight-up immigrate, something most people are not able to do. Fans of iseka 穿越文 know it's not healthy, but what can they do otherwise? The rise of this genre is not a cause or a process. It's a result. When you have your middle school and high school years spent with a schedule of studying from 7am to 10 pm, only half a day off each week. Only Uni lets you relax a bit, then back to one day off a week, and 12 hours of work each workday you'll know. I know this video is mostly consumed by English/western audience, and what red said is not wrong in that context, but those descriptions are really not fair used in Asia Asian context
She's not talking about "a way out", it's about coping mechanisms and learning to deal with the real world instead of avoiding it. Isekais are just a reflection on why Japan is like this, how culturally they don't confront the forces that lead them to unhealthy lifestyles, they either just conform or check out of reality wholesale, that's what happens in a conservative country and it will be that way until they grow a backbone as a society
I dont think what youre saying is exclusive to an Asian society, but its as you say a result of oppressive modern life (capitalism especially). I dont think this video is making any judgement on people for enjoying this kind of fantasy, but more commentary on whether writing that kind of story is less meaningful/interesting than one with some kind of ‘lesson’. That lesson doesn’t have to be ‘dont escape from reality its bad’ kind of takeaway (i find those almost as uninteresting), but it would be a better story if it explored the mentality of the characters and why they dont want to go back, if they can learn to cope with reality or view it differently, or take lessons they learned and apply it to reality to have a better life. The found family trope is especially good for this. Books were always an escape for me as a kid, and i needed that escape, but i always loved books that taught me important truths about life, people, philosophy. They helped far more than pure escapist fantasy.
that's a very interesting point! I tend to find isekai protagonists bland and a little sexist most of the time, and the worlds not well fleshed-out, but I can see how escapism of that sort might be desired by people in that position.
A symptom of society, so to speak. It actually does make a lot of sense when viewed in the context of Japanese/Asian society. It's still a little sad, though. Perhaps there are ways to make it "healthier," while still being enjoyable. I liked what Red said about combining elements of both worlds to get a more wholesome story experience. I think that the game Ni no Kuni did this well. You have to do things in both the mundane and magical worlds to progress the story and reach the end goal to save the protagonist's mother. From what I've seen it also takes the approach of "keeping the portal open."
Different cultures will have variants on the isekai too. Korean comics have a lot more "inverted isekai" than actual "isekai". Instead of a character getting pulled into a fictional world, the fantasy comes to the *actual* world from outer space, some other dimension, etc. And then everyone in the world all has to learn to cope with the new " game mechanics" of how the world now works together. And hopefully figure out who the invader is so they can make them leave Earth alone. Instead of *escaping* the current culture, something else invades and upends the culture in a major way which forces everyone to adjust to it. Examples include Solo Leveling, The Advanced Player of the Tutorial Tower, Return to Player, The Gamer, Omniscient Reader, etc.
Read "The Phantom Tollbooth" for a magical other world story with a combination of game/story rules AND fantastical world with no rules. Where everything is literal from keeping your perspective, to eating your words.
Also had a lovely answer to the “dull reality vs fantastical otherworld” dilemma: the journey through the otherworld gave the MC the perspective to appreciate how much interesting stuff there is in the regular world
One of the stories I really like that has a good balance of "otherworld" to "familiar world" is Omnicient Reader's Viewpoint (ORV or just Omincient Reader.) It's a web novel/webtoon where the fantasy world the main character read about in a web novel is suddenly super imposed onto reality with the characters and plot of the story he had read suddenly show up and make everything go to hell. As the only person who read all the way to the end of the story he knows how to change the future, but also has to tango with otherwordly forces, normal real world trauma, and managing other normal people messing with the story as he knew it from the novel.
Always fun to see the reverse: Magical otherworldly character gets sent/trapped in the familiar world, and doesn't understand why they can't just magic their way out of gridlocked traffic.
I only really enjoy this storyline if the transmigrator still has their magic powers. Otherwise it quickly goes into the nightmare of "how society treats the mentally ill".
@@wrenreed9310 it's played for laughs in Enchanted. She still has the power to control animals with her song, but otherwise Patrick Dempsey is like "I'm stuck with this crazy chick now..."
My favorite variation on this trope is the video game "Final Fantasy Tactics Advance". Four kids fall into the otherworld, and the POV character can't go home until he convinces his three friends that their crappy real world lives are worth more than the endless fantasy world.
there is a game called "fallen london" in this game, you are someone entering a magical underworld. basically, you are the hero, you have zero knowledge of the world, and you need to explore it. the entire otherworld concept is perfect for video games, interactive media, because the best part about otherworlds is the exploration, and in video games, you are the explorer, the outsider, someone who comes from another world, to the game's world.
I rember reading a novel series as a child, set under London I think, in a labyrinthine system of tunnels with strange, possibly protohuman inhabitants. Can't for the life of me remember what it was called, but the protagonist went in following the footsteps of their researcher father, I believe.
I just rewatched "The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe" this past Sunday, so this trope talk was timely. Also, I'm glad to get a definition of Isekai... I keep running into and forgetting to look up what it means.
13:49 Wait, this is an actual thing? I never had this problem. If the MC decides to stay in the alternate world because it makes him/her happy then I'm happy for them, I never thought to myself "oh geeze they get a happy ending and I'm stuck in sucky reality". They just decided to move. Now I've wished for some things in fiction to be real but I'm not jealous of the hero getting a happy ending. I just want to be entertained. :\
I get this feeling. Life in the real world is so mundane and has no magic. Reading/ watching portal fantasies is a bittersweet experience because the protagonist finds a new home and adventure; I have to return to the daily grind, with the knowledge that there is no real escape.
@@erinbond5106 I think the world we live in can be wonderful and at times it is. Its people with too much power that make it unbearable at times. Gotta remove the abusers from power.
One of the many reasons I love The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System is that the POV character is so interesting that there is a lot of fanfiction exploring what could have happened if he didn't transmigrate in the first place.
I wonder: Would Pan's Labyrinth count as one of these? Technically, it might count as an "inverted" version of it: After all, if we take the story at face value, Ofelia originally came from the "Otherworld", and the story is about her journey to return there. From a certain point of view, within the fictional narrative, our world would be the *actual* "otherworld", there.
That story actually fits more into the 'possibly a dream' category. Or it might not fit at all into the "magical otherworlds" theme because it's not a work of fantasy but magical realism (there is always a plausible explanation for any unnatural events, but the story never denies the possibility either. It never confirms if what happened belongs to the natural or the fantastic, leaving both interpretations open as possible truths).
So two comments I want to make. 1. I feel that the "why does this character have to be from our world" problem on top of the projection aspect I feel a major part of it that wasn't mentioned as well is exposition and explanation, as having the character come from our world gives a really easy reason to have all the lore of the world explained to the character and in turn the audience without interrupting the flow. Writing exposition that believably flows into the story without interrupting the pace is hard and an isekai-ed protagonist gives an out to that. 2. The comment about the disconnect of the character getting to continue living in the fantasy world while we the reader cannot also makes me think that that is the reason so many isekai series have troubles ending or even lack a clear ending point to begin with. They will often have a big bad or goal but the road to that goal is often unclear and often not the focus as well. As the instant the adventure ends we have to stop projection ourselves into the world and imagining the kind of adventures we could do in it.
It makes sense especially in the owl house I'm not going to go into spoilers on something that does happen but it does actually make sense because of parallels. Another one that makes sense is the one where the main character is just playing a video game like . hack gu because you don't get the problem of I want to stay in this fictional world because the fictional world is literally just a video game the main characters are playing so you don't not get that problem it's also just a very good jrpg in general. Another good one that is infinity train you have to wash the show to find out because if I tell you it would kind of spoil a plot twist with the numbers going to say is the train is abducting multiple people to go on to it and leave it.
14:40 well, yes. but when one feels hollow already, escaping it for a short while can be what helps one to live. chasing the next "high" can become a goal untill a alternative is found. its of course not healthy, but if one is starving a bit of food becomes hard to resist. it might make the hunger worse later, but it might keep one alive a little bit longer. ^^ (sorry if this is dark, but escapism has saved me from myself in my darkest times and is helping me cope when depression becomes too much. i am getting help and am slowly getting better.)
My favourite version of this trope is the Coraline style, where the villain specifically preys on people looking for an escape from their real world, and the other world seems perfect at first but slowly becomes more and more hostile. It kinda circumvents the idea that you need to escape your life to be happy
Fun Fact: Ascendance Of A Bookworm was originally going to be just a fantasy story. But the author realized that in order for the main character to do and have the knowledge she needed, she needed to have the knowledge of someone from our world.
Great anime, loving this new season, must watch. DO IT!
That story kinda needs the protagonists obsession with books in order to drive about 80% of all the conflict in its plot which is only possible due to being from our world where the idea of readily available books isn't insanity. Another 15% of the drama comes from the lack of common knowledge the protagonist has for her known reality. Such as how nobles can act with complete disregard to the lives and wellbeing of commoners and how it is expected for the mayor to sell orphans in order to buy food in winter. Basically I don't think the point of making Main from our world was just to give her useful knowledge as the entire story is contingent on her otherworldly perspective.
@@everythingisscience658 You make sense.
(All just a guess from here on)
I'm guessing the idea of making it a fantasy, and then switching it to be an isekai was an early draft sort of thing.
Maybe the author had built her world first and then started drafting the story and then figured it out. I don't know.
This's a story that is meant to be isekai. One issue I have with Isekai is often the fact that the hero came from "our" world is nothing but an add-on with no real weight or meaning. There should be a reason that the hero is not of that world, not just a little flavor text but an actual way that the story works better with (or works because) this factor. And this isn't just true of Isekai. Any major aspect of the heroes should be made into something truly significant beyond merely providing a perspective for exposition.
@@broEye1 Yeah, I love it when the MC being from another world is believable and actually plot relevant. The believable thing is another big problem for isekai what with all the OP MC's.
This trope was so fascinating to me as a kid, I was like “wow, these people can go to otherworlds. I wish that was me!” and now whenever I look at these shows now, I still think “I wish that was me”.
I've heard of a treehouse you may want to see.
The reason for wanting it changes but the wish remains
Might be expensive, but ticket to Japan might solve your issues. Rates of being transported to another worlds are insane there xd
Sad!
@@aleksisgabliks3881 just need to be okay with meeting the uber psychopomp, truck-kun.
Side note "The executioner and her way of life" takes a dark twist on ALL of those isekai tropes by focusing on the point of view of characters ALREADY living in the fantasy world and what they think of all these overpowered but emotionally unstable teenagers popping up randomly in their world. (Namely: Fuck this, we've already had four close brushes with the literal apocalypse, never again.)
I think bad writing advice said it at best: if you think about isekai(especially the overpower ones) are like a invasive species.
Is it just me, or are isekai with female protagonists almost always more interesting than their male-lead counterparts? Ascendance of a Bookworm, My Next Life as a Villainess, So I'm A Spider...Even The Saint's Magic Power is Omnipotent, easily the most straightforward female-lead isekai I've seen, provides more novelty than most isekai with male protagonists.
Is it just selection bias? (IE, I only hear about the good stuff and the most boilerplate trash, with dude heroes being part of the template)? Is the male-lead isekai average just weighed down by all those cheap hikikomori wish fulfillment light novels? Or is it the reverse, where authors who want to do something novel are more likely to pick female protagonists?
@@timothymclean You pointing this out had made me realize just how much of the isekai that I like actually has a female protag. Really makes me wonder if it really is a selection bias or the authors writing the female protag isekais are actually putting in more work for whatever reason.
@@timothymclean Writers either want to tell a story or make a cashgrab. If the latter, there's no reason not to make the protag male for easy self-insertion. Therefore the only time the protag is female is for when a story wants to be told.
@@timothymclean That's not quite true. Male led isekai tend to be more popular, thus female led isekai needs to be above a quality treshold to be popular.
There's plenty of garbage below the surface, if you know where to look. The villainess sub-genre in particular has a lot of terrible entries.
Then theres the Never Ending Story, where the main character gets so blindsided by his magical escapism he starts becoming the villain without even noticing it.
I was going to post a comment on if anyone knew of a story where the protag got into a sterotypical isekai scenario, but DID want to and tried to go home- but the Neverending story is another good subversion of that concept- the MC basically becomes the worst sort of overpowered isekai protagonist, but the ultimate point of their character arc is rejecting that power fantasy, accepting who they are and returning to the real world, Fantasy is great but you can't LIVE there- too bad none of the movies end up covering that part.
What do you mean?
@@SkyfishArt The first Movie ends with the MC flying around on Falkor in the real world- basically the whole movie he was getting sucked into the story, and it ends with him Abandoning the real world and embracing fantasy- the second has a similar message, ending with the boy facing a mundane fear, and the one movie where he is in fantasia with wish powers, they drop the real issues of giving a kid in a fantasy land whatever he wants, in favor of a more obvious villain and very bland characters.
