The State of Isekai Anime

If you wanted to characterize “the biggest trends in anime of the last decade,” you might be inclined to narrow in on anime's increasingly global presence or the exploding volume of new TV anime being produced. Maybe, if you follow the industry closely, you'd talk about how overseas finance has changed what anime gets made, a preference towards single cour releases, the decline of original anime not based on a pre-existing manga or novel, or the implications of home video collapsing as a pillar of anime monetization. But one trend that has been impossible to ignore, even amongst people who don't regularly watch anime, the rise of isekai.

If you're entrenched in the anime fandom, it probably feels as though isekai has had a lock on the anime industry for a generation. While there have been anime that would qualify with some regularity going back to the '80s, the term only garnered widespread use in the last fifteen years, and its adoption into English-language fan spaces is even more recent. It was only last year that the loanword joined the Oxford English Dictionary, a full 14 years after “kawaii” and eight behind fellow genre-most-associated-with-anime, “mecha”. The English-language Wikipedia page on isekai is hardly older than Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Indeed, 2019 was the first year where more than 10 isekai series aired on Japanese airwaves. That would be but an auspicious allusion to what was to come.

We are at peak isekai: the genre makes up 15% of 2024's new TV anime. The 34 isekai released last year may only represent a marginal 3% increase from the one prior, but over the last five, the volume of new titles with characters whisked away to another world has grown 143%. To highlight how profound that growth is: more than half of all isekai in the medium's history have been released since 2020.

The most important takeaway is not necessarily the genre's dramatic increase in production, but how isekai seems to have leveled off, holding steady at around 15% of new anime produced. Viewership behavior suggests we have not hit our point of diminishing returns with the genre and that the demand side could bear even more isekai than we're getting now. The community consensus seems to be that there's already too much isekai being made, but when we discuss viewership data later, we'll explore how fan behavior doesn't reflect that notion.

One may be tempted to look at this chart and see the timing of isekai's boom as correlative with the COVID-19 pandemic, to assume that part of the genre's growth is tied to increased demand for fantasy and comfort food during a time when many were isolated or locked down. While it conceptually makes sense, I'd be skeptical of the importance of lockdowns for two reasons. First, this chart largely captures the supply side of the isekai game. Anime production is a slow process, and typically takes a few years between a production committee assembling and any actual production taking place.

Second, while the international anime community saw its ranks multiply during this period, isekai did not experience disproportionate growth. If anything, I'd be surprised to see fewer fans of the genre proportionately, even if the raw number of card-carrying isekai lifers has blossomed. It's true that international sales now represent a majority of revenue in the anime industry, but production plans for this quantity of isekai were already penciled in before that was the case.

As for the chart methodology, what qualifies as “another world” or not depends on who you ask. For our purposes, an isekai anime is either 1) anime that has been categorized as isekai by their publishers, 2) anime that explicitly uses phrases like “isekai” or “in another world” as part of their titles and synopses, or 3) anime I judged as clear “reverse isekai” stories, where a character from another world is trapped in the real world, such as The Devil Is a Part-Timer! or Otaku Elf. I'm very much evaluating whether or not an anime embodies the spirit of isekai in the popular imagination but even if one accounts for any quibbles in definitions here, the direction laid out by the analysis holds strong.

A final observation about the chart is that isekai's growth is similar to John Green's notion about falling asleep and/or falling in love: it happens slowly and then all at once. The genre's dominance was a long time coming, and one only has to look at the history of the genre in anime to see how. While much can be said about isekai in Japan, today we'll be examining the state of isekai from a primarily Western perspective, with a focus on English-speaking territories.

In Japanese, isekai more literally reads as “different world” or “another world”, but the implication and common use in English is as a subgenre where the protagonist finds themselves in another world, typically one more fantastical than their own. 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.

Inflection Points:

1. Late 2009 — Japanese web novel platform Shōsetsuka ni Narō begins to take off. “Isekai” is an early popular category.
2. Late 2012 — The web novel for Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation is released in Japan and becomes an overnight success.
3. Mid-2016 — Re:Zero and KONOSUBA were self-aware and popularized the term with overseas audiences, helped by the success of Overlord the year prior.
4. Mid-2022 — Six isekai TV anime are released in the same season, most with “isekai” or “another world” in their titles. Isekai is now one of the most represented genres in the medium.

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. The excellent Kim Morrissy covered this topic quite comprehensively for ANN a few years back if you'd like to dig into the history more.

