Isekai

"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. Isekai is a Japanese word assimilated into the /tg/ lexicon from the weeaboo faggots 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) have 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, and fewer and fewer isekai light novels get adapted into anime each season, and parodies are becoming more and more common, leaving it only a matter of time before the genre hits "even the parodies are stale" levels of played out.

Why do people hate it so much?

As noted below, 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.
• The hallmark of isekai stories is defining of the world in terms of RPG mechanics. 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 RPGs or videogame RPGs, this is pretty much inexcusable.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 protaganist has an all-female harem party who hang on his every word. Is this starting to sound familiar?
• For more Isekai-specific gripes, 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. If done well, then the story still has some value in being interesting and explore otherwise ignored facets of an overused genre. Done poorly, and 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.
• Almost all the protagonists in isekai stories have tragic background. Not saying it is a bad thing, but it is almost as if the author is trying to pushing it, forcing the reader to go through 1 or 2 chapters of flash backs. Worst if they are all cliches in common manga tropes. But some tragic backgrounds are so well detailed it's almost as if the author self inserted their past there. Here is a few examples:
  • Daddy/Mommy issues - According to various manga, Japanese parents are some of the worst in all of Asia since their working conditions over there have a very high demand and busy schedule that the parents are too busy at work to spent time with their children. Other than that, the parents can be highly demanding, oppress their children to work hard on their school grade to the point it can be very edgy. Sometimes, parents can be a drunken scum bags who either abandon their children or just straight up mistreat them. Protagonist with tragic background like these often has low self-esteem and edginess but have it all fixed up in the other world since now they are popular with bitches.
  • School problems - Way too many isekai protagonists have school-centric tragic backgrounds where they are either bullied in school or have no friends. Probably that's why they become nerds and are able to develop their very own hobbies alone which they would use in the other world.
  • Neet - Oh baby, don't even get me started. Neets in Japanese definition are adult virgins, unemployed nerds who live alone which makes them the definition of being a loser. It is no surprised such a failure could gets cheat powers in the other world compared how piss poor they did in real life.
• O MY GLORIOUS NIPPON STEEL FOLDED OVER 9000 TIMES. Basically just to show how superior the Japanese are compared to the other world. GATE is the worst example of this where the Japanese military in the other world id wrecking havoc with their modern weaponry (keep in mind real life modern Japan don't have their own army, but a self-defense force that cannot be compared to the actual military might like American or Chinese military, no offense). Other than that, various Japanese food and their favorite katana blade are also introduced in the other world to prove their superiority. Is almost if these mass produced Isekai stories and manga are just to advertise Japanese's superiority.

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 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 novels are iconic examples of the core premise that predate cliche fantasy, and C.S. Lewis The Chronicles of Narnia uses the plot for Christian allegory. The NeverEnding Story is the flagship modern western example, and right in the heart of the fantasy cliche storm; Yet it is the purest anti-shit, either despite or because of this. 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. 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.

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. 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.

Reverse Isekai

Occasionally, reverse isekai plots, where supernatural elements from other dimensions have invaded the "real" world, have appeared in /tg/. 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). The Adventure Path Reign of Winter has a trip to World War I era Russia where the party fights Mosin-Nagant and machine gun wielding Russian soldiers, tear gas elementals and 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. In fact, there actually is more than one anime about people from a fantasy world visiting a restaurant in modern Japan. Which in fairness: the modern world wide 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 favorable 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 spices, herbs were still easy enough to get a hold of, and rural cooks knew enough about 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.