Basically none of the film adaptations of the story did the whole "OP Isekai protagonist" thing that Canon Bastion did, much less the character growth he got by moving past that
@@SkyfishArt the original book had Bastien's ability to imagine and dream as a very powerful thing when he gets sent into the book world in the second half of the story. But as he changes things, broad swatches of the world are altered and often not for the better but for the whim of a 10 year old and what they think is best. Combine that with him slowly forgetting his original life, which in turn reduces his creative power and shrinks the world, threatening to destroy it, and you get a thoroughly "nice job breaking it, hero" isekai story
philip wittebane from the Owl House seems to be an inversion of that trope
Narnia is kind of an interesting blend. The kids don't seem anxious to go home for the most part and are always sad to leave but at the same time Aslan makes it clear the point of Narnia was to help them live in their homeworld. Great video as always, Red!
Except for one of the books ending with the kids being told they died in a train accident (if I remember correctly, mightve been some other kind of transportation accident?) and getting to "live" in Narnia for the rest of time.
That was the last battle. It was also when they went through the Narnian equivalent of the apocalypse
@@ryannmarshall3033 Yeah it was a train (everyone except Susan at least)
@@ryannmarshall3033 To be fair that was less Narnia and more actual Heaven. Like, all the good christians who didn't die walked through a door and wound up there while all the devil-worshippers/not-white-people-don't-think-about-it-too-much died in like a flood and fire and stuff.
Anyone ever realize how absolutely terrible it would be to have have lived a full life as royalty, than be transported back to being kids and normal people. Aslan did them no favors with this happening.
Gotta say: I love that you have used the word "grounded" rather than "realistic." It's a much more effective word for communicating that the thing is sensible and understandable, relatable in a way _like_ the real world but without having to have the same _rules_ as the real world. Great video!
yeah. "realistic" can depend a lot depending on well everything to the point of trying to be "realistic" feels ironically more fictional than well normal fiction
grounded conveys the element of "trying to be closer to reality but still not enough"
@@ianr.navahuber2195 Judging from the shows that were usually hailed as "realistic" until the cows came home with vertigo, that's pretty much a codeword that translates to "how much can I tilt the scales to the characters' disadvantage before the scales break". Or "grimdark", for short.
Heck, I'd argue that for all of its edge, Berserk WAS grounded/realistic in certain aspects, because while there was much cruelty in it, not ALL of the people in that world enjoyed kicking puppies with orgasmic glee.
I can’t remember what video it was from, but I’ve also seen the term “believable” used-specifically, “fiction doesn’t have to be *realistic,* just *believable* ” within the confines of its own world.
One day I want to see an isekai where the character just keeps going deeper. He gets hit by a truck, and wakes up in a magical fantasy land. While on his quest to defeat the demon lord, he gets hit by a wagon and wakes up on a spaceship. While on his quest to overthrow the tyrannical emperor, his ship crashes, and he wakes up outside a town in the wild west. While hunting down the notorious outlaw, he gets thrown off his horse, and wakes up in a cyberpunk dystopia, and this cycle continues.
You might need a few extra elements to make the show compelling beyond being funny the first few times, like an overarching plot where they actually figure out what's going on and find a way to break the cycle. And maybe they can bring some of their skills/equipment with them to the next world, and while they never have time to get the best stuff, something that's weak in one world can be great in the other, but then weak in the next, so they have to adapt (i.e. the laser they gave him in the sci-fi world is easily the most powerful weapon on the seven seas in the pirate world, but isn't very impressive compared to even some of the basic spells they teach in the wizard world)
I would read/watch the heck out of something like that
So... Inception
Or the Brothers Lionheart
I had an idea like that except the big bad evil guy has the ability. Evil guy dies, causes chaos for whatever story reason, dies and repeats. The protagonist in turn has to die, undo the chaos as fast as they can before offing themselves so they can keep chasing the evil guy without falling behind.
There's a light novel series with the English title 'I Saved Too Many Girls and Caused the Apocalypse' that sort of does that. The main character is the designated understudy for heroes in various genres and thus gets dragged into three or four different plotlines at the same time. He usually swaps items and weapons around to solve the issues (laser gun to deal with dragon, protection spell to dealy with meteor crash, et)
I'm surprised Coraline never came up, because it honestly feels like a great subversive take on this trope.
I SAW THE TITLE AND THE FIRST THING THAT CAME TO MIND WAS CORALINE I kept watching and thinking, wait are they not going to being up CORALINE? So then I scoured the comments to see someone mention it
I agree, though I’ve never seen it. The trailer played before The Tale of Desperaux and it so terrified me I couldn’t sleep.
@@joshuaridgway3230 honestly, it's just as scary as the trailer showed it to be so you probably shouldn't watch it lol
@@harmonious_choir it was the button eyes that did it for me.
@@joshuaridgway3230 LOL What do you know about the plot? I don't think I've actually seen the trailer, I just know the movie is really scary (seen it)
I actually really like stories where the character stays in the otherworld. To me it doesn't neccassarily have to be a bad message as the message doesn't have to be 'Ignore your problems and escape into fantasy forever' but rather 'you don't have to be satisfied with an unfulfilling life. Instead strive to become the person you were meant to be'.
One theme I would like to explore is; "Is it really an escape from reality when you are grasping for a reason to live?"
Some people would find that depressing but I would find it hopeful if not comforting...
That is true. It's something I started to wonder when O realized that fantasy worlds that are just as real as the grounded worlds the character is originally from, why is it bad to stay there? I think it's bad if a person abandoned all their family that still cared about them in the grounded world but other than that staying in the other world is fine.
The “Science of Discworld” books feature a neat reversal of this: our “Roundworld” is a mundane otherworld, running on science and logic, rather than the rules of narrative that Discworld runs on.
I'd argue that science is genuinely amazing, and more people should appreciate it.
Somewhere out there is a magical version of me saying people should appreciate magic.
I love The Science of Discworld because Roundworld is such a fascinating thought experiment. Especially when they say "recursion has occured"
Reverse-Isekai are fun, but blessedly rare (much as I love them, I know that there are only so many ways to cut them)
I think it was either the colour of magic or light fantastic that also has Rincewind briefly end up on a plane presumably in a world much like that.
@@livingcorpse5664 - For example, Xanth and the aptly named Mundania.
All this talk about magical otherworlds has left me with one burning question on my mind: Is Futurama an isekai?
An ordinary (and, if we're being honest, generally below average) guy is just going about his life, when, at seemingly random, he is launched into a fantastical world he doesn't understand. Now, he has a bunch of new friends and (eventually) starts a relationship with a girl who by any metric seems way out of his league. There's also the fact that Fry, despite being just some guy, is frequently sent out on 'deliveries' (quests) by an eccentric old 'scientist' (wizard) to save the world and/or universe.
Probably? For all intents and purposes, Fry *dies* and doesn't go back to his old world. Wouldn't say it's a power fantasy, but it definitely falls within the periphery.
There is also an aspect of prophecy in Futurama too. Fry is frozen into the future because he is the only being in the universe that can stop the brain swarm. Since due to some time travelling, he is is own grandpa. Leaving him without the "delta brainwave" that leaves everyone else at the mercy of the brains.
Fry even has a few chances to remain in the 20th century. The first time is when he learns the truth about his freezing. But decides to let events play out as they did because he sadly feels more at home in the future. The second is when he uses the time correcting timecode to escape the nude scammers. Only to mess around with the code, creating a time duplicate and getting frozen again. Meanwhile his time duplicate stays in the 20th century until learning that HE is Lars. Either way, Fry will always go back to the future. Because that is where he belongs. The episode where his ex girlfriend freezes herself and arrives in the 30th century demonstrates that. She feels so out of place while Phillip is completely fine.
I'd say it counts. As far as Fry's family in the 21st century is concerned, he disappeared and is probably dead. We even see this in the show's flashbacks.
...My God, you're right.
Technically, it is. Just like Dr. Stone is an Isekai.
Here's some ideas for Trope Talks that I think would be cool:
-Found Family
-Tragic Backstories
-Orphans
-Tokenism
-Final Battles
-Combat Therapy
-Symbolic Superpowers
-Hated Superpowers (Blessing Turned Curse)
-Political Intrigue
-Cycles
-Sibling Dynamics
-Disfunctional Families
-Princess in a Tower (sheltered and naive)
-Lovecraftian Superpower
-Dying Moment of Awesome
-Unstoppable Rage/The Berserker
-Cool Sword
-Big Damn Heroes
-One Man Army
- Enemy Without
- Dungeon Punk
- The Ace
- Battle Couple (or just any trope that depends on a happy marriage/relationship to exist)
- Bildungsroman/Coming of Age
I'd love to see Red cover the "Hero complex" and "Chronic Hero syndrome" tropes, as well as any that follow the same theme. Both are about the character striving to be the hero of the situation, but one is more out of want to be the hero while the other is more because they feel they have to be.
The hero complex is often where the person is actively seeking heroism or recognition, be it because of reward, ego, or so on, and are, and some like Syndrome from The Incredibles and the Reverse-Flash will even go as far as to cause problems just so they can resolve them and be the hero.
Chronic hero syndrome on the other hand is often more out of a genuine desire to help rather than fame or reward but they also tend to feel an overwhelming and often destructive sense of responsibility. You got Adora, Midoriya, Spider-Man, Superman, etc. They feel they have to help people and right wrongs as much as they can, often because they have to power to do so and thus no one else can and usually they'll blame themselves when things go wrong.
@@aros0018 oo steven universe definitley has chronic hero system too
That’s what I love about “my life as a dating sim villainess” our protagonist is 100% aware of what will happen in the future in the story and does everything in her power to NOT let that happen. Heck, she learned how to grow crops at a young age because in one of the 2 endings she’s exiled from society. THIS GIRL GOT GOALS!
That's a bit of an exaggeration. The only reason she succeeded in avoiding her doom flags is because she innocently stumbled into making everybody else fall in love with her (not some big plays on her part), but she's so dense she doesn't even realise it. I mean come on, her big brain plays were summoning earth bumps with magic if she were to be chased and throwing toy snakes at people for the same reason.
the best part of that show/manga is that she derails the entire story from the get-go before the protagonist even arrives, just by being a good person in place of the villainess. "i am GOING to be a good sister to you and there is NOTHING you can do about it". And then she steals all the romance flags for other characters with the protagonist. its great
The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System runs with a similar premise.
I adore that series and it absolutely could not work without the isekai element, which is what I want from my isekais
What about in Katarina's case, which her stupidity makes her frequently forget about it and save everyone to the point they fall in love with her?
Honestly, on the never returning home thing, I tend to feel that a lot of portal fantasy tends to kind of neglect *actually giving characters any reason to want to return*. The original world is not only boring, not only does it have nothing going for it - characters straight up have no positive relationships, no family they're actually attached to, no friends in their original world that they miss, nothing. Only bad things happen.
At that point, it feels almost mean-spirited to make them go back. It feels like watching someone finally escape a terrible personal situation and move away to a different country to make a completely new start, only for someone to go "no, you should go back and fix your shitty original situation, grab those bootstraps you lazy bum" and punt them back.
There are some cases where the protagonist wants to live a quiet and easy life, but since they can't return, they try to carve it out on the new world. Of course that fails, but I quite like it
I feel like there's a feeling, even among people who are seeking out escapism stories, that the real world is the place they have to go back to. IE even if you don't like your life at the moment, there's still the sense that you have to go back eventually. Like at some level you know that never going back just isn't an option. Or would be giving up and be a failure at some level.
two shows that have done that well recently is the owl house and amphibia, and the reason why is honestly dead simple.
family.
neither are over yet and both have it slightly differently, but fundamentally its a case of "yeah my mom (and dad in amphibia) is there and not here and I ain't willing to never see them again without so much as a goodbye" as well as the fact that the circumstances they left being nothing horrible (kinda mucked relationships with friends in amphibia's case and going to a crappy summer camp for the owl house)
Its a case of properly leveraging the fact that the main characters are kids to give the desire to find a way back home (if only temporarily again they haven't finished yet so unclear how it all shakes out) a reason that is properly convincing to the audience.
And on top of that, if the character has no reason to doubt that their otherworld is just as real as where they came from, or at the very least, no reason to think that being there is harming them in any way, then I don't even see how the "escapism is bad" angle could possibly be applied. If moving to a real fantasy world that's more to your liking is escapism, then I don't see how improving your life in any way isn't also escapism. "What? You hate the cold so you moved to a warmer climate? Escapist weakness, you should have grown as a person and learned to enjoy the cold." No reasonable person would say that, people move all the time to improve their lives in various ways IRL. So why would moving to a preferable alternate dimension be any less valid?
The Owl House is doing a great job at handling this very problem. Seriously, it gets pretty heavy.
gosh i remember watching the cat returns and being so mad at the protagonist for wanting to return to the human world. they tried to add stakes by having her slowly turn into a cat but i saw that as a bonus lmaoooo
It's slightly more balanced in the original story where the kingdom of cats is their actual afterlife, at least. Becoming a cat is great, becoming a dead cat not so much
is that when you discovered you were a furry?
@@ratchet1freak no that was when i watched brother bear in 2006
I don’t know about that. Being a cat seems like a downgrade
@@CombatSportsNerd yeah well im a furry
"They can be just stories set in that world" is basically what people have been complaining about the Assassin's Creed series.
