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Isekai rule
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2023
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Isekai is "normal fantasy setting" but you must explain everything to the MC, which is useful because you had to find a way to explain that shit to the audience anyway.
Yeah Tolkien should’ve made Lord of the Rings an Isekai because I didn’t understand the fantasy and I want everything in the world of Middle Earth hamfistedly explained to me.
Isekais are just lazy writing. Even for manga which are often already relying too much on exposition.
Portal fantasies aren't exactly new.
The Chronicles of Narnia, Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz are classics that aren't generally considered lazy.
Isekai tend towards the lazy, self-insert escapist portion of portal fantasy, sure. Most don't have great writing. But keep Sturgeons law in mind - every genre has a few gems in a sea of turds.
Tolkien kinda has something like that in story with the shire being fairly disconnected from the outside world. It still allows for some exposition, but also fits much better into the themes and flow of the story.
There was an original framing story about an Anglo Saxon sailor who finds the straight road and ends up in Valinor.
That's true, other writers use different methods to explain things to the audience, therefore this entire subgenre is just lazy for not doing it the same way
That's just being lazy. Just incorporate all that into the story organically, like everyone else has to.
Frieren is currently doing this perfectly
My favorite example of this is Redline. There's exposition, but it's basically all in the form of news broadcasts about the racers.
Redline is wonderful.
How is explaining things to a character that doesn't know them inorganic? If anything that's a lot more natural than characters just going out of the way to explain things everyone in the universe already knows. It's just another way of letting the audience know what's up, it's not horrible and evil and lazy just bc some anime you don't like do it
Or, and hear me out on this, you could not rely on infodumping and sprinkle your worldbuilding into the background. Y'know, make the world feel like an actual lived in setting by showing and not telling.
If an isekai isn't also doing that already that's just the writers being lazy. I haven't watched a lot of isekai, but as a plot device it's just a more escapist flavor of outsider character, something used in lots of speculative fiction as an excuse to explain major events or broad strokes of worldbuilding.
Maybe isekai is just really bad for replacing more interesting world building with exposition or just having really shallow worlds, that seems accurate from what little I've seen and heard. I just don't think clueless outsider characters are a bad storytelling device when used in tandem with environmental storytelling and other less expository world building techniques. Obv showing is a lot better than telling for 99% of situations, but in settings or stories that need some exposition I think explaining stuff to an ignorant character is far from the worst way to do it. Though isekai and similar stuff is usually too escapist for me, and I prefer most stuff just being in its own setting without those kinds of strings attached
Isekai is "normal fantasy setting", but it has RPG babble all over the place, and it's the favorite game of the MC.
plus the MC's internal monologue can keep relating outsider fantasy concepts in fun 'downhome' kind of ways. Fireball is just like a truck! or something.
If a protagonist isn't affected by what they left behind, the isekai is failing its genre. That's why Moshuko Tensei (Jobless Reincarnation) is one of the best isekai. Not because the MC is likeable, but because he is haunted by what he left behind and is influenced by the personality he formed in his "home world"
That is absolutely correct. It allows you to take a lot of the exposition the narrator normally has to do in order to explain things to the reader and integrate it in dialogue/narrative itself, and the protagonist doesn’t have to be a child/amnesiac/etc to ask obvious questions.
Well in an isekai hentai they explain jack shit why the MC needs to cum in all those women. Just that they are obsessed and he "frees" them.