It wasn't until 2012 with Sword Art Online that English-speaking netizens began using the phrase. According to SAO author Reki Kawahara in comments on Twitter (formally known as X), this is a misuse of the term, saying “SAO is set in the real world!” Sword Art Online became one of the first mega-hits of the streaming era. Accurate or not, this association immediately provided awareness to many overseas fans. To give something a name gives it power, and as is often the case with international anime audiences, having a Japanese name for the category elevated the allure even further, and made those “in the know” feel like insiders. Equipped with “isekai,” fans worldwide began to recognize the genre's relevance with ever-increasing aptitude, perhaps disproportionately so considering how rare isekai anime were during this period.

And so isekai grew.

Comparing the two above charts—the Google Trends journey of the word “isekai” and the release cadence of new isekai anime—reveals the impact of popular series like Overlord, Re:Zero, and KONOSUBA in the mid-2010s: there wasn't enough supply to meet demand suggested by the interest by 2017-2018. Anime most frequently takes 3-4 years between greenlight and release. It's as though you can see dozens of producers scrambling in parallel to get their company's response to Re:Zero onto the desks of animators with the way the charts dance up and to the right.

Is isekai the most popular genre of anime? In a word, yes.

For illustration, I've put together some analysis of all TV anime that broadcast in Japan in 2024. Popularity was determined by the same formula employed in the series of articles where I compare what's being watched in the U.S. compared to Japan expanded to also include several other countries where English is the most-spoken language: Canada, The United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.

By using data scraped from a dozen pirate sites, estimates for legal sites from all available data, and other proxies for viewership, after weighing each metric based on geographic distributions and a quality rating (based on Nate Silver's “pollster ratings” to prioritize metrics that have been demonstrably predictive of viewership in the past), you can make a fairly robust relative popularity scale. For the year 2024, the “top anime” of the year was a competitively ranked trio: Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Hashira Training Arc, Solo Leveling, and DAN DA DAN. All other titles were rated out of 100 compared to the “big three,” if you will. If you then average out the ratings per genre, you get the following chart:

What you see here is that isekai is number two…but only slightly, despite the action genre being home to all ten of the most-performant anime of 2024. While most anime fall into multiple genres in this analysis, “isekai” is wholly unrepresented in the top ten anime of the year, first showing up at the #11 spot. So, how is isekai so close to action in the ratings? Action is one of the biggest cohorts in our analysis, including nearly half of the year's TV series within its large tent. As such, it's reasonable to assume plenty of lower-quality action series dragging down the average, and you'd be right to. However, the biggest determinant of isekai's success is its consistency.

I could make a lot of sports analogies for isekai here, but I'm going to do it in a way that makes sense to me: through the film Moneyball. It's based on the somewhat true story of a baseball general manager who employs quantitative analysis to transform the sport into a giant optimization problem, allowing the (then) Oakland-based Athletics to hire a roster of players who drastically overperform relative to their price and move up in the league's standings. While it's overly simplified for the movie (and arguably, overstated), the key metric the A's team seeks is a player's ability to first base. The heart of the concept is that if you can just get more players on-base, on average, you'll end up with more runs than a team with a lower on-base percentage.

And that's what isekai does; it gets on-base.

When we analyze anime ratings, we split them into four equal groups called quartiles. The light blue bar shows the middle two quartiles, representing the popularity of the median 50% of each genre. Looking at these ranges, isekai is far ahead, with the highest first and third quartile. Even the comparatively weak isekai—those at the 25th percentile—are comparable to the average performance from nearly every other genre. This is also to say that close to 75% of isekai are more popular than the average comedy or romance.

This is the real value of isekai: it's hard to make a flop in another world.

Anime distributors and publishers tend to use letter grades to denote the “level” of an anime, usually in terms of its revenue potential. As such, for an anime to be graded an “S” means it's anticipated to be an all-timer, in the top 5-10% of all series, an anime that will generate huge streaming audiences and many secondary streams of income.

Isekai may be a reliable hitmaker, but it has a really hard time breaking into the “S” category.

When you looked at the chart above, the first thing you may have noticed was, on a 100-point scale, how low the average anime was. The average “popularity score” for all 2024 TV anime was 10.1, with the median sitting just over a value of 5. The trio of top titles mentioned had just as much estimated viewership and interest in them as the bottom 120 combined. This kind of “feast or famine” distribution is fairly normal in media, but that doesn't make it any less hard as a consumer to conceptualize how big the gap is between a Solo Leveling and a Girls Band Cry is, particularly when they sit side-by-side on Crunchyroll and are discussed at similar rates on social media.

