5 ms·

The article kinda touched on how modern anime is a little colder, but didnt get into any specifics. "reborn/reincarnated/transported to another world as a ____

The article kinda touched on how modern anime is a little colder, but didnt get into any specifics. "reborn/reincarnated/transported to another world as a _____" has matured and gotten popular to the point of being its own genre with associated tropes, rather than just being a trope that would sometimes appear in fantasy stories. It's very rare that this is a good literary device. In my opinion, we have it because authors feel the need to turn the dial up on escapism, and what's more escapist than getting a fresh start in, literally, a new life. Dont think of this as me whinging. "reborn as a vending machine" is my most anticipated show this season, I love the weird promises and read this one when it was just a machine translated webnovel :)

ChadNauseam 4y ago
I never thought I'd find another vending machine maniac in the wild :D
- btown 4y ago
  There are dozens of us in the tech industry! Dozens!
  - YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
    Sorry, Isekai fans, or vending machines?
linksnapzz 4y ago
Dont think of this as me whinging. "reborn as a vending machine" is my most anticipated show this season, I love the weird promises and read this one when it was just a machine translated webnovel :) Didn't the Simpsons do that one first? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Simpsons_Spin-Off_Showcase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Simpsons_Spin-Off_Showcase
- foxyv 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpsons_Already_Did_It https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpsons_Already_Did_It
cthalupa 4y ago
I'd wager about 90% of any mass-produced form of media is crap, and anime is no exception. The isekai stuff is just a big part of the latest 90% for anime. There can be hidden gems or interesting deconstructions of the genre, and sometimes crap can just be mindlessly entertaining. I've started getting tired of the sheer amount of it, but I got tired of the 9 million mecha anime when I was younger, etc., as well.
- zahrc 4y ago
  Sturgeons law. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
  - cthalupa 4y ago
    Thanks! I figured I had heard it somewhere before. Good to place a name to it.
BitwiseFool 4y ago
I'd also like to offer a meta explanation in addition to escapism being popular. With so much anime having been produced and made available on-demand to consumers there is a need to stand out and be novel - in both a creative and a business sense. Alternate world storylines seem perfectly suited for this. Anime produced today needs to compete with all the anime produced over the last ~50 years. Whereas anime produced in the 90's only had to compete with ~30 years worth of anime before it. And even then, much less was produced by the industry as a whole back then.
- FooBarWidget 4y ago
  Maybe. But I'm not convinced. Isekai is so widrspread these days it may as well be the default genre, it can't be called novel anymore. Any novelty would have to be found in the particular way they do it, e.g. reborn as a virus or reborn as a vending machine. And I disagree that it competes with 50 years old anime. Most people don't tend to watch old stuff, which they feel is stuffy and outdated. The story and writing could be great, but the pacing is different from modern standards, and the visuals can sometimes feel awful. I argue that only a very select group of people is interested in watching and revering old stuff. This is why reboots work.
  - BitwiseFool 4y ago
    Understandable. When I say compete with I mostly mean "be distinct from", or at the very least "not the same as" rather than viewership numbers. Unless they are specifically rebooting something, as you mentioned.
- sparkie 4y ago
  I think this explanation is a bit of a stretch. Isekais just recycle the same ideas ad nauseam. If it were about creativity, they could do a lot more. You're given a blank slate to create a whole new world and mythology surrounding it, but your protagonist barely leaves the town to explore the world. Which series does this describe? Guy gets hit by a truck, reborn in a medieval-european-esque world where he joins a guild and does menial tasks like collect plants and kill goblins to level up, but this happens rapidly due to superpower which took no effort to gain. It's kind of like the MMORPG grind but without the grind. Instead of playing 20 hours/day, you see the character progress in 20 mins/week. The side-characters are as bland as NPCs. MMORPGs suffer a similar problem: There's so many of them and there's not a whole lot of difference from one to the next. The mangaka are typically young men who grew up playing these games and not getting out much, so it's no surprise their limited experience of the outside world also limits their ideas. Perhaps a source of the problem is the business side of things: The studios are basically forced to fit a story into 13 episodes which leaves little room for actually creating a memorable experience. 24-26 episodes used to be the norm but is now the rare exception. The studios don't want to take risks so they'll only adapt popular manga. Or maybe the consumers just have shorter attention spans, so you make the character go from level 1 to 1000 in the first few episodes to try and hook the audience, then revert to slow-pace. The iseakais that are genuinely creative (cough 12 Kingdoms) get dropped.
taurath 4y ago
> "reborn/reincarnated/transported to another world as a _____" has matured and gotten popular to the point of being its own genre with associated tropes, rather than just being a trope that would sometimes appear in fantasy stories. I think of it this way: As the current world everyone lives in is devoid of meaning - you have to escape inside or to fantasy in order to find meaning. Disenchantment is the mood of the day. With the internet competition among local people becomes a bit moot. Economically everything is irreversibly and increasingly owned by the investor class and its likely that everyone will have more modest goods than their parents had. Where and how do you find a purpose, a meaning against such a backdrop? This is the question that artists and writers are trying to answer. Defeating inner demons, finding connection and community, fighting an uncaring out of touch older class.. all sorts of theories are there.