It did provide a solid reason why Altair gets to respawn and why he can’t kill civilians.
@@lifefindsaway7875 it also implies that he never got hurt in combat
@@lifefindsaway7875 The "respawn" point isn't even a thing -- it's a video game, of course he gets to respawn. Mario didn't need an Animus system to rescue Princess Peach.
As far as "why he can't kill civilians"... sure, it's *a* solution to that question, but it's hardly the only one. He's an assassin, a member of a secretive order on an even more secret mission. Killing people willy nilly would just compromise the mission, so a "mission failed" for that is perfectly reasonable from a video game perspective.
@@lifefindsaway7875 It's less about using the animus framing device to justify video game-ness and more about the modern day plot is boring as hell. I want to climb towers and stab people wearing fancy armors, not walk around in a lab!
Or Most anime in general
I like how Pokémon Mystery Dungeon does it, since the protagonist, typically a human from the “normal” Pokémon world, doesn’t remember anything more than their name and that Pokémon don’t traditionally talk.
This is a handy lampshade for people who know Pokémon media but not PMD, easing the player up to a world with no humans at all, while also making the anxiety of returning to our own dimension something of a non-issue since the protagonist can’t remember what they left behind.
But the REAL best part is the built in emotional sucker punch of, “Yay, we saved the world!- Wait, why am I glowing!??? WAIT”
Seeing the various ways PMD games play with the human-turned-Pokémon inevitably being sent back to regular PokéEarth is always interesting. Sometimes they just come back through the power of friendship, and sometimes it’s a whole post game quest to get them back! It’s always a little different and we’ll worth the play.
PMD actually plays with the magical otherworld concept a suprising amount.
PMD1 ends with the PC returning due to the bonds they've formed with others.
PMD2 Subverts this with the PC no longer able to return to the world they're from, because that world was a bad future they prevented.
PMD3 gives the PC a way to freely travel between the human and pokemon worlds
And Super... Super is just cruel, not just with the PC having no way out of the pokemon one, but also by effectively killing off their partner that was their one emotion connection to the world.
I remember that series being one of the main reasons I wanted a GBA(I didn't get a GBA).
Ooo that makes me interested in playing one of the Mystery Dungeon games.
@@starmangalaxy2001 Will admit, still haven't finished Super and have been trying to avoid spoilers despite how long the game's been out (PMD is the one series I insist on going into blind), but I've seen enough to know generally where it's going, and honestly, unless they can really sell the finale, I'm not going to be that impressed. But I haven't really been impressed with it anyway... I'm not going to go into everything I found wrong with it, but it's in my opinion probably the worst entry in the series.
This is why I think PMD is are the best pokemon games conceptually. Any main line series game that tries to tackle moral and emotional complexity will always inevitable be undermined by the fact that we are complicit in animal fighting (see black and white) but PMD doesn't have that structural problem because its gameplay doesn't actively fight against the story AND it removes humans from the picture (since they are only in text).
This is partly why I like crossover fanfiction, because you can pluck characters from a familiar world and chuck them into what to them is a magical otherworld, but to the reader is just a different familiar world. If it's well executed, you get all the benefit of watching a fish out of water fumbling around this new and weird universe, while still having the comfort of the reader knowing both of these source universes and having a baseline to build changes off of.
Amen to that. I love me a great crossover, granted the two franchises have enough in common to make sense. Hell, I'm writing a For Honor and ATLA fic with this sort of concept, where the remains of a destroyed continent inhabited by peoples greatly inspired by medieval cultures with fantasy elements, cross the sea to find another land also populated with nations inspired by other cultures with their own magic stuff. Can't wait to develop it further.
I really enjoy xovers where a fan of either works doesn't need to know the other to enjoy the story. A great one in mind is *A War of Bloody Evolution* by _RedrumSprinkles_ on ffn, which is a cross between *Warhammer* and *RWBY.* Never even heard of *Warhammer* before, but the way the writer crafts the story makes it easy to get into and enjoy without readers needing a lot of knowledge of either franchises.
@@em5522 Just out of curiosity is it Warhammer Fantasy, Warhammer 40,000 or Warhammer Age of Sigmar that's used for that fic? Admittedly each setting would probably work with RWBY.
@@captainscience2732 I believe it was 40k.
@@em5522 Thanks, I'll have to go check it out.
Undertale is one of these stories, and each of the main routes utilize different tropes of the genre.
The neutral routes are the "Learn lesson, return home" standard hero's journey. Our protagonist had their adventure and return home with nothing more than their experience and a few keepsakes.
The murder route is the power fantasy trope, our protagonist using their power to abuse the world. No lesson is learned. Our hero-turned-villain never goes home. Though, ending with *destroying* the world is an approach I haven't seen elsewhere.
The pacifist route is the "Return home, take new friends" with you resolution. It's considered the "true" ending to the story, and ultimately the most satisfying one.
plus there's a definite use of game mechanics being acknowledged in universe. Flowey as a character is even an example of that sort of trope, someone who uses their disregard for others and foreknowledge for their own benefit.
In a sense, destroying the world is kind of the inevitable conclusion of any Isekai power fantasy, right? No matter what, eventually you've exhausted all the possibilities, eventually you get bored. And then even more bored. Whatever value you might have attached to anything and anyone in the playworld gradually begins to crumble under the weight of accumulated boredom. Eventually, the realisation hits you; This isn't a power fantasy. It's a prison. Suddenly, all that ennui that was built-up turns into seething hatred for the entire, fake, world that is keeping you trapped and killing you slowly. "Not if I kill you first".
There’s also that one ending where everyone is ruled by a dog
And then comes Deltarune, which combines the two worlds of the original story into a new world, and adds an otherworld to that, which retells the original story but also ties in to a whole new story, which breaks down and recontextualizes the lore of the first story, and that's just the first two chapters!
@@luigivercotti6410 When you can do anything, eventually you realize you can do nothing. Everything you do has been done.
15:33 We need more stories where the PoV hero is a life-long resident of the Otherworld and the villian is isekai-ed in and tries to take over with the mentality of "With the power of spoilers and a rampant disregard for other people, I'm UNSTOPABLE!"
YES. YES THIS NEEDS TO HAPPEN.
You mean The Owl House in terms of both hero and villains.
@@matt0044 Tell me more about this "The Owl House", please
@@jeffbenton6183 so regarding the protagonist of the owl house, Luz Nocera, she's a happy go lucky young girl who is obsessed with fantasy and magic who by accident is transported into a fantasy world full of witches and demons, she starts out with the mindset that you mentioned, treating said world like her personal sandbox and believing that she'll be special,a "chosen one" so to speak , and that she'll get to live the life of a young adult fiction novel.
However, gradually, trough a lot of failures and fuck ups, she'll mature and grow out of that mentality, forming real connection with the people of the fantasy world and even finding a second family.
As for the villain, this is spoiler:
The villain is a which hunter from the 16th century who has found himself in the same fantasy world,but has a distain for all witches, believing that they are monsters and wanting to kill them all.
He says that he wants to "kill witches to protect humanity from the treat they pose" but it's pretty evident in the story that he does it because he wants glory, to be recognised as a" hero who saved humanity" and obtain the title of "witch hunter general".
The neverending story does this
I was expecting Red to discuss the subversion of this trope: reverse isekai. Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid was the first thing that comes to my mind whenever I think of it.
Reverse Isekai, don't you mean, The Bible?
What you described sounds more like urban fantasy.
@@potahtwah9591 What you mean is religion in general (because God/Heaven is never on Earth)
The Devil is a Part Timer
Isekai Shokudo, too.
Everyone always mentions girls waking up with perfect makeup, but what about the guys waking up perfectly shaved? It's like they can turn their hair off and never deal with razor burn again.
I don't know why, but after seeing this all I can think of was in the new batman where you can see most of batman face, and he has the exact same stubble as he does when he's bruce. Those cops are horrible detectives.
@@evilcartmensolo7198 Stubble isn’t exactly a strong identifying characteristic
@@willieoelkers5568 well when you are trying figure out someone's secret identity, and you have 3 types of men shaved, stubbel and bearded it loweres your suspects and when the little fan boy cop is all over Bruce and he never seems to shave ( plus same color of beard hair) either it just seems to bring in the suspects. I think in old batman had Batgirl wear a red ponytail when was really blonde. Just to throw off suspicion. Just an observational quirk.
^y’know? This is completely fair.
‘Cause the “perfect hair&makeup” generally isn’t a Female Convenience/Power Fantasy, it’s a Male-Gaze Fantasy of having a conventionally hot girlfriend who’s beautiful all the time and never has morning breath.
@@anonymousfellow8879 I mean most people in fiction are what we'd consider perfectly made up, also being way more attractive than normal is a common power fantasy.
So I don't think it's just the male gaze.
I wish someone would bring up A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, cause it’s a classic example of the “normal person gets transported into an otherworld” being used to convey important themes instead of being used for cheap power fantasy or audience projection.
The entire book is basically written as a satire of medieval romance novels (romance in the artistic sense, not relationships) and the beliefs/behaviors which Mark Twain believed they engendered in the white southern upper class prior to and during the Civil War. He believed that these stories (especially those written by Sir Walter Scott) with their romanticization of war, glorification of nobility, and positive depictions of caste societies helped validate southern plantation owners’ views of themselves as the heirs to a long, cultured history of chivalrous and heroic white aristocrats, in stark contrast to the greedy, cruel, racist tyrants that they actually were.
To that end, Twain decided to write a story where a grimy, low class, “uneducated”, “uncultured”, northern yank gets sent back in time to the kingdom of Camelot and uses his basic 19th century knowledge to show up every other major character, creating “miracles” with science, winning historical battles with modern tactics, etc. Eventually he takes over all of Britain, fully modernizing and industrializing the Isles.
In this story, the fact that the main character is someone from the real world being transported into a fantastical otherworld is an important plot element. The whole point of the story was to satirize the antiquated attitudes of rich southerners by portraying a low class northerner (whom these southerners would have looked down on and resented) basically wiping the floor with the chivalric knights that these southerners to some extent drew inspiration and a sense of identity from. This story needed a normal person from the real world to be transported into an otherworld. Had the story been entirely set in the otherworld it would have been indistinguishable from the very medieval romance novels it sought to satirize.
Even modern isekai is often written with themes in mind. It's just easy to miss them among the Sturgeon's-Law-mandated 90% of garbage.
I mean, it's also pretty anti-Catholic, and doesn't pull any punches about that. But yeah, very much a "you are not a chivalrous hero, and the Good Old Days weren't actually that good" kind of book.
I've been saying for awhile the Connecticut Yankee was the original Isekai story, and some of its satirical themes are pretty timeless.
Excellent comment
Absolutely. Exactly. 10/10. I was just gonna say that. Good taste, yours.
That nod in the beginning:
“Speaking in clear, unbroken sentences without stumbling or losing their train of thought”
Made me wonder how much reading fiction has impacted my self esteem in expressing complex thoughts to other people 😅
😁😁
I think a great example is Link's Awakening. In that game the big twist is that all of Koholint Island is just a fantasy concocted by both Link and the Wind Fish. That means all the people Link grew attached to will cease to exist when the story is over. This really forces us to acknowledge that we do have to move on from this fantasy, otherwise we will be trapped in it. It might be a great experience, but we have to confront reality, even when it hurts like hell.
(In other words: MARIN!!!😥😭)
Ouch. That reminds me of FF X.
Not just that, but there is active ancient prophecy in-game that the world will end when the Wind Fish awakens. So the world is sort of a lucid dream, as the Wind Fish is aware that they are dreaming, as the Nightmares try to prevent you from waking it up.
In regards to the NOT returning home type ending, there is an additional approach that's taken in a classic Swedish children's book "The Brothers Lionheart". It is werry isekai like in its format where the titular brothers die in our world and end up in a fantastical world, where they have new physical skills, and a prophecy of them defeating a evil knight who controls a dragon. But at the end, after vanquishing the dragon, they both end up dying and seemingly going to yet another magical otherworld, possibly hinting at a chain of rebirth between worlds.
Something in a similar vein happens in a webtoon called "Mage & Demon Queen" where a later antagonist is a summoned hero that's supposed to kill the Demon Queen, but he is recurringly summoned to different worlds where he defeats a demon lord with the goal of returning home, only to then be summoned again. And this is his third otherworld, and he has already gone on two journeys and is thus really strong, but also somewhat dismissive and jaded to others perspective, only focusing on his goal of going home.
That was Astrid Lindgren right?
@@natnuss98 Yep, that's correct.
so a proto jupchain then
I LOVE the brothers lionheart! My sister bought it for me 😍
This sounds like a badass purgatory
I actually had to write an essay about a story with an "other world" for one of my college writing classes! I ended up writing about how Into The Spider-Verse subverts this trope by having the "other world" be the main character's world and having other characters as well as their world come to the normal one. I ended up getting extra credit on it!
10/10 movie to write a paper on
So reverse Isekai.
