Isekai

When all is said and done no one will throw the first stone.

This page is in need of cleanup. Srsly. It's a fucking mess.

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This article is about something that is considered by the overpowering majority of /tg/ to be fail. Expect huge amounts of derp and rage, punctuated by /tg/ extracting humor from it.

"Hey guys, today I wanted to talk about the newest, hottest anime to come out this season. All right, get this: It's about a completely normal shut-in Otaku with a very specific skill set that makes him useless in the real world, who is suddenly transported to a fantasy world kinda similar to any JRPG you've ever seen where he suddenly becomes the hottest shit, and he has two jobs: Messing up any poor soul who looks at him the wrong way and getting some 2D bitches. Wait, doesn't this sound oddly familiar?"

– Gigguk, "Isekai: The Genre that Took Over Anime"

Proof that Japan has no publishing standards or quality control (well, no more so than any aggressively market-driven capitalist system). Isekai is a Japanese word assimilated into the /tg/ lexicon from the weeaboo at /a/ and /jp/. Literally meaning "another world" or "parallel world", it refers to a genre in which the main characters are from "our" world and taken to a foreign world resembling some form of fantasy game, where they proceed to become adventurers. Usually, plot reasons prevent them from heading home until something is taken care of—typically whatever big bad evil guy is threatening everything—but sometimes they're stuck there forever and have to adapt as best they can. Methods of transportation are vast and varied, including but not limited to: stumbling into a portal, activating a magical McGuffin, getting run over by Truck-kun and reincarnated (Tensei in weeb, a genre isekai ate), being summoned by the denizens of the world, or the ever-popular getting your brain downloaded into your favorite MMORPG.

The term (and to a lesser extent the genre) has been kicking around the weeaboosphere for a while, but around 2015 publishers started flooding the market with insufferably awful series (with insufferably long titles) that sell both in Japan and internationally like hotcakes, no matter how bland and generic they get. This once again proves that no matter which side of the planet you're on, otaku are autistic retards with no taste. As of 2018 this seems to be tapering off: Kadokawa has banned isekai stories from their light novel competitions, fewer and fewer isekai light novels get adapted into anime each season, and parodies are becoming more and more common, making it only a matter of time before the genre hits "even the parodies are stale" levels of played out. There are also deconstructive stories being written about the genre-- Re:Zero is a particularly notable example where the main character actually has a big self-aware rant about what a loser he is. Oh, and Russia has banned some isekai outright over heretical takes on reincarnation.

However, as of 2023, the genre is still in full swing, though it isn't AS dominant as it once was. There are even some RPG books being published that use the trope as a central theme, most notably the Konosuba TTRPG.

Isekai and /tg/

Although most isekai stories get panned on /tg/ for annoying meta-humor, generic shonen bullshit, generic fanservice bullshit, or a combination thereof (if not the characters being blatantly Mary Sues, or presenting something even more absurd), a handful of series in the genre are decent enough to merit genuine approval. Or they're tolerated because they have monstergirls. Check our anime and manga pages for the current scoop.

While isekai is a distinctly Japanese form of cancer, the basic idea of people from our world getting chucked into a fantastic world and forced to fend for themselves is practically universal and turns up moderately often in Western fantasy with the earliest example perhaps being "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" by Mark Twain which was published in 1889. Oddly, when this happens it tends to be rather less shit perhaps due to it being less common. L. Frank Baum's Oz series, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, and Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom (a.k.a., John Carter of Mars) novels are iconic examples of the core premise that predate cliche fantasy (with Barsoom being the closest of what can be described as "Western Isekai Wankfest" with Carter being very overpowered due to Earth's gravity he grew up with and his combat training), and C.S. Lewis The Chronicles of Narnia uses the plot for Christian allegory. The NeverEnding Story is the flagship modern German example, and right in the heart of the fantasy cliche storm, yet it is the purest anti-shit, either despite or because of this (if you don't count the 80s-tastic American movie). Or at least, it avoids being the self-indulgent wish-fulfillment for irredeemably unlikable losers that makes Isekai so widely hated. One could make the case that The Matrix is an isekai story (it basically reverses a couple of the key tropes), though classifying it as "less shit" may not be accurate for some people. Tangential to these are stories about modern militaries (or, in one odd series of novels, part of the US East Coast) being sent back in time—although it's possible that a movie from '79 called G.I. Samurai, where a JSDF unit accidentally travels back in time and fights their own Samurai ancestors, is secretly the true forgotten granddaddy of the isekai genre, or at least dreck like GATE.

