What are your thoughts on the fantasy isekai genre nowadays?

[proxybaba]

the plot lost its originality
mass-produced genre, nowadays I run away after seeing the tag unless someone highly recommends me for its uniqueness

 

[gaylolis]

i enjoy the promise of people going to explore other worlds.

but the majority of them didn't quite give me what i want, so end up either writing them or went on to search hidden gems instead.

 

[OP1000]

I had an idea where I was planning on working on a novel about a scientist way ahead of his time meeting an isekai person and creating an internet cafe mainly because he was given an idea on how it works. There's also a priest running a broken down church and because of how 'Isekai' protagonist tend to shit on religion and gods, it ended up ruining the lives of priest and nun who only follows their gods and their lives are being hated by people around them and the MC had to try his best to believe that their religion still has hope even when the world was against them and being abandoned by their god.

The ideas for the stories that you mentioned are definitely interesting and could really become

The Alice books from Lewis Carroll and the Oz books from L. Frank Baum are two well-known ones.

There is more than one book that involves Alice?

From what I have been able to observe while reading online, fantasy stories(original works) with a protagonist that has been isekai'd have really dominated the other types of stories out there. The same is true for the fanfics that I have been able to read so far. But as long as the story can entertain me and the plot maintains the interesting aspects that attracted me to it, I do not mind reading such types of stories.

 

[Fox-Trot-9]

There is more than one book that involves Alice?

Yeah. Lewis Carroll wrote 2 Alice books, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. There's even been other Alice books from other authors, like A New Alice in the Old Wonderland from Anna M. Richards, among others.

 

[Disenjoyment]

Has potential, but copy and paste makes more money than new ideas nowadays

 

[Paul_Tromba]

Has potential, but copy and paste makes more money than new ideas nowadays

Really living up to your username there. It's sad, but the truth.

 

[Notadate]

The lime has been mostly squeezed from all its juice, now you only got the pulpy parts. Only a few people think of using the zest.

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- Isekai where the MC knows nothing about the world.
- Isekai where the MC had past exposure of the world.

Regardless the first kind determines the starting conditions of the MC. The cheat that the MC gets is responsible for carrying the MC through the entire story, so its important that the 'cheat' itself is an interesting and unique one and doesn't rely on cliches.

The second kind has nothing to do with 'cheat'. So if the story feels cliche and repetitive, it probably is. Period.

In the first place, isekai itself never has anything to do with the plot. It just a starting point, doesn't determine how exciting the road will be.

Mc who is nonexistent and you are just watching through the rhythms and poetic songs of the wind. Seeing the very world existence, because YOU are the mc, and the wind is just a median for you to see the world.

 

[Missivist]

It's starting to feel repetitive as I read more and more novels about it

You might as well say that "adventure stories" are a stale genre. There is a theory of literature that all good adventure stories are essentially the same – "the hero with a thousand faces". It is all about taking some ordinary person to a fantasy land where they hero up, before (usually) going home again. That idea seems to fit everything from Gilgamesh to Star Wars to isekai stories. The trick is just to write it well enough, with enough new-and-improved characters and plot points, that it is interesting and entertaining one more time. Does it matter how the hero gets there, or gets back? Isekai is just a way to do that.

Of course, the isekai approach is not exactly a recent invention, either! I remember reading "A Princess of Mars", written in 1911 by Edgar Rice Burroughs, to be serialized by a magazine. Yes, that is 112 years ago, but I would say that it could be placed in the isekai genre of serialized fiction. Whatever you want to call it, the idea is to place your modern-world human protagonist in a magical world that mixes inhuman sword-fighters with beautiful human princesses. It is easier for the writer to work with a modern human character, and easier for readers to identify with the protagonist. Of course that has been used for a century or more. It just works too well! Don't expect it to go away soon.

On the other hand, the isekai genre suffers from tropes, cliché, and copypasta that get recycled by authors who rely too much on an easy template for writing, and fail to make it original. Please let truck-kun retire, skip the goddess's white room, ditch the summoning circle, and don't mix isekai with litRPG every time. It is much to late to rely on all those once-useful elements, even if you try to subvert them. That gets repetitive. What about a world with swords but no magic? Or magic but no swords – i don't know how that would work, but it would have to be original! What if someone just finds a "door into another world", or some such? Isekai-lite, but repeated less often. Or a magic book. Fairy rings, anybody?

 

[CarburetorThompson]

There are two types of isekai. Ones where you can skip the first two chapters and it’s just a generic fantasy story, and trash. Oops looks like there’s only one type of isekai.

 

[YatagarasuStudios]

There are isekai that lend itself to being isekai - such as those where it shows one's development compared to their prior life, where their prior life is actually taken into account, even late or in the middle of the full story.

There's also those that connect to the old life via minute details but can, for the most part, function as standard fantasy. Honestly my favourite isekai Knight's & Magic falls under this to a certain extent, and if you take away all the isekai elements, it's still a pretty enjoyable read and watch.