General Isekai Thread

I think a good thing to make an Isekai stand out is to have the protagonist be the sidekick to the other world's Chosen One. It could be more about the protagonist finding friendship in a new world rather than focusing on it being just a power fantasy.Buddy Comedy Isekai is something untapped.

Well there have been some like this but they usually do a "the Protagonist was the 'true' hero all along" spin. Having an Isekai were the Protagonist is just a support to the party could be comfy.

So long as it's not a case of "the hero has all the powers, but lets his harem try anyway because it's cute and he knows he can fix it all anyway".

Replace "the hero" with "Superman" and "his harem" with "his team", you have the Justice League movie.

Edited by dRoy on Aug 16th 2019 at 7:13:58 PM

Hey at least Cavill actually is handsome.

Calling harem protags cute, that’s a rather large overestimation.

Edited by slimcoder on Aug 16th 2019 at 3:16:44 AM

I mean, most anime characters are a basic level of cute unless they're specifically drawn to be unattractive.

I don’t know protags are generally so plain looking it’s not really cute, it’s just basic.

It’s like that Geoff guy from The Goldbergs, so plain & forgettable looking.

You can’t get aroused if there’s no heat.

Edited by slimcoder on Aug 16th 2019 at 3:24:37 AM

Anybody want to comment on my Medea Pideth Machina fanart that was made by anime maker app :3

• First version
• Second version

Pick your favorite. And yes, Medea is actually the evil goddess from Shieldbro and basically the goddess who create Malty :3

I'm all for stories where the main character isn't overpowered, but I never really enjoy it when authors insert the Hero into the story as a side character for some reason.

Maybe because it seems overdone? Or too meta?

I'm not sure exactly why I dislike it.

Maybe because it treats "Hero" as something different from "Protagonist"... or rather, because it tends to do that by slapping you in the face with the perfectly generic "this guy is meant to be the Dragon Quest Hero, therefore you already know what his deal is, what his powers are, and everything else"? It's the whole "game rules as substitute for actual worldbuilding" thing.

I'm reading three stories with The Hero as a side character to someone else's protagonist and I really like two out of three approaches. In Kumo the hero is the antagonist to Kumoko's villain protagonist and the story makes him look frustratingly, what, callow? He's had it so much easier than the characters we've gotten to know and so much less interesting that the natural assumption is that he'll be pigheaded and judgmental. Yet unsympathetic as he is he is still trying in ways they won't and is clearly morally in the right.

In Wild Last Boss the hero is the deuteragonist to the protagonist and is very thoughtful and determined to be a proper hero. While he's kind of a small fry his character shows a lot of potential. Him being a classic hero means he's willing to give everyone else a chance morally speaking and his outsider perspective on the culture of the world he's in shows how ridiculous and hypocritical the people can be.

Death Mage... Meh. Dude isn't even a second stringer yet. I can see where his character arc is going but I have no idea how it'll play out given how the author wanks the actual MC. The two haven't even really met yet. He really does just exist to make the MC look better.

So hero as side character can definitely work but A. you need to have a clear plan for the character and B. the plan can't be to just make the MC look better.

Edited by Arha on Aug 16th 2019 at 1:40:07 PM

Slow Prison Life: The secret society of noble villainesses band together. The otome game culture is rooted deep in this world, afflicting hundreds.

Damn, men in that world are shit.

At least there's an organization that helps all the betrayed girls, even if the head is a bit too enthusiastic.

The men are all shits, the women are all psychopaths.

I thought part of the issue was that they didn't have a solution to the problem.

Because he only found out about the problem literally the day before the most recent chapter. It's his job as The Hero to find that golden third solution everyone else has given up on, not the villain protagonist's. We already have a few hints of possible solutions, the most obvious of which would be Kumoko, the only healthy and friendly god, sacrificing herself or somehow forcing D to fix things, either of which would work in theory. Honestly, I don't expect the series to end with Kumoko still a god no matter what else happens, so sacrificing her divinity or replacing Wakaba Hiiro would accomplish that.

Writing my own Isekai is really making me.understand the mindset.a lot of authors go through,especially with sudden time skips in otome Isekai. My brain is telling me it would probably be better to slow down and explore more on the character's dynamic in regards to the setting instead of jumping from one situation to the next, but my hands can't think of anyway to extend the situation (like I'm intrinsically aware the reader won't care about my mc leaving.her childhood hope, cause we've only been in said home for a chapter, and none of the characters in it were explored due to not being relevant to the plot, but that's the exact reason sticking around in the place is pointless). In that sense stories like Tensei oujo and ascendance of a bookworm are pretty impressive for the way they maintain age progression.

Can Spirited Away be classified as an isekai movie?

In the classical sense, absolutely, but it has basically nothing to do with the genre called that.

I am just wondering to be considered an Isekai it has to be in a RPG mechanics like world with stats.

Well the thing about isekai is that different people have different ideas about what counts or not. Like a lot of people count trapped in a game series and things like SAO but personally I don't count SAO. So it's hard to say what defines an isekai beyond the fact that the main character is sent to another world and that it involves wish fulfillment (Though not always.).

Here's my idea of an Isekai.

"I Reincarnated into the World of Berserk and my Life Turned to Shit."

Being trapped in a shithole of a world...that's pretty much Wortenia Senki right there.

Except all of the shittiness is entirely due to humans rather than demonic Apostles and yes I'm aware that in Berserk all of the "demonic" stuff is really ultimately due to humans too, right up to the evil "god".

Though the protagonist's life doesn't exactly turn to shit so much as he gets unwillingly caught up in the cutthroat politics of that world solely because he's too capable of a leader.

Edited by M84 on Aug 22nd 2019 at 10:32:44 PM

And Now and Then, Here and There.

Wortenia Senki is honestly one of the most cynical isekai stories I've ever seen. It's a horrible setting filled with horrible people and a horrible systemic culture that enables said horrible people. It's bad enough that the protagonist is still considered an improvement even when he's pulling shit like creating a Child Soldier army.