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The World Wars

2019-09-23T23:23:22Z

2620:0:1000:5E10:6D35:9465:FD9E:894: /* The War in the East */

During the [[Industrial Revolution]], Europe was comparatively peaceful for the most part. The 19th century started with the Napoleonic Wars when Industrialization was building up steam in England and afterwards there were a series of colonial conflicts and small to middling wars between the various industrial powers*. The Civil War was on the upper end of conflicts in this era but was limited to the comparatively sparsely populated US, was still fought with muskets and saw about 600-750,000 people dead. The Franco Prussian war was won in six months. Things changed in 1914 when Arch Duke Ferdinand was assassinated, starting the Great War, also known as the ''First World War''. This would be followed up by the ''Second World War'' in 1939-45, which largely stemmed from the consequences of the Great War. '''The World Wars''' would spread across the world and saw conflict and destruction beyond anything that was ever seen before or since.

There are two important factors in the World Wars: Technology and Nationalism. Technology is the easier of the two to understand, in the Napoleonic War the average soldier had a flintlock musket that could shoot 2-4 bullets a minute with an effective range of 100 meters, was supported by muzzle loading cannons that could shoot accurately to about 1km was supported by and steam engines were just beginning to propel boats and move loads of coal around mines. In 1914 the average soldier had a rifle that could shoot 15-30 bullets a minute (which could go through three men and still be deadly) at ranges of over a kilometer and was backed up by cannons that could fire shells six kilometers or more on ballistic courses which exploded in the air raining a spray of balls over a wide area and machine guns which could shoot 450 bullets a minute and airplanes. By the end of the Great War tanks, Sub Machine Guns and Poison Gas had been added to the arsenal. Tactics devised based on 19th century ideas of fighting were useless on this new battlefield and the book needed to be re-written from page one. Other technologies such as mass production, mechanized farming, railways and automobiles, mass education, telecommunications and modern bureaucracies meant that an Industrial Nation could turn more of it's population into soldiers than any medieval nation could ever hope to do (Rome was hard pressed to keep up a standing army of about 1% of it's population, Germany mobilized nearly 20% during the Great War). Through bloody experience generals gradually put together some idea of how to operate in this new battlefield near the end of the Great War and between the wars they'd continue to build on it with experience in small scale wars. Even so people were still making it up as they went in WWII.

Nationalism is more abstract but just as important. In the Middle Ages, people generally identified themselves as being "a Christian Journeyman Blacksmith from London" or "a Jewish Master Cobbler from Munich" and so forth (their job, class, religion and hometown, things which they dealt with face to face day to day). If a civil war happened and they ended up with a new noble house in charge, they would not care too much as long as the new lord upheld his feudal duties. There was a king and he ruled a bunch of land and tried to keep the peace, which was all good but the specifics of this was not a fact which defined them. This began to change with the Protestant Reformation and had a bit of build up through the Age of Enlightenment as propaganda for the masses took form, leading to the birth of nationalism with the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars. People began to see their country as more than just where they lived and the guy in a funny hat who ruled them, but rather as a community of people united by common ideas, languages, beliefs, customs, ideals, and (often) ancestry, people who need to band together and set aside their differences to defend what's theirs against those stinking foreigners with their differences. Public education caught on during the Industrial Revolution, which made it possible to give these ideals to everyone from the richest businessman to the lowliest beggar. When you have two nations which have nationalistic populations and governments and other groups fond of egging nationalism on together it does not take much to get them at each others throats.

Footnote * The Taiping Rebellion in China killed some 20-30 million people, but neither side in it was industrialized beyond buying some foreign weapons to equip some of their troops.

== The First World War ==
To understand the beginning of the major, globe-shaking clusterfuck known as the First World War, we must first look at several key issues that preceded it.

The first and probably one of the biggest contributing factors was the race for Empire. During the preceding centuries, imperialism and expansionism became extremely popular among the industrializing and booming nations of western Europe. Entire swathes of Africa and Asia were carved out by global powerhouses such as Great Britain and France, in order to fuel their industry and economy back home, often at the expense of the natives (the treatment of which varied on which European power dominated that particular region, with those under Belgium's sway being the worst off). For a while, the competition was 'merely' a case of rivalry, as each generally avoided the other's territories in order not to repeat disasters like the Seven Years' War or the Napoleonic Wars. Everything was going more or less splendidly (barring some wars of independence in the Balkans against the increasingly corrupt and stagnating Ottoman Empire), until one key event forever shattered the balance of power so carefully put into place by the Congress of Vienna: the unification of Germany by Otto von Bismark (a political genius so astute that he coined the modern term 'realpolitik').

With Germany now unified, it presented a major threat to the established powers of Europe. Not helping matters was the new Kaiser, Wilhelm II, looking at Britain with barely restrained jealousy and thus deciding that Germany deserved its own overseas empire and place as top dog. Complicating matters further is the fact that the royalty and nobility of Europe were all largely related to one another. In some ways, this made the coming shitstorm seem more like the biggest family feud in centuries. The race for who controlled the biggest slice of the planet was kicked into overdrive, with factories pumping out new, relatively untested weapons such as the machine gun, the repeating rifle, and the howitzer, while shipyards around Europe churned out awe-inspiring steel battleships and cruisers, complete with the largest cannons mankind had ever seen up to that point.

To counterbalance each other, the great powers formed increasingly complex and entangling military alliances, which coalesced into two pacts- the Triple Entente (France, Britain, and Russia) and the Triple Alliance (Germany, Italy, and Austria)

Meanwhile, various nationalist and liberal revolutionary movements were sweeping the continent like a new disease from the Plaguefather. Some of their demands were met, particularly in Britain where the House of Commons gained more power. Other revolutions were violently crushed or flat-out ignored, while still others were successful in their goals through sheer force of arms. The hardest hit, however, were not the more liberalized and industrious Western nations. Instead, the hardest hit by these successive waves of revolution was none other than the two oldest empires in Europe at that time- Austria and the Ottomans, both of whom were weary, tired states in dire need of reform. While some in both powers saw granting people increasing amounts of autonomy as the way to keep their state from collapsing (such as the formation of the dual monarchy and the recognition of Hungary as an equal partner, transforming the Austrian Empire into Austria-Hungary), others insisted on a more hardline approach, trying to keep the state afloat by using terror. All of this bred resentment, particularly in the Balkans, which increasingly became a powder keg that was waiting for the right spark.

That spark came in the form of the assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, at the hands of Gavrilo Princip, who was a member of the infamous Serbian nationalist organization, the Black Hand. Austria-Hungary gave an ultimatum to Serbia, which included some frankly ridiculous and cruel terms. When the Serbs rejected a few of these terms, the Austrians took it as a casus belli and declared war on Serbia. In response, Russia declared war on Austria, to which Germany declared war on Russia, to which France declared war on Germany, etc.

Thus began a conflict that would last for four bloody long years, see eleven million deaths as the result of horrific industrial warfare in the trenches and bombed-out fields, diseases such as the flu, and the breakup of several empires to form new nations. Truly, an entire generation of Europe's men was decimated as a result and gave rise to later extremist philosophies, the proponents of whom were all too eager to amass power for themselves by blaming it on the subversive "other."

Terrifying new weapons of war earned their fearsome reputation in this conflict. Machine guns and air-burst artillery shells rendered the old tactics of Napoleonic warfare suicidal, while mustard gas and the like created a new age of massive destruction. Tanks made their first debut in this war, slowly rumbling forth like invincible metal monsters, shrugging off most resistance and dealing punishing firepower themselves, only to breakdown in the middle of the battle due to being rudimentary designs. The airplane, as well, saw use in a combat role, and it would swiftly become an invaluable strategic and tactical tool, for he who dominated the skies dominated the flow of battle.

The bloodiest war in human history up to that point ended with Germany's surrender at 11:00 A.M, on November 11th, 1918, after being exhausted, starving, and dangerously close to collapse in the face of a communist uprising.

== The Interwar ==
Near the end of the first World War, the world was thrown into yet another cataclysm. The Spanish Flu, named such because neutral Spain was the only place that paid much attention to it over the ongoing war, spread rapidly and killed many thanks to the conditions caused by the war (overcrowding, especially in transport ships for returning soldiers, malnourishment, etc.). The death toll was horrendous, with the minimum estimate of 50 million being over double the entire war's death toll. After this, Europe needed decades to recover from the horrible destruction the war and flu had caused.

America, however, was having its best years ever. The so called "Roaring Twenties" saw a rapid increase in the standard of living. President Harding managed to do the impossible and eliminate the deficit, though some of his appointees trying to sell [[Wikipedia:Teapot Rock|some government owned rock in the middle of nowhere]] marred his legacy (looking back historians realize there's a lack of evidence suggesting he had any knowledge or involvement). The American economy of the time was doing well; unlike the other powers of Europe, it had not been strained extensively by being in a war economy for four years that strained productivity, had prime farmland turned into no man's land like France, its economy pushed to the breaking point like Germany, broken up into squabbling states like the Austro-Hungarian Empire, or had all of that and was taken over by communists after a civil war, while having basically everyone in Europe owe American bankers to pay for the war.

After Harding's death during the scandal, his Vice-President, Calvin Coolidge, took over. This was rather sudden and Coolidge was sworn in during the middle of the night by his father on the family Bible, with his first act was to pray to God to bless the American people and give him the strength to lead them. Unlike Harding, Coolidge proved wildly popular despite (or because of) his quiet nature. His economic policies really kicked off the Roaring Twenties and he was popular enough he was elected by a landslide in an election ''he didn't campaign for'' (having his Vice-President candidate do all the work). Coolidge continued Harding's deficit free budgets to the point the US was able to repay most of the national debt. Despite his wild popularity, Coolidge shocked the world with his announcement that [[Wikipedia:I do not choose to run|"I do not choose to run"]] for reelection and, true to his nature, did not really explain why (he would later elaborate in his autobiography that he did not wish to break the (then unofficial) rule set by Washington of a max of two terms among other issues). He would be followed by Herbert Hoover, who largely road on his success. This would change in October of 1929 when the stock market crashed and ushered in the Great Depression.