List of Isekai

Good Ones

• Aura Battler Dunbine: The first classic, pre-SAO isekai anime, or at least the earliest one worth remembering, which at its most basic can be described as Isekai Fantasy Gundam (apt, considering that both were made by the same guy). Sho Zama, a dissatisfied japanese youth about to get himself killed in reckless motorcycle stunt on a busy highway, is suddenly summoned into an alternate medieval fantasy world, Byston Well, where a local duke by the name of Drake Luft forcibly recruits him and other summoned into his army. Drake Luft was gradually jumpstarting an industrial revolution with a help from other "Upper Earthers" he summoned via a captive fey to give him an edge in his plans to conquer Byston Well while he holds the first adopter advantage, and one of these advantages are the titular mechas, the Aura Battlers which are powered and enhanced by the pilot's Aura (which the summoned Upper Earthers have more powerful ones compared to the locals) with one called Dunbine to be piloted by Sho, who later steals it to join the resistance. The show can be divided into two halves: The first with gradual escalation from guerilla warfare with medieval weaponry supported by Aura Machines to open warfare between kingdoms fielding 100% Aura Machine Armies led by huge Battlecarriers, while the second half starts with the Fey Queen deciding that all Aura Machines were evil and at a cost of her life chucks them all, pilots and armies included, back to Upper Earth, which is in the middle of Cold War.
• Overlord: A gamer gets trapped in the body of his max level Lich avatar and sent to another world, bringing with him all of his treasures and minions (who now are real people) and guild base. He starts out trying to be a good guy in the new world, but he ends up turning into a villain on a path to conquer the new world due to a combination of losing a lot of his ability to feel emotions and his minions expecting him to play the role of a villain.
• That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime: A man dies an wakes up in the body of a super powerful Slime creature with the ability to copy the powers of whatever they eat. They end up becoming the chief of a goblin village and expanding it into a new nation.
• Kiba: What happens when you combine Pokémon with Game of Thrones and a bit of 1985, and then give everyone lightsabers. An obscure but definitely worth watching show about two friends who separately end up in another world where some people have the ability to pull marble like objects out of one part of their body which are used to cast spells, power up lightsaber like weapons, and summon powerful monsters called spirits. Each of them ends up possessing one of the six most powerful spirits in the world which the nations of the new world are fighting for control of. The first boy ends up in the only truly nice nation, while the other ends up in a country that at first seems nice but turns out to be a horrible dystopia where the population is so brainwashed that they are willing to accept capital punishment with a smile for minor crimes even if they committed them accident.
• MÄR: A boy named Ginta gets summoned to another world populated by people based on characters from fairytales and popular classic fantasy books who fight using magical items called ÄRMs. He gets a hold of an intelligent ÄRM named Babbo who can turn into anything he can image. He and several characters including Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz and Jack from Jack and the Beanstalk team up for a tournament to decide the fate of the world against a villainous organization called the Chess Pieces.
• Do You Love Your Mom and Her Two-Hit Multi-Target Attacks?: A parody of typical trapped in a video game wish fulfillment stories. A boy's wish to go into a video game is granted, but it is ruined because he is forced to bring his extremely embarrassing and attractive mother with him, who is a lot more powerful than him in the game world.
• Spirited Away: A girl and her parents accidentally wander into the world of spirits and the parents get turned into pigs by a witch as punishment for stealing food. With the help of a mysterious boy who can turn into a dragon, she gets herself a job working for the witch at her bathhouse for spirits until she can find a way to set her parents free.
• Those Who Hunt Elves: A comedy about a group of people are summoned to another world and can't go back until they can find 5 tattoos placed on 5 random elves somewhere in the world. To find them they strip every elf they meet naked.
• Youjo Senki: Saga of Tanya the Evil: A sociopathic atheist is murdered by somebody he sacked for being a lazy stupid bum, and meets a being who claims to be God. He refuses to believe it really is God and as punishment gets reincarnated as a female child solider in a world resembling WWI Europe, only with magic.
