this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2023
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To be fair, the main appeal of isekai is a person from our world having to adjust to suddenly living in a fantasy world, and applying their knowledge from our world to the fantasy world in some way, which is completely lost if you just make it a straight fantasy. I do agree that there are way too many isekais, most of them copy/pastes of each other, and there are other ways of setting up a similar scenario that don't just use the default isekai setting. Kekkai Sensen for example is a good example of the 2 worlds merging trope which often allows for a lot of the same sort of story beats as isekai but going both ways and with a lot more flexibility.
In my experience this only lasts for the initial arc at best and then the protagonist becomes fully integrated in the world and is no different than someone already living there, with all subsequent arcs receiving no benefit from having someone from another world. The vast majority of isekai make no effort to integrate the protagonist's experience from another world into the plot and instead rush to sweep it under the rug.
There are of course exceptions to the rule but the vast majority of isekai I come across is as I described above.
Yeah 99% of isekais suck and don't use the genre to it's full potential in that regard, but that's what the general appeal of the genre is supposed to be to most people and why they might choose it over a standard fantasy. Most popular/highly rated isekais do usually utilize this aspect to a reasonable degree afaik.
This is something I have a real love/hate relationship with in Overlord. In the books, we get to see a lot more of what's going on in Momonga's head and how his experience as an average salary worker affects his decisions in his new role as an all powerful lich and the dichotomy of how he perceives himself vs how the people of the world perceive him, which is really cool and fleshes out him as a character and the world a lot more. But then people in the new world will casually throw video game terms into their speech like "putting levels into x class," and it really throws me out of the world.