There had been a series of stock market crashes through the the 19th century in the US every decade or so, each with increasing severity and effects in the US as more people moved into cities and were more dependent on wages. The 1920s saw a rise in consumer culture, payment plans, investment, and a lot of scams which culminated in the biggest crash yet. Moreover, since the US was now linked to a bunch of other countries thanks to improved communications, trade, transportation, and so forth, the crash not only tanked the US economy, but that of basically every other developed country (save for the USSR under Stalin, which had its own Stalin-related problems), which further hindered recovery. The old ways of dealing with things did not work and people turned to new ideas. In the US, this was various public works projects and assistance programs, collectively called the New Deal, to get people back working and build confidence in the economy and financial regulations. In Germany, the response was more severe and was seen as a failure of democracy, which contributed to the rise of the Nazi party. Responding to the collapse gave the Nazis the political currency to get into power, stimulate the economy by gearing it up with war and made the UK less willing to intervene to stop them while they were rising.

== The Second World War ==

=== The War in the West ===
See also [[Nazi]]s

=== The War in the East ===
Since at least 1853, when Commodore Perry sailed into Tokyo Harbor, the Japanese feared the day when the powers of Europe would stomp all over them like they did China. In response they began building up their industrial base, importing guns, ships, factory machinery, engineers, textbooks, and professors. Some Japanese people came to the idea that the best way to fend off imperialism was to become imperialists themselves, and they began gobbling up their neighbors from the late 19th century onward (at first, in the name of liberating them and creating a "Greater East-Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere", but with more brutality and for more obviously selfish reasons as time went on). They kept this going into the 20th century (when this sort of behavior was finally falling out of fashion among the Western powers, especially after WWI), by which time the military had become central to Japanese politics. In 1931, they invaded Manchuria and invaded China in 1937, killing millions as they went. The rest of the world was outraged and cut Japan off from trade, which caused them to dig their heels in and keep it up, lest they be perceived as paper tigers. Tensions built until eventually the US threatened to cut off the oil Japan needed to keep their massive fleet running, and the overconfident Army managed to push the Imperial Japanese Navy into launching an attack on the US Navy base at Pearl Harbor.

The idea was that if everything went right the IJN could control the Pacific and force the US to the negotiating table. The Pearl Harbor attack did work very well and they did overrun a lot of Allied holdings around Asia, but the fact was that the US had more than 10 times the Industry that Japan did as well as plenty of fuel. As time went on the Allies were able to roll back the IJA and push back the IJN to the home islands.

=== The Manhattan Project ===
At the tail end of the 19th century, scientists began to work out some odd properties of matter, which eventually got them to realize that splitting atomic nuclei releases millions of times more energy than an equivalent mass of a chemical reaction. Naturally, governments thought "How can we weaponize this?" Such a weapon would be a game changer for warfare and the Nazis getting it first was an intolerable state of affairs. As such the Brits and the Americans pooled their scientific and industrial resources at Los Alamos to work out how to build a bomb. They were not ready in time to deal with the Nazis, but the first two were dropped on Japan to end the war quickly and avoid a long costly slog that would have involved millions dead, instead settling on killing a couple hundred thousand in one go. But since the Russians ended up nicking the research data (supposedly, Stalin knew that the Manhattan Project succeeded before Truman), this paved the way for the nuclear stalemate known as [[the Cold War]].

== The appeal of the World Wars ==
These are the biggest armed conflicts of world history, rolling across continents using modern weapons, from tanks to planes to automatic weapons. Modern War was born in the trenches of the Somme, in the skies above London and over the fields of Poland during the Blitzkrieg.

Of the two wars, World War One gets relatively little media attention and what little it does get is somber. Part of that is because it's hard to craft a heroic action-packed adventure out of the hopeless horror of trench warfare, the other part is that the morality of the war is very, very grey. There was no clear right side, with both the Central and Allied powers equally chomping at the bit for a fight (at least to start with), and ready to start shooting for ''any'' convenient reason. When some damn fool thing in the Balkans finally set everything off, the ''only'' motivation the common people had (besides being drafted and having no choice anyway) to go fight was the extensive propaganda campaigns telling them how totally awful for realsies the enemy was, and anyone asking questions or doubting was shut down ''hard''. The actual fighting was approached in the most bull-headed idiotic way possible, trying to force 19th century Napoleonic tactics to work with 20th century weapons. When it was all over the country blamed and punished for the whole mess wasn't even the one that started it (in fact, the country that actually started it made bank off the entire thing). All told, the First World War is largely seen as a great tragedy, and was quite possibly the most pointless and wasteful war in all of human history.

Probably one of the only noble (and almost certainly the cleanest) aspects of WW1 was the war in the air, where fighter pilots were effectively chivalric knights of the sky. One famous example was Manfred von Richtofann (the Red Baron), easily the most famous Ace fighter of the war, with 80 victories to his name in his distinctive red tri-plane. He was so well respected among his adversaries that when he was finally shot down, the Allied officers who recovered his body buried him with full honors, including an honor guard and gun salute.

Another event stands out known as the Christmas Truce; early on in the war, troops on the Western Front pretty quickly realized that the guys they were shooting at didn’t want to be there any more than they did, and agreed to a ceasefire to celebrate Christmas. When the truce looked like it was going to last, commanders put a kibosh on the whole thing and told them to start fighting again. Another such truce would never happen as the fighting became more destructive, as poison gas attacks and tank assaults made each side far more wary of the other.

The Second World War is a much more palatable conflict of more or less Good vs Evil, with both the Nazis and Imperial Japan going out to conquer their respective hemispheres of the world and exterminating millions as key objectives. The Axis Powers provided a clear and easy villain for the rest of the world to rally against (as well as providing easy media villains for the rest of the century and into the next millennium). The far more mobile and urban warfare of WW2 also allowed for more personal initiative and heroism, and stories of the extraordinary accomplishments of individual squads, or even individual soldiers, are far more commonplace here than they were back in WW1, when individual men or units had no real hope of making a difference, no matter what they did.

As a result, a solid majority of Alternate History fiction is set in WWII one way or another.

== World War inspired Games, Factions and Settings ==
* A lot of stuff from the [[Imperium of Man]], especially the Death Korps of Krieg.
* [[Dieselpunk]] is the WWII equivalent of Steampunk. If you like the general aesthetics and mood of the time period but don’t want to be limited by the period’s technology, or perhaps want to see what would happen if the Nazi “Wunderwaffen” had been fully realized, this is the setting for you.
* [[Bolt Action]], [[Flames of War]], and other similar military tabletop games are set in WWII.
* [[Star Wars]] takes a great deal of inspiration from this time period, and in regards to the prequels, it especially takes a lot of inspiration from the transformation of the democratic-but-ineffectual Weimar Republic into the nightmarishly totalitarian Third Reich (though it was also influenced by the transition from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire).

{{Skub}}
{{Time Periods}}
[[Category: History]]

Isekai

2019-09-23T23:14:22Z

2620:0:1000:5E10:6D35:9465:FD9E:894: /* Bad Ones */

{{topquote|1=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?|2=Gigguk, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFR2nvw19h4 "Isekai: The Genre that Took Over Anime"]}}
[[File:Isekei WHF.png|500px|thumb|right|Not all worlds are ones where you would want to end up]]

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 [[RPG|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 [[Meme|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, 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 [[Zombie|"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 [[Neckbeard|big fucking nerds]] who immediately recognize what's all about and exploit it, often aided by [[Plot armor|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 [[Trivial Pursuit|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 <s>harem</s> party who hang on his every word. [[Mary Sue|Is this starting to sound familiar?]]
** Also most of the time these girls will getting their clothes stripped, humiliated and having the MC barged in their room while they are changing. These lewd scene can be shown in a few page art for the LN and well as panels in the manga version. To summarize, the fan services it featured made the genre into a collection of softcore porn and it is why people are still reading these crap. So why not just read porn then?
* 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 that this is a bad thing, but it is almost as if the author is trying to push the bill, forcing the reader to go through 1 or 2 chapters of flash backs. This gets worse when they are all generic manga cliches. 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 spend any time with their children (a situation that is a genuine issue, but not something the MC bothers with explaining). Other than that, the parents can be highly demanding, overfocusing on academic performance at the cost of any other development in that edgy way that teenagers rebel against mom & dad. Sometimes, parents can also be drunken scumbags who either abandon their children of the next high or just straight up mistreat them. Protagonists 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 just happen to be the cheat key in the other world.
** [[Neckbeards|NEET]] - Oh baby, don't even get me started. NEET is an acronym for "Not in Education, Employment, or Training," typically including [[Grognard|basement-dwelling adult virgins, unemployed nerds]] who live alone which makes them the definition of a loser. It is no surprise such a failure could get cheat powers in the other world compared to how piss poor they did in real life.
* [[weeaboo|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 a medieval fantasy world is wreaking havoc with their modern weaponry (which is not unreasonable to imagine, even for the decidedly modest Japanese Self Defense Force, but it’s taken to the point where it comes across like a cheesy recruitment ad targeting otaku: "Want to be a real hero? We kill more orcs before 9AM than most Paladins do all day!"). Other than that, various Japanese food and their favorite [[Katanas are Underpowered in d20|katana blade are also introduced in the other world to prove their superiority]]. It's almost if these mass produced Isekai stories and manga are just to advertise Japan's superiority to compensate for something...
* The worlds traveled to are generally bland and unoriginal: usually, it's just the JRPG version of the [[standard fantasy setting]], with actual in-universe RPG mechanics. The distancing effect of the latter is rather bad, and the oversaturation of the former only makes things worse.

== Isekai and /tg/ ==

Although most isekai stories get panned on /tg/ for [[TVTropes|annoying meta-humor]], [[Double Cross|generic shonen bullshit]], [[Maid RPG|generic fanservice bullshit]], or [[Extra Heresy|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 [[Approved anime|anime]] and [[manga]] pages for the current scoop.

While isekai is a distinctly Japanese form of [[Skub|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, 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. 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.

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 [[adventurer]]s 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 me|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%26D_Cartoon|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-Nagants 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. 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==

Note: This list currently focuses on mainly isekai that started as an anime or have had an anime adaption. There is a huge number of isekai manga, web novels, and light novels that have yet to have an anime adaption, which for many of them is a good thing.

