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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9597835" data-attributes="member: 18">The problem with Isekais is that they unfortunately very strongly tend to lapse into one of three things (like, the vast majority of the time):1) Cheap wish-fulfilment generally.As a genre it's very easy for it to lapse into nostalgia and general "What if we could go back" stuff which is not interesting or meaningful or insightful or has anything to say of any relevance to anyone.2) Active power-fantasies of the lamest kind.This is very common in Western Isekai, like for example where it's like big-dick engineer guy goes back in time and uses his big-dick engineer skills and skeptical attitudes to solve all the problems of a younger world (or just remembers how to make gunpowder), and only evil fanatics oppose him. In anime it's more often "I became a videogame character and now I'm super-powerful and just owning everyone in the game and it's not even really a challenge", which is not, like, very interesting or fun or cool. Especially when it gets very literal with level-ups and so on.3) Really problematic power-age imbalance romances (or worse, sometimes much, much worse - I'm looking at you several anime series, but Jobless Reincarnation particularly made me think "Hmmm the police probably need to raid this guy's house and have a real good look at his hard drives!"! Get your head on straight Japan!)They don't have to be any of those. You can absolutely do time-travel or time loop shows which don't do that, or where it's getting severely complicated by other factors. You can do man-out-of-time/fish-out-of-water stuff where the person/people transported aren't just straightforwardly at an advantage (for example, in the early '90s there was a book series about a guy being transported to the Celtic Otherworld, and frankly, it was a nightmare for him, and the last book hilariously ends with him back on Earth going to a Christian church and praying fervently and trying to forget any of it happened, even though he knows the Celtic Otherworld and its gods and so on are real).</blockquote>

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