Forum - View topicMushoku Tensei Is Not the Pioneer of Isekai Web Novels, But...
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rdturbo
Posts: 11 |
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nice article
I think its also interesting to note that Konosuba came out 3-4 months after MT and was marketed by the author as a parody of all the novels jumping on the isekai bandwagon and especially those that were trying to copy Re:zero and MT. |
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relena4
Posts: 9 |
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Thanks for writing this article, it was eye-opening! I didn't know about Naro novels and this was a fantastic read. I bookmarked it, that's how much I loved it.
It just hurts me seeing LOTR and MT in the same sentence. I think MT's influence is more like Twilight than LOTR if we're talking genre-defining works. |
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MagicPolly
 Posts: 1596 |
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I'd say (in .hack's case specifically) it's because only one character is ever actually stuck in the game (Tsukasa in Sign). Every other character in every other piece of .hack media has been perfectly free to log on and off as they choose from what I remember. They're not being transported into the video game, they're just playing it in vr. |
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Pedram
Posts: 83 |
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There is also the fact that .hack simply never become that popular or impactful ever. Sword Art Online was also originally written in 2001, in fact, Reki Kawahara draw this in 1999: https://i.imgur.com/0z834tS.jpg https://i.imgur.com/txZKNld.jpg While the game name and character names are different, it's literally SAO's premise that he had in his mind before he write it in 2001. But nobody ever talk about these, SAO is mentioned, but it's always the 2009+ light novel or 2012+ Anime is that mentioned, coz only the Light Novel / Anime got super popular and influenced others. |
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Shay Guy
 Posts: 2166 |
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I was thinking about the subject more, and I decided to see if I could dig into the Wayback Machine and find any records of what kinds of fanfics were popular on Narou back in the day.
Exhibit A, dating to 10 October 2009, is a result page for what I believe is a search for all stories on the site, ranked by all-time point total. This page includes the top 20 stories. Interesting to me: Out of those 20, only two are fanfics (for Fate/stay night and Monster Hunter). Some later pages in the search results have more fanfics, but they seem to cap out at under half. So it looks like in late 2009, Narou had a strong fanfic presence, but it wasn't a majority of what people were reading. Exhibit B, dating to 16 March 2011, is a quarterly ranking from Nijifan, the short-lived fanfic spinoff site mentioned in the article. (The stories themselves still had ncode.syosetu.com addresses.) This works just like the ranking pages on Narou itself; I presume they were added at the same time (though back then, there weren't annual or all-time pages). The source materials represented among those 100 fics are as follows:
And 15 crossovers:
A few additional observations I made from the text on the page. One, 50 out of 100 fics had 転生 (tensei) somewhere in the title, description, or tags. So it looks like it was a tremendously common fanfic premise already, a year and a half before Mushoku Tensei. There's even more of them among ZnT fics than there are Louise Summons X stories, though there's a few of them too. I also notice that 42/100 listings contain チート (cheat). So, that's another historical data point for fan slang, and the story trends it reflects. That trend, too, is nothing new in self-insert fics; way back in 1995, Twisted Path gave its SI what we'd call a cheat power nowadays. Interestingly, categories don't seem to have standardized names like on FF.Net or AO3. (I like that nobody can agree on how to write Infinite Stratos's name.) Exhibit C, dating to 26 August 2010, is another search result page with an all-time ranking, this one from Nijifan. Let's see if its proportions are any different from the March 2011 quarterly rankings...
The details are different, but Negima and ZnT are still on top. What if we jump forward to November 27, when the Wayback Machine scraped more than one page of the rankings? Combining the first five for 100 stories...
And eight more with one fic apiece; the rest seem to be crossovers, with Fate, Negima, and Nanoha heavily represented. There's some variation from the 2011 numbers, with more Nanoha and less Koihime Musou, but again, Negima and ZnT dominate. I gotta admit, I'm curious what sort of long-term impact Negima fandom had on Narou culture, if any. EDIT: A night's sleep later, I decided to collect more data from the November 27, 2010 archive. Looks like the Wayback Machine collected nine pages of rankings, for a total of 180 of the most popular fanfics on Narou. 32 of those, or 17.78%, were crossovers. Here's how the non-crossovers break down:
The 32 crossovers include five Fate/Negima crossovers, four Fate/Nanoha crossovers, three Negima/Nanoha crossovers, and one each of the following:
I notice there's a lot of eroge represented, even if you don't count Nanoha. Koihime Musou, Type-Moon, Majikoi, Muv-Luv, a bunch I hadn't even heard of. And while most ZnT fics in this sample aren't crossovers, Fate is dominated by crossovers -- it's crossover-heavy in English fanfic, but not nearly to the same extent as ZnT. The common denominator between the top fandoms seems to be "lots of pretty girls". Guess that's no surprise. There are some aspects of the ISO Stock Narou Fantasy Setting that don't seem to be taken from any obvious sources here -- Demon Lords, Adventurer's Guilds, etc. Maybe they just percolated in from a formless mass of RPGs? Really, the fanfic influences are clearer when it comes to plot than setting. I dumped the full listing of fic descriptions here if anyone's interested. Last edited by Shay Guy on Wed Mar 31, 2021 4:16 pm; edited 2 times in total |
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TheWa_rudo
Posts: 23 |
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I have to say, that was a pretty good article and it clarified even a lot of my own misconceptions about the history of the rise of isekai.
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VioletCherry
 Posts: 13 |
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Excellent article! I've learned so much about the rise of web novels, as well as the isekai trend. Now I wanna read Mushoku Tensei really bad!
Plus, I'm inspired to start writing again! Thanks so much for writing this! 
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