===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 (implied both in-show and in its spiritual sequel ''Wings of Rean'' to be an actual lost world far beneath the Earth), where a local duke by the name of Drake Luft forcibly recruits him and others 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, that 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 the cost of her own life, chucks them all (pilots and armies included) back to Upper Earth, which is in the middle of the Cold War. Infamous for having a near 100% fatality rate among all named characters (protagonists AND antagonists alike), with only the ''fairy sidekick'' surviving to the end.
* '''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 are now real people) and guild base. He even has a shitton of [[EA|cash shop items]] that he pulls out once in a while during the few encounters that his OP powers aren't enough. 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 and 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. Something interesting about this series is that it plays with the idea of how most monsters in games are just nameless mooks and only named monsters are an actual threat: here, nearly all monsters are born without a name, but a more powerful entity (usually a demon, or, in our slime's case, his elder dragon BFF) can lend a monster some of their power simply by naming them. The protagonist abuses the shit out of this and names every monster tribe in his confederation, giving them all a newfound sense of purpose and identity along with it. While being on good terms with the human & dwarf nations, the demon-controlled nations are not too happy about this upstart slime and scheme to bring him down.
* '''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 named Zed and Noah 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. Zed, who is kind of an egdelord at first but gets better over time, ends up in the only good nation, while Noah ends 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 and form a party with a bunch of hot girls is granted, but his dream is ruined because he is forced to bring his extremely attractive and clingy mother with him, who is a lot more powerful than him in the game world, and thus takes all the challenge out of the game for him, and also wrecks his chances of starting any romance with his party members. The show also parodies the incest themes popular in a lot of anime and light novels, as the main character finds his own mother attractive but is entirely disgusted by those feelings, and his mom is too oblivious to realize how uncomfortable her age-inappropriate behavior makes him, while her feelings for him really aren't sexual at all.
* '''Spirited Away''': A [[Loli|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. Arguably owes more to classic "fairy stories" than to anything in the modern isekai genre, but may have unintentionally contributed to its rise in popularity. This one is by Hayao Miyazaki and has all of the Studio Ghibli flare that weebs constantly point to to say that anime is more than just stupid cartoons.
* '''Those Who Hunt Elves''': A comedy about a group of people who 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 because corporatism, and meets a being who claims to be God. He refuses to believe it really is God (and even instead labels them 'Being X', sort of like how [[Star Trek]] treats a number of hyper-advanced beings with god-like powers), and as punishment gets reincarnated as a female child soldier in a world resembling WWI Europe, only with magic. Said female child ends up duckfacing her way up the ranks of not!Germany and acquiring a number of hangers-on who either fear or respect her. Her main problem is that she keeps getting assigned to incredibly dangerous missions despite desperately wanting nothing more than a desk job away from the front lines so as not to die again and face Being X or his lackeys (i.e., all the deities from other faiths). Also includes such unbelievable amounts of memetic material and jokes about the cynical life of soldier one can hardly imagine what drugs did the author indulge in. Also: making fun of russians and french, in dubious amounts.
* '''Drifters''': Written and drawn by the author of [[Hellsing|HELLSING]]. This is a story about fighting against fate where historic heroes, wise men and generals from the real world (mostly those who suffered ambiguous or "missing in action/no body was found" ends) are intercepted at the point where they ''should'' have died by a rather mundane-looking-but-apparently divine office worker named '''Murasaki''', and given a choice: to either meet their fates and die, or to live on but get transported to another world—one that happens to be in the middle of a massive fight for survival. Needless to say, many choose the latter, including the main viewpoint character, Shimazu Toyohisa of the Shimazu clan. Called '''Drifters''', this group includes a variety of historical badasses (including Oda Nobunaga, Butch Cassidy, Abe no Senmei, Scipio Africanus and Hannibal Barca), and he whips up an alliance made of demihumans and other peoples into a force that ''might'' be able to stand up to the enemy that's threatening to overwhelm the "civilized" peoples: the forces of the '''Ends'''. Unlike the Drifters, these are people who in the real world had unambiguously nasty ends—like Joan of Arc, Rasputin, and Anastasia Romanov—and are given nasty powers as a result. Led by someone implied to be Joshua bar Joseph (a.k.a., '''Jesus Christ'''), the Ends want to wipe the slate clean, and let the so-called monstrous races (Orcs, Goblins, etc.) inherit the world (because apparently "the meek" was a hell of a mistranslation). Compared to other Isekai, the series is themed around second chances (i.e., don't die the same way you did before), which was heavily reinforced in the first encounter with the black king. By the way, [[Berserk|this series is being released at a snail's pace and is on hiatus for unknown reasons, since it is kind of the fashion nowadays for good mangaka to pull a J.R.R. Martin and not actually do their fucking jobs, even if their work starts being adapted to other mediums faster than they're making it]].
* '''Konosuba''': A comedy series, and one of the first to take the piss out of the Isekai genre. It begins 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 (it was actually a tractor moving at around 2 miles an hour) and he died of a heart attack, followed by pissing himself, which she mocks him relentlessly over. 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 for her mocking him, he picks her and the two end up trapped in a fantasy world. The goddess turns out to be pretty damn useless 90% of the time and a huge bitch, and later they are joined by two other girls (a bratty pyromaniac wizard [[Loli|loli]] who can only cast one [[Deathstrike_Missile_Launcher|spell]] a day, and a [[/d/|masochistic]] knight who can't hit anything for shit and makes both enemies and allies alike uncomfortable) 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 (one that can see the Earth but Earth can't see it due to magical stuff or something) where the weapon of choice are "Guymelefs": [[magitek]] [[mecha]] that resemble fantastical giant [[knight]]s powered by the crystalline hearts of [[dragon]]s. She gets caught up in a whole slew of crazy as the evil empire shows up and starts conquering the world while the male lead (the heir to one of the conquered kingdoms) and a ragtag group of rebels struggle to overthrow the empire and restore things to a semblance of normalcy. Had a very pretty anime movie made of it but the movie mashed a lot of plot elements and characters together while also cutting a huge chunk of the story as well.
* '''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, magical well in the shrine her family lives at really are true when a [[monstergirl|many-armed big-tittied centipede woman]] pulls her into the well and transports her to 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-Fiend|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... [[grimdark|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 that partially runs on RPG rules (it has classes, levels, and experience, but some of the heroes make mistakes based on expecting the world to work like an RPG in places where it doesn't) 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 all be 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's forced to buy a [[Monstergirl]] slave to help him fight and builds himself up as a hero for the common man rather than the uncaring and snobbish elite. On a side note, when it first came out, [[SJW]]s threw an absolute [[rage|hissy fit]] over how "problematic" they perceived this show to be, because [[skub|it hinges on a false rape accusation and depicts the slaver protagonist as a populist hero]]. Y'see, the shield gives substantial experience bonuses to the shield hero's companions, '''but only if they're also his slaves'''. In short, ''every one of his friends have to be slave-branded, and placed legally under his ownership as his thralls to take advantage of this exp buff''. In practice the shield hero treats this as a necessary evil, and his "slaves" are treated more as a large extended family than anything else.
* '''.hack''': One of the earliest isekai to make big waves in the US, .hack is a franchise made up of several anime, manga lines, and video games that take place in the near future (at the time they started, the year being 2009) where VR video games are not only wildly popular but one (simply called "The World") is the most popular game in existence. People the world over play the game and form guilds and play together. The main character from .hack//Sign, Tsukasa, does ''not'' want to play with others, though. Due to some deep-seated weirdness, it's quickly discovered that they cannot log out of the game. Oh, and some weird floating slime monster attacks and kills other player's avatars, and those so attacked fall into comas in the real world. And there is some sort of floating [[Loli|loli]] that Tsukasa communicates with as well. Fairly quickly a group of people begin to hunt Tsukasa while another group tries to helm him (later to find out "he" is actually a "she"). Series ends kind of meh but kicked off a major franchise that then pretty collapsed under its own weight (multiple games within a handful of years, multiple manga stories, spin-off anime and more that, in the end, couldn't pay for themselves).
* '''[[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, along with 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, [[skub|or because its just popular]]). The initial premise of SAO is that true VR is achieved through a VR helmet called the "NerveGear", which transports the mind of the wearer into virtual space in a process called "Full Dive". However, Akihiko Kayaba, the inventor of the device sabotaged it and instead: he traps everyone in SAO by removing the log-out feature, and secretly installs a kill-switch onto the helmets that will fry the user's brain if they forcefully yank out the helmet or if they run out of HP in the game. The only way to log out is to clear a tower-like dungeon in the middle of the game, which is filled with high-level mobs and boss-creatures, so the trapped players band together to clear the tower and get out, while some just fuck around and exploit the situation to their benefit. The plot itself has interesting ideas on how teens and young adults cope with the threat of actual death while in a video game (or wanton disregard for it), but has plenty of glossed-over plot holes that, if you look too far into it, makes the entire story nonsensical (such as factoring human physiology into account—most people inside SAO would have died in less than a week due to IRL dehydration and malnutrition). It also doesn’t help that the protagonist, Kirito, is an unabashed [[edgy]] [[Mary Sue|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 [[Drizzt Do'Urden|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. To cap it off, 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), it's 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, it's also pretty much transparent pro-military propaganda, where all of the military's more pacifistic political opponents are portrayed as self-centered opportunists undermining Japan and the JSDF's righteous cause, rather than people who are just ideologically uncomfortable with weekly massacres and unnecessary foreign wars. 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. [[The_World_Wars#The_Second_World_War|This should set off alarm bells for those of you who know history]], especially as the story as a whole seems aligned with the [[/pol/|far-right, ultra-nationalist, Imperial-apologist movement in Japanese politics]] (note that this appears to be a trend in the genre, as you'll see below). Exists in a few "versions": the original web novel, which was hilariously right-wing, an old-school book series (where the editors had to force the aforementioned right-wing rhetoric way down), the manga (which was an almost straight adaptation of the book series), a light novel series (take the books, then water the right-wing rhetoric down even further), and the anime (comparatively wholesome, except for the aforementioned points that make it watch like a propaganda piece).
* '''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 [[Mary Sue|Marty Sue]] to grace recent times. Also its a romance-less harem animu on the side, so they're clearly 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, but that may just be because the target audience can't imagine life without one.
* '''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''': This is just another generic isekai about a main character that was killed and sent to another world by God. But what's so bad about this one that it deserves to be mentioned here? Well, it turns out that the MC, in his original life, was a soldier who participated the Second Sino-Japanese War in China, where he used his [[Katanas are Underpowered in d20|GLORIOUS KATANA FOLDED 9000 TIMES]] and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre killed over 3000+ people]. You still with me? Good. After the anime was announced, controversy obviously started and China threw its weight around, forcing the publishing company to not only cancel the anime, but halting the publishing of the novels as well. Every product relating to this piece of trash was stopped. To make matters worse, many anons also found old tweets from the author on Twitter made before the first volume of his isekai was published, [[/pol/|where he demeans both Chinese and Koreans, calling them inhuman and lacking morality]]. This and other incidents suggest that a good chunk of Japanese isekai authors not only suck at writing but, like a number of bad fantasy authors, are just using the genre trappings to thinly veil and justify their [[Magical realm|socially repugnant worldviews]].