• Drifters: Written and drawn by the author of HELLSING. This is a story about fighting against fate where historic heroes, wise mans and commanders from the real world ended up in the other world after they died. Most of them are Japanese (go figures) and our MC is this Shimazu Toyohisa guy of the Shimazu clan, a crazy idiot who had fought and died in a heroically suicide battle to buy time for his army to escape. He was teleported to the other world by a seemly mysterious divine office worker look like named Murasaki. During his adventure in other world, he would encountered various cliche fantasy species as well as other Drifters who were just like him, such as Oda Nobunaga, Butch Cassidy, Abe no seimei and FUCKING Hannibal Barca (yes, THE Alpis elephant guy). Together, they have to fight against the Ends, whom were historically heroes just like the drifters but has cheat code access to other magical power just because they sold their humanity and shit. Notably, Jeanne d'Arc and Hijikata Toshizō(who is known for liking mayonnaise in the other dimension as well as searching for hidden gold in Hokkaido in the other) is in this group with the Black King (heavily hinted to be Jesus or others with divine power from the real world) as their leader, and they were all chosen by another divine entity named EASY, a woman who is at odds with Murasaki. Compare to other Isekai, Drifters has a theme that made it self unique on it's own, which has to do with the drifters to overcome their previous failure (aka don't die the same way as they did before) and the theme was heavily reinforced in the first encountered with the black king. By the way, this series is being slowly released and is on multiple hiatus for unknown reason since it is kind of a trait now days for good mangaka to fucking around their job.
• Konosuba: A comedy series, and one of the first to take the piss out of the Isekai genre. It beings with a NEET shut-in dying to save a girl from being hit by a truck, whereupon he's met by a goddess in the afterlife. She reveals that the girl was actually not in danger and he died of a heart attack, followed by pissing himself, which she mocks him relentlessly. She then offers him to reincarnate in another world and defeat the devil king, and in return he can have any powerful item he wants. Out of revenge he picks her, and the two end up trapped in the fantasy world; the goddess turns out to be pretty damn useless 90% of the time and a huge bitch, while later joined by two other girls (a pyromaniac wizard who can only cast one spell a day, and a masochistic knight who can't hit anything for shit) to form one of the most dysfunctional parties in existence. It manages to be both a clever deconstruction of Isekai and a pretty hilarious fantasy-themed sitcom all at once.
• Escaflowne: A Japanese high school girl is teleported to a magical world where the weapon of choice are "Guymelefs"; magitek mecha that resemble fantastical giant knights powered by the crystalline hearts of dragons.
• Inuyasha: A rarity in that the teleported protagonist is female, and travel between the fantasy world and the real world happens frequently. Ordinary school-girl Kagome Higurashi learns that her crazy grampa's ramblings about the ancient well in the shrine her family lives at really is magical when a many-armed big-tittied centipede woman pulls her into the well and transports her into Feudal Japan, ranting about killing her and taking a magical "Shikon Jewel" that can make demons into gods. To not be killed, she reluctantly releases Inuyasha; a bad-tempered half-inugami (dog demon) who looks like a bishie boy with long, flowing white hair, claws, and a pair of cute dog-like ears. During the struggle, the Shikon Jewel is shattered, forcing her to reluctantly team up with Inuyasha (who used to be in love with her previous incarnation, the shrine maiden Kikyo) to track down the shards before they can wreak havoc across the land. Their party grows to incorporate Shippo (a baby kitsune boy), Sango (a badass warrior-woman who uses a giant boomerang made of demon bones), and Miroku (a perverted but handsome young monk who sports a miniature black-hole in his right hand... that will ultimately devour him whole, as it has his entire family), and their mission expands to tracking down and destroying Naraku; a bandit turned Demon Prince who has his own evil plans for the Shikon Jewel and who was responsible for the misery that befell Inuyasha and Kikyo.
• Rising of the Shield Hero: Four heroes are summoned to another world to defend it against a phenomenon called the Waves of Catastrophe, where the sky turns red and armies of monsters appear. Each of them is assigned a powerful holy weapon (sword, spear, bow, and shield) and forms their own party to help them level up. However, the hero assigned to the shield immediately gets robbed and falsely accused of attempted rape by his only party member, who seemingly did it just so they could give his stuff to the spear hero as a present. With that horrible start, the shield hero loses interest in saving the world and only cares about going home or getting revenge. To survive, he is forced to build up his reputation, wealth, and power from nothing while all of the other heroes (who turn out to be all be idiots) soar ahead of him. And since nobody wants to ally with him and his shield keeps him from wielding any other weapons, he forced to buy a slave to help him fight.
• .hack:
• Log Horizon: A new update of old-school PC MMORPG Elder Tale ends up dragging its entire logged-in player base into the world it portrayed. Veteran player Shiroe and a few of his friends try to figure out what to do with their new existence, before finally deciding to take an active stance in influencing their current reality for the better. This, on top on trying to find out just WHY everyone got dragged into Elder Tale, or at the very least, a world that seems to look like the game world.
• Re:Zero:

Bad Ones

• Sword Art Online: One of shows responsible for the explosion in the popularity of Isekai. Was very popular when it came out, but as Reki Kawahara continued the series: the quality of the story degraded slowly over the years, and along with it the general fanbase's opinion. It still has it's fans, along with a sizable amount of detractors (as most feel SAO's popularity is undeserved, and taking the spotlight off other shows worth the praise, or because its just popular). Technically speaking the other world is just a VR MMORPG instead of an actual fantasy world, but everyone else just copied SAO even when it didn’t make sense to include game mechanics like HUDs with skill trees. It also doesn’t help that the protagonist, Kirito, is an unabashed edgy Marty Sue (although the edgy part eventually mellows down, he's still a Marty Sue in all depictions. On a side note, Kirito is also responsible for the painful influx of terribly written edgy teenage dual sword-wielding OCs in the early 2010s, to the point there's now a slight stigma with using dual-swords for your character in RPGs) and the first season ended on a nonsensical conclusion. The female characters that make up Kirito's not-harem are waifu material though, if that's any consolation, and SAO at the very least has the decency to write them as their own relatable characters, instead of being orbiting cumdumpsters for the protag to cockblock at will (and as bad as his character is written, Kirito still has a wholesome relationship with his in-game waifu, turned IRL waifu: Asuna.).
• GATE: Thus the JSDF Went There: This was a series that had some potential as the premise was somewhat similar to Stargate; A gateway to another world suddenly appears right in the middle of Tokyo, and almost immediately a bunch of monsters and medieval soldiers start pouring out and attacking anyone in sight. Naturally, the modern Japanese military beats them back, then decides to invade the other world to hold those responsible for the attack accountable. This could've been a good story as there's some actual political intrigue on both sides of the gate, but besides the usual Isekai problems (The protagonist is a lazy underachiever and yet has specops credentials, and has a harem of girls who are or look half his age) its also in-your-face nationalistic, to the point where the Japanese Self-Defense Force effortlessly curbstomps any enemy they go up against, including three different spy agencies and the capital of the enemy empire. Besides removing any tension from the story, its also pretty much transparent pro-military propaganda, where all of the military's more pacifistic political opponents are portrayed as self-centered opportunists. Nevermind that the JSDF basically claimed the other world as their sovereign territory by virtue of being connected to Japan and are seeking to exploit its resources. This should set off alarm bells for those of you who know history.
• In Another World With My Smartphone: The protag gets accidentally offed by God, and as an apology resurrects him with god-tier stats and a smartphone with several, mostly unfair features. He is, without a doubt, the most unironically-blatant Marty Sue to grace recent times. Also its a romance-less harem animu on the side, they're not even trying to aim above the 13-year old demographic.
• The Master of Ragnarok & Blesser of Einherjar: Even worse than Smartphone. Possibly the worst isakai ever. Take everything people hate about isekai and turn it up to eleven. Lazy animation, a harem that includes disturbingly young girls, and an unwatchably boring plot. Also has a guy with a smartphone, oddly enough.
• Garzey's Wing: 1996 release, widely hailed as one of the worst anime ever made; particularly, the Central Park Media dub made an already incoherent plot even more nonsensical. For example, one notorious line goes "We have to circle quickly. We need a stirrup to do this. But don't be unduly concerned. We can use our spears to stand our ground firmly."
• [New Life+] Young Again in Another World: Is just another generic isekai about the mc that was killed and sent to other world by god. But what's so bad about this one that it deserves to be mentioned here? well...turns out the MC of this one in life was a soldier who participated the 2nd sino Japanese war in China which he used his GLORIOUS KATANA FOLDED 9000 TIMES and killed over 3000+ people. You still with me? good. After it's anime was announced, controversy started to stirred and China does not sit well with one that they forced the publisher company to not only cancel the anime, but canned the publishing of the novels as well, every shipments about this piece of trash was stopped. To make matter worse, many anon also found old tweets of the author on twitter made before the first volume of his isekai was published, where he demean both Chinese and Korean, calling them inhuman and lacks morality. This incidents has proven that Japanese isekai authors are not only sucks in writing, but also are some of the worst scum bags in Japan as well as the overall world.

Weird Ones

• Isekai Quartet: Take the main casts of "Overlord", "Konosuba", "Saga of Tanya" and "Re: Zero" find themselves in a middle school. Most of them want to return "home". The result? A somewhat interesting gag series about an Isekai squared situation. Weird because it blurs the line between Isekai, Reverse Isekai, and Not Isekai. Funny, but only if you have some awareness of at least one (and preferably more) of the four series, and are willing to tolerate "HILARITY ENSUES" grade "hi-jinks".