It’s also interesting in that the other world is actually just an otherworld to a fictionalized fantastical reality
The MU is based on our world, but fantastical and superhero-y
The world in spider verse is exactly like it except subtlety different
The only differences are a few characters being different people, backstories being changed, and some logos being different
Honestly a lot of the isekai heroes never returning home have less to do with the literary aspects and more with the fact that almost every one of the stories are unfinished or even outright canceled.
Also because quite a few people (I'm one of them) actually hate it when the protagonist abandons his friends and/or loved ones from the Isekai world to return home. (Escaflowne!!!!!!!!)
😁😁
That's kinda funny.
Considering most of these series are made to keep going until the author burns out or people stop buying them, not to tell a self-contained story, that tracks.
Probably cause most of the anime adaptations are just ads for the light novels or they end up being garbage that’s not worth continuing.
Anime being ads is a myth. It’s usually in an attempt to start a franchise nobody asked for.
I feel like Amphibia is a series that does this trope really well, both the real world and the fantasy world are explored in interesting ways, allowing the characters and the audience to feel nostalgic about the old world where they came from while also showing how the protagonist grows from the experiences in the magical world.
Amphibia is cool and the story is interesting but the characters and dialogue are just not it chief
I like how it compares and contrasts how the three main girls react to their situation
@@lightningvolt3150 I heard about Amphibia but someone had to shove it down my throat. And I’m probably getting old so Amphibia isn’t my cup of tea
Really appreciate how Amphibia and The Owl House take the idea.
Not other are both of the other worlds actually DISTINCTLY THEIRS (like the settings don't feel like half-considered copy/pastes of others), but both series make a major narrative thrust about how important the real world actually was in shaping the characters' circumstances and everything they ran away from. Both series have a major dramatic hook on why escapism taken too far can actually be dangerous and emotionally devastating but also have numerous episodes highligting what makes their settings interesting.
In Owl House it's used to contrast the heroine from the main antagonist and in Amphibia it's used to contrast the three main Earth girls and how their drastically different personalities created differing roles for them in different parts of the world.
But then everything changed when Disney rules the world
One of my favorite scenes from Narnia is where Digory says "try me" when the Pensivie kids tell him that he wouldn't believe them
he has an idea of what the kids went through, and wants to hear their story in detail. He misses Narnia and magic despite having grown up, and not being able to go back.
Parallels his speech to them at the end of the book, where he tells them "Don't talk about this except with other people who've had similar adventures. Oh, they're out there. You'll get to recognize them. There's a sort of look..."
@@earlwajenberg I kinda wish in stories where there are multiple protagonists would do something like that more often. The older generation of heroes recognizing when the younger generation is about to/just experienced their journey and taking a vested interest in what their successors did.
Though, of course, when that was written, the Magician's Nephew was still years away - there's no hint that Professor Kirke had ever been to Narnia, let alone having been present at its creation in the first book.
You missed a variation: The real world the character starts out in turns out to be the fantasy world, and the world they go to turns out to be the real world (e.g. Amber is the actual real world, and Earth is just a fantasy world where gunpowder works).
Hmm, Kingdom Hearts could be said to be doing this with Quadratum basically being Shibuya. The fact that Sora’s art style is more in line with modern FF games when in Quadratum in the KH4 trailer while we see Donald and Goofy still in the usual KH style at the end also demonstrates that divide.
His Dark Materials does that iirc
@@DianaCHewitt Haven't read it in a while, but I think there it's more multiverse than any one Real World (TM)
Huh, does the end of Evangelion where the whole Abgel Invasion was just a simulation count?
The game the Book of Unwritten Tales did this as a joke.
1:52 Greatly appreciate how Red felt no need to specify whether she meant 'neighbours who *are annoying* ' or 'how best *to annoy* one's neighbours '- We've all seen you, Bilbo
Ah, good. Red mentioned the most powerful magical portal of them all: Truck-Kun.
The most powerful psychopomp.
You could even call him the uber psychopomp.
Was gonna say, "A gateway to multiple other worlds that doesn't involve Natural Disasters, Magical Furniture, Or getting hit my a Truck" killed me.
@@aquamarinerose5405 nooo you had to watch out for that truck!!
@@aquamarinerose5405 ooh where were you reincarnated?
On the note of staying forever, the most healthy take I've seen is what I'd describe as 'I fucked up in the normal world, I'll do better this time' - basically, their life was miserable before, but that was the result of their choices, and they're aware of that fact. They're not just staying in the magical world because it's fun and with magic, they either can't go back or the life they've built is better because they're more motivated to live a good life. Examples being 'I killed slimes for 300 years' where the protagonist died from overwork, and chooses to be an ageless witch who just lives in a cottage in a field, or Reincarnated as a Slime where one of the protagonist's main requests upon dying was just to have someone to talk to in his next life - the fact that this wound up being a nigh-omniscient agent of the world and later, a city full of people was happenstance and his own hard work respectively.
I remember reading a manga (can't remember the title) where the protagonist was an evil queen of a fantasy world who didn't care about her people. When her people executed her, she got reborn in our real world and decided to make up for her sins by becoming a doctor. Then she died again in a plane crash iirc? And woke up as her old self (but years before her tyrannical rule) and continues to be a doctor
Wait is that how he got Great Sage in the light novel/manga because the anime was just a virgin joke about him being a great sage.
Paladin of the Marches a.k.a Faraway Paladin is basically this. MC trying to do better with their new life.
@@misamisaa4547 also sounds like doctore elise?
@@misamisaa4547 bump incase someone gives the name.
I think the classic "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" gives the best "Over-powered" reasoning even if it does ignore the limits of medieval machining. Also, a reminder that bathroom scenes can be powerful when they are included ala "All Quiet on the Western Front" and GoT.
Modern definitely-isekai parallel: Ascendance of a Bookworm, where the bibliophile heroine reincarnates in the body of a sickly peasant child after a bunch of books fall on her in an earthquake. She uses all of her modern knowledge to make books common enough that she'll be able to run a bookstore, like she wanted to do before dying of books.
It's good for a lot of reasons that don't really fit in a comment.
What's the bathroom scene of All Quiet on the Western Front?
One only needs play through Duke Nukem to find out "The bathroom is the BEST place for a truly horrific fight scene. ;o)
I had a funny idea an Isekai protagonist who’s cheat ability is that they have been Isekaied over and over again and they have several lifetimes of skills to draw upon. No special cheat magic abilities, but just them having years of experience to draw upon.
this is what Quickly Wear the Face of the Devil does - MC was yeeted through countless worlds before the beginning of the story when he gets rid of system that forces him to play along the original story of the story world he got yeeted into. He realises that the system's big boss is using these worlds to collect energy and since he's *very* pissed at it, he yeets himself through some more worlds where he does the best to totally fuck up the original story and get the energy that boss system would normally get so he can go home. Ok he technically has a bit of a cheat because the author made him a top level hacker in the real world but that can also be shoved into the "he has experience with this" box
@@misamisaa4547 Darn, seems it's purely a manga... for now. The concept sounds good, but I require it to be an anime before I can watch it with one of my best friends that's hugely into isekai.
Spoiler Warning for Cautious Hero:
This is actually why Seiya is overly powerful. He was Isekaied before, yet when he was returned home and his level was reset as a normal person again, his base stats remained higher. So the second time he's isekaied at the start of the series, he starts at level one and can train his stats even higher.
If you're interested, you kind find that by looking into genres dealing with quick wear/quick transmigrations, particularly ones that utilizes infinite flow.
omg my oc is that same way, no cheat skills but 'I've done this for so long it doesn't even bother me'
Red: *shows Centaurworld*
Me: "Oh, yeah, the Nowhere king exists! Thanks, Red, for reminding me of that absolutely terrifying eldrich monstrosity!"
The fact that Red actually mentions Fushigi Yuugi (even if only as a background example) is so cool, it's an amazing story that really deserves more attention.
Also, in regards to the Inuyasha "where'd all the magic go" question I have a personal theory that most of Rumiko Takahashi's works take place in the same world, where magic USED to be plentiful but is now pretty rare because of human expansion and technology, and people who still possess super-human abilities tend to become either martial artists or monks/magicians making a living through founding schools
My cousin has the theory that the youkais were getting smaller with time, and then they barely exist on Kagome's era.
Fushigi Yuugi hits all the isekai harem power-fantasy boxes and through various portal and reincarnation shenanigans manages to hit every type of ending at some point. I don't know why it doesn't come up more in discussions about the genre.
Escaflowne is also pretty classic otherworld from the same era. A lot of heroine escapist fantasy at the time.
While watching this, I couldn’t stop thinking about Marcy Wu from Amphibia. She and her friends ended up in an otherworldly because she wanted to literally escape reality due to the news of her family moving. I think it’s a very interesting insight into the trope because it does acknowledge that the adventures in Amphibia helped the protagonists grow, but doesn’t deny that the reason they got there in the first place, while well intentioned, was still selfish from Marcy’s part
Coraline was my first experience in this trope. Honestly, it was a great story and one that actually kinda helped me as a kid, since Coraline's real world looks so bleak when we first see it. Then, over the course of the movie, she learned to cherish what she's got in the real world, because the people there are the ones that care about her, even if sometimes, it doesn't feel like it
Good comes with bad, you can't have one without the other. The bad things are what make you genuinely appreciate when things truly do go your way, and I've yet to find a story that encapsulates the feeling that Coraline presented.
I have to say...I've always felt like the going back part doesn't make sense in a lot of "otherworld" stories. You can define it as escapist, but that really only tracks if the otherworld isn't real. The moment that we establish that the otherworld is an actual place, the paradigm shifts. Sure, if the protagonist was happy in their previous life, then going back makes sense, but in a lot of these stories they weren't. The idea of "learning to appreciate your circumstances" doesn't make a lot of sense if those circumstances were genuinely miserable, and especially not if the protagonist doesn't _need_ to accept them any more. Meanwhile, the protagonist has this new set of circumstances, where they have status, acceptance, are possibly financially well off and almost certainly well connected, and where they have typically already resolved the biggest problem that world faces, ushering in an era of relative stability and peace. If we accept that these worlds are, within the context of the story, real - that is to say, if we discredit the "escapism" argument, because the character is not choosing a fantasy if the world is "real" - then going back seems to be making the message that it's normal and correct to let the life we've become accustomed to hold us back. Give up your progress, your growth, and your success, because family and friends are more important, or simply because that's "not where you belong".
From a realist perspective, the "Dorothy Gale approach" makes much more sense. Rather than letting the love for the family she left behind hold her down, she ultimate uses her new position to lift the people she cares about up. In taking them with her, she teaches the lesson that as good things happen to you, as you succeed, you bring what you care about with you, but it's okay to leave the things you've moved past behind. To me, it seems that unless there is some core flaw of the otherworld that prevents the protagonist from accepting it as a permanent circumstance, this should be the expected goal. Not going back to a worse set of circumstances, but of retrieving the things they left behind that are still worth keeping. With the "keep the portal open" route as an acceptable backup for those who can't take everything they care about with them. There's nothing wrong with visiting your old home town now and then, but giving up your successful career to move back in with your parents and work at the local McDonalds is just weird.
Incredibly well said.
I feel like I resonate the most with your take the most from what I’ve read in the comments- and that may be bc of my life experiences that I relate this way. But I agree that the hardships of the “normal life” often dictate what the “Other world” represents. When the “Normal life” is better comparatively to the other world, it makes sense that going back would be the goal. But when the “Normal life” is miserable, or unfulfilling in some way, and fulfilment is found in the “Otherworld”, I feel like we’re growing backwards if we go back to the “Normal life” to apply all the lessons learned all over again.
This is why I'm REALLY dreading that Owl House will take that route. I'm pretty sure Terrence is self aware enough to KNOW that Luz moving back to Earth permanently is the worst possible outcome for this story on several levels. But the cliché ending would be devastating there.
I think Red's commentary is specific to the "real world protagonist escapes into a work that is literally fiction in universe" variant. As that's the one with the most parallels to the experience of an audience member
agree, in settings where we've established that the magical world is real, it becomes the equivalent to a foreign country. It has its own people, history, rules, culture, etc and the protagonist has the decision to move there full time, visit a lot, or return home once and for all. And much like visiting an actual country, even if they choose to return home, they might do so having grown from their experiences and taking bits of that country back with them (new ideas, items, words, etc).
In that case, deciding to stay in the fantasy world would be equivalent to visiting a foreign country and deciding to immigrate there. And if that country clicks for you and you have opportunities there, why wouldn't you move there full time?
I think its a matter of perspective. Red, I suspect, was viewing those other worlds under a lens of escapism (its key to the entire trope after all), but what if they might be better viewed as an analogy for world travel? Maybe the magical elements are metaphors for the sometimes magical experiences of going someplace you've never been? What if the monsters are the fear, uncertainty and genuine risk that comes from visiting certain places? And the protagonist acquiring magic or tools that help them survive in that world, synonymous with learning that place's language and culture so you can better navigate? Is making a fantasy world as a metaphor for real world travel strictly necessary? No, but then what is strictly necessary when we're talking about literature?
And if you're like me, and you don't have the money or opportunity to travel, fantasy worlds are really your only option. Escapism, sure, but sometimes that escapism is exactly what you need.
