Isekai

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

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

The term itself is not new, but currently these days stories about people appearing here and there in a different world is getting out of control in Japan. Not to mention titles becoming longer and longer...

The hallmark of isekai stories is the definition 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. Isekai protagonists tend to be big fucking nerds who immediately recognize this and exploit it, often aided by unreasonably high stats relative to their abilities in real life. The unstated implication is that the overweight slimeball watching/reading the isekai story would be just as successful as the protagonist because of his valuable and hard-earned RPG knowledge.

Although most isekai stories get panned on /tg/ for annoying meta-humor, generic shonen bullshit, generic fanservice bullshit, or a combination thereof (if not the characters being blatantly Mary Sues or even presenting something even more absurd), a handful of series are decent enough to merit genuine approval (which is pretty rare in the case of such stories). Or tolerated because they have monstergirls, at least. Check our anime and manga pages for the current scoop. (As a general but not absolute rule, the further from Mary Sue-dom the lead character, the more favorably it will be looked upon.)

While isekai is a distinctly Japanese form of cancer, the basic idea of people from our world getting chucked into a fantastic world and forced to fend for themselves is practically universal and turns up moderately often in Western fantasy. Oddly, when this happens it tends to be rather less shit. L. Frank Baum's Oz series, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, and John Carter's Barsoom novels are iconic examples of the core premise that predate cliche fantasy; a /tg/ example that (in hindsight anyway) fits the isekai mold well is GURPS' flagship fantasy setting, which revolves around people from across the universe getting isekai'd to the planet of Yrth by an extradimensional "Banestorm" and proposes that players could stat themselves and then play as themselves on Yrth after getting deposited there by the Banestorm.

Isekai also has its influence on Old School Roleplaying; as stated above, there are plenty of pulp fantasy novels involving ordinary souls getting sucked into a strange, alien world and becoming heroic adventurers as a result. Hells, Greyhawk has several deities who actually originated on other worlds - Murlynd, Saint Cuthbert and Mayaheine‎‎ have all been implied to have come to Oerth from "real" Earth - whilst the Forgotten Realms was, once upon a time, hinted as being connected to Earth by various portals to different times and places; the not!Egyptian race was actually supposed to be peopled by real ancient Egyptians who had been summoned to the Realms en-masse by evil sorcerers as slave labor, only to break free of them. Then there's the D&D Cartoon, whose plot was D&D by way of Isekai.

Isekai dominance is about to end,with less and less series in the genre been animated each season. But the bigger indicators is Kodansha, a large Japanese publisher, banning Isekai stories from their Light novel competition, due to their catalog been overcrowded with the damn things (and we shouldn't discard the idea that they fear the titles becoming so ridiculously long that, eventually, there will be no space for cute anime girls in the covert). And since light novels are the primary source for Isekai anime, the beast will starve to death.