===Weird Ones===
Or at least the "good" weird ones (that is, of sufficient quality to qualify as "Good Ones", above), or those otherwise of some significance.

* '''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".
*'''Restaurant to Another World''': One of the few Reverse Isekai stories. There's no overarching plot or villains, just a bunch of fantasy folk visiting a restaurant in Japan. Each patron has their own quirks and favorite dish, as well as their story of how they came to discover the restaurant and the friends they make inside.
*'''Plus-Sized Elf''': Another reverse Isekai featuring a cast of [[Monstergirl]]s in Japan who can't return home because they all got fat from eating too much delicious but unhealthy food. They're being helped by a health and fitness expert to lose weight, but each girl's obsessions and constant infighting keeps them from making too much progress. The manga has some actual fitness tips sprinkled throughout, but it's also pretty lewd at times.
*'''Kyoryu Wakusei'''　('''Dinosaur Planet'''): A fairly old (1993) blend of live action (for the "real world" parts) and anime (for the virtual parts) for kids. The adventures of a girl in a (highly inaccurate) virtual simulation of dinosaur times with her navigator in the real world. Strangely contains a fanservice scene of the girl's virtual avatar (who admittedly looks nothing like her real self, with different hair style and color plus a different actor). The reason this even mentioned is it's one of the primary theories of where the hell the term 萌 (Moe) comes from: The girl's avatar is named that (and, unlike the other major theory, Hotaru To'''moe''' of Sailor Moon, uses the same kanji) and said fanservice scene greeted with a very enthusiastic statement of "萌～...".
*'''Thermae Romae''': A comedy about a Roman Thermae (public bath) architect who accidentally traveled to modern Japan after he slipped into his bath water. There, he learns a great deal of knowledge from the flat-faces (what he calls the Japanese), and uses this knowledge to improve Roman Thermae when he gets back. Later chapters turn into [[/tv/|the time traveler's wife]], where he meets this Roman-obsessed Japanese girl (who is also the only "flat-face" he can communicate with in Latin) and falls in love with her.
* '''Re:Creators''': A reverse Isekai, where characters, called creations, of popular created worlds get transported to a real world by a creation that has broken the fourth wall. The idea that their worlds are fruit of imagination and the concept of creator and the act of creation is not something you usually encounter in an anime. It does spiral downwards into a clusterfuck and trope bashing, but hey, if you can have a redhead piloting a mecha, why not? Extra points for filler episode making fun of all the reasons filler episodes exist.
[[Category: Gamer Slang]]
[[Category: Weeaboo]]

Isekai

2019-09-23T23:07:11Z

2620:0:1000:5E10:6D35:9465:FD9E:894: /* Bad Ones */

{{topquote|1=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?|2=Gigguk, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFR2nvw19h4 "Isekai: The Genre that Took Over Anime"]}}
[[File:Isekei WHF.png|500px|thumb|right|Not all worlds are ones where you would want to end up]]

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 [[RPG|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 [[Meme|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, 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 [[Zombie|"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 [[Neckbeard|big fucking nerds]] who immediately recognize what's all about and exploit it, often aided by [[Plot armor|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 [[Trivial Pursuit|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 <s>harem</s> party who hang on his every word. [[Mary Sue|Is this starting to sound familiar?]]
** Also most of the time these girls will getting their clothes stripped, humiliated and having the MC barged in their room while they are changing. These lewd scene can be shown in a few page art for the LN and well as panels in the manga version. To summarize, the fan services it featured made the genre into a collection of softcore porn and it is why people are still reading these crap. So why not just read porn then?
* 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 that this is a bad thing, but it is almost as if the author is trying to push the bill, forcing the reader to go through 1 or 2 chapters of flash backs. This gets worse when they are all generic manga cliches. 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 spend any time with their children (a situation that is a genuine issue, but not something the MC bothers with explaining). Other than that, the parents can be highly demanding, overfocusing on academic performance at the cost of any other development in that edgy way that teenagers rebel against mom & dad. Sometimes, parents can also be drunken scumbags who either abandon their children of the next high or just straight up mistreat them. Protagonists 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 just happen to be the cheat key in the other world.
** [[Neckbeards|NEET]] - Oh baby, don't even get me started. NEET is an acronym for "Not in Education, Employment, or Training," typically including [[Grognard|basement-dwelling adult virgins, unemployed nerds]] who live alone which makes them the definition of a loser. It is no surprise such a failure could get cheat powers in the other world compared to how piss poor they did in real life.
* [[weeaboo|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 a medieval fantasy world is wreaking havoc with their modern weaponry (which is not unreasonable to imagine, even for the decidedly modest Japanese Self Defense Force, but it’s taken to the point where it comes across like a cheesy recruitment ad targeting otaku: "Want to be a real hero? We kill more orcs before 9AM than most Paladins do all day!"). Other than that, various Japanese food and their favorite [[Katanas are Underpowered in d20|katana blade are also introduced in the other world to prove their superiority]]. It's almost if these mass produced Isekai stories and manga are just to advertise Japan's superiority to compensate for something...
* The worlds traveled to are generally bland and unoriginal: usually, it's just the JRPG version of the [[standard fantasy setting]], with actual in-universe RPG mechanics. The distancing effect of the latter is rather bad, and the oversaturation of the former only makes things worse.

== Isekai and /tg/ ==

Although most isekai stories get panned on /tg/ for [[TVTropes|annoying meta-humor]], [[Double Cross|generic shonen bullshit]], [[Maid RPG|generic fanservice bullshit]], or [[Extra Heresy|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 [[Approved anime|anime]] and [[manga]] pages for the current scoop.

While isekai is a distinctly Japanese form of [[Skub|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, 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. 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.

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 [[adventurer]]s 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 me|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%26D_Cartoon|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-Nagants 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. 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==

Note: This list currently focuses on mainly isekai that started as an anime or have had an anime adaption. There is a huge number of isekai manga, web novels, and light novels that have yet to have an anime adaption, which for many of them is a good thing.

