Are the majority of Isekai Settings all Fantasy Settings?

[CarlManvers2019]

This may or may not be right

But I tend to notice the majority of Isekai series I’ve read or know of, aren’t in settings other than Fantasy and usually they’re just pastiches or copies of this Dragon Quest stuff

An obsession with MC’s simply being referred to as “The Hero” and “Demon Lord”

Is there anything in particular that attracts them to these settings other than being simply cliche?

 

[Pocky Balboa]

Is there anything in particular that attracts them to these settings other than being simply cliche?

Why does Western fantasy go with the cliche Tolkien/DnD-esque settings? Because that's the most widespread and familiar of the fantasy settings and it makes it easier to reach a wider audience. Same with Dragon Quest-esque settings. It's the most widespread and familiar fantasy setting in Japan, thus it's easier to grab a wide audience.

 

[CarlManvers2019]

Why does Western fantasy go with the cliche Tolkien/DnD-esque settings? Because that's the most widespread and familiar of the fantasy settings and it makes it easier to reach a wider audience. Same with Dragon Quest-esque settings. It's the most widespread and familiar fantasy setting in Japan, thus it's easier to grab a wide audience.

Honestly it’s kinda because I’m used to fantasy wherein MCs go by different titles than simply “Hero” and the antagonists aren’t just straight up “Demon Lords” these days

I mean Elder Scrolls V Skyrim had a dragon god for the main antagonist and as noted for Elder Scrolls, the Daedra are neither good or evil or always invaders

I sorta am more into Dark Fantasy sort of stuff mixed with Sword & Sorcery and Lovecraftian Horror these days or settings like Elder Scrolls

 

[ATP]

This may or may not be right

But I tend to notice the majority of Isekai series I’ve read or know of, aren’t in settings other than Fantasy and usually they’re just pastiches or copies of this Dragon Quest stuff

An obsession with MC’s simply being referred to as “The Hero” and “Demon Lord”

Is there anything in particular that attracts them to these settings other than being simply cliche?

Maybe it is for japaneese boys,who secretly always wonted harem of cute elves.Even if such boys are 40 years old and work in rich company.

 

[prinCZess]

As I understand, a large part of it is Japanese fantasy being spun-off from a very limited degree of works that were translated (Tolkien and Dungeons & Dragons the big names among those) and, as mentioned, the pervasive desire to have more generic lead-figures for a salaryman to fantasize himself as being rather than lead-figures who were characters in their own right (though it does happen, the isekai genre in general encourages the former).

The 'generic fantasy world' trope does help, though, in just...being generic. Various kingdoms and such make for easy political stories, generally a central religion or two that maybe compete can inspire conflict, and then the racial differences and distinctions...Western fantasy sees the same thing with Medieval Europe being the dominant model for the appearance of settings and straying off that can make people confused or see a 'need' to justify or explain it in the story where just having Medieval Europe but with [dragons, mages, magic, etc] tends to be accepted without much complaint.

 

[LifeisTiresome]

@CarlManvers2019

Nearly all fantasy uses the generic fantasy world template whether said template is Dragon Quest or Medieval Tolkien. Its still the generic fantasy world template. Hell, MGE uses said template too.

 

[CarlManvers2019]

@CarlManvers2019

Nearly all fantasy uses the generic fantasy world template whether said template is Dragon Quest or Medieval Tolkien. Its still the generic fantasy world template. Hell, MGE uses said template too.

I sort of appreciate when it mixes though

Like when you travel from the European Town in Diablo III to a place that’s Arabian-lite and it’s noted that the characters come from various lands including a Japan expy and a Deep African Jungle expy

 

[LifeisTiresome]

I sort of appreciate when it mixes though

Like when you travel from the European Town in Diablo III to a place that’s Arabian-lite and it’s noted that the characters come from various lands including a Japan expy and a Deep African Jungle expy

Sure. I don't disagree with you but fundamentally, most of fantasy does the generic fantasy setting. Bersek does it too. Midland is Medieval Europe that you have seen 1000 times.

 

[Marduk]

a) Its easy to imagine how some average salaryman or other such "could be me" factor main character could turn out to have knowledge and skills that could be of great value and importance in a pre-industrial world.
OTOH in a world of common spaceships, power armor and replicators, its not easy to write this kind of story.
b) As mentioned, the idea of generic fantasy world is a thing, and not just in manga/anime, most of the audience will get most of the references, so will most of the writing and animation staff, and the legal department will not lose much sleep either. With sci-fi, you have to license or make your own, and unless you license one of the popular (and proportionally expensive) ones, you will have to explain everything to everyone from scratch. Hell, a lot of people have issues with understanding the cutting edge technology of today, so coming up with sci-fi that makes any sense and writing stories in that setting that stick to the fictional technology meant to be even more complex than modern one is an additional challenge that few will appreciate.