While contemporary Isekai (2010-present) are cut-and-pastes of the same old "die and reincarnate OP" themes, the plot device itself was present in a lot of Japanese shit before it.

As mentioned above, older "isekai" stories aren't "reincarnation" stories, but are people being transported to another world to fulfill missions or destinies. Their mileages tended to vary, but there was one notable proto-Isekai called "God(?) Save Our King" which ran from 2000-2010 that subverted many tropes before they were even established. The series was basically Yaoi-lite, and had a straight, 15-year old Japanese boy transported to another world via toilet to become its "Demon King," where his every whim was catered to by a bunch of bishounen demons/elves (teenage girlbait). The show itself ran for an ungodly long time, and is actually quite ok if you're an irredeemable weeb with trash taste.

The other isekai genre is "you're trapped in a video game and dying here means you die irl" Genre in the 2000s, such as Sword Art Online and .hack. They were everywhere back when MMOs were still uber-popular and VR was still considered cool. This also technically makes Digimon an isekai. This genre basically ended when Log Horizon showed everyone how it's done.

Isekai also has its influence on Old School Roleplaying; as stated above, there are plenty of pulp fantasy novels involving ordinary souls getting sucked into a strange, alien world and becoming heroic adventurers as a result. A /tg/ example that (in hindsight anyway) fits the isekai mold well is GURPS' flagship fantasy setting, which revolves around people from across the universe getting isekai'd to the planet of Yrth by an extradimensional "Banestorm" and proposes that players could stat themselves and then play as themselves on Yrth after getting deposited there by the Banestorm. Hell, Greyhawk has several deities who actually originated on other worlds - Murlynd, Saint Cuthbert and Mayaheine‎‎ have all been implied to have come to Oerth from "real" Earth - whilst the Forgotten Realms was, once upon a time, hinted as being connected to Earth by various portals to different times and places; the not!Egyptian race was actually supposed to be peopled by real ancient Egyptians who had been summoned to the Realms en-masse by evil sorcerers as slave labor, only to break free of them. Then there's the D&D Cartoon, whose plot was D&D by way of Isekai. That being said, unless your DM was being really lazy, if you tried to talk in-universe about stats or levels or other meta game content like they do in Isekai stories, NPCs would and should treat you like a madman.

On a funny note some people at /tg/ has started to compare Girlyman's current timeline novels to an isekai series due how he now has to save a distant realm from the evil overlord(s), everyone is in awe of him and the blue-wonder even got a sort of harem.

Perhaps the ultimate sign of isekai's connection to /tg/ is that there exists an isekai series with its own official roleplaying sysem; KonoSuba, which could very easily be adapted to your own homebrewed isekai setting.

Slow Life Fantasy

This variant is another product of Japan's toxic work culture. The hero may or may not be overpowered, but in this version, the show doesn't even pretend that he or she is supposed to be challenged. Indeed, the hero may outright reject the idea of taking down tyrants, fighting in wars, or even adventuring in general. Instead, they seek an easy and-or simple and fulfilling life as a farmer or shopkeeper. The idea is still Wish Fulfillment, but instead of being the big Hero, it's just to have the happy life that evades so many in the real world, but with a fantasy gloss (why raise chickens when you can raise Chocobos?). It's basically Isekai as a Slice-of-Life series, and thus shares almost all the issues of typical Isekai stories (slice of life does cut down on the power-scaling issues), only now there's even less of a plot to deal with.

Reverse Isekai

A more /tg/-related example of reverse isekai.
This is John Romero's origin story btw.

Occasionally, reverse isekai plots, where supernatural elements from other dimensions have invaded the "real" world, have appeared in /tg/. They mix well with Urban Fantasy (hell in many cases it basically IS urban fantasy). In Masque of the Red Death, the Red Death's corruption of magic means planar travel only works one way and anything inbound is stuck. D20 Modern's default for supernatural entities is that they a dropped onto Earth from another plane, "The Shadow", and can't go home (though their corpses vanish upon death, being "reclaimed" by The Shadow). The Adventure Path Reign of Winter has a trip to World War I era Russia where the party fights Mosin-Nagans and machine gun wielding Russian soldiers, tear gas elementals and actual Grigori Rasputin.