===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 (implied both in-show and in its spiritual sequel ''Wings of Rean'' to be an actual lost world far beneath the Earth), where a local duke by the name of Drake Luft forcibly recruits him and others 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, that 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 the cost of her own life, chucks them all (pilots and armies included) back to Upper Earth, which is in the middle of the Cold War. Infamous for having a near 100% fatality rate among all named characters (protagonists AND antagonists alike), with only the ''fairy sidekick'' surviving to the end.
* '''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 are now real people) and guild base. He even has a shitton of [[EA|cash shop items]] that he pulls out once in a while during the few encounters that his OP powers aren't enough. 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 and 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. Something interesting about this series is that it plays with the idea of how most monsters in games are just nameless mooks and only named monsters are an actual threat: here, nearly all monsters are born without a name, but a more powerful entity (usually a demon, or, in our slime's case, his elder dragon BFF) can lend a monster some of their power simply by naming them. The protagonist abuses the shit out of this and names every monster tribe in his confederation, giving them all a newfound sense of purpose and identity along with it. While being on good terms with the human & dwarf nations, the demon-controlled nations are not too happy about this upstart slime and scheme to bring him down.
* '''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 named Zed and Noah 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. Zed, who is kind of an egdelord at first but gets better over time, ends up in the only good nation, while Noah ends 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 and form a party with a bunch of hot girls is granted, but his dream is ruined because he is forced to bring his extremely attractive and clingy mother with him, who is a lot more powerful than him in the game world, and thus takes all the challenge out of the game for him, and also wrecks his chances of starting any romance with his party members. The show also parodies the incest themes popular in a lot of anime and light novels, as the main character finds his own mother attractive but is entirely disgusted by those feelings, and his mom is too oblivious to realize how uncomfortable her age-inappropriate behavior makes him, while her feelings for him really aren't sexual at all.
* '''Spirited Away''': A [[Loli|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. Arguably owes more to classic "fairy stories" than to anything in the modern isekai genre, but may have unintentionally contributed to its rise in popularity. This one is by Hayao Miyazaki and has all of the Studio Ghibli flare that weebs constantly point to to say that anime is more than just stupid cartoons.
* '''Those Who Hunt Elves''': A comedy about a group of people who 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 because corporatism, and meets a being who claims to be God. He refuses to believe it really is God (and even instead labels them 'Being X', sort of like how [[Star Trek]] treats a number of hyper-advanced beings with god-like powers), and as punishment gets reincarnated as a female child soldier in a world resembling WWI Europe, only with magic. Said female child ends up duckfacing her way up the ranks of not!Germany and acquiring a number of hangers-on who either fear or respect her. Her main problem is that she keeps getting assigned to incredibly dangerous missions despite desperately wanting nothing more than a desk job away from the front lines so as not to die again and face Being X or his lackeys (i.e., all the deities from other faiths). Also includes such unbelievable amounts of memetic material and jokes about the cynical life of soldier one can hardly imagine what drugs did the author indulge in. Also: making fun of russians and french, in dubious amounts.
* '''Drifters''': Written and drawn by the author of [[Hellsing|HELLSING]]. This is a story about fighting against fate where historic heroes, wise men and generals from the real world (mostly those who suffered ambiguous or "missing in action/no body was found" ends) are intercepted at the point where they ''should'' have died by a rather mundane-looking-but-apparently divine office worker named '''Murasaki''', and given a choice: to either meet their fates and die, or to live on but get transported to another world—one that happens to be in the middle of a massive fight for survival. Needless to say, many choose the latter, including the main viewpoint character, Shimazu Toyohisa of the Shimazu clan. Called '''Drifters''', this group includes a variety of historical badasses (including Oda Nobunaga, Butch Cassidy, Abe no Senmei, Scipio Africanus and Hannibal Barca), and he whips up an alliance made of demihumans and other peoples into a force that ''might'' be able to stand up to the enemy that's threatening to overwhelm the "civilized" peoples: the forces of the '''Ends'''. Unlike the Drifters, these are people who in the real world had unambiguously nasty ends—like Joan of Arc, Rasputin, and Anastasia Romanov—and are given nasty powers as a result. Led by someone implied to be Joshua bar Joseph (a.k.a., '''Jesus Christ'''), the Ends want to wipe the slate clean, and let the so-called monstrous races (Orcs, Goblins, etc.) inherit the world (because apparently "the meek" was a hell of a mistranslation). Compared to other Isekai, the series is themed around second chances (i.e., don't die the same way you did before), which was heavily reinforced in the first encounter with the black king. By the way, [[Berserk|this series is being released at a snail's pace and is on hiatus for unknown reasons, since it is kind of the fashion nowadays for good mangaka to pull a J.R.R. Martin and not actually do their fucking jobs, even if their work starts being adapted to other mediums faster than they're making it]].
* '''Konosuba''': A comedy series, and one of the first to take the piss out of the Isekai genre. It begins 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 (it was actually a tractor moving at around 2 miles an hour) and he died of a heart attack, followed by pissing himself, which she mocks him relentlessly over. 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 for her mocking him, he picks her and the two end up trapped in a fantasy world. The goddess turns out to be pretty damn useless 90% of the time and a huge bitch, and later they are joined by two other girls (a bratty pyromaniac wizard [[Loli|loli]] who can only cast one [[Deathstrike_Missile_Launcher|spell]] a day, and a [[/d/|masochistic]] knight who can't hit anything for shit and makes both enemies and allies alike uncomfortable) 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 (one that can see the Earth but Earth can't see it due to magical stuff or something) where the weapon of choice are "Guymelefs": [[magitek]] [[mecha]] that resemble fantastical giant [[knight]]s powered by the crystalline hearts of [[dragon]]s. She gets caught up in a whole slew of crazy as the evil empire shows up and starts conquering the world while the male lead (the heir to one of the conquered kingdoms) and a ragtag group of rebels struggle to overthrow the empire and restore things to a semblance of normalcy. Had a very pretty anime movie made of it but the movie mashed a lot of plot elements and characters together while also cutting a huge chunk of the story as well.
* '''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, magical well in the shrine her family lives at really are true when a [[monstergirl|many-armed big-tittied centipede woman]] pulls her into the well and transports her to 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-Fiend|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... [[grimdark|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 that partially runs on RPG rules (it has classes, levels, and experience, but some of the heroes make mistakes based on expecting the world to work like an RPG in places where it doesn't) 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 all be 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's forced to buy a [[Monstergirl]] slave to help him fight and builds himself up as a hero for the common man rather than the uncaring and snobbish elite. On a side note, when it first came out, [[SJW]]s threw an absolute [[rage|hissy fit]] over how "problematic" they perceived this show to be, because [[skub|it hinges on a false rape accusation and depicts the slaver protagonist as a populist hero]]. Y'see, the shield gives substantial experience bonuses to the shield hero's companions, '''but only if they're also his slaves'''. In short, ''every one of his friends have to be slave-branded, and placed legally under his ownership as his thralls to take advantage of this exp buff''. In practice the shield hero treats this as a necessary evil, and his "slaves" are treated more as a large extended family than anything else.
* '''.hack''': One of the earliest isekai to make big waves in the US, .hack is a franchise made up of several anime, manga lines, and video games that take place in the near future (at the time they started, the year being 2009) where VR video games are not only wildly popular but one (simply called "The World") is the most popular game in existence. People the world over play the game and form guilds and play together. The main character from .hack//Sign, Tsukasa, does ''not'' want to play with others, though. Due to some deep-seated weirdness, it's quickly discovered that they cannot log out of the game. Oh, and some weird floating slime monster attacks and kills other player's avatars, and those so attacked fall into comas in the real world. And there is some sort of floating [[Loli|loli]] that Tsukasa communicates with as well. Fairly quickly a group of people begin to hunt Tsukasa while another group tries to helm him (later to find out "he" is actually a "she"). Series ends kind of meh but kicked off a major franchise that then pretty collapsed under its own weight (multiple games within a handful of years, multiple manga stories, spin-off anime and more that, in the end, couldn't pay for themselves).
* '''[[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, along with 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, [[skub|or because its just popular]]). The initial premise of SAO is that true VR is achieved through a VR helmet called the "NerveGear", which transports the mind of the wearer into virtual space in a process called "Full Dive". However, Akihiko Kayaba, the inventor of the device sabotaged it and instead: he traps everyone in SAO by removing the log-out feature, and secretly installs a kill-switch onto the helmets that will fry the user's brain if they forcefully yank out the helmet or if they run out of HP in the game. The only way to log out is to clear a tower-like dungeon in the middle of the game, which is filled with high-level mobs and boss-creatures, so the trapped players band together to clear the tower and get out, while some just fuck around and exploit the situation to their benefit. The plot itself has interesting ideas on how teens and young adults cope with the threat of actual death while in a video game (or wanton disregard for it), but has plenty of glossed-over plot holes that, if you look too far into it, makes the entire story nonsensical (such as factoring human physiology into account—most people inside SAO would have died in less than a week due to IRL dehydration and malnutrition). It also doesn’t help that the protagonist, Kirito, is an unabashed [[edgy]] [[Mary Sue|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 [[Drizzt Do'Urden|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. To cap it off, 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), it's 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, it's 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. [[The_World_Wars#The_Second_World_War|This should set off alarm bells for those of you who know history]], especially as the story as a whole seems aligned with the [[/pol/|far-right, ultra-nationalist, Imperial-apologist movement in Japanese politics]] (note that this appears to be a trend in the genre, as you'll see below). Exists in a few "versions": the original web novel, which was hilariously right-wing, an old-school book series (where the editors had to force the aforementioned right-wing rhetoric way down), the manga (which was an almost straight adaptation of the book series), a light novel series (take the books, then water the right-wing rhetoric down even further), and the anime (comparatively wholesome, except for the aforementioned points that make it watch like a propaganda piece).
* '''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 [[Mary Sue|Marty Sue]] to grace recent times. Also its a romance-less harem animu on the side, so they're clearly 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, but that may just be because the target audience can't imagine life without one.
* '''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''': This is just another generic isekai about a main character that was killed and sent to another world by God. But what's so bad about this one that it deserves to be mentioned here? Well, it turns out that the MC, in his original life, was a soldier who participated the Second Sino-Japanese War in China, where he used his [[Katanas are Underpowered in d20|GLORIOUS KATANA FOLDED 9000 TIMES]] and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre killed over 3000+ people]. You still with me? Good. After the anime was announced, controversy obviously started and China threw its weight around, forcing the publishing company to not only cancel the anime, but halting the publishing of the novels as well. Every product relating to this piece of trash was stopped. To make matters worse, many anons also found old tweets from the author on Twitter made before the first volume of his isekai was published, [[/pol/|where he demeans both Chinese and Koreans, calling them inhuman and lacking morality]]. This and other incidents suggest that a good chunk of Japanese isekai authors not only suck at writing but, like a number of bad fantasy authors, are just using the genre trappings to thinly veil and justify their [[Magical realm|socially repugnant worldviews]].

===Weird Ones===
Or at least the "good" weird ones (that is, of sufficient quality to qualify as "Good Ones", above), or those otherwise of some significance.

* '''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".
*'''Restaurant to Another World''': One of the few Reverse Isekai stories. There's no overarching plot or villains, just a bunch of fantasy folk visiting a restaurant in Japan. Each patron has their own quirks and favorite dish, as well as their story of how they came to discover the restaurant and the friends they make inside.
*'''Plus-Sized Elf''': Another reverse Isekai featuring a cast of [[Monstergirl]]s in Japan who can't return home because they all got fat from eating too much delicious but unhealthy food. They're being helped by a health and fitness expert to lose weight, but each girl's obsessions and constant infighting keeps them from making too much progress. The manga has some actual fitness tips sprinkled throughout, but it's also pretty lewd at times.
*'''Kyoryu Wakusei'''　('''Dinosaur Planet'''): A fairly old (1993) blend of live action (for the "real world" parts) and anime (for the virtual parts) for kids. The adventures of a girl in a (highly inaccurate) virtual simulation of dinosaur times with her navigator in the real world. Strangely contains a fanservice scene of the girl's virtual avatar (who admittedly looks nothing like her real self, with different hair style and color plus a different actor). The reason this even mentioned is it's one of the primary theories of where the hell the term 萌 (Moe) comes from: The girl's avatar is named that (and, unlike the other major theory, Hotaru To'''moe''' of Sailor Moon, uses the same kanji) and said fanservice scene greeted with a very enthusiastic statement of "萌～...".
*'''Thermae Romae''': A comedy about a Roman Thermae (public bath) architect who accidentally traveled to modern Japan after he slipped into his bath water. There, he learns a great deal of knowledge from the flat-faces (what he calls the Japanese), and uses this knowledge to improve Roman Thermae when he gets back. Later chapters turn into [[/tv/|the time traveler's wife]], where he meets this Roman-obsessed Japanese girl (who is also the only "flat-face" he can communicate with in Latin) and falls in love with her.
* '''Re:Creators''': A reverse Isekai, where characters, called creations, of popular created worlds get transported to a real world by a creation that has broken the fourth wall. The idea that their worlds are fruit of imagination and the concept of creator and the act of creation is not something you usually encounter in an anime. It does spiral downwards into a clusterfuck and trope bashing, but hey, if you can have a redhead piloting a mecha, why not? Extra points for filler episode making fun of all the reasons filler episodes exist.
[[Category: Gamer Slang]]
[[Category: Weeaboo]]

Isekai

2019-09-23T22:58:13Z

2620:0:1000:5E10:6D35:9465:FD9E:894: /* Bad Ones */

{{topquote|1=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?|2=Gigguk, [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFR2nvw19h4 "Isekai: The Genre that Took Over Anime"]}}
[[File:Isekei WHF.png|500px|thumb|right|Not all worlds are ones where you would want to end up]]

