my pet theory about isekai is its the eastern counterpart to the Western apocalypse fetish. i think they are the same genre; in the sense they both are born from a frustration with the status quo and a deep desire to wipe the slate clean and exist in a world where the rules make sense

It’s not anime, but one twist I enjoyed on the Isekai trope was The Owl House. The protagonist comes into the fantasy world thinking they’re going to be the Chosen One, but quickly discovers that not only are they not, by the standards of the fantasy world they’re functionally disabled. So in overcoming the “disability,” the fantasy world acts as a metaphor for growing up and out of childish mentalities, whereas most isekai wallow in childish mentalities.

So teenagers can self-insert

Stories where the characters came back from the isekai world and had their powers with them

Matrix revolutions

I have just now had a thought that the Standard Isekai Setting allows people to write in what is de facto fanfiction-like alternate universes of the same setting, with many of the same benefits. The hard work of world-building is all done for you! The Standard Isekai Setting has an adventurer's guild where people fight monsters for money and there's a demon lord out there somewhere and there are character classes and sometimes it's a video game etc etc (all of which seems vaguely inspired by Dragon Quest to my western eyes), which allows authors to use it as a shorthand and then maybe they add twists to their ~~AU~~ original isekai story. Perhaps the main character is a vending machine, or is a sword, or has a cell phone.

Like with fanfiction, readers like the original work and so seek out variations of that work. But in this case, the setting of the SIS, rather than any particular story, is the "original work".

I also think that the SIS lends itself well to clickbait titles, which IIRC are very important on that one website where everyone posts their isekai webnovels. If you see the title "Reincarnated In Another World To End Catgirl Slavery", you know what you're going to get.

It seems one allure of isekai is that the worldbuilding is relatively easier to write and that it has RPG mechanics I guess. Plus I'm living a reverse isekai right now because I'm a saiyan living the life of a........ Very strange and disturbed individual on a backwater ass planet

They're softcore pornographic slop, and everybody who enjoys them knows they're slop but likes them because of the softcore pornography.

The same way that pornography mainly has faceless men, disembodied arms and penises, isekai has the most generic dark-haired Japanese NEET main characters because those are the characters that the primary audience of isekais will most easily relate to.

And the quality of the medium can be similarly analogized. Some porn, rarely, becomes popular because of the quality of the cinematography, or the quality of the narrative, and there are certainly people in porn since it's inception who want more art in pornography; but more important to the success of a work of pornography is the attractiveness of the actresses, or the absurdity of the premise, or the depravity of the acts. The same could be said for an isekai anime.

A snort owl got reincarnated as a sex arse in Britain during the great sex arse shortage of 2020.

Reincarnated as a sword is good because killing slave owners and the vending machine one is also good otherwise slop genre. I have a soft spot for sword art online only because its the first anime I watched and the first bit is fine if a bit oddly paced

Overlord for example would not have been affected if he was just some lich who woke up a thousand/hundred years later.

I would go beyond and say that Overlord fails to benefit from being Isekai the same way Konosuba does because its story is unconcerned with being an Isekai. The start of Overlord sort of hints at the notion that the main character was left behind by his online friends and that all his NPC companions/slaves remind him of those friends but I don't think that matters past episode 2. Meanwhile Konosuba is a genre deconstruction so it actually does care about making fun of all the stupid things you find in the wider genre, ironically making it one of the few Isekais that care about being an Isekai.

Grimgar didn't have anything close to a good production but its story at least was about how the protagonists were normal, regular people who needed to learn how to become killers in a world driven by MMO logic. Turns out the low level monsters they need to kill for money don't wanna die. So they eat a lot of shit for half the show and then keep eating shit after. It also probably helps that despite being driven by MMO economics (kill monsters to get a payday), the show does have stakes as death is a possibility at least.

Also in keeping with not utilizing one's premise, its soooooooooooooooooooooo boring to have yet another show that uses videogame logic and sticks a videogame UI onto the protagonist's eyesight only to not use any of it storywise. The one exception I can think of was Log Horizon as it is a story about what players would do given that they are not just trapped in a videogame world - they are used to theme park MMO kinds of socialization. Turns out that when you can respawn murder is not that big of a problem for a budding society of Player Characters. But when some people are level 10 and others are level 100 you kinda have to watch out for slavery. That's inherently interesting.

Isekai isn't bad. Spirited Away is Isekai. Power Fantasies aren't inherently bad either. The problem is how SAO christened Isekai into a haven for mass produced nonsense.

i don't remember watching much anime that actually acknowledges the isekai as anything more than the reason the main character is overpowered (either by previous life knowledge or by a gift of some entity at the moment of the transition). they could be the standard fantasy setting with a god giving them some blessing and stories would work exactly the same, since the point of them is usually the power fantasy. it's just currentls the best selling setting for light novels (where most of the isekai stories come from) so writers and publishers are pushed to create more stories where most of the time the isekai topic is completely ignored. before this, the magic school was the standard setting and there were many animes like that

there are many "transported to other world" (pre isekai as a common genre) stories that are interesting to watch where the setting actually drives the story and having the caracter knowing nothing of the world is the interesting part. i cannot remember a single one that is recent so they are usually older works that have different problems (the most comon one is the "chosen one" trope).