One odd feature in Japanese Reverse-Isekais is an emphasis on how Japanese food is so much more awesome than whatever bland, flavorless food the peasants of the fantasy world have to eat (to be fair, modern food in general, if made well, would indeed be better than most medieval fare, especially the stuff serfs ate). In fact, there actually is more than one anime about people from a fantasy world visiting a restaurant in modern Japan, just as an excuse to show off food porn with no real plot. In fairness, the modern worldwide food distribution networks that can ship sun-ripened lemons and meat to any point in the world within 24 hours is likely going to compare favorably to all but the highest fantasy fare. Even so, even the lowliest peasant would put some effort in using what they had to make food taste good; even if they couldn't afford many spices, herbs were still easy enough to get a hold of, and rural cooks knew how to prepare meats to make them taste good, whereas fantasy peasants may as well be eating dry, stringy meat with a side of boiled, unseasoned vegetables and mud for dessert. Apparently none of the authors do 5 fucking minutes of Internet research.

Otome Isekai

No, you don't need to be a boy to have your harem, stupidity may be optional.

Proving women can also be otaku, this distinct type of isekai was born. Otome Isekai (a term used by the author of this section) is, for all intents and purposes, the female variant of regular isekai but done in a rather misogynistic manner written by women. Apparently, women are only interested in otome visual novels/dating sims/trashy pulp novels with a lot of high nobility hot guys, Mary Sue commoner protagonists, petty villains and formulaic plots flatter than a Repulsor's roadkill. The main character of this variation of isekai will typically reincarnate in the body of one of the characters of the Novel in question and, from there, take part in a proverbial adventure in a magic/nobility academy where the protagonist will win the hearts of a veritable harem of hot guys (usually the original romanceable characters), the original protagonist, the villains and any other unwitting NPCs by being an EVEN BIGGER Mary Sue than the original character.

A common variant that became the main type of otome isekai for a time, eventually branching off into its own genre, is the villainess genre. As the name implies, this sub-genre follows the scheme told above, but instead the protagonist becomes the villainess character("Akuyaku Reijou" — 悪役令嬢 lit.: "Antagonistic Noble Young Lady" in Japanese) of the plot, typically fated to meet a sad and/or grisly end by whatever means. It's usually up to the protagonist to change their fate and survive by some means, whether it's by making a moral about-face, trying to vanish from the setting, or by trying to roll with their reputation. While the premise sounds more interesting at first, it falls to the same tropes and endings as the others: harem of hot guys, befriending anyone and generally being a Mary Sue, BUT IN THE BODY OF A VILLAIN! As mentioned, the villainess genre has become its own thing now and you can find villainess stories without a speck of isekai anywhere, but the baggage yet remains.

Why do people hate it so much?

As noted above, stories of people entering other worlds are nothing new, and speaks to a common desire to experience strange and exotic lands. Yet Isekai stories still get a lot of flak for many reasons. Besides there being way too many anime/manga that are all basically the same story with slightly different premises, it boils down to a number of common gripes:

• The biggest one is that rather than trying to tell a compelling and interesting story, too many Isekai stories are just the basest wish fulfillment fantasies for the lonely basement-dwelling neckbeard. Most of the other complaints are derived from this one.

