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The State of Isekai Anime

I have nothing against Isekai myself, but I know this article is gonna upset some people with the implication that the genre isn’t going anywhere.

While this concept is found in folklore from around the world, the genre's roots in popular fiction like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court lay a common groundwork for how isekai is approached today. While there are still some Western works of fiction that would reasonably be considered isekai, over the last 30 years, isekai has become a staple of anime, manga, and novels from Japan. Until recently, almost all of its growth has come from the popularity of media from that country.

The mastermind behind Mobile Suit Gundam, Yoshiyuki Tomino, released the great Aura Battler Dunbine in 1983. It's considered the first isekai anime by many due to its commonalities with the genre today, despite a handful of contenders for that designation with earlier release dates, including an anime adaptation of the Wizard of Oz that hit cinemas the year prior. The 49 (thoroughly excellent) episodes of Dunbine locked in many of the tropes that would become most commonly associated with isekai going forward and served as an inspiration for many of its successors in the genre.

Popular anime like The Vision of Escaflowne, Magic Knight Rayearth, Digimon, and .hack//SIGN are all clear examples of “in another world” stories released in the years between Aura Battler Dunbine and the modern era of isekai. While they may have been described with the term in Japan and occasionally compared to one another, the term was not used as a category until the Japanese web novel platform Shōsetsuka ni Narō grew an audience in the late 00s in parallel with one of its more popular subjects for fanfiction, The Familiar of Zero.

Otome games are visual novels or otherwise story-driven games with a female target audience that focus on romance, often with a reverse-harem framing or opportunities to enjoy handsome gentlemen interacting with one another. In many, a villainess character is prominent: she is your primary adversary, your rival in love.

When I first got into anime in a big way back in early 2009, the "cancer" on anime was moe. Some people felt there was just too much of it. Back then, none of us had any idea of what "genre saturation" would REALLY look like.

Looks like somebody saw my post criticizing the isekai fandom from the This Week in Anime article last week (along with the unintentional soapboxing) and did the demographic report and the whatever we're seeing in the article. Anyway, this is very informative, and there's one part of the article that caught my attention:

mdo7 wrote:

Looks like somebody saw my post criticizing the isekai fandom from the This Week in Anime article last week (along with the unintentional soapboxing) and did the demographic report and the whatever we're seeing in the article. Anyway, this is very informative, and there's one part of the article that caught my attention:

This article was in the works long before new year. These sort of articles require a ton of work and can't be created in a week.