- cthalupa 4y ago
  I'd agree - there's a reason that the protagonists in these are almost always unemployed shutins or people that are half-dead from overwork even before they have their unfortunate encounter with a truck. Either you can't find work, or it's a soul crushing march towards death while performing meaningless work to make someone else rich while receiving no appreciation for it. Japan has been facing a lot of these issues for longer than a lot of the rest of the developed world, but it increasingly seems like they were just a bit ahead of the curve in it happening.
  - taurath 4y ago
    The other part of it is - there is no hope of things changing any time soon. There is no generational change happening, the old people are still in charge and will be for a long time. Until they start to actually go away nothing will change.
dageshi 4y ago
At a mechanical level isekai in webnovel form lets you introduce the reader to a new world much more quickly and easily than if the MC were in that world with no reference to our own. It's why I think it's so popular, especially when coupled with a "System" as in litrpg which accelerates that even more.
- CobrastanJorji 4y ago
  And don't forget how easy it is to explain your book's premise. Most stories have trouble marketing what makes them special. "It's a young adult action adventure that gets very into describing food, with teens going on big journeys and discovering secrets, with a whole lot of lore and stuff, and we see multiple generations over the course of the books, with characters going on to becoming the myths that later characters learn about in other books, and also it's all animals" is hard to explain in five words. Then take something like "Isekai but it's a Roomba." There, I told you what it's about, and you already know with near 100% accuracy whether or not it's for you.
  - jabroni_salad 4y ago
    Well, roomba isekai has a good twist in that the MC was originally a mundane roomba that has been mildly uplifted, rather than a former human. https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/60292/all-the-dust-that-falls-a-roomba-isekai-adventure https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/60292/all-the-dust-that-fa...
- jabroni_salad 4y ago
  I used to dig that explanation, but even outside of the ultra-pulp areas, every fantasy world is ultra samey and does not really need to be introduced to the reader at all. It's either a tolkien derivative or... whatever the most influential xianxia novel is. I'm not as good with those, but this one could not help but notice that all the cultivation books are cut from the same cloth.
- pwinnski 4y ago
  It's easy on the creators primarily, they get to skip a lot of steps and don't have to explain away things like cell phones. For consumers, they get quantity. Although it shouldn't be impossible, it seems really hard to get any kind of real quality out of isekai stories. Usually the stakes are low and the setting is surprisingly similar (even though having a different setting is ostensibly the entire reason for the genre). All you end up with is variety in characters, and even then there are common tropes.
rcme 4y ago
Maybe not specifically a rebirth, but I recently watched Chainsaw Man and My Hero Academia. Both of these shows are kind of like a bildungsroman crossed with having one's virtuous deeds rewarded with a great gift.
phnofive 4y ago
Vending Machine is getting adapted?! Awesome. ...yet, I think you're right about the parallel world escapism.
subjectsigma 4y ago
When I first started watching anime, it felt very new and fresh, as if Japanese studios really truly cared about making well-written stories, and didn’t rely on lazy stereotypes or prudish Western conventions. I very quickly realized that it felt new because it was new to me. Anime is chock full of stereotypes, cliches, re-hashed plot lines, and lazy unimaginative plots. Maybe even more so than Western media. 90% of anime absolutely is crap, just like 90% of everything else
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y ago
  Yep, but they make so many of them that some good ones land. The ones with good plot are usually way better than most tv shows I watched (yes this is a 1-person point of view). And every epic anime beats tv shows that try to be epic, for some reason!
dimmke 4y ago
I’m not sure if I agree with the articles thesis. There have always been bleak anime. There’s so much more out there now. Some of it is whimsical and hopeful. Some that come to mind from the last decade: - Yuri on Ice - A Place Further than the Universe - Your Name - Sasaki and Miyano - Given - The last Evangelion movie (which was a real holy shit moment for me) - Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet - This one is an odd pick but the Cyberpunk anime Netflix came out with last year was so so good. I know it undercuts my point given how it’s set in a dystopia but I felt like humanizing these characters that are criminals in a broken world and showing how they still have hopes and dreams and love… I found it very touching. - The Stranger by the Shore Also Chainsaw Man is really really good, though it is dark and gory.
hakfoo 4y ago
My theory was that the isekai concept justifies a lot of storytelling framework: * You can have a main character with modern sensibilities and attitudes, and yet fit him in a fantasy- or historical world. You can and often do get away with asking Nobunaga Oda if he's considered using the blockchain to enhance his military presence. * The MC having to come to terms with his new world provides a lore-sane way to soft-launch the worldbuilding.