Honestly this is one of the reasons why I never really liked Final Fantasy Tactics Advance's story and how it tries to spin an "escapism is not healthy!" story.
Like, it's not a magical otherworld. One of the kids whole-ass rewrites reality itself with a magic book and replaces it with a new one.
Also two of the three kids' lives are utterly miserable. Mewt gets snowballs with *rocks* inside it hucked at him, his mom is dead and his dad is a chronic drunk who can *barely* hold down his job. And the hero's younger brother is chronically ill to the point where he has to go to the hospital on the reg and can no longer walk.
...And, in spite of this magical otherworld being actually real (in that the real world itself was turned into this place), and the suffering he knows that two of his loved ones have waiting for them in the normal world...The hero literally asks out loud "Why don't you want to go home......? :( "
Like...If it was a story about the dangers and ethics of playing god with world-changing magic, or the powers that maintain that otherworld being dangerous entities manipulating the kids so they could keep that world going, it could have had a real interesting angle...
But nope, purely a story about 'escapism bad'.
...Which is fine for some of the characters who just needed some confidence to stand up to the bullies. But man do I feel for the younger brother, who really got the short end of the stick. :(
One bend on this trope I've seen recently is "Isekai, but multiple people get sent there over time" which results in an entire _culture_ of Isekaied real-world people in the actual Isekai world, complete with meta-commentary and references to things nobody else (including those who died earlier in the real world) know of - mostly internet culture.
What story are you referencing? That sounds interesting.
Sounds like So I'm A Spider, So What? The main cast is a whole classroom of people who end up getting transported into the Isekai Otherworld but also end up being placed in a whole host of different roles in the Otherworld.
From generic fantasy monsters to different races that are warring. Our main protag is a girl who becomes a spider and uses her new skill set to become God. Typical Isekai setting, really.
@@ashtonpeterson4618 Reminds me of That Time I Got Reincarnated As A Slime
I don't actually want to reveal the story for possibly-legitimate personal reasons, but I will say that, while it isn't IASSW, it is currently going through a story arc focused on someone who is a Spider, so what?
Dr. Stone
I'm surprised that Red didn't talk about Digimon. Where the main characters go to another world, save it, come back to save their world, and then decide to go back to save the other world again. Heck, Digimon Tamers (season 3) spent 25 episodes in the normal world before they decide to go to the Digital World on a rescue mission.
Digimon has played around with the Isekai trope a lot.
Scrolled through the comments specifically to see Digimon mentioned.
@@MagrokAlpha same
Digimon is an interesting case. Every AU in the canon is based around a Digital World that needs saving, but it isn't always a main setting of the stories. The almost entirety of Frontier and most of Adventure takes place on the Digital World, in 02 the cast visits the Digital World in almost like an extracurricular activity and Tamers spends only a third of the season in the Digital World.
The thing about Digimon is that, while the portal fantasy is an important aspect, it's not the main focus. The main focus is the bond between the Tamers/Chosen Children and their Digimon partners. Most of the times, the Digital World is just the place where the Digimon live, it's just a means to an end. It's not dependent on the portal fantasy aspect of it either, it can also work in the Real World -- the entirety of Ghost Game so far has taken place in the Real World.
Still, Digimon is the reason why I'm quite fond of this trope.
@@BG12sofia This is actually my personal favorite take on this because it actually links the other world to the known world thus explaining not only why our hero(es) are getting involved in the first place but why they will never fully escape the 'real world' since the worlds clearly influence each other.
My go to example of this sub-genre besides Digimon is Kaijudo: Rise of the Duel Masters where our hero was technically *born* in the other world but was brought to and raised in the known world by his mother since she only fled to the other world to escape a villain and returned home once it was deemed safe enough to do so.
It was on becoming a teen in the human world that he and his friends accidentally discovered the other world via a monster coming into the human world. This in turn leads them into joining an organization formed to protect both worlds with the aforementioned villain being an ex high ranking member of said organization who went rogue, attacking the hero's father who was another high ranking member which is what lead to the hero being born in the other world in the first place.
Isekai more has to do with the surrounding troupes of the story than just the other world plot line. I don't think digimon really fits the isekai tag line because of that. Tamers is GOAT though.
A common theme in these stories is having the main characters refer to these other lands as fantasy and how abandoning the ‘real’ world for them is bad. I understand symbolism for the reader sake but in the story, these fantasy lands are real. They do exist and are only fantastical in that they operate under different laws then our world. It’s not escapism or running from reality when your fantasy land is a literal place. Referring to our world as the ‘real’ world ceases to make sense once it’s made clear that the fantasy world actually exists.
Yeah, this was actually a problem I struggled with in creating a sort of deconstruction isekai. Basically the protagonist's friend ends up in fantasy land and refuses to leave, because from his perspective he's in a fantasy land where he doesn't have to work, everything he wants is given to him and he's the king/chosen one. The protagonist wants him to return to his family but his friend retorts by saying something like:
"Of course YOU can say that. You already have everything you want, good grades, a lot of friends you can rely on, what do I have? Nothing. Here, everything I want is given to me. Why would I want to leave?"
Because when there IS an actual fantasy land which you CAN go to, why wouldn't you? Why wouldn't you escape to somewhere that is objectively better?
@@mariustan9275 In a way, a character choosing to stay in the fantasy land is no different from a real person just moving to a better place. You wouldn't say they're making an unhealthy decision just because they moved to escape their abusive family, toxic community, dead end job, or general unhappiness. Just because they have some things to unpack in therapy doesn't mean the decision to leave wasn't a good and reasonable one.
@@Arzamol5 Yeah, that's what I think of too. You can justify this if the character in question manages to make a new life to move away from their mistakes, but it also feels like a jerk move because you left without telling any of their friends or family. If they were abusive thats fine but if not in the OG world they're still going to be worried.
I've been thinking the same thing. The anti-escapism thing might be justified if their *only* motivation for wanting to stay is satisfying some superficial power fantasy, or avoiding some problem back home that they could solve with the right life lesson. But if the character's quality of life is better than they could realistically achieve in what they call the "real" world, then staying is a perfectly rational decision. Especially if they end up making new friends in Isekai-ville - those relationships are just as valid as any other.
I like how The Owl House handles this, because at one point in the story Luz considers staying in the human realm or "the real world." permanently, and this is framed as a bad decision for her as she would essentially be cutting herself off from her friends and loved ones in the other world when she's at her lowest point. I haven't seen that take used in this genre before, and it makes sense.
"Even if it is breached, it would take a number beyond reckoning - thousands - to storm the keep."
"Tens of thousands."
"But my lord, there is no such force-"
Isekai:
Specifically, Arifureta
@@aflyinfaux1447 eat a bar of soap and wash the hands you typed that name with- this is a family friendly channel. We may be nerds, but we have *standards.*
@@bodaciouschad I wanted to google it but now I'm afraid of what I might find
@@navarog378 the anime is ok but doesn't have the depth of the manga.
I appreciate that theirs an Isekai character named Rudeus that has a legitimate explanation for why he has such unusual skill and magical prowess as a kid. He was literally reborn in another world as in he started in a new world as a baby. He was already aware of himself and had all his previous experiences and memories and decided much earlier than most people would to practice magic with the determination that kids don’t have. So by the time it was recognized he had been practicing for maybe 10 years. He was freakishly strong because his adult brain came up with a plan and goal much sooner than other people would and practiced all the time
Isekais are partially responsible for getting me to move thousands of miles away from my toxic childhood home and start a new life in a foreign (to me) land. Its only "escapism" until you actually escape
You're still in the real world, though. Not some magical neverland.
@@Manuelomar2001 That's not the point.
While many of us might dream of the _fantasy_ elements of it all, the desire to escape a terrible situation is just as important a part of the fantasy.
@@Manuelomar2001 no shit sherlock
@@nullpoint3346 But are you being proactive in the really real world, or are you just accepting that your reality is terrible, and retreating into the fantasy in your mind to pretend it doesn't exist, forever?
@@phastinemoon What? They weren't saying anything like that. They were pointing out that Mike was stating just that escapism as a need only exists for as long as you feel that need to escape (such as into the fantasy setting of a book). But once you DO escape (either by moving, changing the life situation, etc.) then you aren't experiencing escapism because you HAVE escaped. You just did it in the real world for realsies. It doesn't have to involve anything fantastical at all.
And I'd bet they were being proactive, having done as they said: moved away from a bad situation to one where they are, apparently, doing better.
"...the audience will run out of story and end up back in the real world"
Or they turn to fanfiction and never leave
which, on the other hand, doesn't rule out running out of any meaningful story anyway and/or ending up in essentially a cliché copy of the real world. Not that there aren't good fanfics, but it's far from guaranteed to get one randomly.
@@pRahvi0 you could write your own at that point.
@@TheAssassin642 That rabbit hole is very, very, deep.
Yep. That's what happened to me. I fell down that rabbit hole and I'm NEVER going to find my way out.
Don't do fanfiction, kids. It's a drug more addicting than heroin.
Help me.
@@WilliamTheMuddy I wish I could help, but I'm afraid that I'm just as addicted as you are. I fear it may be inescapable.
Hear me out: A story where the main character switches from the real world to the magical world when the fall asleep, or from the magical world to the real world through the same process. To anyone else, it seems like they are a heavy sleeper who just woke up, while to them they are living two lives in completely different worlds, maybe bringing random things with them between worlds during some of the switches. Alongside this, day in the real world is night in the fantasy world, and vice-versa. They feel fine waking up in each world, and would also be unable to avoid switching because everyone can only go so long without sleeping. Then the readers would be invested in both worlds, and maybe something will begin to threaten both worlds so the main character has to do something about it in both the real and magical worlds
This sounds like a great idea! I feel like it could certainly solve the issue of "one world being noticeably superior to the other", for a start
I feel like, by what you said, you'd like Welcome to Japan, Miss Elf!
Or the character is the *reason* something begins to treathen both worlds
that if done right could be amazing.
@@icarussarts Oh! So like, maybe the character is disrupting the balance of the universe due to their constant dimension-hopping?
As a person whose earliest memories involve my family moving to an entirely different country in pursuit of a better life, leaving some family members behind in the process. I've never really understood why fictional characters are so invested in returning to a place that seems to leave them miserable. Moving literally every year during my formative years as my mother chased jobs that would allow her to support two sons as a single mother probably don't help in that regard.
To me, if going somewhere else allows you to find personal fulfillment and better meet your mental, physical, and emotional needs as a person, why exactly shouldn't you just stay there? So the stories where the protagonist, who has spent an entire story not only having adventures but making powerful genuine bonds in the Otherworld, chooses to stay there if anything make more sense to me than the alternative.
Especially since the ones who go back just seem to... slot back into the same life they found unsatisfying in the first place with no real attempt to make major change to it? Won't they just be miserable again in like a month when the rejuvenation from their magical holiday wears off? Like why don't they ever decide to move to another city, or country even?
As a general rule, the thinking is that "The real world is safer to live in". And thats as far as the author thinks it through, so the MC wants to return home. I don't know how any author can genuinely think this, what with the dystopian nightmare of living in a word where the entire planet is no more than 60 seconds away from nuclear hellfire cleansing the planet of life at the whims of about a dozen meglomaniacs weighing down on anyone who returns to the real world compared to theit fantasy worlds where they already dealt with whatever the worst threat of the century was- surely the fantasy realm is safer.
That's very true. My family moved countries as well when I was 11, and it was kind of an isekai of its own, we'd be on a new place with great opportunities and a chance of a better life, and a better, less hostile culture towards my family. My question is, if the place is definitely better than your original place, why the hell wouldn't you want to stay? I had to go back to my home country a decade later due to visa issues, and honestly? It kind of sucks, you feel very displaced and kind of alien, I mean, I've accustomed to so many different things in the new country, made friends and did a lot of my education there, and now after return the culture clash and the dissociation is real.
A lot of the time, the character would stay in the other world of it wasn't for their family, loved ones, or pets being in the other world. For people with "living atachments" for lack of a better term, abandoning everyone they care about is not as appealing.
Now if you have someone like Harry Potter, the only people he cares about were in the "magical world." Technically the muggle and magical "worlds" aren't physically seperate, and it's a "hidden magical world" trope. Still, we see in the movies, and in the books, that Harry would have 100% abandoned the muggle world to live in the magical world.
Usually because they ended up there against their will, the unfamiliarity of the new place makes it look much more hostile/dangerous than the familiar world, and/or there is something/someone in the familiar world too important for them to leave it behind.
Returning to a bad situation with zero change is just bad writing. If the main character is meant to go on a journey and grow, they cannot come back the as same person who left. At it's most basic, this could mean one of two things.
1. They resolve to change their Real World situation because they now have something they didn't before.
2. They have gained a new appreciation for their Real World situation and realized it's not actually as bad as they thought.
Note: #2 hinges on the prerequisite that the Real World situation is not terribly flawed, but that the character's initial perception of it was. If it actually is genuinely terrible, we've swung back around to bad writing again.
Rick: "Do you two want to stay here forever?"
