Indulgent furry artist, character designer and cartoonist, NSFW 🔞
Calling late 20s old when I've known some massive anime fans who got into it in the late 1990s is such a cognitive dissonance it's making my neck hurt
It is getting increasingly more common that I can say "Hon, I've been doing this longer than you've be alive," and mean it literally.
:(
I don't know what's worse, that or "isekai isn't that old of a genre". Inuyasha is probably as old as this person. Fushigi Yuugi is older!
I keep being so confused by this "isekai is a power fantasy where a guy goes into a video-game-like world or possibly a literal video game" talk. No! Isekai is when a totally average girl gets sucked into a fantasy world where she has like, one special magical power or a prophecy about her or something and is otherwise still an ordinary teenage girl who must rely on the help of one or more hot guys for her survival! Get off my lawn!
it's amazing how the lead in can be so wrong and yet their conclusion is absolutely right.
furthermore, I consider that isekai must be destroyed.
Isekai as a modern genre formed around the beginning of the 80s, defined by works like Haruka Takachiho's novel Warrior from Another World and anime like Aura Battler Dunbine. Of course those were influenced by portal-fantasy elements in literature and folktales about people traveling to mysterious or even heavenly places.
Which isn't terribly old in the scheme of things but it's a hell of a lot older than Sword Art Online.
“To me, an older anime fan (I watched the melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya while i was in high school in the mid 2010s when anime was a monoculture)”
About 20 years ago, rather than being spoken of as a genre, "isekai" would normally have been thought of as a setting for fantasy, and someone going to another world as a trope that was used in some premises, so I do think there's sense in regarding it as a young genre.
introducing these so-called “anime fans” to the seminal isekai light novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
Magic Knight Rayearth. El-Hazard. Vision of Escaflowne. Star Trek Voyager. Captain N: The Game Master. Kidd Video. Dungeons & Dragons (animated). Time Tunnel. Buck Rogers. Lost in Space. DOCTOR FREAKING WHO.
"Isekai" as a very specific thing where you get sent to a world where videogame mechanics are just part of the world is a new-ish thing (but .hack called, it wants its worldbuilding back), but if you widen the lens just a tiny bit more than that then it's older than dirt and Narnia is an isekai. hell, widen it a bit and Homer's Odyssey is an isekai.
