Isekai

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

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

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

The term (and to a lesser extent the genre) have been kicking around the weeaboosphere for a while, but around 2015 publishers started flooding the market with insufferably awful series (with insufferably long titles) that sell both in Japan and internationally like hotcakes, no matter how bland and generic they get. This once again proves that no matter which side of the planet you're on, otaku are autistic retards with no taste. As of 2018 this seems to be tapering off; Kadokawa has banned isekai stories from their light novel competitions, and fewer and fewer isekai light novels get adapted into anime each season, and parodies are becoming more and more common, leaving it only a matter of time before the genre hits "even the parodies are stale" levels of played out.

Why do people hate it so much?

As noted below, stories of people entering other worlds are nothing new, and speaks to a common desire to experience strange and exotic lands. Yet Isekais 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 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. Outside of Isekai stories that actually take place inside of RPGs, this is pretty much inexcusable.
• 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.
• The protagonist frequently is overpowered in a way that puts him way ahead of his peers, despite lacking any useful combat, intellectual, or even social skills from his homeworld. Rarely does the protagonist have to put that much effort in overcoming his obstacles.
• Even more offensive protagonists will be actively unlikable or even outright repulsive, despite not suffering any consequences for it.
• And on top of that, 99.9% of the time, the protaganist has an all-female harem party who hang on his every word. Is this starting to sound familiar?
• For more Isekai-specific gripes, while many stories are just copycats of one another, some will attempt to put an "original spin" on the genre, usually by adding a gimmick. If done well, then the story still has some value in being interesting and explore otherwise ignored facets of an overused genre. Done poorly, and it comes across as just plain tiresome, especially if the gimmick is the only thing keeping the story afloat when the characters and plot fail to impress.

Isekai and /tg/

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

While isekai is a distinctly Japanese form of cancer, the basic idea of people from our world getting chucked into a fantastic world and forced to fend for themselves is practically universal and turns up moderately often in Western fantasy with the earliest example perhaps being "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" by Mark Twain which was published in 1889. Oddly, when this happens it tends to be rather less shit perhaps due to it being less common. L. Frank Baum's Oz series, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, and Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom novels are iconic examples of the core premise that predate cliche fantasy, and C.S. Lewis The Chronicles of Narnia uses the plot for Christian allegory. The NeverEnding Story is the flagship modern western example, and right in the heart of the fantasy cliche storm; Yet it is the purest anti-shit, either despite or because of this. Or at least, it avoids being the self-indulgent wish-fulfillment for irredeemably unlikable losers that makes Isekai so widely hated. One could make the case that The Matrix is an isekai story (it basically reverses a couple of the key tropes), though classifying it as "less shit" may not be accurate for some people. A /tg/ example that (in hindsight anyway) fits the isekai mold well is GURPS' flagship fantasy setting, which revolves around people from across the universe getting isekai'd to the planet of Yrth by an extradimensional "Banestorm" and proposes that players could stat themselves and then play as themselves on Yrth after getting deposited there by the Banestorm.

Isekai also has its influence on Old School Roleplaying; as stated above, there are plenty of pulp fantasy novels involving ordinary souls getting sucked into a strange, alien world and becoming heroic adventurers as a result. Hell, Greyhawk has several deities who actually originated on other worlds - Murlynd, Saint Cuthbert and Mayaheine‎‎ have all been implied to have come to Oerth from "real" Earth - whilst the Forgotten Realms was, once upon a time, hinted as being connected to Earth by various portals to different times and places; the not!Egyptian race was actually supposed to be peopled by real ancient Egyptians who had been summoned to the Realms en-masse by evil sorcerers as slave labor, only to break free of them. Then there's the D&D Cartoon, whose plot was D&D by way of Isekai. That being said, unless your DM was being really lazy, if you tried to talk in-universe about stats or levels or other meta game content like they do in Isekai stories, NPCs would and should treat you like a madman.

Reverse Isekai

Occasionally, reverse isekai plots, where supernatural elements from other dimensions have invaded the "real" world, have appeared in /tg/. D20 Modern's default for supernatural entities is that they a dropped onto Earth from another plane, "The Shadow", and can't go home (though their corpses vanish upon death). The Adventure Path Reign of Winter has a trip to World War I era Russia where the party fights Mosin-Nagant and machine gun wielding Russian soldiers, tear gas elementals and Rasputin.

One odd feature in Japanese Reverse-Isekais is an emphasis on how Japanese food is so much more awesome than whatever bland, flavorless food the peasants of the fantasy world have to eat. In fact, there actually is more than one anime about people from a fantasy world visiting a restaurant in modern Japan. Which in fairness: the modern world wide food distribution networks that can ship sun ripened lemons and meat to any point in the world within 24 hours is likely going to compare favorable to all but the highest fantasy fare. Even so, even the lowliest peasant would put some effort in using what they had to make food taste good; even if they couldn't afford spices, herbs were still easy enough to get a hold of, and rural cooks knew enough about how to prepare meats to make them taste good. Whereas fantasy peasants may as well be eating dry, stringy meat with a side of boiled, unseasoned vegetables and mud for dessert.

