Forum - View topicThis Week in Anime - Reincarnated in Another Column
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FilthyCasual
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Andrew Cunningham
 Posts: 511 Location: Seattle |
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Do-Over Damsel is written by a woman for one of the few clearly female-targeted light novel labels so we don't need to worry about male gaze. Honestly it doesn't even seem interested in doing an actual romance at all, just making (not especially funny) jokes about how they get shoe-horned into series (like Nina, which is already forcing it in awkwardly) that don't need them. I'm totally down for pint-sized cannonball punching.
I'd also like to die on the hill of reincarnation in the same world not being isekai. There's no other world! It's just sekai! (Not actually a viable usage.) And again for the cheap seats, litrpg elements are often found in isekai/narou-kei but aren't actually part of the genre itself any more than harems or I dunno, buying slaves. These kind of misunderstandings are pervasive enough without professional writers perpetuating them, even if you're mostly joking. |
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Fluwm
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The best part of the seasonal deluge of isekais is reading through the ensuing TWIAs. So much more enjoyable and entertaining than actually watching any of these shows.
That said, as fun as it is to poke fun at these isekais, I think there's an angle here that's unfortunately rarely, if ever, brought up -- the scorn they earn is very much not deserved. At least, not to the extent that even the worst isekais accumulate it. All of these stories are the products of amateur writers effectively writing fanfiction. Not only is it understandable for their work to not be very good, that's kind of... the point of it. Bad isekai anime/light novels don't come from nowhere: they come from the deep systemic failure of the publishing and animation/manga industries. When a web novel is picked up, they have a certain responsibility to the authors to help them improve their work -- otherwise they'll never stop working at the amateur level. Likewise, when adapting a story to a new medium, new creative forces have a duty to alter that story to best reflect the strengths of the new medium. All these bad isekai stories all have the same root cause, I think: an abnegation of professional responsibility across multiple industries. This is a hill that I will die on. Like, it's fun to make fun of That Time I Was Reincarnated As a Slime for being so clumsy with exposition that 90% of its runtime is dedicated to meeting room conversations either describing events that just happened, or describing events that are about to happen... but that's not solely down to Fuse (the author), but the wider industry and culture that's failed them -- and that's why 20 volumes deep, they're still relying the same, amateurish, clumsy techniques. The writers aren't being empowered to improve their craft, and the animators and manga artists are compelled to be so deeply beholden to to the source material that they effectively have no room for their own creative input. It's a miserable, rotten situation for everyone involved.
I think it depends on the story. A "different world" can mean many different things. If it's a reincarnation into a different era, that's a different world all right -- that good ol' "fish out of temporal water" trope. But reincarnated into the same lifetime? Not so much. |
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