Summary
The isekai trope is one anime fans see every single season nowadays. With just how saturated the trope has become in anime, manga, and especially light novels, many try their darndest to avoid engaging with any isekai at all, but over the past three decades, there have been anime and manga titles that turn the whole trope on its head.
Here are some of the most interesting isekai that have completely subverted the basic premise of isekai, or made use of it in interesting ways.
In Case You Don’t Know What “Isekai” Is
When Characters Get Sent to Alternate Worlds
The basic idea of isekai is that a main character is sent to an alternate world, usually one with heavy fantasy themes, for whatever reason. It can be a spontaneous spiriting away; a situation where they are reincarnated into this alternate world; or even one where they are trappedwithin the bounds of a book or video game. The term “isekai”, written 異世界, is a Japanese word meaning “another world”, combining a character that means “odd” or “different” with “sekai', meaning “world”. The trope is found in all kinds of media in various spatio-temporal contexts, but if we’re talking about the origins of the trope in Japan, the story of Urashima Tarō is an important folktale that can be traced as far back as the 8th century. The modern isekai title has become associated specifically with many other tropes due to the vast majority of isekai stories being set in a magical fantasy, countless characters have wound up in some version of a magical medieval Europe.
This European context adds another layer of separation, and often the protagonist of an isekai is a modern-day Japanese person who imparts their knowledge in fields like science and medicine, and after a bout of homesickness, a fragment of the Japan they left behind often serves as comfort to them. It’s also common for protagonists to be fully aware that they’ve been “isekai’d”, having engaged with the context at some point through entertainment media. Magic and magic systems are a mainstay when it comes to isekai, whether the story in question is battle-focused or not. As the trope has become more saturated, isekai has adopteda feeling of “self-awareness"and a level of self-deprecation due to the oft-derivative nature of many of its stories. As an easily entertaining literary device, isekai is often the direction chosen by new authors and can be adopted by writers of any skill level in interesting ways.
The Joys of Subversion
In general, classic isekai titles ironically have more depth than isekai that arose in the early 2000s and 2010s. Something likeThe Vision of Escaflowne (1996), hailed as one of the best TV anime of the 1990s, presented the trope at its simplest. It follows a high school girl named Hitomi, who is transported to Planet Gaea when a boy named Van appears at her high school athletics track engaged in battle against a dragon. Van is the King of Fanelia, and together with a Knight from Asturia called Allen, he pilots the mystical mech known as Escaflowne; while Hitomi gains the power of clairvoyance, becoming the key to awakeningEscaflowneand saving Gaea.The basic formula of isekairecently generally features overpowered protagonists, and the trope eventually started to spawn variants, such as characters being reincarnated as insignificant characters or even villains; or situations where the elements of a fantasy world are transported to our own, a phenomenon dubbed “reverse-isekai”.
At some point, isekai fantasies set in magical realms converged heavily with the kind featuring characters who are trapped in a video game, with many fantasies adopting RPG mechanics with which the MC, usually a shut-in nerd or something to that effect, can quickly grasp the power system and developments in the central world. These variations on the isekai concept could at their best be called subversions, but at their least-inspired, they were only superficial alterations to the basic premise, not to mention the fact that this shift towards the trope’s subversion was based largely in parody due to the emphasis on comedy that arose followingthe immense success ofKonoSuba (2016).
SomeIsekai Subversions and Shows That Use the Trope in Unexpected Ways
Many of Them Are From the 2010s
An example of brilliant isekai subversion can be seen inThe Executioner and Her Way of Life (2022), which lures the viewer in with the promise of following yet another anybody’s journey to a magical world where he’d gain an incredible power, but catches the viewer off-guard when the priestess who discovered him murders him because this world has experienced an apocalyptic event caused by the overwhelming abilities of Otherworlders. Her role is to eliminate Otherworlders with powerful abilities who are usually summoned for nefarious reasons. In 2016, theJapanese webnovel site Shousetsuka ni Narouput a restriction on new isekai titles being submitted to the site because of how oversaturated the trope became on the website. However, the 2010s also saw the emergence of many major isekai titles with truly trope-breaking plot lines.
Log Horizon (2010) – Trapped? Not If We Just Live Here
An interesting variation of the trapped in a video game variant of isekai story is seen inLog Horizon(2010). The story is set in an MMORPG called Elder Tale, which, in its twelfth expansion pack, saw 30 000 players on the Japanese server who had previously logged out, suddenly logged back in and unable to leave. Unlike most isekai of the same kind, the players weren’t necessarilyoverly concerned with “clearing the game"or finding a way out, but how to adapt to life in the bounds of a game.
The Devil is a Part-Timer (2013) – Just Put The Fries in the Bag, Satan
At some point in history, perhaps the funniest isekai with the most promising premise was a story about the Demon Lord Satan retreating from total defeat in the realm of Ente Isla, at the hands of the chosen hero. He and his most loyal servant, Alsiel, wind up in modern-day Japan stripped of their magic, leading to Satan finding work at McRonalds with the goal of climbing to thepeak of the corporate ladder– and taking over this world, one serving of fries at a time. The reverse-isekai perspective, combined with truly hilarious comedy backed by a gripping story.
KonoSuba: God’s Blessing On This Wonderful World (2016) – Genre-Bending Comedy
A title that may have fundamentally changed the trajectory of isekai, making the trope one that is now very attached to the idea of making fun of itself. This self-parody is not always done as well asKonoSubahas, because many isekai titles that attempt this parody make it all that they are, rather than a springboard for the story and characters to shine. WhatKonoSubarules over is the very idea of expectation subversion, withbrilliant comedic timing and lovable characters. Many titles have tried to emulateKonoSubato disastrous results.
Re:CREATORS (2017) – Unique Reverse-Isekai About the Act of Creating
Re:CREATORSmight be one of the most interesting interpretations of isekai, featuring a reverse-isekai premise in which the main characters from the works of various authors arrive in the real world. When the created learn that their lives are just creations for the sake of entertainment, some of them take it upon themselves to end the suffering in their worlds of origin by killing the author, or the “god”, who created them. The concept is unique and brings together various themes, most importantly the relationship between artists and their creations, as a means to explore the age-old question: “if God is real, why do we suffer?”
Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation (2021) –
Mushoku Tensei’sprotagonist, Rudeus Greyrat, is rather divisive given the kind of person he was in his previous life, and still continues to be in his current incarnation. He combines the usual overpowered protagonist trope with depth of character development and a good level of mystery when it comes to the mechanics behind his reincarnation into this world of fantasy and magic. Its character and dialogue-driven approach allows for focus on the mundane, but it’s also the vibrance of the central world that makesMushoku Tenseia brilliant fantasy even before it is an isekai. There are definitely a lot more variations of isekai that have themselves spawned subversions, like how chosen heroes can be contrasted by blatant villains as seen in the “reincarnated as a villainness” sub-trope that has come up, especially in the shо̄jo demographic and very popularly withSaga of Tanya the Evil.
The amazingRe:Zerogave its main character a power that only works if he experiences the fear and pain of death, whileGrimgar of Fantasy and Ash (2016)built up to revealing that its premise was actually that of an isekai as characters would retain habits from their past lives in a modern world; while Drifters (2016) took a number of historical figures from different eras and threw them into the same fantasy world. The trope deserves the scrutiny that it gets from anime fans, but at the same time, there are so many isekai that aren’t just harems around an overpowered protagonist set in some kind of medieval European fantasy world (those can be fun too sometimes). With this many possibilities, isekai can spawn some truly amazing stories.
