Forum - View topicThis Week in Anime - Are This Season's Isekai Anime Any Good?
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Key
Moderator
 Posts: 18212 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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Pretty sure I know what Bear is referring to, as there's one story element which could definitely hit on a moral/political divide and the final resolution of one major character could get mixed reactions from the audience. However, I also feel that those possibly-controversial elements contribute to it being the emotional and thematic powerhouse that it is. Really, it's like no other isekai series, old or new.
If you said "the usual trappings of recent Narou-driven isekai" then I would agree with you. Isekai is too broad a classification for any individual title or configuration of traits to pointed to as "usual trappings" in general. (It would be like saying that there's a "usual" type of sci fi.) And I'll still continue to insist that isekai can be considered a genre and that titles which might be called Portal Series fall under that umbrella. Every genre has its subcategories, after all. Last edited by Key on Sun Apr 21, 2024 10:32 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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AliceTheHare
 Posts: 71 Location: Los Angeles |
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The heck you talking about Yohko is awesome, fantastic even. But to build off the thesis in this thread I've watched many of these Narou adaptions and like with everything some are good while others are bad, it's same as it ever was. Not everything from the past is perfect nor is everything new awful, and vice versa; It's people only judging things based on their vintage or whatever trend their apart of and not of their own qualities that gets me most frustrated here. Though glib dismissiveness is part and parcel with most online media discourse, so it's never surprising seeing it crop up in these discussions. |
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Bonebrain
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Nostalgia is very powerful and hard for some people to let go of. Reminds me when the moe boom happened and people had a huge hatred for shows like K-ON and people tried to insist that Azumanga Daiyo wasn't moe/CGDCT because they liked that one and it was only the then-modern stuff that classified as "moe"  As far as isekai goes, I went back to watch Dual recently which was basically an isekai Eva clone and I thought it stunk. I remember liking it originally but I also watched it before I saw Eva back in the day so that probably was why I liked it then since I didn't know what it was actually copying. I also remember El Hazard and I didn't like it very much. Well, I think I liked one of the series but not the others. I forget which was which though. Escaflowne was cool though
There's plenty of isekai and shows in general from back in the day I find not very good. Overall I think there's more good these days just due to the shear amount of shows we get every season so there's a bigger pool to draw from |
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Top Gun
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De gustibus non est disputandum and all that, but that is...not a very common opinion from what I've seen. I know SIGN gets some flak for being glacially-paced but honestly, that was a big part of what interested me in it in the first place. I caught a few random bits of it on Toonami before I was an anime fan, and the fact that you could have a cartoon with a bunch of people standing around talking about their personal issues was pretty mind-blowing. More to the point of this thread, it's one of those older other-world shows (or the trapped-in-a-game variant at least) that does a great job of maintaining the importance of everyone's original lives. In particular, Tsukasa started out almost welcoming being trapped in The World, but over time they came to realize that they couldn't run from the real world and sought to return from it. As far as Miroku goes, I don't want to presume what sort of reaction he would have received today, though I have my suspicions. The fact is that any creative work is the product of its own time, for all of the good and bad that entails. Inuyasha started its run almost 30 years ago, and Rumiko Takahashi has been writing manga for almost 50 years. Of course there are going to be elements in it that don't hold up as well to modern sensibilities. I'm not nearly so concerned about the behavior of older characters like Miroku, or Master Roshi long before him, as I am the content of recent series written well after people should know better. And there's also the issue of framing: Miroku's behavior was a recurring gag for which he always received immediate comeuppance, whereas characters in other series I could think of never seem to get called on their gross behavior.
