Isekai tropes/stereotypes you hate the most?

[samiluu]

ugh I see, thanks for the info

[Berserker]

I hate how overpowered they get, or even begin. These are people from the modern world who probably don't even know how to hold a sword. But they are usually immediately magic prodigies.

I want to see them get trounced by a level 1 goblin before having to learn the basics of survival by the citizens of the world.

[Manyana]

harem. harem. harem. it ruins a good story.

[crimson_mystery_cake]

Honestly I miss the days of Inuyasha. I miss Magic Knight Rayearth and Fushigi Yuugi. It really feels like the fun mythical fantasy elements of isekai have just been completely killed off and it's just been replaced by something I personally like a lot less.

I mean, I don't want to bash the current isekai genre. Lots of people like the current isekai cliche of "oh no I got hit by a truck and am now in game world" or "oh no I've been somehow transported into a novel and I have to marry the duke!?!?????" but that stuff has just never been what I liked the genre for. I guess I'm just at that age where I fall into the category of "grumpy old man complaining about what the kids are into these days." lmao

[crimson_mystery_cake]

I detest when they want to make the world look like a medieval fantasy, but they don't go full on Fantasy and create stupid magical appliances or have most house have mysterious indoor plumbing that works. If you're going to go medieval, go fucking medieval.

I hear what you're saying, and honestly for the most part I agree. It would be SO METAL to see an isekai series actual take how things would actually be in a historic setting into account, buuuuut on the flipside I also totally understand why most isekai don't go into this route. It's supposed to be shameless wish fulfillment and having characters struggle with there not being modern appliances or having horsepoop litter the street as mothers bury their 16th dead baby wouldn't be exactly the cheery bright fun that most people are looking for with their fantasy these days.

Though on that note I have kind of wondered what would it be like if an isekai protagonist brought a modern day disease into an isekai world. Like say, just randomly off the top of my head, covid-19. There are obviously way more obvious choices than that but that disease is what's hot in the streets right now and I think it'd be interesting to see how a fantasy world would deal with the pandemic we are facing with right now.

[crimson_mystery_cake]

Also all this talk of harems has made me think what if someone like Ataru Moroboshi from Urusei Yatsura was sent to an isekai world, where his goal would be to actually get a harem but he's a jerk so all the women hate him except for one who is SUPER loyal to him but she blasts him with magic whenever he "cheats" so he tries everything in his power to get rid of her. That would be a fun twist to the genre.

[darthmongoose]

The lack of thought and worldbuilding that goes into the setting is one of my biggest beefs. To me, the setup of "A person from our world is in a strange other reality!" is the perfect excuse to go absolutely hog-wild with the world building because you can have characters explain literally everything to the protagonist who knows nothing at all about that world without it feeling clunky! You never need to have that issue where characters are like "AS YOU KNOW, we live in a constitutional monarchy ruled by the Mushroom King, who is the being with the most magic" to a character who lives in that kingdom and ought to know that.
The perfect opportunity to have a world with strange customs, strange gods, strange food, strange terrain with the chance to seamlessly explain all of it to the protagonist and what do they make? Oh, it's basically a less imaginative version of a generic JRPG or something. Like it's not even as inventive as the popular video games in the genre it's inspired by; Final Fantasy XIV has some pretty interesting world building in terms of technology, Aesthetic, religion, creatures and cultures, but isekai stories it's always like "there are elves, their culture is they live in forests, I guess.". Hell, Final Fantasy X practically WAS an Isekai and it used that to give the setting a really rich culture and history that made it truly feel like exploring another world.

Escaflowne has already been mentioned twice on this thread but I'll give it some more praise because oh my god, Escaflowne really did have such a wonderfully unique, alien feeling world. That's Isekai done right.

[Sethstiel]

I like isekai genre, I hate the stereotypes, almost everything about them.. especially harem & abuse as a joke...

What I miss is Kyo Kara Maoh

[ahogemon]

I like isekai genre, what I hate is that most of them referred to gaming, gaming, and gaming, the use of level, exp, skill point, unlocking ability, overpowered almost like a hacker, etc. Why? I got bored with them.

