A tangent but am I the only one who's weirded out by the incredible popularity of the whole isekai thing?
As a kid I used to love reading stories based on by favorite games and enjoyed seeing dry stats substituted with good description. Now people seem to want the opposite. They want the protagonist to have levels xp and shit like that. A kind of a map of a map of map thing.
Dunno, the fact that's it's gotten huge as a mainstream genre rubs me the wrong way. That's probably how boomers feel about everything.
It comes down to execution. If the stats exist for no reason other that "hey, I'm lazy how do I show this guy is op?" it most likely sucks. If they have a greater purpose it can be really funny though. So I'm a spider, so what? has a nice twist on the genre for example where the system and its existence eventually gets a really good justification that I won't spoil.
If you want to see an isekai that actuallly earns the hype pick up the books for this one. I actually bought the books after pirating them initially and I pirate EVERYTHING. Or wait for the currently airing anime, its a decent adaptation.
Basically I wanted to say its a good story that would not work purely based on descriptions and actually requires the stats. Though they mostly disappear roughly half way into the story.
Consider this: you're a young author who wants to talk about how the current political/economic systems governing your life are awesome/terrible/the jews fault. You need a quick shorthand allegory that your reader's are intimately familiar with, because you don't want to spend forever doing hard boring things like worldbuilding and lore when you could be focusing on something more profitable like character design and power fantasy wish fulfillment.
Video games have clear rules (even if they are arbitrary) and are ostensibly meritocratic- things we attribute to life under neoliberal capitalism that isn't necessarily true. When the genre is played straight, it serves as an idealistic, escapist take on what life should be like, and when the genre is played subversive it serves as an ideological criticism (either left or right) of our current material conditions.
Why should we be surprised that many people, bereft of any ideological framework, grasp onto something easy to understand?
A tangent but am I the only one who's weirded out by the incredible popularity of the whole isekai thing?
As a kid I used to love reading stories based on by favorite games and enjoyed seeing dry stats substituted with good description. Now people seem to want the opposite. They want the protagonist to have levels xp and shit like that. A kind of a map of a map of map thing.
Dunno, the fact that's it's gotten huge as a mainstream genre rubs me the wrong way. That's probably how boomers feel about everything.
It comes down to execution. If the stats exist for no reason other that "hey, I'm lazy how do I show this guy is op?" it most likely sucks. If they have a greater purpose it can be really funny though. So I'm a spider, so what? has a nice twist on the genre for example where the system and its existence eventually gets a really good justification that I won't spoil.
If you want to see an isekai that actuallly earns the hype pick up the books for this one. I actually bought the books after pirating them initially and I pirate EVERYTHING. Or wait for the currently airing anime, its a decent adaptation.
Basically I wanted to say its a good story that would not work purely based on descriptions and actually requires the stats. Though they mostly disappear roughly half way into the story.
Consider this: you're a young author who wants to talk about how the current political/economic systems governing your life are awesome/terrible/the jews fault. You need a quick shorthand allegory that your reader's are intimately familiar with, because you don't want to spend forever doing hard boring things like worldbuilding and lore when you could be focusing on something more profitable like character design and power fantasy wish fulfillment.
Video games have clear rules (even if they are arbitrary) and are ostensibly meritocratic- things we attribute to life under neoliberal capitalism that isn't necessarily true. When the genre is played straight, it serves as an idealistic, escapist take on what life should be like, and when the genre is played subversive it serves as an ideological criticism (either left or right) of our current material conditions.
Why should we be surprised that many people, bereft of any ideological framework, grasp onto something easy to understand?