what’s the etiquette? where do i start? there are so many niches and such that i’m not sure.
i have watched some anime, but mostly things like dragon ball. i am looking to get more involved with the community to help discover anime and get more into the trends, etc.
i don’t know what “isekai trash” means lmao
Subgenre of fantasy, where the protag goes to another world. Extremely popular, and extremely diverse, so this leads to a lot of less-than-inspired authors writing isekai. It’s really fun, though, at least in my opinion. [Disclaimer: I watch a lot of isekai.]
The Log Horizon series I recommended is IMO really good; a bunch of players of a game are trapped inside the game they were playing, and trying to come back to Earth. Other popular isekai series are:
It’s a single person reincarnated into the game. As the undead that used to be his player. It’s a mix of kingdom building and slowly watching someone’s morals fading away, as the habit makes the monk
Also “kingdom building” like the above, but there’s no game. Just some guy reincarnated as a slime. Mostly uplifting
The protagonist got reincarnated as the villainess of a game series she loved, and is trying to avoid the bad ending. Except she isn’t very smart.
The protag goes buy food late night, and suddenly another world, and he doesn’t know why. He has a weird “gimmick” though, he can return from death. The traumas pile up.
Slapstick comedy. Protag kicks the bucket, and as he’s getting reincarnated the goddess can’t stop mocking him. He forces her to go to the other world with him. They build a dysfunctional adventurer party: he’s mediocre, she’s dumb, and they got a masochist and a mage who only knows a single wide-area spell in the party. [Note: not recommended as an introductory series for isekai, given it relies a lot on poking fun at common tropes of the subgenre.]
Protag is a bookworm, dies crushed by books, and reincarnates in a world where books are extremely expensive and she’s dirty poor and has poor health, but she’s still obsessed with books at the expense of everything else.
Protag dies as a shut-in, and gets abandoned when reincarnated as a baby. A ghost, a skeleton and a mummy raise him. Solid adventure, and rather good worldbuilding.
some of those sounds so fun!! thank you for the info!
ive watched the first season of re:zero, and a few episodes in the 2nd, but am having a hard time continuing because it all seems so… neverending. its really really good, and i love the characters, but to have the story be replayed, or issues resurface, so many times is draining!
i think another issue i didn’t know i would have is the titles! for example:
is
the real title?
Regarding titles, a lot of anime end up with really long official titles because they originate from a Japanese web-novel site where due to the design of the site people have to distinguish their works by the title alone.
I love Kono Subarashii Sekai ni Shukufuku o! but that’s a bit of a mouthful so I (along with everyone else) just call it KonoSuba.
Incidentally, this is probably related to the reason SailorFuzz suggested avoiding anime with long titles. Anime that originated from that site on average have more amateurish writing since it’s a site for self-publishing. I wouldn’t go so far as to discount everything there though; there have certainly been some good stories that originated from that site. In addition to KonoSuba I also really liked The Apothecary Diaries, Log Horizon, and Re:Zero for example. There are also plenty of great anime with longer titles that don’t originate from that site, such as Kaguya-sama: Love is War or Legend of the Galactic Heroes.
oo i didnt know that! so its people who write and draw their own web novels, and then sometimes they get picked up by a studio and made in to anime? thats actually really cool!
Many anime viewers (understandably) complain about the results, but it’s certainly nice that amateur writers have a place to publish and read each others’ works. The normal pipeline there is that something will start as a web novel, and then if it’s really successful it’ll get picked up by a publisher like Kodansha to be sold as a light novel and then if that’s successful it’ll eventually get animated. There will often also be a manga adaptation. I’m not certain how different the web novel and light novel usually are; my impression is not very! There is some editing that goes in though, and the light novels also have a bunch of included illustrations. This is both a good thing and a bad one. The web novel will usually have no art at all, just text. When those illustrations are made for the light novel adaptation, they’re locking in character designs that they’ll have to stick with later if those books ever get animated. But at the light novel stage it’s still relatively low-budget so the amount of talent and effort that goes into making those character designs usually (in my opinion) doesn’t measure up to the talent and effort that goes into making character designs for manga-original or anime-original stories. So in addition to a generic RPG fantasy world, you (often) end up with generic RPG fantasy character designs.
“Kono Subarashii Sekai ni Shukufuku o!” is the real title. “KonoSuba” is a really common fan nickname. I’ll reformat the list to be a bit clearer.
About Re:Zero, the story being replayed is part of its gimmick. Like trial and error. Other series aren’t so “repetitive”.
i know like the whole point of re:zero is the replaying of time thing, but it gets draining i guess because ::: spoiler spoiler he has to die and its always so violent or traumatic, which of course, is also part of the point. :::
Yeah, it gets worse over time. Way worse. I love the series but I must admit it’s the sort of stuff I only watch if I’m really in the mood to do it. (Like Evangelion [inb4 not isekai]. Amazing series, one of the classics, but it weights a bit on your psyche.)
There’s stuff like Tondemo Skill de Isekai Hourou Meshi and Isekai Nonbiri Nouka to flush out the bad feelings. Those are mostly slice of life fluff: in one it’s a guy cooking for a giant wolf and a slime, in another it’s some guy farming and building a settlement in the middle of nowhere.
oh man im def checking out the farming one, that sounds perfect to just chill with!
Re:Zero is great but if you don’t want to watch the main character have a horrible time you probably are good to stop watching. It is definitely gonna keep happening more in the future.
thats good to know thank you! :)
“isekai” is “another world”.
The protagonist ends up leaving our world and is transported/reincarnated into another – usually JRPG-like medieval fantasy themed – early in the show. The stereotypical mechanism is that the protagonist gets run over by a truck… Usually they end up in some sort of power fantasy story taking advantage of either their knowledge/technology from our world or special skills they got via the reincarnation or whatever.
There’s, uh, a lot of them… of varying quality.
Some popular examples are Konosuba, Re-Zero, and Mushoku Tensei. Which shows qualify as trash is, of course, a matter of taste. 🙃️
i see! thank you :) i have heard from more than one person now that these are hit or miss, so i will have to be careful!
When they hit, they hit like a truck.
I’ll see myself out.
hehehe