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 [[RPG|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 [[Meme|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, 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 [[Zombie|"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 [[Neckbeard|big fucking nerds]] who immediately recognize what's all about and exploit it, often aided by [[Plot armor|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 [[Trivial Pursuit|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 <s>harem</s> party who hang on his every word. [[Mary Sue|Is this starting to sound familiar?]]
** Also most of the time these girls will getting their clothes stripped, humiliated and having the MC barged in their room while they are changing. These lewd scene can be shown in a few page art for the LN and well as panels in the manga version. To summarize, the fan services it featured made the genre into a collection of softcore porn and it is why people are still reading these crap. So why not just read porn then?
* 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 that this is a bad thing, but it is almost as if the author is trying to push the bill, forcing the reader to go through 1 or 2 chapters of flash backs. This gets worse when they are all generic manga cliches. 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 spend any time with their children (a situation that is a genuine issue, but not something the MC bothers with explaining). Other than that, the parents can be highly demanding, overfocusing on academic performance at the cost of any other development in that edgy way that teenagers rebel against mom & dad. Sometimes, parents can also be drunken scumbags who either abandon their children of the next high or just straight up mistreat them. Protagonists 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 just happen to be the cheat key in the other world.
** [[Neckbeards|NEET]] - Oh baby, don't even get me started. NEET is an acronym for "Not in Education, Employment, or Training," typically including [[Grognard|basement-dwelling adult virgins, unemployed nerds]] who live alone which makes them the definition of a loser. It is no surprise such a failure could get cheat powers in the other world compared to how piss poor they did in real life.
* [[weeaboo|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 a medieval fantasy world is wreaking havoc with their modern weaponry (which is not unreasonable to imagine, even for the decidedly modest Japanese Self Defense Force, but it’s taken to the point where it comes across like a cheesy recruitment ad targeting otaku: "Want to be a real hero? We kill more orcs before 9AM than most Paladins do all day!"). Other than that, various Japanese food and their favorite [[Katanas are Underpowered in d20|katana blade are also introduced in the other world to prove their superiority]]. It's almost if these mass produced Isekai stories and manga are just to advertise Japan's superiority to compensate for something...
* The worlds traveled to are generally bland and unoriginal: usually, it's just the JRPG version of the [[standard fantasy setting]], with actual in-universe RPG mechanics. The distancing effect of the latter is rather bad, and the oversaturation of the former only makes things worse.

== Isekai and /tg/ ==

Although most isekai stories get panned on /tg/ for [[TVTropes|annoying meta-humor]], [[Double Cross|generic shonen bullshit]], [[Maid RPG|generic fanservice bullshit]], or [[Extra Heresy|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 [[Approved anime|anime]] and [[manga]] pages for the current scoop.

While isekai is a distinctly Japanese form of [[Skub|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, 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. 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.

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 [[adventurer]]s 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 me|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%26D_Cartoon|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-Nagants 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. 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==

Note: This list currently focuses on mainly isekai that started as an anime or have had an anime adaption. There is a huge number of isekai manga, web novels, and light novels that have yet to have an anime adaption, which for many of them is a good thing.

===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 (implied both in-show and in its spiritual sequel ''Wings of Rean'' to be an actual lost world far beneath the Earth), where a local duke by the name of Drake Luft forcibly recruits him and others 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, that 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 the cost of her own life, chucks them all (pilots and armies included) back to Upper Earth, which is in the middle of the Cold War. Infamous for having a near 100% fatality rate among all named characters (protagonists AND antagonists alike), with only the ''fairy sidekick'' surviving to the end.
* '''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 are now real people) and guild base. He even has a shitton of [[EA|cash shop items]] that he pulls out once in a while during the few encounters that his OP powers aren't enough. 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 and 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. Something interesting about this series is that it plays with the idea of how most monsters in games are just nameless mooks and only named monsters are an actual threat: here, nearly all monsters are born without a name, but a more powerful entity (usually a demon, or, in our slime's case, his elder dragon BFF) can lend a monster some of their power simply by naming them. The protagonist abuses the shit out of this and names every monster tribe in his confederation, giving them all a newfound sense of purpose and identity along with it. While being on good terms with the human & dwarf nations, the demon-controlled nations are not too happy about this upstart slime and scheme to bring him down.
* '''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 named Zed and Noah 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. Zed, who is kind of an egdelord at first but gets better over time, ends up in the only good nation, while Noah ends 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 and form a party with a bunch of hot girls is granted, but his dream is ruined because he is forced to bring his extremely attractive and clingy mother with him, who is a lot more powerful than him in the game world, and thus takes all the challenge out of the game for him, and also wrecks his chances of starting any romance with his party members. The show also parodies the incest themes popular in a lot of anime and light novels, as the main character finds his own mother attractive but is entirely disgusted by those feelings, and his mom is too oblivious to realize how uncomfortable her age-inappropriate behavior makes him, while her feelings for him really aren't sexual at all.
* '''Spirited Away''': A [[Loli|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. Arguably owes more to classic "fairy stories" than to anything in the modern isekai genre, but may have unintentionally contributed to its rise in popularity. This one is by Hayao Miyazaki and has all of the Studio Ghibli flare that weebs constantly point to to say that anime is more than just stupid cartoons.
* '''Those Who Hunt Elves''': A comedy about a group of people who 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 because corporatism, and meets a being who claims to be God. He refuses to believe it really is God (and even instead labels them 'Being X', sort of like how [[Star Trek]] treats a number of hyper-advanced beings with god-like powers), and as punishment gets reincarnated as a female child soldier in a world resembling WWI Europe, only with magic. Said female child ends up duckfacing her way up the ranks of not!Germany and acquiring a number of hangers-on who either fear or respect her. Her main problem is that she keeps getting assigned to incredibly dangerous missions despite desperately wanting nothing more than a desk job away from the front lines so as not to die again and face Being X or his lackeys (i.e., all the deities from other faiths). Also includes such unbelievable amounts of memetic material and jokes about the cynical life of soldier one can hardly imagine what drugs did the author indulge in. Also: making fun of russians and french, in dubious amounts.
* '''Drifters''': Written and drawn by the author of [[Hellsing|HELLSING]]. This is a story about fighting against fate where historic heroes, wise men and generals from the real world (mostly those who suffered ambiguous or "missing in action/no body was found" ends) are intercepted at the point where they ''should'' have died by a rather mundane-looking-but-apparently divine office worker named '''Murasaki''', and given a choice: to either meet their fates and die, or to live on but get transported to another world—one that happens to be in the middle of a massive fight for survival. Needless to say, many choose the latter, including the main viewpoint character, Shimazu Toyohisa of the Shimazu clan. Called '''Drifters''', this group includes a variety of historical badasses (including Oda Nobunaga, Butch Cassidy, Abe no Senmei, Scipio Africanus and Hannibal Barca), and he whips up an alliance made of demihumans and other peoples into a force that ''might'' be able to stand up to the enemy that's threatening to overwhelm the "civilized" peoples: the forces of the '''Ends'''. Unlike the Drifters, these are people who in the real world had unambiguously nasty ends—like Joan of Arc, Rasputin, and Anastasia Romanov—and are given nasty powers as a result. Led by someone implied to be Joshua bar Joseph (a.k.a., '''Jesus Christ'''), the Ends want to wipe the slate clean, and let the so-called monstrous races (Orcs, Goblins, etc.) inherit the world (because apparently "the meek" was a hell of a mistranslation). Compared to other Isekai, the series is themed around second chances (i.e., don't die the same way you did before), which was heavily reinforced in the first encounter with the black king. By the way, [[Berserk|this series is being released at a snail's pace and is on hiatus for unknown reasons, since it is kind of the fashion nowadays for good mangaka to pull a J.R.R. Martin and not actually do their fucking jobs, even if their work starts being adapted to other mediums faster than they're making it]].
* '''Konosuba''': A comedy series, and one of the first to take the piss out of the Isekai genre. It begins 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 (it was actually a tractor moving at around 2 miles an hour) and he died of a heart attack, followed by pissing himself, which she mocks him relentlessly over. 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 for her mocking him, he picks her and the two end up trapped in a fantasy world. The goddess turns out to be pretty damn useless 90% of the time and a huge bitch, and later they are joined by two other girls (a bratty pyromaniac wizard [[Loli|loli]] who can only cast one [[Deathstrike_Missile_Launcher|spell]] a day, and a [[/d/|masochistic]] knight who can't hit anything for shit and makes both enemies and allies alike uncomfortable) 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 (one that can see the Earth but Earth can't see it due to magical stuff or something) where the weapon of choice are "Guymelefs": [[magitek]] [[mecha]] that resemble fantastical giant [[knight]]s powered by the crystalline hearts of [[dragon]]s. She gets caught up in a whole slew of crazy as the evil empire shows up and starts conquering the world while the male lead (the heir to one of the conquered kingdoms) and a ragtag group of rebels struggle to overthrow the empire and restore things to a semblance of normalcy. Had a very pretty anime movie made of it but the movie mashed a lot of plot elements and characters together while also cutting a huge chunk of the story as well.
* '''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, magical well in the shrine her family lives at really are true when a [[monstergirl|many-armed big-tittied centipede woman]] pulls her into the well and transports her to 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-Fiend|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... [[grimdark|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 that partially runs on RPG rules (it has classes, levels, and experience, but some of the heroes make mistakes based on expecting the world to work like an RPG in places where it doesn't) 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 all be 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's forced to buy a [[Monstergirl]] slave to help him fight and builds himself up as a hero for the common man rather than the uncaring and snobbish elite. On a side note, when it first came out, [[SJW]]s threw an absolute [[rage|hissy fit]] over how "problematic" they perceived this show to be, because [[skub|it hinges on a false rape accusation and depicts the slaver protagonist as a populist hero]]. Y'see, the shield gives substantial experience bonuses to the shield hero's companions, '''but only if they're also his slaves'''. In short, ''every one of his friends have to be slave-branded, and placed legally under his ownership as his thralls to take advantage of this exp buff''. In practice the shield hero treats this as a necessary evil, and his "slaves" are treated more as a large extended family than anything else.
* '''.hack''': One of the earliest isekai to make big waves in the US, .hack is a franchise made up of several anime, manga lines, and video games that take place in the near future (at the time they started, the year being 2009) where VR video games are not only wildly popular but one (simply called "The World") is the most popular game in existence. People the world over play the game and form guilds and play together. The main character from .hack//Sign, Tsukasa, does ''not'' want to play with others, though. Due to some deep-seated weirdness, it's quickly discovered that they cannot log out of the game. Oh, and some weird floating slime monster attacks and kills other player's avatars, and those so attacked fall into comas in the real world. And there is some sort of floating [[Loli|loli]] that Tsukasa communicates with as well. Fairly quickly a group of people begin to hunt Tsukasa while another group tries to helm him (later to find out "he" is actually a "she"). Series ends kind of meh but kicked off a major franchise that then pretty collapsed under its own weight (multiple games within a handful of years, multiple manga stories, spin-off anime and more that, in the end, couldn't pay for themselves).
* '''[[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, along with 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, [[skub|or because its just popular]]). The initial premise of SAO is that true VR is achieved through a VR helmet called the "NerveGear", which transports the mind of the wearer into virtual space in a process called "Full Dive". However, Akihiko Kayaba, the inventor of the device sabotaged it and instead: he traps everyone in SAO by removing the log-out feature, and secretly installs a kill-switch onto the helmets that will fry the user's brain if they forcefully yank out the helmet or if they run out of HP in the game. The only way to log out is to clear a tower-like dungeon in the middle of the game, which is filled with high-level mobs and boss-creatures, so the trapped players band together to clear the tower and get out, while some just fuck around and exploit the situation to their benefit. The plot itself has interesting ideas on how teens and young adults cope with the threat of actual death while in a video game (or wanton disregard for it), but has plenty of glossed-over plot holes that, if you look too far into it, makes the entire story nonsensical (such as factoring human physiology into account—most people inside SAO would have died in less than a week due to IRL dehydration and malnutrition). It also doesn’t help that the protagonist, Kirito, is an unabashed [[edgy]] [[Mary Sue|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 [[Drizzt Do'Urden|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. To cap it off, 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), it's 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, it's 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. [[The_World_Wars#The_Second_World_War|This should set off alarm bells for those of you who know history]], especially as the story as a whole seems aligned with the [[/pol/|far-right, ultra-nationalist, Imperial-apologist movement in Japanese politics]] (note that this appears to be a trend in the genre, as you'll see below). Exists in a few "versions": the original web novel, which was hilariously right-wing, an old-school book series (where the editors had to force the aforementioned right-wing rhetoric way down), the manga (which was an almost straight adaptation of the book series), a light novel series (take the books, then water the right-wing rhetoric down even further), and the anime (comparatively wholesome, except for the aforementioned points that make it watch like a propaganda piece).
* '''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 [[Mary Sue|Marty Sue]] to grace recent times. Also its a romance-less harem animu on the side, so they're clearly 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, but that may just be because the target audience can't imagine life without one.
* '''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''': This is just another generic isekai about a main character that was killed and sent to another world by God. But what's so bad about this one that it deserves to be mentioned here? Well, it turns out that the MC, in his original life, was a soldier who participated the Second Sino-Japanese War in China, where he used his [[Katanas are Underpowered in d20|GLORIOUS KATANA FOLDED 9000 TIMES]] and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre killed over 3000+ people]. You still with me? Good. After the anime was announced, controversy obviously started and China threw its weight around, forcing the publishing company to not only cancel the anime, but halting the publishing of the novels as well. Every product relating to this piece of trash was stopped. To make matters worse, many anons also found old tweets from the author on Twitter made before the first volume of his isekai was published, [[/pol/|where he demeans both Chinese and Koreans, calling them inhuman and lacking morality]]. This and other incidents suggest that a good chunk of Japanese isekai authors not only suck at writing, but can be some of the worst scumbags in Japan as well as the overall world.