Only one that was remotely decent was the John Brown one.

I just don't find a lot of the worlds that interesting tbh, I feel fan works can explore the settings of series that I love more anyway even if it does end up more tropey and married to the original plot. Have heard of some good ones like ascension of a book work and I am a fan of my next life as a villainess

The generic ones are just formulaic escapist-fantasy genre-writing that's oversaturated because "what if you could just not be dealing with all the bullshit of this broken, dying world anymore, and also you get a free harem or something idk" is as comforting a slop trough to disaffected young men today as "what if you could be a big strong manly adventurer guy and get exotic damsels in distress as special good boy prizes" was with pulp adventure or sword and sorcery novels in the early-mid 20th century. You could probably toss in other formulaic genre slop like the Noir genre too.

Some of them actually do something interesting with it, though, and I've noticed an increasingly common gag in normal fantasy series of throwing in an isekaid character who's not in the main cast. Like A Wild Last Boss Appeared! is formulaic genre slop, but also actually makes the way the world isn't just a generic fantasy world but specifically a generic fantasy world written as a backdrop for a shitty MMO that's also been heavily influenced by officially recognized fanfics from its players a meaningful point, with the protagonist literally stepping into the shoes of a fictional character he created and wrote but who also had this entire separate existence full of all the little details the game couldn't provide or that would had to be there for the character's story to make sense. It basically ends up as "what if Overlord was actually well written and had good worldbuilding" while still being slop with mistakes and plot holes that the author points out in the volume notes.

Animes like SAO (which I didn't find interesting beyond the first story) make the other world an entirely false world and never let you forget the characters are real people who can actually die in the real world (sort of an anti-isekai genre).

I can't believe I'm saying this, but the Alicization seasons are actually the best that mainline SAO ever was. I mean they're still gross and even more full of the other kind of SA than before, but the storyline of literal artificial human souls growing and developing within their own artificial world and how it handled the fact that in the shitty fantasy world some scientists built they used the same artificial literal human souls to power the designated ontologically evil antagonist races (tl;dr: they were also people and had an innate bias towards wanting peace and coexistence instead of eternal apocalyptic warfare, and had to be forced into that role through violence) was actually pretty good. The only genuinely ontologically evil characters in the seasons are American PMCs working for the CIA. And the best part is Kirito is either depowered or in a coma for almost the whole thing.

Still problematic slop though.

The best isekai me will always be.hack sign, although I haven't watched or played all of it, and it's kind of not like a traditional isekai except for one person. It seems like most peoples first isekai of that type seems to be sword art online, which I do not like. I guess I don't mind the video game aspect as long as it's done well and has a good emotional depth and storytelling. After all, there are other animes that are video game-like but are not isekai.

I read who made me a princess this year,

but yes, I agree with you. I also don't think that just plainly being a fantasy would necessarily fix everything that's wrong with reactionary anime content, or Mary Sue problems/bad writing.

Is My Little Pony: Equestria Girls an isekai or a reverse isekai?

I generally had no interest in that category so I never really watched anything from it, but one day recently I figured wth I'll put on something new that I don't particularly care about to have in the background while I'm working on something else and I've ended up really enjoying the "reincarnated as a slime" series so far lol I think it kinda fits the show well that this slime has knowledge it otherwise wouldn't have since it's kind of "human." I guess it could still work as "I'm an intelligent slime."

The Korean comics I like that're also isekai raised the bar so high for me that it's been impossible for me to go back to reading any Japanese comics. Like most of it goes back to Korean comics being not (as) freaking pedophilic or sexual to the point of competing with the storyline, but I find that Korean isekai style stories tend to be more varied and vibrant with their hooks and story plots in how they integrate the whole "normie in another world" bit.

Like I'll hoot about my fav again, 'The Greatest Estate Developer' an isekai about some Korean dude that's near the bottom rung of society and likely to work himself into an early grave get plopped in another world that's exactly like his favorite fantasy webnovel into the body of the son of some countryside noble. But instead of being some lustrous aristocratic blue-blooded elite that's waited on hand-and-foot or some sort of ubermensch power trip of a character, the body the Korean dude took over is a normal fucking aristocrat, as in a shitty person that terrorizes the people while constantly engaging in excessive hedonism. His powers? A sort of gaming UI system screen pop up that shit talks him and the body he's inhabiting. What does he do with the fact he's isekaid and he's a fuckin normie? Nope, no slave buying, no fancy fucking wowie wowza chemistry to make guns, nah dude gets a fucking shovel and makes an ondol (house with heated floor) for the innkeeper whos inn his body's previous owner trashed before he isekaid there.

His entire story is about him busting his ass to improve the material lives of the people regardless of where they're from or what they are. It's just a good story.

Hell even the more cheesy basic-ass isekai slop stories like the comics "I Shall Live As a Prince" or "The Novel’s Extra" are refreshing in comparison to the many of the isekais that're considered top quality on the Japanese side.

Amphibia does more with the isekai genera than anything else I've seen. There's a Gamer protagonist who's nerd-er-y makes her the special most bestest at everything and a political attaché to the king. But she's not the main character. Instead, it follows her looser friend who winds up in living with a bunch of farmers in the boonies.