I feel like I've recently seen multiple people make this sort of ridiculous "but what about past show X?" comparison in an attempt to deflect criticism from a modern series, but they fall completely flat in that they show very little awareness of how the past show actually did things. Like, NTHT has been critically acclaimed from its release up to now. Its horrific content isn't designed to entertain or titillate, but instead played completely straight. It's a brutal, unflinching study of the very worst of humanity, and even a quick glance at today's headlines would confirm that it's even more timely now than when it was made. Your average Narou adaptation doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as it. Closing thought: I love the point that Yuvelir and others made about the use of "isekai" as a plot point versus a genre unto itself. It's a perfectly fine tool in a capable writer's hands, and can be used to great effect, but if it's the entire raison d'etre of the story, then the result will almost always be void of any real narrative depth. |
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a_Bear_in_Bearcave
Posts: 514 Location: Poland |
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spoiler[Well, the way the raped main girl who wanted abortion/suicide was convinced to not commit suicide because her rape baby deserved a future was really awful, and her deciding to stay in this world despite the fact that her family would never learn what happens with her was IMHO bad as well. I also disliked how the henchwoman of main bad guy was kinda excused as "he used to be good guy" when she was helping him genocide villages and taking kids as either soldiers or to human rape baby farms, and how the leader of the village got turned from someone with understandable difference to cruel and pathetic villain who tortured the orphan mom and utterly failed against the big bad, just to make MC and orphan mom in the right, two characters that seemed to me as author's mouthpieces when it comes to morality.]
This was also weird criticism because many people today like MHA and Demon Slayer despite disliking Mineta or Zenitsu, so it's not like such characters are disqualifying the show. In those shows, such characters are usually secondary characters (it's hard to tell with Zenitsu, he is part of main trio yet feels like secondary to me) and used as comedy relief, so they're easy to skip. And, like you mentioned, often getting punished for it as part of the joke. They aren't the main characters buying a hot slave and being rewarded for that with love and loyality. As for nostalgia, I even start to miss those school based (often ecchi) battle harems after all those isekai. At least they didn't have RPG levels. Maybe someone should continue/restart adaptation of the Chivalry of Failed Knight? |
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pip25
Posts: 156 |
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The problem I have with this is that most people have no clue what "Narou" even is. I also only have a vague understanding based on the discussions in this thread. Also, what qualifies as "recent"? The plot idea consisting of "ordinary person gets transported somewhere where (s)he kicks ass, optionally with a harem" is quite old at this point. These don't feel like very good ways to narrow down or categorize creative works. Not to mention that isekai feels like a much narrower category than sci-fi (it's "fantasy" that feels similarly broad). |
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vorkedlarfleeze
Posts: 19 |
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If someone can ignore stuff they don't like in a show and still enjoy it then kudos to them. Although most people seem to have a habit of insisting things must change to fit their own tastes which runs counter to the whole concept of artistic expression and would jeopardize the enjoyment for everyone else. I do think it's worth noting that anime studios and production committees, famously greedy as they are, wouldn't be producing all these Narou adaptions if it weren't very clear to them that most anime fans are, in fact, avid fans of these series. The people flipping out are a minority; most of whom who don't watch these shows to begin with. |
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NeverConvex
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Those seem like pretty compelling criticisms; does in fact make me want to re-watch it to see if I agree.
