Inside Isekai

The isekai genre is about people that are transported to another world. This usually takes the form of going from the real world to a fantasy world with magic, or being inside a virtual reality game. The concept of isekai has been around for a very long time in fiction, like in The Wizard of Oz, but in anime industry isekai shows started to pop up in the 90s before becoming more popular in the 00s and progressing to very popular in the current decade. Record of Lodoss War, Magic Knight Rayearth, Now and Then, Here and There and Vision of Escaflowne are some of the earlier isekai that inspired the future trend. The genre evolved into .Hack//Sign, Abenobashi Magical Shopping Arcade, Digimon and Inuyasha. The modern era began with Sword Art Online and has had successes like Overlord, Log Horizon, No Game No Life, Konosuba and Re:Zero.

The 90s isekai were focused on the characters and how they dealt with their new surroundings. They were straightforward and there's not much to say about them. Not many people today bother watching the old isekai because they are the roots of the genre, meaning all the tropes have been seen already. The Seinfeld is unfunny concept applies to these shows. Now and Then, Here and There used the concept of isekai to tell a more serious story than all of the other shows at the time, but it was niche and didn't take off. The legacy of 90s isekai is the concept of being transported to another world and presenting an interesting new world.

.Hack//Sign kickstarted the trapped in a game style of isekai, which is influenced heavily by The Matrix. .Hack//Sign was a serious character driven show which didn't focus on the world, but on the main character who cannot log out. It's very dialogue heavy and progresses at a snail's pace, but the concept and the execution set the bar for trapped in a game. Abenobashi Magical Shopping Arcade opted for the Wizard of Oz style isekai where the real world is represented in various fantasy ways. Gainax's Abenobashi uses the different worlds for comedy and pop culture references instead of in a meaningful way like in .Hack. The absurdity was on par with Gainax's FLCL and explained just about as little. Digimon was similar to .Hack in that the characters are transported to a digital world, rather than an alternate fantasy reality. Its success was mainly due to the combination of the digital world and the monster aspect that Pokemon made popular. Inuyasha sticks to the fantasy world isekai, wherein a girl is transported to a magic feudal Japan. Inuyasha's success wasn't necessarily due to the genre, but because of the character interactions and humour that the creator, Rumiko Takahashi, had been wildly successful at in her previous shows, Urusei Yatsura, Ranma 1/2 and Maison Ikkoku. 00s isekai left the legacy of creativity with the underlying concepts of the show.

Sword Art Online, by far one of the most popular anime ever, kickstarted the rebirth of isekai on a large scale to the point that it's hard to find a season with at least one isekai show. It used the Matrix style of isekai with the trapped in a game idea that .Hack did. Unlike .Hack, Sword Art Online is plot focused, though it spends a lot of time introducing characters that immediately fall for the protagonist. Kirito, the protagonist, is very overpowered, for no explainable reason, which meant that Sword Art Online ended up as an escapist empowerment fantasy. As is the trend with the shows that followed Sword Art Online, most of them are empowerment fantasies of some kind. No Game No Life has the protagonists that cannot lose, Overlord has the protagonist as potentially the strongest entity in the universe and Youjo Senki has the protagonist in a position of military power. There are some that broke the mold: Konosuba features a bunch of useless rejects grouping up together, Log Horizon has believably scaled characters, and Re:Zero tries to do the opposite of empowerment fantasy by making the main character, who has an overpowered ability, an insufferable idiot that constantly does cringeworthy things and screws things up badly. The oversaturation of the isekai market has lead to many fans turning away from the genre in search of something else, but isekai has been around for long enough that it's not going anywhere. Modern isekai will leave the legacy of empowerment fantasy and pushing the boundaries.