===Weird Ones===
Or at least the "good" weird ones (that is, of sufficient quality to qualify as "Good Ones", above), or those otherwise of some significance.

* '''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".
*'''Restaurant to Another World''': One of the few Reverse Isekai stories. There's no overarching plot or villains, just a bunch of fantasy folk visiting a restaurant in Japan. Each patron has their own quirks and favorite dish, as well as their story of how they came to discover the restaurant and the friends they make inside.
*'''Plus-Sized Elf''': Another reverse Isekai featuring a cast of [[Monstergirl]]s in Japan who can't return home because they all got fat from eating too much delicious but unhealthy food. They're being helped by a health and fitness expert to lose weight, but each girl's obsessions and constant infighting keeps them from making too much progress. The manga has some actual fitness tips sprinkled throughout, but it's also pretty lewd at times.
*'''Kyoryu Wakusei'''　('''Dinosaur Planet'''): A fairly old (1993) blend of live action (for the "real world" parts) and anime (for the virtual parts) for kids. The adventures of a girl in a (highly inaccurate) virtual simulation of dinosaur times with her navigator in the real world. Strangely contains a fanservice scene of the girl's virtual avatar (who admittedly looks nothing like her real self, with different hair style and color plus a different actor). The reason this even mentioned is it's one of the primary theories of where the hell the term 萌 (Moe) comes from: The girl's avatar is named that (and, unlike the other major theory, Hotaru To'''moe''' of Sailor Moon, uses the same kanji) and said fanservice scene greeted with a very enthusiastic statement of "萌～...".
*'''Thermae Romae''': A comedy about a Roman Thermae (public bath) architect who accidentally traveled to modern Japan after he slipped into his bath water. There, he learns a great deal of knowledge from the flat-faces (what he calls the Japanese), and uses this knowledge to improve Roman Thermae when he gets back. Later chapters turn into [[/tv/|the time traveler's wife]], where he meets this Roman-obsessed Japanese girl (who is also the only "flat-face" he can communicate with in Latin) and falls in love with her.
* '''Re:Creators''': A reverse Isekai, where characters, called creations, of popular created worlds get transported to a real world by a creation that has broken the fourth wall. The idea that their worlds are fruit of imagination and the concept of creator and the act of creation is not something you usually encounter in an anime. It does spiral downwards into a clusterfuck and trope bashing, but hey, if you can have a redhead piloting a mecha, why not? Extra points for filler episode making fun of all the reasons filler episodes exist.
[[Category: Gamer Slang]]
[[Category: Weeaboo]]

Belisarius Cawl

2019-09-23T22:49:23Z

2620:0:1000:5E10:6D35:9465:FD9E:894: /* Remember that Guy? */

{{Topquote|The Omnissiah filled the galaxy with mysteries so that we might learn from them, coming step by step closer to his perfect being. To ignore them, even in the face of war, is heresy.|Archmagos Belisarius Cawl}}
{{Topquote|His colleagues are limited. Their beliefs have become a faith that they dare not challenge. The Adeptus Mechanicus is far more trammelled in its thinking than the Mechanicum of your time was, my Lord Guilliman, and the archmagos was a radical in those distant centuries. You would not have come to him if he were not.|Cawl Inferior, Cawl's not-an-AI}}
{{Topquote|I suppose I could part with one and still be feared|Cawl, on his various Doomsday Devices}}

[[File:CawlArt.jpg|300px|thumb|right|Ten thousand years and enough augmentations to be the size of a Carnifex, and he still hasn't gotten rid of that organic left arm.]]

'''Archmagos Dominus Belisarius Cawl''' is the first unique character for the Adeptus Mechanicus faction, and like all good servants of [[Omnissiah|the dragon on mars]] has turned himself into a [[awesome|FUCKING CYBORG]]. Along with [[Inquisitor Greyfax]] and [[Saint Celestine]], he forms the Triumvirate of the Imperium. This motherfucker is old. How old? Ten thousand years. Which should be impossible as the oldest a magos of the Mechanicus can get is around 1,000 years and they also go insane, but who knows. He might have spent most of it in stasis, or built himself new bodies and implanted his not-an-AI into it, but the most popular rumors among the Mechanicus have it that he did so using some kind of forbidden [[Xeno|xenos]] tech while replacing what few organic parts he had left with machinery, Ship of Theseus style. Even after having his memories wiped on two separate occasions, he's famed among the AdMech as having a truly unmatched hoard of knowledge compiled over the millennia.

He has some sort of mysterious mission he's been on for the last ten thousand years. It was given to him by [[Roboute Guilliman|/tg/'s favourite person]], apart from a certain [[Matt Ward|Spiritual Liege]] and consists of two parts. The first is making Guilliman a brand new suit, making Belisarius Cawl the slowest tailor in all of fiction (though admittedly that's because it went on hold until he could figure out the 'resurrection' thing). The second is to build brand new weapons and pull out old ones to help fight against the enemies of the Imperium. His main creation was the [[Primaris Marines]] which took him nearly 10,000 years to create (although this was because of how ridiculously advanced and hard to decipher the [[God-Emperor of Mankind|Emperor's]] work was). Or he's just incredibly lazy. It's not like he really answers to anyone.

His voice has varied somewhat, the few times we've heard it. In the trailer for Rise of the Primarch [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DMCTbIH924k he also sounds like a combination of Mr Freeze (TAS version) and a Dalek.] However, in the more recent trailer for Battlefleet Gothic: Armada 2, detailing Cawl's arrival on Cadia and his meeting with Trazyn [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWEH4sjqlmY Cawl's voice is damn near incomprehensible]. It's a wonder anyone could have a conversation with him. Note, however, that he apparently has the ability to swap out personality traits as readily as other people do wargear, so how he acts and sounds may diverge dramatically depending on who he meets, when he meets them, and who he is when he does.

On a side note, his name is most likely a shoutout to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belisarius this guy], who basically made the Byzantine Empire great again, if only for about a dozen years. As an elegan/t g/entleman or a clever ca/t g/irl you already knew the Byzantine Empire is, in fact, the Eastern Roman one, with both of the terms created after the end of the realm; its citizens referred to it as the Roman Empire - the very one which the Imperium is based on.

==Remember that Guy?==

Before people get a little confused, Cawl was first introduced in the ''Fall of Cadia'' phase of the [[Gathering Storm]], where barring his mysterious ten-millennia mission, nothing was really ''known'' about the archmagos. Subsequent works have tried to fill his backstory... with varying results.

The first to try this was the [[Adeptus Mechanicus]] codex (where he was the only named HQ), where a sidebar posits that he was part of the Emperor's team that developed the Black Carapace (!!). Needless to say, everyone forgot that the Emperor didn't create the organs by himself (even though the Larraman's Organ is literally named after one of the scientists who helped make the organs), so Black Library instead gave a background that made far more sense:

It turns out that while Cawl did NOT work on developing the Black Carapace, an atheist Scientist named Ezekiel Sedayne did. At some point later, Sedayne attempted to steal Cawl's body and overwrite his mind, but Cawl's ego was too big to be absorbed, and he stole Sedayne's memories instead. In [[Paradox poker|classic style]], the Emperor himself had apparently [[Just as planned|seen this coming]], as he once [[Dick|intentionally called Sedayne by the name Cawl]] instead of Ezekiel, even before said mindmeld occurred, somehow knowing that Cawl would be the one to later remember it. Possibly. It was a vision induced through ancient xenotech shenanigans, by the manipulative will of a C’tan, into the hive mind of a deranged cyborg, after all. It could also have been the spirit of the Emperor breaking into the vision to give him a pep talk, as he proceeded to reassure Cawl that the archmagos would only betray him once, and it would not be a true betrayal at all.