As mentioned above, the top isekai anime of the year sits at rank #11 for the year: Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation. But with a popularity rating of just 33% that of Demon Slayer, is it fair to call it an “S”-level title? It's watched by a ton of people, yes, but is that all it takes to make an Attack on Titan-level hit? In English-speaking countries, it's not a top-seller for home video. The light novels haven't made the BookScan charts. The anime's licensee Crunchyroll isn't selling much branded apparel (though sublicense Ripple Junction has a dozen SKUs currently active), nor have there been any collaborations for other categories of licensed merchandise.

This is the case for most isekai titles. Popular ones like Re:Zero and KONOSUBA fare a bit better in the specific verticals mentioned above, but generally speaking, isekai anime are less likely to see their rights exploited outside of streaming compared to similarly viewed shows. The factors behind this “always the bridesmaid, never the bride” situation can best be examined by understanding exactly who is watching isekai.

What kind of person watches isekai? To answer this question, the best place to go is to the people who watch isekai. As part of White Box Entertainment's research for publishers, my team and I regularly survey self-identified anime fans in select English-speaking countries (the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa), and that gives us a good place to start looking at what the demographics and behaviors of this group are compared to anime fans at large:

Considering a large percentage of the anime community watches isekai, it's impressive that this profile tells you anything about isekai fans, but the trends align with observed fan behavior to highlight key differences. Isekai fans, in short, watch more anime and have been watching anime for longer. There are slightly more males than the fandom at large, but only slightly (English-speaking countries are the only territories with a noticeable gender gap in viewership). Non-binary fans are proportionately less likely to watch isekai. We see parallels between merchandise and fandom activities: isekai fans are 22% less likely to listen to anime soundtracks or purchase any anime merchandise.

There are many challenges with this kind of analysis, though. First, it's self-reported. People who fill out surveys have the distinct characteristic of being willing to fill out surveys, and while my team and I work hard to address that, it's a limitation for sure. Secondly, we can only be so thorough. For many traits, interests, and behaviors, isekai fans were essentially the same as the audience at large.

One of those that was particularly interesting to me was the stated propensity to discuss anime online on social media: people watching at least a single isekai anime this season as well as self-identified isekai fans alike both said they discussed anime on social on the regular — at a higher rate than the broader survey sample! This stood out because, in my research, isekai is the genre with the lowest social media volume in English, particularly compared to viewership. Again, as with merchandise, there are certainly outliers, but one would hardly know The Most Notorious "Talker" Runs the World's Greatest Clan is one of the most-watched anime of the Fall in the US by browsing BlueSky, nor is it represented as well as similarly-viewed series in the English fanfiction, fanart, or cosplay spaces.

The takeaway? People love to watch isekai, but when they engage in fandom activities, they're more likely to engage regarding a different anime they're keeping up with. The depth of their interest in isekai runs a bit more shallow. However, there's another complicating factor that plays a role in the decreased interest in fandom surrounding isekai anime: the backlash towards the genre in the community.

You don't have to spend much time talking with anime fans to hear complaints about the volume of “isekai slop” and it's hard to blame long-time viewers in particular for their perspective: the quantity of new isekai hitting Japanese airwaves in any given week since 2022 is around the same number as the entire late-night anime roster combined as recently as 15 years ago. It begs the question, should isekai take up 15% of the TV anime scene?

It's been almost two years since Steve Jones & Nicholas Dupree wrote “we've truly reached the bottom of the barrel” regarding isekai. It's been five years since Geoff Thew released a video called “Too Much Isekai” — and that was during a year with less than half of 2024's volume! These are far from the only content creators and editorial teams to feel this way, and it's reflected in the fandoms across political borders and languages.

As we discussed earlier, isekai draws in viewers with a consistency not even “shonen action” can compete with. And compared to other forms of visual media with similar audience sizes, anime is extremely cheap to produce. If we wanted to make a perfectly economically efficient distribution for what the anime industry as a whole should produce, we would need more isekai, at least until its middle 50% of titles stopped performing so far above other genres.

That said, not all popularity is equal. We're talking about art here, and there's a reason that so many of us have moments from anime first encountered decades ago that still resonate with us now. This emotional impact has business ramifications as well. Anime that can affect a broader audience has a broader reach, something that's of particular interest to the biggest purveyors of the medium in the Western world like Crunchyroll and Netflix.

The challenging thing is trying to measure the qualitative reaction to anime. We've already explored how isekai anime, while generally strong performers are rarely considered “anime of the year” material by viewership. The same behavior is seen in the eyes of critics and fans. Since its inception in 2017, only two isekai have been nominated for the Crunchyroll Anime Award's top category, Re:Zero and Sonny Boy, the latter of which wholly ignores most conventions and tropes popular in the genre. Isekai is nowhere to be found in Anime News Network's Best Anime of 2024 list, and to find a representative of another world in the annual AOTY mega-poll results from ANN's readers, you'd have to go back to 2021.