ChadNauseam 4y ago

I never thought I'd find another vending machine maniac in the wild :D

btown 4y ago
There are dozens of us in the tech industry! Dozens!
- YeGoblynQueenne 4y ago
  Sorry, Isekai fans, or vending machines?

linksnapzz 4y ago

Dont think of this as me whinging. "reborn as a vending machine" is my most anticipated show this season, I love the weird promises and read this one when it was just a machine translated webnovel :) Didn't the Simpsons do that one first? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Simpsons_Spin-Off_Showcase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Simpsons_Spin-Off_Showcase

foxyv 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpsons_Already_Did_It https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpsons_Already_Did_It

cthalupa 4y ago

I'd wager about 90% of any mass-produced form of media is crap, and anime is no exception. The isekai stuff is just a big part of the latest 90% for anime. There can be hidden gems or interesting deconstructions of the genre, and sometimes crap can just be mindlessly entertaining. I've started getting tired of the sheer amount of it, but I got tired of the 9 million mecha anime when I was younger, etc., as well.

zahrc 4y ago
Sturgeons law. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
- cthalupa 4y ago
  Thanks! I figured I had heard it somewhere before. Good to place a name to it.

BitwiseFool 4y ago

I'd also like to offer a meta explanation in addition to escapism being popular. With so much anime having been produced and made available on-demand to consumers there is a need to stand out and be novel - in both a creative and a business sense. Alternate world storylines seem perfectly suited for this. Anime produced today needs to compete with all the anime produced over the last ~50 years. Whereas anime produced in the 90's only had to compete with ~30 years worth of anime before it. And even then, much less was produced by the industry as a whole back then.

FooBarWidget 4y ago
Maybe. But I'm not convinced. Isekai is so widrspread these days it may as well be the default genre, it can't be called novel anymore. Any novelty would have to be found in the particular way they do it, e.g. reborn as a virus or reborn as a vending machine. And I disagree that it competes with 50 years old anime. Most people don't tend to watch old stuff, which they feel is stuffy and outdated. The story and writing could be great, but the pacing is different from modern standards, and the visuals can sometimes feel awful. I argue that only a very select group of people is interested in watching and revering old stuff. This is why reboots work.
- BitwiseFool 4y ago
  Understandable. When I say compete with I mostly mean "be distinct from", or at the very least "not the same as" rather than viewership numbers. Unless they are specifically rebooting something, as you mentioned.
sparkie 4y ago
I think this explanation is a bit of a stretch. Isekais just recycle the same ideas ad nauseam. If it were about creativity, they could do a lot more. You're given a blank slate to create a whole new world and mythology surrounding it, but your protagonist barely leaves the town to explore the world. Which series does this describe? Guy gets hit by a truck, reborn in a medieval-european-esque world where he joins a guild and does menial tasks like collect plants and kill goblins to level up, but this happens rapidly due to superpower which took no effort to gain. It's kind of like the MMORPG grind but without the grind. Instead of playing 20 hours/day, you see the character progress in 20 mins/week. The side-characters are as bland as NPCs. MMORPGs suffer a similar problem: There's so many of them and there's not a whole lot of difference from one to the next. The mangaka are typically young men who grew up playing these games and not getting out much, so it's no surprise their limited experience of the outside world also limits their ideas. Perhaps a source of the problem is the business side of things: The studios are basically forced to fit a story into 13 episodes which leaves little room for actually creating a memorable experience. 24-26 episodes used to be the norm but is now the rare exception. The studios don't want to take risks so they'll only adapt popular manga. Or maybe the consumers just have shorter attention spans, so you make the character go from level 1 to 1000 in the first few episodes to try and hook the audience, then revert to slow-pace. The iseakais that are genuinely creative (cough 12 Kingdoms) get dropped.

taurath 4y ago

> "reborn/reincarnated/transported to another world as a _____" has matured and gotten popular to the point of being its own genre with associated tropes, rather than just being a trope that would sometimes appear in fantasy stories. I think of it this way: As the current world everyone lives in is devoid of meaning - you have to escape inside or to fantasy in order to find meaning. Disenchantment is the mood of the day. With the internet competition among local people becomes a bit moot. Economically everything is irreversibly and increasingly owned by the investor class and its likely that everyone will have more modest goods than their parents had. Where and how do you find a purpose, a meaning against such a backdrop? This is the question that artists and writers are trying to answer. Defeating inner demons, finding connection and community, fighting an uncaring out of touch older class.. all sorts of theories are there.

