1 year ago
53
One of the most all-consuming trends in current anime, manga, and the Japanese pulp fiction markets are isekai, or "another world," stories. The tropes of the genre consist of the following: depressed and overworked student or office worker dies a gruesome, violent death, more often than not getting hit by a truck as they cross an urban street. Student or office worker gets reincarnated into an alternate world, usually one with magic and monsters, sometimes one indistinguishable from a video game they have been playing recently. In this new world they are shockingly attractive, skilled at all they do, are loved by all members of the opposite sex, and go on to repeatedly save the world and do polygamy until the series becomes unprofitable.
It seems like about half the market consists of these stories, and we could go on for quite some length about what it might mean for the youth of a staunchly xenophobic, conformist society to find their surroundings so dull and prospects so hopeless that they fantasize about dying violent truck-based deaths that could launch them into an alternate world where they're allowed to have flowing, neon-colored hair and most problems can be solved by stabbing something.
We won’t, though, because glass houses and so forth.
