I mean, yeah. The real world sucks. It’s basically one or two steps away from becoming the whack dystopian world in Ghost in the Shell, but without all the cool technology to match.
Have you lived in Japan? I want to die and be reincarnated as a slime too
For real though, isekai for me is like an instant pass nowadays. I don’t mind fantasy anime, but the “hurr durr I’m a highschool loser that died and woke up in an MMO world” has to be the most creatively bankrupt genre of modern anime/manga and I really don’t understand the appeal, especially when 90% of them are just variations of generic Dragon Quest tropes. You can make escapist fiction without having to resort to beating a dead horse that has been dead, buried and decomposed for at least a decade now.
And now that I think about it, do these isekai animes and mangas even sell that well to justify making so many of them? There’s no way Japanese audiences aren’t also getting sick of them to at least some extent despite how many of these still keep getting made.
He further criticized modern anime for incorporating game-like elements without logical in-universe explanations.
“Recent anime works will show things like a level-up gauge that appears when characters tap the air, even though there’s no in-setting reason for them to have a personal interface like that. I may just be getting old, but it really makes me wonder: ‘What is going on here?’ It just doesn’t work for me.“
I couldn’t agree more. It just goes to show how little thought and care is put into the setting and world building of these shows, there’s no craft behind most of these, they’re just following trends it feels like.
the appeal is that it’s the same predictable crap, over and over and over. people like that.
there are studies on this. people who prefer watching the same show over and over tend to be insecure, depression, and anxious types and their habit of never trying anything new reinforces this.
new and complex ideas are difficult and painful for most folks, so they avoid them.
yes
I mean have you seen the state of the world; currently it’s rampant with capitalism, explotation of women, degradation of LGBTQTIA+ rights, blatant nazism and extreemists, ecoterrorism and climate change denialism, shinkflation, etc
I mean it’s really hard to have hope with the top constantly kicking people down and everyone just trying not to drown just to live an above average life
unless you’re born with a silver spoon or got the right connections, things are looking mighty tough to say the least
“Recent anime works will show things like a level-up gauge that appears when characters tap the air, even though there’s no in-setting reason for them to have a personal interface like that. I may just be getting old, but it really makes me wonder: ‘What is going on here?’ It just doesn’t work for me.“
My idea on what’s going on here is, people find it impossible to imagine what is entirely alien to them. Fiction uses various tricks to bridge this gap for its audience; by describing familiar experiences in a fantastical context, it draws you into its imagined reality. But for people who exercise little actual agency in their real lives, don’t go outside much, and play a lot of videogames, the traditional material probably isn’t stuff they can relate to as well as people in the past could. A fictional world that has the mechanics of a videogame is a natural direction to go because it will be easier for modern people to imagine than a fictional world where nobody uses phones or computers.
What do you mean by traditional material?
I can see your argumentation being followed by misguided production management, but I doubt it’s necessary or can positively influence world-building.
All kinds of mechanisms and progression can be presented naturally, intuitively, and embedded within the world. I doubt a noticeable number of people are so far gone they can only understand the world through the interface of video game interfaces.
What do you mean by traditional material?
Things that have in the past been used in fiction to evoke familiar experiences to help people relate to it, or to convey something more concisely by building with concepts the audience can be assumed to be familiar with. For instance I’m reading Dracula right now, and while it does a great job of being comprehensible and relatable to a contemporary audience, I imagine it would be experienced somewhat different by someone living in the time it was written, who probably would have had more direct experience with things like the behavior of horses, letter writing, and cultural attitudes towards aristocracy and war pre-WW1. Though the parallels between letters and digital communications probably help a lot, reliance on them and the fear of having those communications restricted or tampered with is definitely relatable.
I can see your argumentation being followed by misguided production management, but I doubt it’s necessary or can positively influence world-building.
I don’t think it’s correct to attribute this phenomenon to cynical marketing efforts, there’s a vast amount of amateur fiction in this vein. Personally a large portion of my dreams center around videogame elements, and settings and scenarios that are partly or entirely explicitly artificial constructions are what I tend towards imagining while awake. Art reflects the minds of artists and audiences so it’s a natural direction for it to take.