Whether it's on MyAnimeList, Crunchyroll, or IMdB, isekai ratings are virtually indistinguishable from other genres on average. I typically don't put stock in these sorts of user ratings, but isekai anime tends not to get enough critical reception to make it onto the likes of similarly misleading aggregators like Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes that are used as barometer of reception in polite company. As a result, I took the time to crank out MyAnimeList's ratings for isekai compared to other genres since the spike in 2019. The results can be found here:

To start a list of important qualifications, according to my survey data and SimilarWeb, MyAnimeList skews male significantly more than most other anime websites. This is compounded by the fact that the users most likely to leave a rating are even more male and younger. People who use MyAnimeList are more likely to be deeply enfranchised compared to the anime audience as a whole. Additionally, most people will not leave a review for an anime they have no interest in even starting, and isekai are typically loud and obvious as to their nature, thus removing those who find them unpleasant as a rule from even giving them enough of a chance to leave a “3/10 dropped” from the calculation entirely.

You can understand with all these issues with the data—as well as the novel's worth more I'm holding back for everyone's sake—that I don't take any platform's user ratings all too seriously in evaluating reception, even one as popular as MAL. That said, once we take this chart with a bucket of sand, the trend we saw with popularity is represented once again: isekai is generally received fairly well. Titles like Re:Zero and Mushoku Tensei have demonstrated that the genre's best are evaluated by the anime community without their genre being held against them, and titles like Sonny Boy and Ascendance of a Bookworm represent isekai's ability to cater to a more critically-inclined crowd.

Breaking out the subgenres within isekai reveals how much the “cheat” sub-category drags down the rest. As you'll see from the analysis, I think there's a great case for cheat isekai's importance, but it's not as easily defined as something like a “reincarnation” isekai. A cheat isekai, to me, is a series where the protagonist has a disproportionate power-level advantage beyond the skills or knowledge they bring from another world. One of the loudest critiques of isekai characterizes the genre as power fantasies for those dissatisfied with their station, replete with wish fulfillment of every flavor. I find this to be a bit too broad of a brush, even when centering on the “cheat” subgenre that most closely aligns with the stereotype.

But cheat isekai only represent 11% of the genre's output in recent years, and, perhaps more importantly in understanding why they're so visible, they're amongst the most watched. Using the same methodology for 2024 anime as above for the sub-genres, we find the average popularity of isekai TV anime as follows:

This one requires a caveat as well if a smaller one. Many of these sub-genres or genre cross-overs are quite small; “villainess,” “slice of life,” and “transformation” are only represented by a pair of titles each for 2024. These trends are consistent enough over the years but as with the above chart, I'd encourage you to not treat it as gospel.

That said, sub-genre performance only further demonstrates the power of isekai. All but two of isekai's particular classifications beat out drama, romance, and sports anime on average, and isekai crossover genres outperform equivalent non-isekai categories as well. For example, slice of life that's also isekai are 55% more popular on average than your standard iyashikei. I would not have anticipated romance as a category that benefits from a cross-genre with isekai, but the data show just that.

You may also notice another trend comparing the two charts about isekai's subgenres, one that's represented across all media: critical evaluations seem to be negatively correlated with popularity. That is to say, the most popular isekai subgenres are the least well-regarded, and the most positively reviewed don't necessarily see much in the way of viewership. Such is the way it goes!

Even though “reincarnation” is a consistent winner with viewers, since it represents such a significant share of all isekai, it's hard to parse out anything meaningful about whether the reincarnation element is an important quality to either viewers or critics.

Transformation anime performs quite well, but much of this can be attributed to how strict I was in my definition. For classifying subgenres, I tried my best to aggregate tags and metadata across multiple platforms, but in the end, I had to rely on my own experience with these titles. For "transformation" I felt the category was compelling enough to crunch the numbers on, as many consider it a core element to many anime in the genre. However, “transformation” is a bit too broad of a topic. If we're to get metaphysical, almost any isekai contains a transformation of the protagonist(s), especially those involving reincarnation. In the end, after a strenuous debate with other isekai experts, I landed on the concept that an anime where the protagonist is no longer human would be the deciding line. Anything less drastic would lead to too many case-by-case subjective considerations and would, like with reincarnation, muddy the results. Thus, for 2024, the success of transformation isekai was all but certain. It's mostly due to two heavy-hitting franchises that have had regular seasons: That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime and Overlord.