Gripes about the worlds

• While most isekai stories used to be about the protagonist wanting to escape the otherworld to get back to reality, it has become increasingly common for the protagonist to not be able to go back or them not even wanting to go back. As a result, most isekai stories could easily work as regular fantasy stories with few alterations, making the whole isekai aspect pointless.
• The worlds travelled to are so god damned painfully bland and unoriginal, usually the JRPG version of the standard fantasy setting at that. Not only is this oversaturated but, coming from an Asian nation, why in all the Yama hells bring your characters into Not Thirteenth Century Catholic Germany all the time? When Westerners do it to (say) Arabian Nights they get called "Orientalists" or worse. Suppose we spot each other this on condition we don't make our counterparty DAMN LAME. Seriously, where in the proverbial fuck are our Mesoamerica's, the Middle-Eastern civilizations, the South Asian and Southeast Asian ones? Hell, even in the European setting that every single Isekai is teleported in, it is blatantly cut-and-paste when in reality, Medieval Europe was shockingly diverse in terms of beliefs, culture and architecture. The orthodox buildings of the Byzantines for example, looks completely different from the Gothic architecture of Western Europe or the paganistic runes of Northern and Eastern Europe. So even in the very setting it is trying to emulate, Isekais are blander than wall paste.
  • This is most likely because the Dragon Quest vidya gaems are some of the best-selling media of all time in Japan, so basically every Japanese kid is nostalgic for their fantasy land with slimes and magic swords; but are niche and usually flop everywhere else, so it just comes across as a bunch of bland RPG pastiches ripping each other off.
• And because they're JRPG the isekai will often go so far as to define the world in terms of RPG mechanics. We shit you not. People in isekai worlds speak of levels, classes, and experience as real and tangible things as opposed to the mechanical abstractions fa/tg/uys normally recognize them as. Outside of Isekai stories that actually take place inside of tabletop or videogame RPGs, this is inexcusable. To make matters worse, this has started appearing in fantasy series that aren't isekai. Seriously, say what you want about SAO, but at least it has the excuse of being inside an actual video game, so the RPG mechanics makes sense in-universe. But when a 'supposed' fantasy world does it? It automatically breaks several levels of immersion. There is nothing more off-putting than a medieval setting suddenly having a voice announcement out-of-fucking-nowhere to let MC-kun know which class to level up.
• The worlds of Isekai frequently (read "almost always") have a problem with what's known as a "Second Order Idiot Plot". An Idiot Plot is, of course, a plot that only happens because everyone involved is an idiot (and it can be done well; see, for example, Burn After Reading); but a Second Order Idiot Plot is a plot that only happens because everybody in the world is an idiot--frequently, either some obvious solution is overlooked for dumb reasons, some obvious phenomena is ignored, or some baldly obvious lie is widely accepted. This is generally abused to create easy problems for the protagonists to solve.
• Magic being treated as a "I Win" button. Every single overpowered Isekai protagonists (And friends!) are only overpowered due to the aid of some bullshit magic enhancement. Name me ONE Isekai protag who became powerful largely based on his/hers swordskill with no magical bullshit enhancements involved. Now, in a good fantasy with a good magical system such as Witch Hat Atelier or Full Metal Alchemist, magic (Or whatever it is called in the setting) has both a set of universal rules that grounds the user from being a one-man army and has its own limitations and issues that prevent it from going all out. For Witch Hat Atelier, magic is drawn rather than spoken and one must have years of training to properly draw all the runes and glyphs that will affect the type, power and size of the magic. And even then, the type of spells one can cast is heavily regulated and restricted; creating a self-limitation to avoid another magical world war like before. For Full Metal Alchemist, extremely dangerous alchemy is incredibly risky as under the Laws of Equivalent Exchange, the alchemist in particular must be willing to sacrifice something that is a part of him/herself in the process. Therefore, greatly limiting the overall affects of alchemy unless you are willing to literally give up your humanity in the process. But in shit Isekais (Read: All of them), the MC can just know a very convenient spell he pulled out of his ass and nuke the goddamned place, without any limitation whatsoever. And even with limitations, the protag can just find a loophole and handwave it out of existence, making said limitation utterly pointless.
• Since some Isekai protagonists are so powerful, no one in the new world is capable of opposing them; that includes the cliche "great demon king" who had terrorized the world for centuries only to get one-shotted by the MC in one chapter, thus erasing any conflict and tension and making the story even duller. Other type of villains like high-status types (king, nobles) or anyone in the world whom had grudge or a bone to pick with the protagonist may be introduced, but due to how the human civilization of the other world are incapable of advancing their technology in most isekai, these villains are arrogant, ignorant, and often underestimate the MC and their otherworldly knowledge (see the Emperor from GATE). Therefore, they will inevitably get their asses handed to them by the MC and their modern Japanese knowledge + JRPG cheat stats when they tried to sabotage or kill the MC's party and fail again and again. In short, Isekai lacks proper and inspiring villains.
• Speaking of Demon Kings/Lords: the main villains of an Isekai are almost usually this and, like the very world they live in, look generic as fuck, resembling more of a hot bishie dude with horns than some monstrous abomination. This isn't limited to just the 'demon lord' however; nearly any monster in an Isekai is also blatantly generic-- stock D&D dragons, goblins, orcs, trolls, giant spiders, etc. You want them in? Fine, but at least have the creativity to give them an interesting backstory, character design and motivation beyond "RAAAWR! ME TAKE OVER THE WORLD!". If your antagonist(s) looks like it was copied and pasted from Microsoft Word, then you have created an uninteresting and boring adversary, and nothing is worse in a story than to be boring.
• Badly-done racism. This one is especially unforgivable considering that racism has been a way of life in Japan for hundreds of years and you'd think they would understand something about it by now. Having drama where the humans hate the elves or the beastfolk is fine. The part that so many series forget is setting up an actual reason that so much bad blood exists, and considering exceptions such as sailors and merchants (who are historically the least racist bunch in real and imagined existence) who don't care whom they do business with. They even fail to consider that maybe some of the characters might have different opinions on the other races or simply do not care when a light elf sees another elf of delicious chocolate variety, because God forbid there be any dimensions to the cast. Of course, setting up the world to be full of people who are spiteful for absolutely no reason means that your main character gets to show off how accepting and benevolent he is compared to the backwards fantasy peasants. Which brings us to...