Morty: "Why does it have to be forever? Can't we just go home during the weekend or go back to do laundry? "
One of my favorite Isekai stories is “Ascendance of a Bookworm”, because the isekai’d character really shapes the world around her by recreating things from our world to make life easier for the lower class in her new world, which, in combination with her near-deadly high levels of magic, *really* catches the attention of the magical higher class…
Mine is M.A.R. which is one of the classic Isakai that the manga maybe have a rush ending but at least the anime is pretty good
It's also the _only_ Isekai I have ever seen where the protagonist bows their head in apology, only for the NPCs to be all, "WTF is this?"
In the other ones, bowing is universal. As a Westerner, I find it jarring.
@@sempersolus5511 To be somewhat fair, universal symbols westerners use show up pretty often in their fantasy media as well so I think it's a pretty normal thing for writers to do in general.
Ascendence of a Bookworm is such a good story and is definitely my favorite Isekai
Same I love ascendance of a bookworm. I also learnt a lot from it too
Isekai is probably the strongest argument when comparing Digimon to Pokemon. Yeah, they have similar concepts of "fight monster with other monster to win" but HOW the characters interact with the setting makes a world of difference (pun intended).
Digimon also does a great job of handling the other world/real world dynamic.
GOD FINALLY A COMMENT ABOUT DIGIMON!!!
In terms of interesting otherworld construction with respect to both straight worldbuilding detail and how the otherworld relates to the mundane world, Digimon Tamers is pretty exceptional, and not just for a kids' show. But it was also the brainchild of Chiaki Konaka, an extremely interesting and inventive writer in general, so that's not really a surprise I guess.
Also, far better character writing!
Look me in the eye and tell me that you could ever see Pokémon tackling the family drama of divorced parents and how it impacts their kids.
@@phastinemoon I'm a nintendo guy but I 100% agree with this
I don't think the disconnect of the heroes wanting to stay in the otherworld is an unsolvable problem, but rather that the vast majority of isekai don't even *try.* There's a lot of potential space to play with the interaction between an otherworld and the mundane world without necessitating the hero returning afterwards. I feel like the *really* unhealthy angle is the way modern culture *vilifies* escapism. Demanding we set aside silly dreams of actually being happy and just accept our place under a corporate boot.
God, agreed. It feels like escapism isn’t allowed in favor of gritty and bleak so often. Like, don’t get me wrong, I love me some darkfics or TLOU games, but also, there isn’t anything wrong with a desire to escape a shitty situations to a fantasy world. Is it really any worse than fantasizing about leaving a shitty situation via a lottery win or attracting the affections of someone with a more realistic power to get you out somehow?
Your comment makes me wonder if there's a story where the hero checks off all the boxes of an otherworld/isekai, but then when the adventure ends, they have to manage their status, their harem, their wealth, and everything else that comes with escapism and power fantasies every day for the rest of their life.
@@FREEK777ful "Yay I'm the king now!"
"Great, here's all these forms to fill out, at least 15 complaints from spoiled brats, several impatient diplomats from countries that range from minor to 'DON'T PISS THEM OFF', and you're also the high-commander of our army"
"shit, I'm the king"
@@FREEK777ful There kinda is? It's called 'How a Realist Hero rebuilt the Kingdom'. Basic plot is the main character got Isekai'd not because he has some fantastic super power, but because of his management skills. The king isn't a good administrator, and *knows* he's not a good administrator, but doesn't really have anyone he trusts to do a better job of it, so summons someone with that ability, and promptly abdicates in favor of the person who clearly can do the job better so the former king can.
His 'super OP power', such as it is, primarily involves being able to animate multiple quills to fill out paperwork faster, at least at first.
I very much agree with Red on this point. But this is my first time reading a response from someone who disagrees, so for what it's worth I really appreciate a different point of view on this trope.
Regarding the escapism of a character staying in the otherworld forever: If their real reward is more the friends they made along the way and they stay there more to be with those people than it doesn't feel as much like pure escapist fantasy to me. A story like that could be rewritten to work in the real world; in real life you can visit another place, meet people you like, and decide to move there, the otherworld just adds fun magical elements to the plot. If the reward the protagonist gets by staying in the otherworld is getting to be hero-king of the world with fame and riches and power, that feels more totally escapist to me. There's no real-world equivalent to that story you're just spicing up with magic, it's something that can only happen with magic.
curently slowly working on a story where the hero gets abducted to another world where high fantasy magic is used like technology and finds it much more enjoyable and peacful then our world despite the on going conflict with the demons who abducted him in the first place only reason he wants to find a way back home is to let his loved ones know he's ok that is until he finds out the earth has been invaded by the same demons who have been causeing trouble in this other world and leads the charge of knights to go back to earth to save the day only to find while its been two years for him it's been five years for everyone else, half of mankind is dead, banished to other dimensions or enslaved, multiple citties and nations destroyed, his younger sister is now the same age as him, his parents are dead, and the humans working with the demons are being lead by his childhood best friend who has now become a mad tyrant. This isnt the earth he left behind this isnt home anymore as the time that was home for him has long since pased not just beacuse of the disaster and changes that have hapened on earth while he was gone but his time in the otherworld has changed and matured him. The earth he returned to isnt his home anymore its the otherworld now as thats where he has more friends and a life now which is why even after saveing earth and opeing travel between the two worlds he chooses to stay in the otherworld as thats where his home is now.
One of my favorite of this genre does something akin to this. The character ends up in the world by DYING, but still spends most of the series yearning to return to earth. Eventually he comes to terms with his own death, and realizes that his family will have to carry on without him. Along with *that* realization is another, that the people he has met in the otherworld need him just as much as his family on earth did.
In the end, the story isn't that he decided to stay in the otherworld because it was better, rather he accepted his place IN the otherworld and devoted his energy to that, rather than getting home.
Edit: By request, the series is the Celestine Chronicles. Be forewarned, its quite lewd, but genuinely well written mythology mash-up fantasy
@@matthewturpin6429
can we get the title, please?
@@matthewturpin6429 seconding the need for the title for this series tbh
@@matthewturpin6429 You going to share that with the class?
I was wondering how long Red would take before saying 'Isekai'.
She took longer than I expected.
"luxurious apartment on student salary" is something that gets me about various Russian classics.
In that main characters are mostly students who are struggling to make ends meet (I mean, some go to murder to get money). But they also have a maid at their house who makes tea and stuff.
Pretty sure this is actually based on reality and not the same situation as Red has mentioned but it still feels weird.
Sounds like the TV show Friends but with a maid (twenty-somethings living in ridiculously large apartments in New York City that would cost an arm and a leg in the real world to rent despite some of them struggling for cash).
@@akl2k7 Yeah, though part of the reason for that is due to the limits of filming technology at the time, they wouldn't have been able to fit a camera, lights and all in a smaller space. Though the main thing is that the capitalist class ignores the plight of workers.
I would love your take on the book version of Howl's moving castle. Spoilers for the book: Howl is actually a Welshman from our world who uses the grounded magical world of the POV character Sophie as an escape. When he takes Sophie to our world we see his sister is literally 2 steps away from declaring him trash and disowning him. He has accomplished more in Sophie's world but he is still a self-proclaimed coward.
I loved that twist! It made the real world feel more magical, seeing it from Sophie’s pov. And Howl is EXACTLY the type of character who would find himself in a magical otherworld and say “screw reality! I have magic powers and a magic house!!!!” And I love him for it
…. Brb, gonna go reread that book
@@AskMia411 I know right! I was so surprised the first time I read through and then I could not believe I didn't see it coming. I also need to reread the book. I see something new every pass through.
Neat, glad I can watch this in my pocket dimension; away from everyone else with floofy the city coyote.
Who's fursona is Floofy?
Is that reference to something? I feel like that's a reference to something
@@abloodcorpse3318 no ones, I just want to be a city coyote and eat babies in a video game while on the lamb. As a coyote, its a reference to one of the best player in the game, the outside.
@@quitkid8727 well, its a reference to pocket dimension and a game called the outside, sorta like an alien game you play. My favorite place is the city as a floofy coyote. Where Its like gta 5 on the lamb. I dream of being the actual floofy. A real doozy. You see he was a poggers player who survived for a long time as a evil coyote under the lamb; creatively deciding places to take a stand. He lasted his whole lifetime and actually 7 years past what he was supposed to die. One of the best pro's in the coyote and city meta. Its better than you think a shocker tool that looks like a dog but you may be more vicious as part of your build. Imo a little under meta that could surprise the bigger humans.
@@skyprior3866you've served to only confuse me more. Well done.
I think while a lot of isekai focuses on “power fantasy,” others used the related idea of your skills being useful or there being a place for you in that world even if it isn’t “look how awesome I am and how much everyone loves me.” This is because as I see more of the genre there are many shows where the protagonist is not the chosen one, but a humble shopkeeper or some other minor figure who finds peace in the calm nature of everyday life. While the power fantasy aspect might be running away from your problems, I also see the other end as a form of therapy, where you are able to slow down and enjoy the simple life with your buds, away from the endless grind of modern corporate society.
Dude, my escapist fantasy as an adult is getting to be a happy nobody doing a peaceful skilled trade in a small city with no violent crime. Bonus points if all my friends and a hot date or two live within walking distance. Real earth and Middle Earth alike are ravaged by wars, and people still swing on you in countries that don't know war. I love me some grimdark, but the real comfort fantasy is escape from everything in the last sentence.
@@CelestialNerd336 My escapist fantasy is living on a peaceful farm in a small rural town with a small collection of livestock and crops to care for, having enough time to make bows and other old weapons. And of course, a close-knit group of friends and family.
Headhunted to another world has the most unrealistic escapist fantasy: A good boss.
Isekai iyashikei is an interesting combination, and as an adult I can definitely see the appeal. Reincarnated into the world of Aria where every dayis calm and beautiful, work is fulfilling without being exhausting, friendships are stable and meaningful, and you don’t have to live in fear of a bad gondola review getting you fired? Yes please.
There's also another similar variant that is kind of a blend between the two, that being situations where you're transported/resurrected into the other world but are only special because of the knowledge you couldn't have gained without having lived in our world. This is admittedly much more rare, and will usually focas on the main character trying to rebuild our world (or something like it) but better this time. A decent example of this, I'd argue, would be Dr. Stone; which is an isekai where the world gets petrified for millions of years, all of Humanities inventions are destroyed by time, and the main characters are all just modern humans who use their scientific understanding to slowly develop a stone age civilization. Admittedly the titular main character has intelligence that borders on being magic, but that's mostly used as an excuse for the writers to come up with interesting inventions which probably took them days to actually research.
The game of Deltarune kinda does this in a very very interesting way.
Because not only do you enter the Dark World, and learn about it in a sense, with Kris and Susie.
But you, as the player, is also technically in Kris and Susie’s world, the entire game is kinda technically a breaking of the 4th wall, as you/we, as the player, takes control of Kris, the character.
Forcing them to go on this journey and do things against their will.
The Snowgrave route in Chapter 2 is a great example of this (I actually haven’t done it so mainly going off of what I’ve read and heard), the other characters comment on how Kris looks and acts after the second fight with Berdly in that route.
And in the normal route, after beating ‘secret’ boss, Spamton Neo, and leaving the basement, Susie stops and actually goes “are we seriously NOT gonna talk about what just happened” and then a little later notices that Kris has goosebumps and asks if they’re ok.
If they player answers Yes, Kris doesn’t say anything, but the others comment on how they look (Kris is clearly NOT ok).
And if the player answers No, then Ralsei will comment and technically ask again as Kris is actually shouting/yelling.
I think that is a really fascinating take on these types of stories.
That hallow feeling at the end of stories where the character gets to stay in the reality where everything is just better for them is all to relatable, but I also find it a little motivating too. It kinda gives me a certain drive to make the reality I live in a little more and more like the reality I find ideal, one step at a time.
This video kinda highlights why I love how the owl house handles Luz wanting to go back home
It starts with her choosing to stay in the demon realm because she had the choice of going back if she needed and knew her mom wouldn’t worry because she was supposed to be away at camp anyways.
Then the season 1 finale happens and the portal is broken. Suddenly the plot is about trying to get back home. She’s starting to get worried about her mom because she was supposed to be back from camp at this point.
And finally Yesterday’s Lie and the episodes after. She gets to see her mom again and explain what’s been happening. Luz sees how her mom’s heart breaks when she realizes that Luz chose to stay there back in season 1. Almost every episode after she talks about how much she wants to see her mom again. “Reaching Out” especially enforces how this is affecting Luz. Even tho she made a flower and sent it off with Amity, it’s not the same.
They manage to establish why Luz stays in the beginning and why she wants to get home so badly after while still keeping it completely believable. She’s only 14, of course she’d want to stay in her escapism world and switch to wanting to see her mom once reality sets in!
Really? To me, right now it seems like Luz would rather stay in the magical world than go back Earth, or at least try to come up with a method where she can somehow live in both worlds
@@floricel_112 A large segment of the fandom is placing our bets on "makes a new portal door and visits regularly". There's a whole doomsday *thing* between now and the possibility of her going home at all, mind, but after that it's probably free game. Besides, she Amity she'd show her around Gravesfield. Gotta make that happen.