[DelythThomasArt]

Heck another good franchise of Isekai would be Digimon (watch season 3 Tamers that ones a doozy), with the concept of kids being sucked into a digital realm of monsters with different cultures, beliefs and tec.

[Llyrel]

All of what @Kelheor said!

Also:

• Reincarnated as the villainess… except that the villainess wasn’t that evil at all/it was the actual bad guys all along plotting against her and giving her a bad reputation/she was poisoned and THAT is why she was acting like an ass in the original story/whatever. It was fun and interesting the first time, but now it looks like pretty much every villainess story is like that. I want a villainess that is genuinely powerful and evil, with a real BAD reputation that is hard to change and characters who are actually scared of her, dammit what even IS the point of making it a "villainess" story, when you're just going to have a pretty cinnamon roll who did nothing wrong and who constantly gets treated like crap by everyone? Also... I have yet to get too far into any villainess story, so I'm not sure if this is taken care of at some point in these stories, but... I WANT TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS TO THE ACTUAL VILLAINESS, DAMMIT. WHY did the MC reincarnate into the villainess as an adult in the first place? Did the original villainess die? Did she and the character switch bodies? If so, is she now causing havoc on Earth? Is MC going to fight to get back their body? I want to knowwwww! D:

• Conveniently reincarnated BEFORE shit happens, protagonist knows exactly what’s in store for them. It feels so… lazy Would love to see the character being thrown into the new world during a story arc they’re NOT familiar with… or having to survive as a character who was never mentioned in the original game/novel and has absolutely no ties with the protagonists (I -think- there are some stories in which the MC becomes a side character, but they usually still get involved with the main protagonist/the villain and change the main plot, so yeah... always the same story). Being a side character/a part of a new story arc, they’d still have the advantage of knowing the world they just ended up in, BUT would still have to figure out how to survive on their own, which would make for a far more interesting story, IMO.

• Leveling up/gaming references/skill points/quests/stats: as much as I love videogames and especially RPG games… it’s SO DAMN BORING to have all of these numbers and quests being thrown at my face every two seconds, omg D: I can’t be bothered to remember which level my own Skyrim character is, who even CARES if the protagonist has 299 or 301 health points? D:

[BlairFujin]

Just really tired and can't wait for the "I'm an utter looser but one day I die and wake up in a very slight dragon quest reskin and now I have a harem, cause girls here can sense that I'm a protagonist" trend to end...

[Kuma]

Yeah, that's something nobody touches on. Imagine introducing smallpox or even something like the common cold to an Isekai. That would be awesome.

There is a relatively decent Isekai about a biochemist who reincarnates in another world and kickstarts a medical revolution.

[feuersichel]

That sounds interesting. What is the name of that story?

[FafasMcMelt]

isn't the point of isekai to be as garbage as humanly possible though?

[Kelheor]

Thankfully not all isekai was made in 2020-2021

[thecrystalrook]

Also, to be clear, it's not just simply, "they went somewhere that was foreign to them." By this logic, Dragonball would be Isekai (it's not). In the isekai genre, the characters typically gain new abilities by being in that world or some rules of the new world's physics are different from their own.

[TL_Nonoke]

This thread made me giggle because it's exactly the reason I ended up writing my own transmigration story because I was sick of Chinese female manhua characters who were assassins or doctors in their original world transmigrating just so that they could kickass and take revenge on the family of the body's original owner. I do apologize that there is a little reverse harem going on in my novel, but it's not the main focus of the story...

Thanks for the thread...totally made my day.

[jermajay]

Does that mean Harry Potter and Percy Jackson are technically isekai

[HGohwell]

Harry Potter and Percy Jackson are part of the Magic School genre (or at least Percy Jackson is borderline magic school and part straight up fantasy adventure) which while similar and overlapping in some (often equally annoying and haremy) tropes, isn't the same, and another genre that goes way further back than most people think. They key part of isekai is being transported to another world. While they're very different to the normal world, they're still part of our world in a sense. That'd be like considering time travel isekai, which is an discussion actually, but so far not accepted.