Gripes about the protagonists

No author has yet managed to even notice the main male character customization menu for their Isekais, so they have to stick to changing hair and eye color.

• Isekai protagonists tend to be big fucking nerds who immediately recognize what's all about and exploit it, often aided by unreasonably high stats relative to their abilities in real life. The unstated implication is that the overweight slimeball watching/reading the isekai story would be just as successful as the protagonist because of his valuable and hard-earned RPG knowledge, as opposed to not even being able to understand the language spoken by anyone there (or them understanding you- I hope one of your skills is charades) and dying of cholera a week later.
• The protagonist frequently is overpowered in a way that puts him way ahead of his peers, despite lacking any useful combat, intellectual, or even social skills from his homeworld. Rarely does the protagonist have to put that much effort in overcoming his obstacles and is often deemed "The Chosen One" or "Special Blooded" by what amounts to GM fiat. Just like a unique snowflake.
• Even more offensive protagonists will be actively unlikable or even outright repulsive, despite not suffering any consequences for it.
• And on top of that, 99.9% of the time, the protagonist has an all-female harem party who hang on his every word. Is this starting to sound familiar? (Note, in particular, that usually these female party members exist purely to provide fanservice and be waifued. On top of this, they're fairly likely to be noticeably underdeveloped and/or cliched.) While this is not necessarily a bad thing, there are countless examples of lazy writers going way too far with it and turning the characters into caricatures or pulling the rug out from under the readers and going from harem to vanilla romance. It's at the point where the openly pornographic isekais are actually an improvement because they don't pretend that said harem is anything but a collection of sex objects.
  • To further expand on the female character issue: look, we in 1d4chan hate Mary Sues with a passion. But you know what is just as bad as a female Mary Sue? A soulless, living pair of tits. Since nearly none of the female characters in this sort of situation have any agency, they are literally just there for an unfunny boob joke or sexual harassment 'joke'. The end result is that your 'waifus' are boring and replaceable as fuck who are just as painfully blank as the protagonist and antagonist. In the end of the day, we like characters who are interesting, tits or not, and parading around these characters like trophy wives when the protag most definitely did not do anything to earn their love and affection is insulting to our collective intelligence.
  • This gets doubly, egregiously worse if said harem contains blatant lolibait and that the author tries (and always fails) to justify it by giving us tired-ass lame excuses like she is either a thousand years old, it is somehow considered legal in the setting, or worse of all, protag-kun is an actual pedo or child molester but is somehow considered A-okay because he is now in the body of a little boy. This in itself is already considered atrocious, regardless of how unnecessary it is and that depicting such acts without even the strongest condemnation of it in-universe, should raise the mother of all red flags on what the story is trying to tell us. But the stupid gets worse when certain zealous fans do the mother of all mental gymnastics to defend this shit. No bitch, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is probably a fucking duck.
    • Jobless Reincarnation deserves to be called out here. Doesn't matter if it has good animation, okay world building and praise as the "Father of Modern Isekai". If the whole ethos of the plot is that it is a 'redemption story' like many of its fans like to promote, than it better seriously deal with the MC's blatant history of pedophilia, child grooming, child molestation and the creation of child pornographic material (in his past life at least). Look, you can write stories detailing such serious topics, but it must be handle with as much care as Schindler's List. Jobless Reincarnation however? Nearly every case of the MC attempting to sexually assault a young pre-teen, the show treats as a joke with circus music. Does the MC becomes repentant, does he gets severely punished, does he suffer any consequences from this? No. He does not. In fact, he ends up marrying into a harem of the three girls he fucking groomed from the get go. His only 'karma' is that he became impotent, but that itself is a joke of a punishment, given his predator relationship is orders of magnitude worse. The show tries to sympathize with the MC by giving him a 'tragic' backstory (Read: its bullying, fucking tiresome), but having a tragic backstory does not excuse his monstrous behaviour. Jobless Reincarnation is still a power fantasy, the WORST type of power fantasy, as it gives rewards a convicted pedophilic piece of shit with a loving middle-upper class family inside the body of a little boy, filled with little girls of which he can prey on with little to no consequences, whilst becoming powerful and praised as a hero at that. As a 'redemption story' it fails to comment on the MC's biggest flaw and worse, treat his actions as a joke and even rewards his grooming in the end. At best, it makes the series callous, at worse, dishonest. This shit can make or break readers and watchers. You want to watch/read a good redemption story where the MC actually faces his past crimes and tries to make amends? Read Vinland Saga.
• Almost all the protagonists in isekai stories have either a tragic or "NEET" background. Again, not necessarily bad but definitely overused. This gets worse when they are all generic manga cliches. But some tragic backgrounds are so specific it's as if the author inserted their own past there.
• As if the above wasn't enough, too many isekai MC are edgelords. For most of them, their reason for being edgy is how they were abused, betrayed, NTR'ed or disowned by either the MC's school classmates, other isekai'ed people, or society as a whole. Some really awful isekai have their MC doing really edgy shit like mass murder, owning/buying slaves, and rape but still be portrayed as morally in the right, like, y'know doing it anyway but at least accepting you've become a monster yourself, which sounds like special pleading.