2:05: And sometimes they'll do the exact opposite of the exact opposite, which is not the same thing at all! (I'm thinking of reverse isekai like "The Devil is a Part-Timer" or "Enchanted," but we could probably spend all day reversing the premise in one direction or another without using the dame premise twice.)
I'm surprised Red never mentioned Re-zero in this video:
- A protagonist goes to another world because he died
- finds out he can't run from his personal problems by going to a fictional world
- deals with actual mental health issues and sets a realistic reason for why the protagonist doesn't want to go home
In conclusion, I highly recommend this show!!
The real world equivalent to staying in the otherworld forever I can think of would be moving to another state/country you visited for work/studying abroad because you found it happier even if it meant leaving behind family in your hometown. And even when it just represents an escapist fantasy, I can't fault a story for that if it's the logical outcome.
Exactly! It feels more mature and rewarding when the isekai protagonists initially wants to go back to the cozy old life they knew but over the series grows to love the new world and decides to stay there. I completely disagree w/ her.
I partially agree but usually if you move somewhere, you will be able to communicate with your family and friends you've left behind, and see them occasionally. Not so if you are in a whole other world. There are situations where it'd make sense and stuff but the decision to never see any of the people you knew, or any of the previous world ever again is a much heavier decision than moving town.
@@ymous9109 North Korea and South Korea would disagree
@@Ucatty2 that's not the devastating response you think it is. Like I said, there are situations in which staying makes sense, one of which being if your life was bad in your old world. However, I was explaining that it is not an equivalent choice to moving town. It is a decision that some people would make, but it is a very weighty decision
I mean...I feel like if a story makes a bad or unsatisfying decision because it's the logical outcome of the story, it still deserves _some_ fault for making _that_ the logical outcome.
Not necessarily true in this case, but I've seen the Thermian Argument used in much stupider situations.
I think re:zero is an interesting case of "protagonist leaves behind a world they have nothing to care about in" because subaru is one of the people who was reading the stories about power fantasy isekai, and thinks he ends up in one at first. But we see that he actually ends up in hell world. Also, its more than just a frame for the "real story" becuase subaru's experience in the real world actually matters to the story, and has a notable effect on his character
Also there's the tragedy in that it's not until after Subaru is in the other world that he's able to grow and change as a person and reconcile with his parents, but specifically a false version of his parents in a magical trial. And he has to deal with the realization he might never be able to see them again to tell them for real. Re:Zero is really good
The staying there forever aspect can be better used when it changes the characters involved and explores the pain and struggle of never returning home. Re-zero, ascendence of a bookworm and mushoku tensei do this by showing how they had of lot of stuff worth living for but the fact being they can never return or undo those mistakes.
I think one of the most interesting takes on the whole "I have read this story so I know what's gonna happen" is in Beware the Villainess, where the main character ends up in her favourite *whatever the korean equivalent of "shojo" is* novel and... let's just say she changes the story so much that she ends up confronting the personification of the will of the author.
Sometimes it's fun to read/watch the "after story" Isekai. Basically the MC did the whole main plot and now has either returned to the real world, or tries to settle down in the other world. Gives a whole "Now here's the rest of the story" feel
In a sense of karma, I'd like to see an epilogue where the harem lead realizes he still needs to care for his 4+ wives and army of offspring. Yeah, didn't think this through did ya dumb-dumb.
Isekai ojisan
@Prey R There is also a film with this same premise. But i forget.
One good use for this trope I can see is that you don't have the "as you know" problem where you have to explain basic world mechanics to your readers that everyone who grew up in this world should know. I'm not sure I can think of a better way to establish things like that.
You then do fall into another problem which is when your exposition is just straight up infodumping to a character, vs. some sort of show don't tell exposition.
Well, all you need for that kind of exposition is a "fish-out-of-water" type protagonist. Which you, for example, can also get with a protagonist that grew up extremely sheltered or imprisoned. Jarod from the show the Pretender comes to mind for me (yes, I'm old).
@@Rhaifha Or start with the protagonist as a child. They don’t need to stay a child for the whole thing, just long enough to have a parent/grandparent/teacher/mentor sit them down and teach them all about how their world works and what details are gonna be relevant to the situation.
It's one potentially useful device, but if it's just for that it's at best cheap and also comes with the danger of making resorting to straight up infodumps for everything seem much more justifiable even when its still be bad storytelling.
Any extent of fish out of water can give you a fair jumping off point for why other characters may need to explain certain things and exposing in a world in dialogue or otherwise overly explicitly usually is not a good choice.
It's better to use a fair amount of indirect exposition, or incluing/Indirect Exposition spread throughout the story, especially if you have a completely different world to build.
In a book this may be in the narrative (As they entered the city through the new gates Luna caught her first glimpse of the bustling crowds and landing platforms.).
In comics, movies and such you can tell a lot by what things you show in the background, like putting up pictures involving a zeppelin or showing a train station to set the story in a steampunk/early industrial setting.
In just about any medium you have the option of implying things with the dialogue and actions without necessarily coming out and saying it. Things like characters avoiding a certain part of the town, saying that X group could help, bemoaning their issues (people complain about things even when the general problem is known) and so on all can help establish the setting.
Now, it does usually pay off to have characters that are more or less knowledgeable about certain parts of the world (or that have different views on them) to be able to get across things that can be hard to explain otherwise, but it doesn't have to be as extreme as knowing literally nothing. Most of the harder to explain parts are also things that characters may not know without necessarily having to be naive beyond belief, entirely isolated or from another world.
If you're joining a band of rebels, you may need some introduction to how things work, who's in charge and so on, if you're not from the region there may be social things that don't make sense to you, if you're not a mage you may not get why this magical device that V is building is a big deal or why the weather acting in a particular way may be concerning.
What personally would interest me most is seeing the clash of more mundane presumptions.
How religion works, aspects of society, what's real and what isn't (Dragons are totally a thing but if you believe in lizard people you're still crazy), weather there's any kind of identification, getting used to a different money system or a completely different economy (IRL figuring out Canadian or US dollar is hard enough, imagine if things didn't have similar worth in proportion to each other as you'd likely find in any pre-industrial place), different relations to distances or places (both in the "This is 200km away, it takes several days to get there" and the "Ok, let's hop onto a shuttle ship to the moon base" direction), different levels of technology (maybe magic enables comparatively advanced communication tech but guns never really took off?)...
Hell, give me two different magic systems, or one that doesn't quite work the same for the protagonist (without making them OP) and show the differences there.
Those things are a lot more interesting than "UwU I got here, everything is cool and quickly understood, I am super OP and I get a harem!".
One thing I kinda wished they showed more of in the Overlord Anime was the world the main character was from. Because the game Overlord is based on Yggdrasil seems kinda predatory with P2W mechanics and grindy systems. But when we realize the main chracter is from a world so bad that nature and being able to see the sky are no longer possible in the real world as it exists as a dystopian society, it makes the characters reactions to being isekai'd a bit more interesting why does he like the idea of flying to the sky and looking out at the forest and the world, it also makes us sympathetic to why he would put up with a game with systems that constantly exploit his wallet. Turns out the real world is doing that already and he would gladly fork out his life savings for an actual escape from it.
When Centaur World and The Owl House are used as examples, you know it's going to be an interesting video.
Idk if you made the “They seem to be very good friends” meme but that was absolutely hilarious thank you for showing it
I can understand the escapism. Life can be hard for a lot of people, and even if getting out from under the kotatsu or out of the hot pool can sting, at the same time being able to curl yourself up in that warmth for brief periods can be very healing for someone who's surrounded by cold. Just like getting up from a sleep in a perfect bed is hard, and much of the day might be spent wishing to get back into that bed, but having had that good night's sleep did help you to be able to face the day. That said, I would certainly say don't make it an isekai unless you're going to do something with that aspect. If you'd face little change outside exposition simply having the hero be a farm boy who was suddenly granted superpowers by a god, then there's little point having him be from our world in the first place.
I've said it in another reply that I think one of the big issues with isekai specifically is the fact that a lot of it (at least in the various japanese media where you can't go 5 feet these days without running into one) is designed as escapism for a bunch of people who don't want life lessons about how the real world can be good too, but also are the people who NEED to hear that.
@@aquamarinerose5405 That may be a portion of their audience, but I seriously doubt whether it could really be said that it's "designed" for denial. It's fantasy, and yes some people embrace the fantasy like it's real, but not all of them. Just because it's designed to allow some indulgence of those fantasies does not at all mean that it's "designed for people who don't want to accept reality". Not any more than a huge portion of just about all kinds and genres of fiction from everywhere worldwide. Escapism is a big portion of fiction and is true of a great deal of all forms, and one could just as easily say that anything with almost any level of escapism is "designed" for people who won't accept the reality of their own lives or the potential for their own lives to have meaning.
My biggest problem with Soul Land 1 and 2. 2 is especially bad in that regard. It was just a throwaway line that is never mentioned again.
The isekai aspect allows for more projection (and possibly more relatability) onto characters because they're from our world, so they're just like us. They can often be author self inserts as well. I'm not the only one who's fantasised about falling into a magical world, right? The difference is that authors sometimes write and publish those stories, and people eat them up. Myself included, to a degree.
You missed one aspect of this trope. The inversion where the POV character is from the otherworld and is transported to our mundane reality.
Also, one of my favorite subversions of this trope is when the protagonist is transported to the otherworld, uses their outsider perspective to see how dangerous/dysfunctional it is, then decides they're not touching that mess with a 10ft pole and just leaves to start a slice of life adventure.
Can you name some of the ⁿ⁰2 category because it sounds cute af
@@Howdyasdo Beware of Chicken on RoyalRoad. Guy is reincarnated into a sect in a xianxia world, says screw this and leaves to become a farmer.
Only sane response to being dropped in a xianxia world imo
@@AZombieWizard thank you! :)
My favorite of example of this is Code Lyoko. Aelita just wants to have a normal life with her new friends. She lost her family to the project to create XANA and Lyoko, but she's been trapped in there. She only gets to interact with her friends through them coming to her or through computers for a long time. Let's just say I can really identify with Aelita wanting to be able to just live a normal life with those that care about her.
The current sets of Isekai are starting to take up premises that remind us that just having even the least combat effective traits and being isekai'd would still be pretty cool. Were you an accountant? Welcome to the fantasy world that desperately needs number crunchers so the kingdom doesn't implode.
I want to see an isekai where we see the aftermath of another character staying in the other world. What would happen if the brother of a person who was isekai'd found him and was very angry because their family missed him or suffered or something.
Maybe they can even make it so that the mc sides against their OP brother in this senario and it would be about the mc trying to get powerful enough to defeat this traditional op isekai hero.
How A Realistic Hero Rebuilt the Kingdom is a great example of this.
To note a very good Otherworld story, I want to mention "The Never-ending Story", but specifically the book there-of. If you know the classic 80s movie, that is only the first half of the story and the second half involves Bastian, the kid reading the book, going on an adventure through Fantasia. However the drive slowly pushing him to wanting to go home is the mechanic of him making wishes, but they have to be deep desires, thus they end up being important to him personally. However the second half of that is for each wish granted, he loses a related memory - like one of his first wishes changes his physical form, thus he forgets that he ever looked like the somewhat dumpy kid he really was.
It ends up a journey of self-understanding that leads him to his way home, and his truest friends in Fantasia helping him find his way because they know practically his whole story when he has forgotten it.
TL;DR, read the book of "The Never-Ending Story". It is deep, thoughtful and massively more than the movies were (yes, the second movie was loosely based on the third quarter of the book. I however deny that any other movies ever happened).
Fantasia, yes! I thought the movie was fun when I was a kid, but discovering the book years afterwards was mind blowing.
@@M0ssP1glet Word. I stumbled across the book by literal accident, as I was at a church kids' summer camp and someone left their copy sitting around. I later bought a copy when the second movie came out. That book has been lost along the way, I wouldn't mind a new copy.
"It's almost like... I- going swimming in the winter. The water is heated and the experience is pleasant as long as your in it, but the moment you leave it, reality becomes a lot more unbearable."
Somebody isn't a Canadian.
I bet she gets Spring, too...
@@chrisforsyth8323 What a truly lovely April it has been.
@@medi2649 The roads are certainly suffering for it. Going from +15-19 to below 0 every other day has turned many of them into pothole-palooza.
@@medi2649 -- 7th winter is always great for pictures of fresh snow!
@@russellbrown6888 I wish you safety and unbothersome temperature shifts half-brothers. We will get through this.
It feels weird hearing this music and not hearing the phrase "A LOVE TRIANGLE!" associated with it.
TRUE
And a weirdly charismatic bartender from the west narrating everything
Some spoilers for Amphibia, but I loved what they did with the seasons where you had Anne going to the semi-magical otherworld of Amphibia, then _inverting the trope_ by having the Plantars, the talking frogs, wind up on Earth and that becomes THEIR weird, alien otherworld. Anne is taught by the Plantars how to survive in Amphibia, then she teaches them how to survive on Earth.
