Anime is one of those things we don’t talk about in public. Not only is it imported from another country, but it seems to be a conduit for outcasts and other people that don’t fit in. Not that anime is bad. Many people have a hobby or something they enjoy. But have you taken a look at some of the anime cringe in the last decade? Some of this stuff is ridiculous, and it goes by the name of isekai.
The easiest way to spot an isekai is the normal tropes. Look for an exceptionally long title that looks like a long-running sentence and then a comparison to another person. Consider if it is a person who finds themselves awakened in another universe with no explanation as to why they got there. Does it use RPG mechanics such as a level-up system and an inventory? What about tracking stats and needing to acquire different loot from a dungeon? Is there some evil dragon that needs to be defeated to get to the next plot point?
Be sure to double-check anything that suddenly takes place with magic and medieval European architecture from the 1000s to the 1800s. More importantly, there should be some kind of big bad, unsolvable mystery, or plot element that is known from the get-go, but it takes the hero to solve it.
This is a genre where the star character is transported into another realm, often against their will. Often at a considerable disadvantage, they normally have an advantage that puts them into the limelight very quickly. More to the point, this character often becomes a Mary Sue.
What is a Mary Sue? It is a writing term about a character that everyone likes, gets access to all of the best stuff, or always seems to have the best solution to get what they want. In a word, they are often described as a self-insertion for the author. This concept skips a bit in the form of a character that viewers are supposed to project onto. It could be them. In reality, it would be possible to completely bypass this character and we’d actually have a good story on our hands.
Sonic X accomplishes the projection onto a twelve-year-old nicely, and what Western fans noticed right away is they wanted to see Sonic doing what Sonic does, not watching some young kid enjoy being part of Sonic’s world. It seems counterintuitive, but it was shown to work with other Sonic cartoons of the era, and those were Western animations.
Vision of Escaflowne and Fushigi Yuugi also show that being transported to another world is nothing new, but in those cases characters are at a severe disadvantage while the world around them does its thing. If they are not careful or have some protector around, that character will die. In the case of Fushigi Yuugi, the protagonist tries to kill herself, as does one of her friends.
.hack seems to be the first example of this trope with the MMORPG mechanics when the protagonist cannot log out. I never did watch it, as the concept of not being able to log out of a video game never grabbed me. I’ve seen this same concept of virtual reality used in Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, and then Batman: The Animated Series. Logging out unexpectedly leaves your mind trapped in virtual reality.
We know it doesn’t work this way any more than waking a sleepwalker will suddenly leave them stuck in their dream. Okay, it is debatable if you should wake a sleepwalker. They may very well be aware of their surroundings, but they might flip out. You get the idea.
Suddenly a new anime by the name of Sword Art Online comes into play with the familiar concept that a young high school student cannot log out of a video game. Only this time, the rest of the gaming populace for this particular game cannot log out either.
Why? Because they’ve developed a new VR headset where what people experience will affect them physically. How could this possibly go wrong when someone decides to hack the game so no one can log out?
Hacking in video games is nothing new, especially where people can take advantage of each other and disrupt another’s fun or fantasy. But why is it then, in the real world, when parents are known to shelter, helicopter, and otherwise set rules against their children, that they would buy this revolutionary headset for their children? Knowing full well that their children will experience this as something real?
This has already become a thing in social networking, and critics have been speaking out against it for the last decade about affecting children’s development and their cognitive and social skills not being able to handle it. Sixteen usually seems to be the cutoff when children should be allowed on social networking.
Sword Art Online has a protagonist who was a beta tester, so he gets to dual wield. This is weird, because no other character gets to do it. It is also backwards from how most video games would present it. But suddenly we have progression via stats, item usage, and characters being able to complete an area for others to pass.
Kirito, the star character, is of course always on the scene. Never mind that he also has a love interest, and the two of them fight their way through the dungeon. To spice things up, there was a second series where the girlfriend is kidnapped by the person who hacked the system to begin with. We do get a satisfying conclusion to him, but Kirito is still the one to do so.
Suddenly Kirito has all of the abilities of the hacker? I’ll be damned. It sounds like a Mary Sue.
My problem with this kind of thing is it removes the element of active participation from a video game. If a person is going to project onto a protagonist that is meant to feel like a self-insertion, why not just play a video game which actually does that? Something we know isn’t real and we can log off from whenever we want?
Why not remove the isekai element and just put it straight into a game’s plot or use the game’s elements? Delicious in Dungeon has all of the RPG-style mechanics and plot elements while deliberately explaining why the dungeon works the way that it does. More importantly, Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End also shows what happens after the big bad has been destroyed and the original party has dispersed.
The whole isekai element needs to stop. It isn’t that it is sloppy and lazy writing — it is — but more that this element has been in the limelight for over a decade. This seems similar to the whole monster-collection anime trend. Bonus props if it involves having the monsters fight.
