Revolutionary heroes ranging from John Brown to Kim Il-Sung are isekai'd to a fantasy world that parodies shows like 'the rising of the shield hero' to break the chains of slavery in all forms once more and liberate the fantasy workers and the peasants from the yoke of feudal oppression while hunting down so-called "heroes" summoned by the feudal lords who intend to use them as tools to preserve their power and the economic base of their feudalistic slave economy.
Show me Stalin riding a chocobo or some shit leading a calvary charge against slaver caravans!
Show me Marx, Engels, and Lenin working together in the cities inspiring the proto-proletariate to take up arms against the feudal robber-barons and their land-leechs that bleed them dry
Show me Mao, Tito, and bonus character Jan Žižka, on a rural bro-venture with the three in a competitive rivalry to see who can organize the greatest peasant rebellion between the three!
That concept sounds so good. But then, I do absolutely love "modern socialist winds up in medieval fantasy world, quickly becomes so disgusted (s)he must apply dialectical materialism and drag this place kicking and screaming into a form of communism, 1917 style, after all, tsarist Russia wasn't an industrialized nation either" as a subgenre - I don't like isekai as it usually goes, I do like this variation of it - and I also like less explicitly isekai style dropping a modern communist into a decidedly apolitical or liberal hegemony universe in order to lead a revolution, especially when they didn't set out to do so, and they and the local party's attitude to it is "we want a revolution the way a desperate woman wants an abortion, or the way you want to gnaw your leg off when you've been caught in a bear trap" - the whole "no one wants to need a revolution" trope.
You might like the John Brown Isekai - it's not explicitly communist, he's very much written In Character and less as a revolutionary figure and very explicitly as a Christian acting out of religious conviction against slavery, and an early American who believes in the American style of democracy, but a student of historical communist tactics and governance practice might see some parallels in the military tactics and the very early council systems when they've got less than a hundred people. And, y'know, even a bourgeois revolution is a good thing in a feudal society if it ends slavery and brings some level of democracy. As much as I like stories that take that setting and skip straight to the proletarian revolution. Like the Bolsheviks actually did in our timeline.
Mark Twain was so close with A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Tbf, it is hard to do the whole "someone from modern Anglosphere nation dropped into King Arthur's court" thing and also have that person believably be a well educated communist party cadre. But I'd love to read such a thing.
might do better with a Bill Haywood type
True, that would work and I'd love to read it.
Glad someone here mentioned the John Brown Isekai.
Do you have any recs for that 'modern socialist in a fantasy world' subgenre? Closest I know of is probably Otherworldly Anarchist.
Yeah, it's one of my favourites. Not really socialist, but it is a revolution story, and it's a damn sight better than the genre usually is.
Unfortunately I don't, most of the ones I've found are either unfinished and not super promising, very specific to its source material and requires previous knowledge of that existing universe, or... obviously written by someone who is not a socialist and is making fun of the Soviet Union. I'll go through my history and bookmarks on my favourite sites when I have some time and see if there's anything I'd actually recommend to my fellow tankies in there, though.
I love slop webnovels, gimme some even if it's trash.
One that I've been reading is From Londoner To Lord, which bills itself as a modern engineer fixing an extremely low fantasy medieval world. It never actually mentions the big scary c word, but all the most impactful things he does are basically what immediately post revolutionary communist governments reforming agrarian societies do. Abolishing slavery, arming women, doing land reform, introducing universal child education and an adult literacy program, building public housing and starting public food distribution.
I think the best story that sounds like what you're describing is the historical fiction book "Mediterranean Hegemon of Ancient Greece" by Chen Rui. Take a Chinese Civil servant - who's probably a party cadre - who's an ancient history nerd and throw him in the body of a random Greek mercenary that died during the campaign of the ten thousand under Cyrus the Younger, and see what kind of hijinks he gets up to.
Real slow burn, the writer doesn't show too much Chinese chauvinism beyond asserting the Greek were too backwards to think of making sausages as a means of rational preservation. Beyond that the writer introduced minor technological or organizational improvements that wouldn't look too out of place from the time period instead of using his modern knowledge to drop things like gunpowder, steel, or the steam engine to try and rapidly modernize the environment he found himself in. The book primarily focuses on matters of war and governorship with minor focuses on diplomacy and religion and overall when I read it I was quite enthralled by it.
Mmm. Sounds really good.
I'm reminded of "Blue Man" by Lazar Lagin, where a Soviet student from 1959 isekaied into 1894 and participates in budding revolutionary movement. I don't know, if it was translated into English.