Isekai Trash
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
I’ve been watching a lot of isekai anime lately, because I have had the ‘rona and been feeling like absolute garbage and lately whenever I start Starfield my machine powers down for unknown reasons. It doesn’t happen with any other games that I’ve found, just Starfield. I’m not thinking clearly enough to troubleshoot it, so I’ve just kind of back-burnered it for the moment so I can sit around watching the most generic anime possible.
I mean it’s not all isekai, a lot of it is actually tensei, but it’s the same basic concept except for the addition of going back to your childhood which I don’t think is a coincidence.
Really it’s all just varying amounts of childhood. We’re seeing a number of isekai with adults, lately; “Handyman Saitou” and “Middle-Aged Online Shopper” come to mind, and “Realist Hero” was a university student rather than a high schooler. I haven’t watched “Shield Hero” in quite some time, but I think he was also uni-level rather than high school. Typically an isekai protagonist is high school age, or is regressed to high school age in the world transfer, and the latest trend toward tensei or “reincarnation” storylines is just regressing further to infancy or early childhood.
The core desire in these stories appears to be going back and trying again. We don’t really get to do that, as a general rule. You enter a situation and you make your decisions and then time moves on and you get the results you get. Usually, we don’t make the best decisions — we can’t, since we aren’t able to see the future — and then we don’t get the best possible results. And that sticks with some people. They get stuck, thinking about what they did “wrong” and how they could do it right “next time.”
Of course, you rarely get a next time, and even if you do… you’re still unable to see the future. Existence, by nature, isn’t deterministic. So even if you make the decision that would have been “right” the last time, you don’t have any guarantee it will be right this time. We’re not good at handling that, as a species.
We don’t like things to be very different. We want them to be the same. But it’s little differences that make the difference. You write a book about a vampire creeping on a high school girl, nobody is interested. You make the vampire go to high school himself, and everybody goes wild for it. You recognise that while an adult reader is going to go “why the fuck would anyone want to go to high school forever,” a high schooler is not going to question it because high school is just what you do. If you are a high schooler you go to high school. If you’re made into a vampire at high school age, you just go to high school forever, that’s how it works.
It doesn’t make any sense, but what the fuck does at that age?
I think a lot of people get into their mid to late thirties and realise they were supposed to do something in their career, but they didn’t do it because they didn’t know what it was. So they wish they could go back and try again.
And a lot of people in their first job realise they were supposed to do something in university, but they didn’t do it because they didn’t know what it was. People in university realise they were supposed to do something in high school. People in high school realise they were supposed to do something in middle school. They should have done something in grade school. Something as a child. Something as an infant.
I think a lot of us are not where we want to be, and we really want to go back to where we went wrong and like… not fuck it up.
But there is no one place we went wrong. There is no one place we fucked up. We didn’t make one wrong turn, we made dozens of them. Hundreds. Thousands. And backing up to where we made the first one won’t magically stop us from making the rest of them.
The second major element of an isekai or tensei storyline is often just glossed over. You don’t just back up to where you were, so you can make the right turns now. You also get some sort of amazing, incredible power that makes everything easy for you. You just get it handed to you.
In show after show after show, the reincarnated protagonist is born to a wealthy noble family that provides him with a life of absurd luxury. The summoned isekai protagonist frequently arrives in a royal court and is hailed as the hero of legend. Even when he doesn’t, he rapidly discovers he’s immensely overpowered — usually with magical powers far beyond the norm, sometimes of a variety nobody else has seen in this world.
It’s very much in the vein of “and as long as I’m dreaming, I’d like a pony.” Deep down, we know that going back won’t fix the problems, so what if… what if we went back, and we had our youth, and we were rich and had privilege and were handed every advantage and then on top of that we had magic?!
It’s a much more satisfying fantasy than… what if we tried again.
No special powers. No special privileges. Just right here, right now, with the things we already have. What if we tried again?
We mostly don’t do that, because why would we? It didn’t work last time. Why would it work this time? Why should we pick up our old dreams and dust them off and see if maybe, just maybe, we could make a go of them after all?
Much easier to make excuses. It’s too late. We’re too old. We tried that before.
But what if?