His true origin was as a humble vat-clone, dumped out of a Mechanicus tube with the body of a 10 year old and a smattering of implanted knowledge. However, even then, he was a prodigy—while only a few hours old, and while his fellow vat children were uncommunicative zombies, he was asking questions and being a smartass to the magos in charge of intake selection. Of the three possible doors he could have been sent through, he was selected to enter the rarely used center door, which was implied to represent the Omnissiah. Who, as Cawl might put it, he has a non-zero probability of actually being (or becoming), given how charmed his 11 millennia of accumulated existence has been.

== During the [[Horus Heresy]] ==
[[File:CawlYoung.jpg|200px|thumb|right|Archmagos Cawl, back when he was still recognizably human.]]
Cawl's first recorded appearance in history was as a Tech-Acolyte on the Trisolian system during the Horus Heresy; while he had declined several of the more visible cybernetic augmentations favored by the tech-priests, he had secretly undergone illegal brain-enhancing surgeries to make himself smarter. Even back then, he had a reputation as a maverick for his pro-innovation stance.

When [[Horus]] and his Legion attacked the world of Trisolian A4, Cawl's mistress defected to the traitors for fear that her secret project to make herself immortal via cloning would be lost. Cawl feigned loyalty to the Warmaster, and later took the opportunity to kill his treacherous superior when [[Leman Russ]] and the [[Space Wolves]] [[Battle of Trisolian|arrived to try and kill Horus]]. After absorbing her intelligence core and knowledge of cloning, that is.

== Fall of Cadia ==
Cawl is introduced at a technoarchaeological dig on the planet Eriad IV, a planet only notable for having a small Imperial outpost that was destroyed in the 4th [[Black Crusade]]. Although his progress is interrupted by an [[Ork|Orkish]] invasion, he continues onward, following the mysterious hints of the [[Shadowseer]] Sylandri Veilwalker. Eventually, he digs deep enough to find the remnants of [[Cadian Pylons| ancient obsidian pylons]]. Cross-referencing this with similar discoveries, he realizes that [[Abaddon]] has made a point of destroying similar such pylons across his Black Crusades. He puts two and two together, and immediately starts heading for [[Cadia]], fearing that they might be the last pylons left in the galaxy.

After arriving at Cadia and briefing the command about his discoveries, he went about studying the pylons, believing that they held the key to Abaddon's defeat. This was a dead end until [[Trazyn]] showed up and gave him some Necrontyr tech-support. With his help, he managed to activate the true power of pylons, shrinking the [[Eye of Terror]] and fucking up all warp activity on Cadia. This was a double-edged sword, as while it prevented [[Daemons]] from manifesting, it also forced the [[Legion of the Damned]] out of the Materium and greatly weakened Saint [[Celestine]]. Despite this, the defenders successfully got the Black Legion to retreat, and victory looked inevitable.

Then Abaddon just had to crash the remnants of a [[Blackstone Fortress]] into Cadia. Cawl's efforts were for naught, as the pylons were destroyed and the Eye of Terror expanded to consume the Cadian Gate. He retreated on his [[Ark Mechanicus]], the Iron Revenant, but was pursued by Abaddon, who just learned of a mysterious relic Cawl had and sought to claim it for himself. Cawl was forced to sacrifice the Iron Revenant to stave off the Vengeful Spirit and took his artifact along with the rest of the Imperial forces to the ice moon of Klasius, where they found the [[Emperor's Sword|Emprasword]]. Cornered by the [[Black Legion]], all seemed lost, until they were saved by the timely intervention of the Ynnari [[Eldar]], who offered an escape route through the [[webway]] and an alliance (needless to say, he is really ashamed that he couldn't stop what happened to Cadia).

===Rise of the Primarch===

This is where it's revealed that the artifact Belisarius has is the Armor of Fate and a self-fitting dressing room, commissioned by Grandpa Smurf several millennia in advance. Cawl, alongside the Ynnari, successfully uses this to resurrect Guilliman and then assists him in his crusade to Terra. When they arrive Guilliman tells Cawl to work on the second part of his mission, that of strengthening Imperial forces by pulling out all the stops on Mars.

It has since been revealed that this "second part" was the creation of the [[Primaris Marines]], along with their new wargear.

===What Could Possibly Go Wrong?===

A shard of Cawl currently wants Guilliman to appoint him Fabricator General of Mars so he can "Get Shit Done", but Guilliman is unwilling to have all of the tech priests lose their minds over it; given his outspoken views on the value of innovation and thinly veiled contempt for the accepted AdMech dogma such a [[PROMOTIONS|promotion]] would be certain to result in a civil war within the Mechanicus. The prime Cawl incarnation admits this himself, and plans to bring the ambitious shard back into line—which just demonstrates that the many separate parts of his personality ''literally'' don’t always think alike.

Demonstrating what could generously be called a disregard for consequences, Cawl also has experimented with creating Primaris Marines of all the [[Traitor Legions]], as well as the infamous missing Legions II and XI. He petitioned Guilliman to sanction their use, but you can guess how that went. (Guilliman has a feeling that he's just going to try and make them anyway). He is also trying to make new pylons to shrink back the [[Great Rift]]; perhaps it's time for Cawl to pay a visit to [[Illuminor Szeras]], or maybe politely request (at gunpoint) Magos-Explorator [[Omnid Torquora]] to tell him all the knowledge he has left of that empyrical bomb he used in the novel [[Adeptus Mechanicus]]: Tech-Priest.

Oh, and that AI we mentioned in the top quote? It's not even the only one. Guy Haley's ''In the Grim Darkness of the Far Future'' openly mentions that Cawl's mind is essentially composed of numerous AI copies of himself operating in tandem with his original mind, in what he compares to being a conductor of an orchestra with the AI copies as the musicians. Which in effect makes him practically immortal, since he could switch on a backup copy of himself if his original body dies.

And after spending roughly the last century collecting Necron tech and crypto codes while Guilliman was off crusading, he went to Sotha, fucked over a C'tan shard, and wound up with so much xenos tech installed and data downloaded into his brain that all of his implants now glow Necron green. Which is about as heretek as you can get short of straight-up joining Chaos.

Furthermore, between trolling one of his favorite Smurfboys and submitting his application for the Steal All Your Shit Club (known members include Trazin the Infinite and the Blood Ravens), he casually gives the Imperium the technology to teraform worlds nommed by the nids.

Also, apparently, at some point either the [[Emperor]] or the [[Void Dragon|Omnissiah]] asked Cawl to free him. No word yet on which one it was, whether he agreed, and how any of his plans to do so might be working out.

== On the Tabletop ==
[[File:Cawl.jpg|300px|thumb|right|Too many limbs? NO SUCH THING!]]

Come with a special rule that allows you to add or subtract 1 when rolling on the Canticles of the Omnissiah which as Mars you get to roll twice and keep both, allows Mars units within 6" to re-roll any to hit in shooting,also have the ability to repair any friendly {{W40Kkeyword|imperium}} model within 3" by 1 wound, without caring even a little bit about its other keywords - he can repair {{W40Kkeyword|infantry}}, {{W40Kkeyword|cavalry}}, whatever. AdMech units get d3 wounds healed instead, though. I guess 10000 years of min maxing yourself lets you do these things. And his Solar Atomiser is an Assault D3 S10 AP-4 unholy beast that does D3 damage, unless the target is within half range, which then it does D6 damage.

===7th Edition===
{| class=wikitable
! || Pts || WS || BS || S || T || W || I || A || Ld || Sv
|-
| '''Belisarius Cawl:''' || 200 || 5 || 5 || 5 || 6 || 5 || 3 || 3 || 10 || 2+\5++\5+++
|}

Belisarius Cawl is quite a formidable opponent. His ranged weapon of choice is the melta-gun on steroids Solar Atomizer, and for melee he's got a Mechadendrite Hive to fight hordes, Arc Scourge to fight vehicles, and a power axe to fight terminators. He also brings across the three Canticles of the Archmagos, which are like the Canticles of the Omnissiah but they also affect friendly vehicles not part of the Cult Mechanicus faction. Harmony of Metallurgy gives It Will Not Die, Utterance of Neutralization increases Ballistic Skill, and the War Hymnal of Fortitude grants invulnerable saves.

Not only can he dish out the pain, he can take it as well, with a 2+ armor save, Toughness 6, Feel No Pain (which is rerollable if he's the Warlord), and five wounds [[cheese|which he restores 1d3 of each round]]. Oh, and he can also use his canticles to give himself three It Will Not Die rolls. However, he lacks Eternal Warrior, and his Invulnerable Save is a mere 5+, making him vulnerable to Instant Death.

== List of Things Cawl ''May'' Have [[Blood Ravens|Borrowed]] ==
As mentioned, Papa Cawl is probably the only cogboy in the Adeptus Mechanicus (and probably in all the [[Imperium]]) who has straight-up invented ''loads'' of new shit without [[Blam|disappearing]]. Many of his new toys have features found in other xenos and/or look like their weapons. Whether or not it is an example of [[Blood Ravens|"borrowing" their designs]] or [[Just As Planned|convergent invention]] [[skub|is up to you.]] This list will certainly get bigger as more units are introduced.
===From the [[Eldar|Space Elves]]===

* Primaris [[Reiver]] incorporate sonic/audio weaponry into their helmets to scare the shit out of their enemies, just like the howling banshees (though to be fair, we've invented such [[Wikipedia:Sonic weapons|weapons]] in early M3) or [[Noise Marines|Emperor's Children]], though we're pretty sure he's not dumb enough to mess with Chaos stuff... we think. Night Lords have used such tech since the start of the Great Crusade. The Mechanicus would have made it for them even back then.
* The Overlord Dropship uses energy shields instead of the usual void shields.

===From the [[Tau|T'au]]===
* The [[Primaris Captain|Primaris Captains']] Gravis Armour appears to be inspired from the Tau, though they may be also inspired by the [[Squats|Squat]] [[Hearthguard|Hearthguards]].

[[Category:Warhammer 40,000]] [[Category:Imperial]] [[Category: Adeptus Mechanicus]]