 

[Pocky Balboa]

I sort of appreciate when it mixes though

Like when you travel from the European Town in Diablo III to a place that’s Arabian-lite and it’s noted that the characters come from various lands including a Japan expy and a Deep African Jungle expy

Those are also overused tropes in the Dragon Quest-expies.

 

[Captain X]

Probably most of them are this way because there were some early examples which were based on games or at least game tropes that turned out to be pretty popular, and it turned into a trend thanks to everyone else trying to cash in on what's popular, just like the Evangelion and Gundam clones before them. One example I know of but haven't watched for myself yet which breaks this stereotype, though, is Saga of Tanya the Evil, in which a Japanese salaryman is reincarnated as a German loli in a WWI-like setting, essentially as punishment and a challenge by God. Or at least that's the description a friend of mine gave to me after he watched it.

 

[Typhonis]

John Carter of Mars is an Isekai setting. He is magically transported to another world where after a lot of adventures...he becomes Warlord of Mars and even marries the beautiful princess. Whom is a badass in her own right.

 

[Bear Ribs]

Western Planetary Romance (Aka Isekai before the Japanese term became popular) were more often a sci-fi setting than fantasy. Buck Rogers in the 24th century f'rex, where Rogers was put into suspended animation by a mysterious gas in a cave in and woke up five centuries later. Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd century is a bit of a pastiche where Holmes' body is enbalmed in honey and future science is able to revive him, with his sidekick an android that's memorized everything Watson ever said and programmed itself to have the same attitude. Gordon R. Dickson's short Story "Danger, Human" has the MC abducted by aliens, as do the execrable Gor novels. Actually a lot of the sci-fi Isekai start with alien abductions.

One thing we're running into is that with the breakdown of traditional publishing houses to act as gatekeepers, anybody can publish their own webnovel and get enough recognition to be published. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, mind. If you read and clicked like on "In another world with my cheat power" all the search engines will promptly feed you "I died but now my cheat power got me a harem" and "I went to another world and now I'm the demon lord?" These two factors together have caused literature to become more "faddish." The search engine boost means whenever a really popular original story comes along, all the inevitable copycats get boosted by the search algorithm applying the same tag to them. The lack of publisher control means that everybody who got boosted can get published. This tends to lead to the same fad idea suddenly blossoming all across the world at once and then dying out once people get sick of it and a new idea blossoms everywhere at once.

The same effect also tends to magnify stories with the exact same premise because the search engines tend to run off of tags, so a story that has 100% of the tags of the very popular "In another world with my cheat power" will get to the top of the similar stories list where as "Aliens Kidnapped Me and Now I'm a Mercenary Commander" will only share maybe a quarter of the tags, not get the same popularity boost, and be lost down in page 4.

 

[Pocky Balboa]

John Carter of Mars is an Isekai setting. He is magically transported to another world where after a lot of adventures...he becomes Warlord of Mars and even marries the beautiful princess. Whom is a badass in her own right.

Western Planetary Romance (Aka Isekai before the Japanese term became popular) were more often a sci-fi setting than fantasy. Buck Rogers in the 24th century f'rex, where Rogers was put into suspended animation by a mysterious gas in a cave in and woke up five centuries later. Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd century is a bit of a pastiche where Holmes' body is enbalmed in honey and future science is able to revive him, with his sidekick an android that's memorized everything Watson ever said and programmed itself to have the same attitude. Gordon R. Dickson's short Story "Danger, Human" has the MC abducted by aliens, as do the execrable Gor novels. Actually a lot of the sci-fi Isekai start with alien abductions.

One thing we're running into is that with the breakdown of traditional publishing houses to act as gatekeepers, anybody can publish their own webnovel and get enough recognition to be published. I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, mind. If you read and clicked like on "In another world with my cheat power" all the search engines will promptly feed you "I died but now my cheat power got me a harem" and "I went to another world and now I'm the demon lord?" These two factors together have caused literature to become more "faddish." The search engine boost means whenever a really popular original story comes along, all the inevitable copycats get boosted by the search algorithm applying the same tag to them. The lack of publisher control means that everybody who got boosted can get published. This tends to lead to the same fad idea suddenly blossoming all across the world at once and then dying out once people get sick of it and a new idea blossoms everywhere at once.

The same effect also tends to magnify stories with the exact same premise because the search engines tend to run off of tags, so a story that has 100% of the tags of the very popular "In another world with my cheat power" will get to the top of the similar stories list where as "Aliens Kidnapped Me and Now I'm a Mercenary Commander" will only share maybe a quarter of the tags, not get the same popularity boost, and be lost down in page 4.

And thus, further shows all of that nonsense spread by sources like Mother's Basement that Japanese isekai started out as a female dominated genre to be complete and utter lies. I mean, even if you ignore Dunbine and Wataru like these SJW dickheads do, you've got shit like Panzer World Galient pulling planetary romance shit by magically transporting dudes to another planet.