More General Gripes

• You ever notice how Isekai titles are always extremely long and ridiculously specific? Apparently Japanese adolescents are too busy to read the blurbs on light novels and manga, so they just put the blurb right in the title. How lazy can you get?
• While many stories are just copycats of one another, some will attempt to put an "original spin" on the genre, usually by adding a gimmick, such as the protagonist being a LITERAL VENDING MACHINE or a slime that can absorb powers. If done well, the story has some value in being interesting and exploring otherwise ignored facets of an overused genre. Done poorly, it comes across as just plain tiresome, especially if the gimmick is the only thing keeping the story afloat when the characters and plot fail to impress.
• O MY GLORIOUS NIPPON STEEL FOLDED OVER 9000 TIMES. Basically, just to show how self-righteously superior the Japanese and only the Japanese are compared to the other world. Generally, it involves the reincarnated protagonist being homesick for their Japanese food and introducing amazing new flavors to the fantasy world: jelly donuts rice balls, soy sauce, and miso paste are the most common. Despite Japan and Asia in general being a huge market for Western fast-food chains, the protagonists are always treated as big fucking deals for introducing soy sauce over rice. Katanas are also introduced in the other world to prove their superiority, though exaggerated sword bullshit is the norm for Western and Eastern fiction alike.
  • GATE is worth calling out here as the worst or at least one of the most infamous examples of this, where the Japanese military in a medieval fantasy world is wreaking havoc with their modern weaponry against villains with single-digit IQ or self-preservation. This is not exactly unreasonable nor immersive breaking to imagine, even for the decidedly modest Japanese Self Defense Force, but it’s taken to the point where it comes across as a distasteful, tone deaf, juvenile power fantasy and a cheesy (but icky, like spoiled brie) recruitment ad targeting otaku: "Want to be a real hero? We kill more orcs fantasy Romans before 9AM than most Paladins barbarians do all day!" Which is expected with the author being a right-wing JSDF veteran. Call it "Hard Otaku Making Hard Decisions (While Hard)".
• "Japanese" language or Japanese traits (black hair, white skin) being something sacred or ancient or special in the isekai world. Usually used to mean that some "undecipherable script of the Ancients" is just 21st-century Japanese carved on a plaque somewhere without any further development. If the author is going for cheap edge boosts, anything related to the Japanese is a symptom of a curse or a demonic heritage. And it's just as stupid as African natives suddenly worshipping white people as gods.
• Some of the edgier Isekai have a tendency to deal with such serious issues as rape, slavery, racism and genocide... which would be fine, if they didn't usually do so in such an immature, sociopathic and/or poorly handled way that you start to hate either the author's suspected age group, the whole nation of Japan (or whatever country produced it), or humanity in general just by association with this edgelord garbage.
• Even worse are the ones that are blatantly hypocritical or edgy regarding darker issues of mankind. For example, slavery is depicted as an immaturely handled "bad thing" (It's ok to abuse, kill, or use up slaves in deadly forced labor if no good user buys them- even ancient societies had standards for such issues), but when the protagonist also invests himself in that practice, all of a sudden, it is considered okay since he is considered a 'hero' and therefore, a 'good guy'. Because gosh, what our MC is doing couldn't possibly be considered slavery since he treats his property with such care and tenderness... No. Fuck off with that gaslighting bullshit. Either slavery is a bad thing or a good thing, no in-betweens. You can't have your cake and eat it too, especially with extremely dark topics like this. To pull this stunt reeks of dishonesty and bad faith. It reaches ludicrous levels of retardation when a righteous and good kingdom with plenty of magic to bypass labor, complete with knights and paladins and kind kings, has a bustling, legal slave trade where women are so ill-kept it's counterproductive to their value, a vampire noble can buy and drain an entire stable of girls and the burnt corpses get discovered, and everyone shrugs it off an an oopsie.
• Constant reuse of the same mythological terms. Always expect to hear about the big gods of Olympus, always expect a half-assed version of Norse Mythology, and so on. This is especially egregious in any setting where you see multiple pantheons coexisting in the same area.