Aside from “cheat” isekai, most subgenres have grown at the same rate as isekai, their proportion of new anime produced staying more or less flat year-to-year. One subgenre where there's been a slight uptick in production as well as cause for extra attention is villainess isekai. While the title “otome isekai” is perhaps both more accurate and is used by many of the subgenre's most ardent adherents, it's known colloquially as “villainess” due to both the term's ubiquity in titles and its resonance with English-speaking audiences. 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. And for many isekai anime aimed at the otome game audience, our protagonist finds themselves in the role not of the hero, but of the villainess!

The subgenre's most well-known example is 2019's My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom!, wherein the protagonist is magically trapped in the world of her favorite otome game in the villainess role. Besides being quite popular with its intended audience, My Next Life as a Villainess was something of a crossover hit, and became one of the year's more popular new titles, receiving not only a second season, but a film as well. Relative to other anime of similar popularity, isekai franchises tend to get fewer theatrical excursions than their contemporaries, so the fact that Catarina Claes's exploits made it to the big screen before Ains Ooal Gown is particularly notable.

In the years since, there have been a handful of anime adaptations with similar concepts. Where this trend is even more noticeable in the world of Japanese web novels and light novels from which almost all isekai anime are adapted. Like isekai itself, villainess anime in the six years since My Next Life as a Villainess has performed consistently in both the West and in their native Japan, making the category attractive for producers looking to minimize risk. Already, we have anime adaptations for The Old Man Reincarnated As A Villainess, The Holy Grail of Eris, and The Dark History of the Reincarnated Villainess planned for this year or soon thereafter, but that's only considering anime based on Japanese works.

South Korean manhwa/webcomics have had some of their biggest successes in the world of isekai, with villainess titles taking a more central position on trending lists on webtoon sites than their contemporaries in manga and Japanese light novels. With the increased interest in South Korean comics as source material for anime in recent years, including the mega-popular Solo Leveling and, in particular, the villainess isekai Why Raeliana Ended Up at the Duke's Mansion, I believe we'll see the continued growth of otome-styled isekai anime in the years ahead.

The volume of new TV isekai seems to be in a steady state, if not growing ever slightly. It's one of anime's most popular genres and has become an iconic one, representative of many of everything the medium can offer. Like their Japanese counterparts, international audiences seem incredibly receptive to watching the majority of the isekai series released, even if they're not as keen on building a fandom around them.

Similarly to the anime that adapt them, isekai manga and light novels may not be at the top of the charts, but many franchises are solid perennial sellers. Digging into sales numbers from Oricon, it's rare to see an isekai franchise in any manga top 10, but for everything concerning light novels, the genre is ever-present. I haven't seen any meta trends either in Japan or overseas that there's any kind of shift away from isekai in readership, and I see no reason to doubt that the supply of source material for more anime can sustain the current rate of adaptations.

Which brings us to the future. As The New York Times reported last year, nearly every anime studio was booked for years out, and that issue hasn't changed since. The anime currently in production or penciled in with studios aren't necessarily locked in, but shifting what's already queued works against the risk-averse philosophies of most publishers. Earlier, I noted how the “sudden” spike in anime production was essentially on a 3 to 4-year delay from when the genre started to deliver outsized results around the globe. Similarly, we'd need to see a significant downside in the financials related to producing isekai anime for the trend to reverse, and even then, there'd be a years-long gap to be meaningfully felt.

To be clear, the opposite is happening. Isekai is a low-risk, high-reward genre for anime producers, just as much now during peak isekai as it ever was. Even a poorly performing isekai delivers outsized results compared to any other genre, almost as if the label is a “one weird trick” for producers. It was a technique that likely brought about WarnerMedia's Suicide Squad ISEKAI, an anime with a conceit that was so compelling that it spent 16 days on Max's top 10 in the United States last year, suggesting viewership in the millions in America alone.

Isekai is not just continuing to get produced at incredible rates: it's getting preferential treatment in 2025. Crunchyroll typically dubs 15-20 simulcasts in a season, but with more than double that in terms of new anime, Big Orange needs to prioritize. Tellingly, nearly every isekai premiering this month is on the list of Q1 dubs, with isekai representing more than 40% of Crunchyroll's dub output.

For 2025 and into the future, isekai is a core part of the popular conception of anime. While I don't think we'll see an isekai reach the level of mega-hits like Jujutsu Kaisen and Demon Slayer, the anime industry can hardly be faulted for investing so heavily in the genre when it's continued to find such consistent success with little indication of flagging. Isekai seems resilient to negative sentiment in the community, and audiences have shown a consistent interest in new IP based on the genre alone. The state of isekai is strong, and I'm excited to see where it goes from here.