I wanted a good jumping off point for a dumb series about my love of isekai and I was originally going to make it about Isekai Smartphone, but I decided that would be very silly. After all you don’t know me well enough to just jump into my delicate arms like that; they’d probably snap like twigs. So I decided before I jumped into the beauty that is isekai, we should get to know each other a bit better. I’ll light a candle to set the mood.

I want to do something very stupid and try and define isekai, not right away of course, but eventually. That’s my goal for the moment and I want to do my best to fulfill it. Joe from Pause and Select said in a inspired rant (and I’m paraphrasing here) that the prescriptive definition of what makes an isekai is holding us back when discussing this genre, and to that end I want to set out on a quest to define it descriptively, that is to say, what elements make an isekai? What things do isekai do that other stuff doesn’t? My quest for answers starts now, I suppose.

I don’t want to come across as a blind fanboy, which is something I am very concerned about seeing as I have a lot of love for series that are…less than perfect to put it kindly. That love stems from a very honest place and my intent isn’t to push people into watching something they won’t enjoy; far from it. I think that isekai gets a bad rap in the anime circles that sit comfortably between extremely casual and extremely critical wherein they’re perfectly correct when they say a show is bad for a certain reason but they don’t understand why the show has that flaw and have even less understanding about what that flaw means in context.

The main example that comes to mind is with narou-kei isekai, a.k.a what is typically thought of when isekai is mentioned; the protagonist run down by a truck only to come back with big powers (and a bigger dick). A complaint levied at these kinds of shows is that the main character is overpowered; that there’s no tension in the conflicts, and like I said that’s perfectly true on the surface. However this criticism misses the point of these characters being so powerful.

Modernity needs to be contextualised, I hope that’s not an outlandish statement to make, because it’s what I think. I also think that isekai is one of the greatest storytelling conventions we have for doing that. When an isekai character in a narou-kei story is given their unbelievable power it’s not a “fuck you” to the plot, it’s an expression of that person’s modernity and how the world we live in is so far ahead of anything in this realm or the next. For example, the smartphone is one of the most powerful things we possess and is capable of doing pretty much anything, given you know how. So in the hands of Isekai Smartphone’s protagonist it does, because as a modern man he is the apex of this society. All this stems from the common thread in all isekai stories, that being “knowledge is power”. That being said, the flaws that a character like this has can’t manifest in any way that makes him less modern; to make him unable to accomplish anything in this society that would be possible if this was a modern setting would be counter-intuitive to what these stories are saying. Narou-kei isekai protagonists have to be powerful, after all it’s the convention. This goes double for their flaws as well though, the biggest challenge for Isekai Smartphone’s protagonist in this first season is that he’s unable to divorce his modern idea of a relationship in order to adapt to this fantasy setting; polygamy isn’t allowed in Japan and therefore he can’t participate in such a system. Pushing the limits of modernity is what narou-kei is about, to me at least, feel free to disagree.

Digibro had a slightly different explaination stating that (narou-kei) isekai are an imagining of a place where the “meaningless” skills you possess like strategising and critical thinking means something more than just being something you have because you find video games fun. I’m inclined to agree, self-inserting yourself is the name of the game after all, and it feeds into my main point. These modern skills are worth less than they would be in a less technologically advanced age, and I should mention that the otome-game subgenre explores this a lot better than narou-kei does, though I don’t want to talk about this too much until part 4 of Joe’s series “A Thousand Isekai” comes out which I assume will tackle, at least in part, these kinds of stories (as of writing this otome-game isekai only exist in manga and light novel form unfortunately, you should look out for “I was reincarnated as an otome game villianess” though, I hear it’s getting an adaptation (or read the manga it’s pretty good, in fact read Koushaku Reijou no Tashinami as well while you’re there it has an extremely abrupt beginning but the politics are quite intriguing)).

That last point about otome-game isekai is something I really wanna drive home; there’s this constant conflation of all isekai, and it sucks since they’re quite clearly not all the same. For a new genre to form and for people to look at it and say, “well that sucks by virtue of its existence” is the height of idiocracy. As Joe said, people don’t care to learn about these things because they don’t think it’s important, and it’s up the people who do care to tell others. Maybe I can be that person; I want to be that person; I believe I can be that person. That’s all I want to say for now since this was only an introduction type thing, but y’know, correct me if I’m wrong and accost me if I’m right. Thanks for reading.

I think that one of my defining features (read: unfixable skills) is how sloppily I write so you’d be better served not partaking of my flower bud if that unmoistens you since it’ll only get worse. Well it might get better (I hope). This is entirely unresearched as I wanted a place to start from, a blank slate in which to carve out something for myself. I don’t think I’ll go back and edit any mistakes I made as I think my ineptitude should be immortalised. I will however correct them in future posts, since I’m supposed to be learning. I talked about it the most so I want to cover Isekai Smartphone next. I’m @apurpledoplhin if you want to correct or accost me I can take it I swear.