List of Isekai

Good Ones

• Overlord: A gamer gets trapped in the body of his max level Lich avatar and sent to another world, bringing with him all of his treasures and minions (who now are real people) and guild base. He starts out trying to be a good guy in the new world, but he ends up turning into a villain on a path to conquer the new world due to a combination of losing a lot of his ability to feel emotions and his minions expecting him to play the role of a villain.
• That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime: A man dies an wakes up in the body of a super powerful Slime creature with the ability to copy the powers of whatever they eat. They end up becoming the chief of a goblin village and expanding it into a new nation.
• Kiba: What happens when you combine Pokémon with Game of Thrones and a bit of 1985, and then give everyone lightsabers. An obscure but definitely worth watching show about two friends who separately end up in another world where some people have the ability to pull marble like objects out of one part of their body which are used to cast spells, power up lightsaber like weapons, and summon powerful monsters called spirits. Each of them ends up possessing one of the six most powerful spirits in the world which the nations of the new world are fighting for control of. The first boy ends up in the only truly nice nation, while the other ends up in a country that at first seems nice but turns out to be a horrible dystopia where the population is so brainwashed that they are willing to accept capital punishment with a smile for minor crimes even if they committed them accident.
• MÄR: A boy named Ginta gets summoned to another world populated by people based on characters from fairytales and popular classic fantasy books who fight using magical items called ÄRMs. He gets a hold of an intelligent ÄRM named Babbo who can turn into anything he can image. He and several characters including Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz and Jack from Jack and the Beanstalk team up for a tournament to decide the fate of the world against a villainous organization called the Chess Pieces.
• Do You Love Your Mom and Her Two-Hit Multi-Target Attacks?: A parody of typical trapped in a video game wish fulfillment stories. A boy's wish to go into a video game is granted, but it is ruined because he is forced to bring his extremely embarrassing and attractive mother with him, who is a lot more powerful than him in the game world.
• Spirited Away: A girl and her parents accidently wander into the world of spirits and the parents get turned into pigs by a witch as punishment for stealing food. With the help of a mysterious boy who can turn into a dragon, she gets herself a job working for the witch at her bathhouse for spirits until she can find a way to set her parents free.
• Those Who Hunt Elves: A comedy about a group of people are summoned to another world and can't go back until they can find 5 tattoos placed on 5 random elves somewhere in the world. To find them they strip every elf they meet naked.
• Youjo Senki: Saga of Tanya the Evil: A sociopathic atheist dies and meets a being who claims to be God. He refuses to believe it and as punishment gets reincarnated as a female child solider in a world resembling WWI Europe, only with magic.
• Drifters: Written and drawn by the author of HELLSING. This is a story about fighting against fate where historic heroes, wise mans and commanders from the real world ended up in the other world after they died. Most of them are Japanese (go figures) and our MC is this Shimazu Toyohisa guy of the Shimazu clan, a crazy idiot who had fought and died in a heroically suicide battle to buy time for his army to escape. He was teleported to the other world by a seemly mysterious divine office worker look like named Murasaki. During his adventure in other world, he would encountered various cliche fantasy species as well as other Drifters who were just like him, such as Oda Nobunaga, Butch Cassidy, Abe no seimei and FUCKING Hannibal Barca (yes, THE Alpis elephant guy). Together, they have to fight against the Ends, whom were historically heroes just like the drifters but has cheat code access to other magical power because they sold their humanity and shit. Notably, Jeanne d'Arc and Hijikata Toshizō is in this group with the Black King (heavily hinted to be Jesus or others with divine power from the real world) as their leader, and they were all chosen by another divine entity named EASY, a woman who is at odds with Murasaki. By the way, this series is being slowly released and is on multiple hiatus for unknown reason since it is kind of a trait now days for good mangaka to fucking around their job.
• Konosuba:
• Escaflowne:
• Inuyasha:
• .hack:
• Log Horizon:

Bad Ones

• Sword Art Online: One of shows responsible for the explosion in the popularity of Isekai. Was very popular but now is mostly hated. Technically speaking the other world is just a VR MMORPG instead of an actual fantasy world, but everyone else just copied SAO even when it didn’t make sense to include game mechanics like HUDs with skill trees. It also doesn’t help that the protagonist is thoroughly unlikeable and the first season ended on a nonsensical conclusion.
• In Another World With My Smartphone: Horrible Marty Stu wish fulfillment.
• 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.