I mean -- there's not much point to discussion or thinking about art at all if you believe sales figures, or even just a production committee's decision to create something at all, are enough to imply that it was good and should be treated as beyond criticism. At least, discussion that isn't just an attempt to build a better predictive model of show sales or something like that. The starting point for a thread like this is that there's something that merits discussion beyond what a production committee thinks will generate profit, or whether a show pulled a lot of eyeballs. |
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Yuvelir
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Leaving aside that neither profit nor viewership numbers free anything from being poorly done and the criticism that entails... ...you don't even need "most anime fans" to love narou-kei isekai for it to be a safe profitable bet, you just need that subset of anime fans to be one of the larger ones, you don't even need it to be the largest set if the largest one incurs on higher production costs (I'm sure the battle shounen fanbase is way larger, but it's probably way more expensive to license and adapt the latest Shounen Jump series than that isekai LN with sixth degree derivative inbreeding that topped the forum charts last month). As for the minority... it doesn't even have to be a smaller group since nobody can't generate anti-sales. The haters could be more than the lovers and it would still be profitable (I don't think that's the case, but if it were it would likely make no difference to the bottomline). And of course we don't watch these shows. That's the whole point. They're so bad we refuse to watch more of them, that's the entire argument; wanting their offerings to be better than what they are. If anything, people no longer watching these shows would be a stronger reason for these committees to reconsider their priorities, way way more than people complaining about them but watching and buying anyway. |
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Key
Moderator
Posts: 18212 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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You should, because I don't entirely agree with Bear's take on certain points. (For instance, I never felt that spoiler[the henchwoman was being let off the hook. She was kept around because they needed someone who knew how to operate Hellywood, but under guard.] I also disagree with spoiler[The interpretation on the village leader.] I do agree that spoiler[Sara's decision to stay is more iffy, even if there was some justification. (She wanted to take over the role of the mother.] The other major point mentioned is the moral/political point I referred to, and that's the one that's going to split audiences, even if it is part of a consistent characterization for the MC. |
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a_Bear_in_Bearcave
Posts: 514 Location: Poland |
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I mean, Narou self-publishing website "Let's Become a Novelist" is itself barely 20 year old (as expected of anything famous due to internet) so basically everything Narou is relatively recent, when you add the time before it got big and popular - MT started publishing on Narou in 2012, Re:Monster in 2011, and those are the oldest popular Narou works I heard of. In comparison, Rayerth was written 1994-1996 with anime in 1997, and Twelve Kingdoms was written in 1992-2001 with anime in 2002. So we can divide it as "pre-Narou boom" and "post-Narou boom" and it will mostly hold true. As for plot idea, isekai aren't only Narou works with "ordinary person (x happens) (s)he kicks ass, optionally with a harem". "Kicked out of the party for shitty skill, skill turns out to be cheat skill" is very similar to those isekai, which even led some people to try to qualify them as "isekai, but native one" which I already gripped about. And while otome villainess genre is also isekai, even Narou isekai, it tends to be distinct due to often not kicking any ass - most popular otome villainess, Bakarina - I mean Katarina Claes - doesn't have any cheat skill except being very dumb and likeable harem gravity well. I think we'd need to separate otome isekai as a more shoujo-like genre. 7th loop Villainess from what I've seen feels like typical shoujo anime - and as I just realized when writing this, it's not even isekai but reincarnation story, even if using same trappings of "I know I'm doomed" as otome isekai. So, isekai isn't even central to the common plot/genre on Narou. It can be easily replaced with reincarnation, being given a cheat skill by a god/demon lord/anyone, or probably several other ideas. |
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NeverConvex
Subscriber Posts: 2317 |
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This is jumping way back in the thread, but this is kind of an interesting question. This thread got me to start watching Magic Knight Rayearth, and they literally say 'isekai / 異世界' frequently in the show; I guess at least the term was in common use within lore of these shows, whether or not it was a common genre label yet. There's also a JP-language wikipedia page for 'isekai', which cites 1992's Twelve Kingdoms as an early, enduring example of the genre. Not sure if it says anything about when the genre label itself was invented, though, or if this is just being applied retroactively, similar to the discussion in this ANN thread. Last edited by NeverConvex on Mon Apr 22, 2024 2:07 pm; edited 2 times in total |
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Key
Moderator
Posts: 18212 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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That's definitely not true of all of them, though. Villainess Level 99 was very much an OP MC power fantasy, as was (to a lesser degree) last year's Most Heretical Last Boss Queen. |
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Lord Geo
Posts: 2559 Location: North Brunswick, New Jersey |
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The term "isekai" itself, at least from a modern usage perspective, dates back to Haruka Takachiho's novel Warrior from Another World from 1979, which in Japan is literally titled Isekai no Yuushi, while for anime Aura Battler Dunbine from 1983 is generally considered to be the first proper isekai anime. Everything else since, in Japan at least, has more or less been made off the shoulders of those two works. |
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NeverConvex
Subscriber Posts: 2317 |
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re: Lord Geo -- that's really interesting, thanks! Was not familiar with those. (EDIT: ah, I see it comes up in the JP wiki I linked as well, though)
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