cthalupa 4y ago
I'd agree - there's a reason that the protagonists in these are almost always unemployed shutins or people that are half-dead from overwork even before they have their unfortunate encounter with a truck. Either you can't find work, or it's a soul crushing march towards death while performing meaningless work to make someone else rich while receiving no appreciation for it. Japan has been facing a lot of these issues for longer than a lot of the rest of the developed world, but it increasingly seems like they were just a bit ahead of the curve in it happening.
- taurath 4y ago
  The other part of it is - there is no hope of things changing any time soon. There is no generational change happening, the old people are still in charge and will be for a long time. Until they start to actually go away nothing will change.

dageshi 4y ago

At a mechanical level isekai in webnovel form lets you introduce the reader to a new world much more quickly and easily than if the MC were in that world with no reference to our own. It's why I think it's so popular, especially when coupled with a "System" as in litrpg which accelerates that even more.

CobrastanJorji 4y ago
And don't forget how easy it is to explain your book's premise. Most stories have trouble marketing what makes them special. "It's a young adult action adventure that gets very into describing food, with teens going on big journeys and discovering secrets, with a whole lot of lore and stuff, and we see multiple generations over the course of the books, with characters going on to becoming the myths that later characters learn about in other books, and also it's all animals" is hard to explain in five words. Then take something like "Isekai but it's a Roomba." There, I told you what it's about, and you already know with near 100% accuracy whether or not it's for you.
- jabroni_salad 4y ago
  Well, roomba isekai has a good twist in that the MC was originally a mundane roomba that has been mildly uplifted, rather than a former human. https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/60292/all-the-dust-that-falls-a-roomba-isekai-adventure https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/60292/all-the-dust-that-fa...
jabroni_salad 4y ago
I used to dig that explanation, but even outside of the ultra-pulp areas, every fantasy world is ultra samey and does not really need to be introduced to the reader at all. It's either a tolkien derivative or... whatever the most influential xianxia novel is. I'm not as good with those, but this one could not help but notice that all the cultivation books are cut from the same cloth.
pwinnski 4y ago
It's easy on the creators primarily, they get to skip a lot of steps and don't have to explain away things like cell phones. For consumers, they get quantity. Although it shouldn't be impossible, it seems really hard to get any kind of real quality out of isekai stories. Usually the stakes are low and the setting is surprisingly similar (even though having a different setting is ostensibly the entire reason for the genre). All you end up with is variety in characters, and even then there are common tropes.

rcme 4y ago

Maybe not specifically a rebirth, but I recently watched Chainsaw Man and My Hero Academia. Both of these shows are kind of like a bildungsroman crossed with having one's virtuous deeds rewarded with a great gift.

phnofive 4y ago

Vending Machine is getting adapted?! Awesome. ...yet, I think you're right about the parallel world escapism.

subjectsigma 4y ago

When I first started watching anime, it felt very new and fresh, as if Japanese studios really truly cared about making well-written stories, and didn’t rely on lazy stereotypes or prudish Western conventions. I very quickly realized that it felt new because it was new to me. Anime is chock full of stereotypes, cliches, re-hashed plot lines, and lazy unimaginative plots. Maybe even more so than Western media. 90% of anime absolutely is crap, just like 90% of everything else

Fire-Dragon-DoL 4y ago
Yep, but they make so many of them that some good ones land. The ones with good plot are usually way better than most tv shows I watched (yes this is a 1-person point of view). And every epic anime beats tv shows that try to be epic, for some reason!

dimmke 4y ago

I’m not sure if I agree with the articles thesis. There have always been bleak anime. There’s so much more out there now. Some of it is whimsical and hopeful. Some that come to mind from the last decade: - Yuri on Ice - A Place Further than the Universe - Your Name - Sasaki and Miyano - Given - The last Evangelion movie (which was a real holy shit moment for me) - Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet - This one is an odd pick but the Cyberpunk anime Netflix came out with last year was so so good. I know it undercuts my point given how it’s set in a dystopia but I felt like humanizing these characters that are criminals in a broken world and showing how they still have hopes and dreams and love… I found it very touching. - The Stranger by the Shore Also Chainsaw Man is really really good, though it is dark and gory.

hakfoo 4y ago

My theory was that the isekai concept justifies a lot of storytelling framework: * You can have a main character with modern sensibilities and attitudes, and yet fit him in a fantasy- or historical world. You can and often do get away with asking Nobunaga Oda if he's considered using the blockchain to enhance his military presence. * The MC having to come to terms with his new world provides a lore-sane way to soft-launch the worldbuilding.