 

[Bear Ribs]

And thus, further shows all of that nonsense spread by sources like Mother's Basement that Japanese isekai started out as a female dominated genre to be complete and utter lies. I mean, even if you ignore Dunbine and Wataru like these SJW dickheads do, you've got shit like Panzer World Galient pulling planetary romance shit by magically transporting dudes to another planet.

Ha, yeah even that story's pretty recent as Isekai goes though. The oldest Japanese Isekai I'm aware of is Urashima Tarō and it dates to the 8th century at the latest. The anime version was made in 1918.

 

[Captain X]

I suppose the reason he made that argument is that The Vision of Escaflowne has been made an isekai in retrospect. Not a bad show, actually.

 

[Agent Mulder]

John Carter of Mars is an Isekai setting. He is magically transported to another world where after a lot of adventures...he becomes Warlord of Mars and even marries the beautiful princess. Whom is a badass in her own right.

John Carter really doesn't fit the archetype of the isekai protagonist though. For one, he isn't exactly your average hikikomori physically, and on top of that he's an immortal being of dubious humanity. He comes off as more of a herculean demigod rather than the average in every respect isekai protagonist that allows for audience projection. I at the very least think the project-able protagonist is a pretty important feature for something to be called an isekai. Otherwise farscape is an isekai.

 

[S'task]

And thus, further shows all of that nonsense spread by sources like Mother's Basement that Japanese isekai started out as a female dominated genre to be complete and utter lies. I mean, even if you ignore Dunbine and Wataru like these SJW dickheads do, you've got shit like Panzer World Galient pulling planetary romance shit by magically transporting dudes to another planet.

Err... it's not entirely incorrect though? The examples given that you quoted are all American works, and the modern genre conventions in many respects trace back to an American source of "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court"; and in many respects you can trace the core concept of "person displaced from their normal world" back even farther in American literature with Rip Van Winkle. However, within anime most of the story beats you'd consider to be part of Isekai were much more common in Shojo or female led series in the 80s and 90s than they ever were in male oriented anime and manga and some of the biggest named isekai series from before the 2010s were all female lead and female oriented stories. Others have already mentioned Escaflowne, but it was hardly unique, you also had The Twelve Kingdoms (which also laid the groundwork for the typical Light Novel > Anime adaption path that many Isekai follow), and going back further you have Magic Knight Rayearth, and of course for popularity you also can look at Inuyasha which while not EXACTLY the same as Isekai, is REALLY DAMN CLOSE (the main difference being the main protagonist can return if they want to rather than being trapped).

That said, there were older isekai style shows that had male leads and were more male oriented, so to say it was entirely female dominated is... not entirely incorrect but also ignores quite a few series.

 

[Pocky Balboa]

However, within anime most of the story beats you'd consider to be part of Isekai were much more common in Shojo or female led series in the 80s and 90s than they ever were in male oriented anime and manga and some of the biggest named isekai series from before the 2010s were all female lead and female oriented stories.

And that's just plain wrong. There were just as plenty of male and shounen/seinen isekai in the 1980s and 90s. Hell I can even name light novels from the 80s. For example, the first Japanese work (not just light novel, predating anime and manga) that would set the tropes of Japanese isekai was "Isekai no Yūshi" by Takachiho Haruka, published in 1979 (I mean, it is literally the ur-"Japanese high school student gets summoned to save the otherworld" novel). The first of the Rean no Tsubasa light novels began in 1983, 5 years before the more well-known animated AU of the Byston Well series, Aura Battler Dunbine, came out. Then you've got Ijigen Kishi Kazuma by Shizuka Oryoji and Yoshikazu Yasuhiko published in 1988 for interdimensional summoning isekai. And these are sword and sorcery stories and shounen/seinen types, not shoujo or what not. And there were more in the 90s too.

And then you've got the kid hero isekai subgenre started by Mashin Hero Wataru, which spawned a whole mess of forgettable copycats back in the 80s and 90s to the point where we had a deconstruction of the kid hero isekai with Now and Then, Here and There. They're not as well known as the shoujo isekai because they never came over at the same time. I mean, take NG Knight Ramune, for example, probably one of the better known of the Wataru clones. I only heard about it back in the 90s because of this one dedicated dude and his Geocities site on the entire Ramune series.

It's absolutely bullshit that there are people that will count those old-school magical girl series where the the MG comes from a magical world to do episodic shit as reverse isekai, then claim that isekai featuring mecha (or if it's shounen fighting like Shurato) doesn't count just so they can claim shoujo and female-led stories was the origin and the main source of isekai. Nevermind the fact that there's a lot of media from the time period like light novels they don't even know about.

 

[Terthna]

Part of the problem is that the history of Japanese entertainment media is far more extensive that many from outside the country realize; even those who consider themselves fans. I mean seriously; have many people do you think have actually heard of Panzer World Galient, Aura Battler Dunbine, or Now and Then, Here and There, outside of Japan? Heck, not many Japanese people living in Japan have heard of them these days, let alone seen them. We're all just skimming the surface of a vast, deep ocean.