I love this trope. For me, the Wayward Children series is a great series that portrays otherworlds as having a will of its own. They pick the children they want to keep and throw out the children when they aren't needed or wanted anymore.
So you have kids that were turned into heroes/villains by their adventures and are now desperately trying to find their way back to their otherworlds. Kinda heartbreaking since they are broken tools by their otherworlds.
The Unbelievable Gwenpool is probably my favorite 'character transported into a magical otherworld' story. It sounds like such an awful premise at first glance but the actual comic is so sincere, so creative, so smart about the ways it challenges and undercuts the power fantasy the protagonist thinks she's been put into, and just so consistently surprising and delightful in how it uses the medium of comics and the particular ways western superhero comics function as an industry and even the specifics of how Marvel Comics operates as a business as a meaningful, impactful part of its story. It's an absolute treat and I wish Gwen still existed.
The thing with "Over the garden wall" is that that world exists and isn't just a dream its more like purgatorio. So it kinda fits both dream and fantastical grounded
She said they didn’t have to be non real
They just had to feel dreamlike and be less rigidly defined
Whatever the unknown was, it couldn’t be 100% real and it couldn’t have been 100% imaginary
It was purgatory, or a dream, or something
And it happened
8:43 Wait a minute, bullet #2, are you telling me *Superman is an isekai protagonist?* He was transported to another world where he was super powerful by that world's standards.
Well the world doesn't constantly give him random women so probably not.
I'd argue that no, because there be wasn't any previous word familiar to him (too young for that).
Ostensibly yes, however the audience is unable to project themselves onto Superman for obvious reasons, and Superman himself doesn't derive anything from being from another world other than his powers. He fits the in-narrative role closely, however his metanarrative role is completely different.
that's an interesting question, does a different planet count as another world? sure, there's physical distance separating the two, but they're still in the same universe
@@seven-cats-3 isekai can be done on the same planet with time travel, no reason why another planet wouldn't count.
I really like the sub-genre of this particular trope, namely the Reverse-Isekai, where character from the Otherworld end up stuck in the Familiar World (See Devil is a Part-timer)
And then Dark Isekai walks in and reminds you of the existential dread. Fucking Rezero and Tanya.
@@catboyvideoessays1480 Ha, as if I need reminded. Existential dread is my default state lol
100% agree on the "The world you see for 95% of the story is fake" is such a letdown and depressing trope
Yeah. That's another reason why I love Log Horizon, because you only see glimpses. The first episode starts off with the main character already in the video game world, along with every other player that was logged in when the new expansion dropped, and no one has any idea what's going on.
Sometimes there's flashbacks, mostly of people sitting in front of the PC and playing the game, and when a character dies, they find themselves in a grayscale version of the real world until they are ready to go back and try again.
The NPCs are mostly considered flat and boring by the players, until they slowly realize that those people have lives, hopes, dreams, and so on. Heck, one guy even lives with an NPC, and she is the man in the house, even though he could kill her 100 times over before she dealt 1hp, and he's immortal.
Dude has a short temper, is violent, and completely out of her league, and yet she has the balls to boss him around. It's amazing.
It's really not too different from the infamous "it was all a dream" endings when you phrase it that way.
@@Stratelier "It was all a dream" mostly falls under this category with the exception of the cases where the dream is somewhat real, like Alice in Wonderland
@@Maxisamo1 alternatively where the "it was all a dream" is used as a deus ex machina to save the characters because things were ending so badly, them being told at the end "it was only a bad nightmare. but it is all right. everything is fine now" is a happy ending (see Grant Morrison's Animal Man run's final arc, or a more bittersweet that still keeps the story going in Young Justice S1 episode failsafe)
"We accept the fact that there may be other worlds out in space, but might there not be other worlds here? Other worlds, in other dimensions, coexistent with this? If there are other worlds parallel to ours, are all the doors closed? Or does one, here or there, stand ajar?”
― Louis L'Amour, The Haunted Mesa
"Duh. Books."
― Me, My Recliner
When you live in a society with extremely high pressure. There's really no “healthy” way out. Unless you decide to cut ties with the people around you who have that common value, 99% of your family and friends. Or straight-up immigrate, something most people are not able to do. Fans of iseka 穿越文 know it's not healthy, but what can they do otherwise? The rise of this genre is not a cause or a process. It's a result. When you have your middle school and high school years spent with a schedule of studying from 7am to 10 pm, only half a day off each week. Only Uni lets you relax a bit, then back to one day off a week, and 12 hours of work each workday you'll know. I know this video is mostly consumed by English/western audience, and what red said is not wrong in that context, but those descriptions are really not fair used in Asia Asian context
She's not talking about "a way out", it's about coping mechanisms and learning to deal with the real world instead of avoiding it. Isekais are just a reflection on why Japan is like this, how culturally they don't confront the forces that lead them to unhealthy lifestyles, they either just conform or check out of reality wholesale, that's what happens in a conservative country and it will be that way until they grow a backbone as a society
I dont think what youre saying is exclusive to an Asian society, but its as you say a result of oppressive modern life (capitalism especially). I dont think this video is making any judgement on people for enjoying this kind of fantasy, but more commentary on whether writing that kind of story is less meaningful/interesting than one with some kind of ‘lesson’. That lesson doesn’t have to be ‘dont escape from reality its bad’ kind of takeaway (i find those almost as uninteresting), but it would be a better story if it explored the mentality of the characters and why they dont want to go back, if they can learn to cope with reality or view it differently, or take lessons they learned and apply it to reality to have a better life. The found family trope is especially good for this. Books were always an escape for me as a kid, and i needed that escape, but i always loved books that taught me important truths about life, people, philosophy. They helped far more than pure escapist fantasy.
that's a very interesting point! I tend to find isekai protagonists bland and a little sexist most of the time, and the worlds not well fleshed-out, but I can see how escapism of that sort might be desired by people in that position.
A symptom of society, so to speak.
It actually does make a lot of sense when viewed in the context of Japanese/Asian society.
It's still a little sad, though. Perhaps there are ways to make it "healthier," while still being enjoyable. I liked what Red said about combining elements of both worlds to get a more wholesome story experience. I think that the game Ni no Kuni did this well. You have to do things in both the mundane and magical worlds to progress the story and reach the end goal to save the protagonist's mother. From what I've seen it also takes the approach of "keeping the portal open."
Different cultures will have variants on the isekai too. Korean comics have a lot more "inverted isekai" than actual "isekai". Instead of a character getting pulled into a fictional world, the fantasy comes to the *actual* world from outer space, some other dimension, etc. And then everyone in the world all has to learn to cope with the new " game mechanics" of how the world now works together. And hopefully figure out who the invader is so they can make them leave Earth alone. Instead of *escaping* the current culture, something else invades and upends the culture in a major way which forces everyone to adjust to it. Examples include Solo Leveling, The Advanced Player of the Tutorial Tower, Return to Player, The Gamer, Omniscient Reader, etc.
Read "The Phantom Tollbooth" for a magical other world story with a combination of game/story rules AND fantastical world with no rules. Where everything is literal from keeping your perspective, to eating your words.
Also had a lovely answer to the “dull reality vs fantastical otherworld” dilemma: the journey through the otherworld gave the MC the perspective to appreciate how much interesting stuff there is in the regular world
Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time…
@@russellmarch4983 Underrated book IMO
@@MomsAgainstCatboys yeah. I remember enjoying it, and the wordplay commands all my respect.
I loved that book
One of the stories I really like that has a good balance of "otherworld" to "familiar world" is Omnicient Reader's Viewpoint (ORV or just Omincient Reader.) It's a web novel/webtoon where the fantasy world the main character read about in a web novel is suddenly super imposed onto reality with the characters and plot of the story he had read suddenly show up and make everything go to hell. As the only person who read all the way to the end of the story he knows how to change the future, but also has to tango with otherwordly forces, normal real world trauma, and managing other normal people messing with the story as he knew it from the novel.
Always fun to see the reverse: Magical otherworldly character gets sent/trapped in the familiar world, and doesn't understand why they can't just magic their way out of gridlocked traffic.
I only really enjoy this storyline if the transmigrator still has their magic powers. Otherwise it quickly goes into the nightmare of "how society treats the mentally ill".
@@wrenreed9310 it's played for laughs in Enchanted. She still has the power to control animals with her song, but otherwise Patrick Dempsey is like "I'm stuck with this crazy chick now..."
Smurfs movie
Who else is thinking Devil is a part timer?
My favorite variation on this trope is the video game "Final Fantasy Tactics Advance". Four kids fall into the otherworld, and the POV character can't go home until he convinces his three friends that their crappy real world lives are worth more than the endless fantasy world.
there is a game called "fallen london" in this game, you are someone entering a magical underworld. basically, you are the hero, you have zero knowledge of the world, and you need to explore it. the entire otherworld concept is perfect for video games, interactive media, because the best part about otherworlds is the exploration, and in video games, you are the explorer, the outsider, someone who comes from another world, to the game's world.
Unlondon and separately, The Black Sea
I rember reading a novel series as a child, set under London I think, in a labyrinthine system of tunnels with strange, possibly protohuman inhabitants. Can't for the life of me remember what it was called, but the protagonist went in following the footsteps of their researcher father, I believe.
Sounds like it was based on Neil Gaiman's "Neverwhere."
Undertale
@@50mt that sounds like the mortal engines prequels, Fever Crumb specifically
I just rewatched "The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe" this past Sunday, so this trope talk was timely.
Also, I'm glad to get a definition of Isekai... I keep running into and forgetting to look up what it means.
I, on the other hand, was recently reminded of Silent Hill, so I was thinking of something very different going into this video. XD
13:49 Wait, this is an actual thing? I never had this problem. If the MC decides to stay in the alternate world because it makes him/her happy then I'm happy for them, I never thought to myself "oh geeze they get a happy ending and I'm stuck in sucky reality". They just decided to move. Now I've wished for some things in fiction to be real but I'm not jealous of the hero getting a happy ending. I just want to be entertained. :\
same lol
Same here.
Red has some odd quirks in her likes and dislikes.
I get this feeling. Life in the real world is so mundane and has no magic. Reading/ watching portal fantasies is a bittersweet experience because the protagonist finds a new home and adventure; I have to return to the daily grind, with the knowledge that there is no real escape.
@@erinbond5106 I think the world we live in can be wonderful and at times it is. Its people with too much power that make it unbearable at times. Gotta remove the abusers from power.
One of the many reasons I love The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System is that the POV character is so interesting that there is a lot of fanfiction exploring what could have happened if he didn't transmigrate in the first place.
I wonder: Would Pan's Labyrinth count as one of these? Technically, it might count as an "inverted" version of it: After all, if we take the story at face value, Ofelia originally came from the "Otherworld", and the story is about her journey to return there. From a certain point of view, within the fictional narrative, our world would be the *actual* "otherworld", there.
That story actually fits more into the 'possibly a dream' category.
Or it might not fit at all into the "magical otherworlds" theme because it's not a work of fantasy but magical realism (there is always a plausible explanation for any unnatural events, but the story never denies the possibility either. It never confirms if what happened belongs to the natural or the fantastic, leaving both interpretations open as possible truths).
@@Katwind IDK if it helps any, but Guillermo del Toro actually DID confirm all the magical stuff in the movie was real.
So two comments I want to make.
1. I feel that the "why does this character have to be from our world" problem on top of the projection aspect I feel a major part of it that wasn't mentioned as well is exposition and explanation, as having the character come from our world gives a really easy reason to have all the lore of the world explained to the character and in turn the audience without interrupting the flow. Writing exposition that believably flows into the story without interrupting the pace is hard and an isekai-ed protagonist gives an out to that.
2. The comment about the disconnect of the character getting to continue living in the fantasy world while we the reader cannot also makes me think that that is the reason so many isekai series have troubles ending or even lack a clear ending point to begin with. They will often have a big bad or goal but the road to that goal is often unclear and often not the focus as well. As the instant the adventure ends we have to stop projection ourselves into the world and imagining the kind of adventures we could do in it.
It makes sense especially in the owl house I'm not going to go into spoilers on something that does happen but it does actually make sense because of parallels. Another one that makes sense is the one where the main character is just playing a video game like . hack gu because you don't get the problem of I want to stay in this fictional world because the fictional world is literally just a video game the main characters are playing so you don't not get that problem it's also just a very good jrpg in general. Another good one that is infinity train you have to wash the show to find out because if I tell you it would kind of spoil a plot twist with the numbers going to say is the train is abducting multiple people to go on to it and leave it.
14:40 well, yes.
but when one feels hollow already, escaping it for a short while can be what helps one to live. chasing the next "high" can become a goal untill a alternative is found. its of course not healthy, but if one is starving a bit of food becomes hard to resist. it might make the hunger worse later, but it might keep one alive a little bit longer. ^^
(sorry if this is dark, but escapism has saved me from myself in my darkest times and is helping me cope when depression becomes too much. i am getting help and am slowly getting better.)
My favourite version of this trope is the Coraline style, where the villain specifically preys on people looking for an escape from their real world, and the other world seems perfect at first but slowly becomes more and more hostile. It kinda circumvents the idea that you need to escape your life to be happy