So, are there any actually good Isekai?

No.

Well, actually "no, but actually kinda yes", but since that question is such an obvious setup for a joke...

More seriously, Isekai, like any genre, is subject to Sturgeon's Law: 90% of any genre is crap. That percentage can go up if we're talking about works that are focused more on filling out a checklist than telling an interesting story, and the market pressures on Isekai results in a lot of checklists that authors feel they need to fill their works with. That being said, there are works that at least try to bring some actual originality to the genre, and some that are fairly good. Lists of the two can be wildly different so we won't list them here, mainly because we're not TV Tropes, and because we have an approved anime page for that kind of shit.

BUT...

Before they get turned to Anime, a lot of Isekai start as light novels, the Japanese sorta-equivalent to Western Juvenile/YA fiction. Think back to how many "Teenager fights against Dystopic Government through mandated Survival Games" books came out after the Hunger Games. Isekai is literally the Japanese equivalent of the phenomenon, and they get away with it because, well, you're consuming content for kids, even the edgier/subversive isekais. Their cut-and-paste nature is also a cynical byproduct of current anime production, too. Just like how MCU movies are the same shit, different hero money-printers, the majority of anime produced today are actually quite short, running for a single cour (10-12 episodes, often with a 13th added to the Blu-Ray) and usually lucky to last one whole season (24 episodes). At best, they'll get to maybe the third volume/book of the series. And merely by the fact that they're TV adaptations of a novel series, they often leave out potentially important details or subtlety. They're literally filler shows, like mid-season replacements in American TV, and so cookie cutter stories and design makes sense: they're mostly made to fill timeslots during the off-season, keep viewer interest, and generate merchandise while the studio works on the real moneymakers.

If you're into Isekai, it's probably because of its light-heartedness and fantasy-fulfillment, being basically fantasy slice-of-life that's meant to fill you with fluffy feelings. This is pretty much what makes /tg/ cringe, since a lot of the main characters are OP mary sues who will never struggle in their quest for Noblebright (or in some cases, plunging the world to Grimdark).

But ultimately if you are watching/reading one that can be considered "crappy" but you are enjoying it then what's the problem? It's not like you should actually care about what /tg/ (or anyone for that matter) thinks about how you enjoy your hobby, as long as you don't try to hard sell it to people to the point of annoyance or get shriekingly angry when someone points out what they see as problems with it. Go ahead and enjoy; just being at /tg/ or this wiki to begin with shows you never cared really much if something was badly written, awfully designed, grimderpy, mainstream, generic or lacking a soul to begin with.

Gallery

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  Not all worlds are ones where you would want to end up.
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  Or not.
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  Truck-kun has become the easiest way to get isekaied, but to date we are still waiting for an isekai where he becomes the protagonist.
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  Yes, we actually recommend it.

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  Gate: The Elevator Pitch