A Writer/Artist lost in dreamland.
Most people that know me tend to call me "Shy", or "Mali"
You used to be able to stumble upon a mysterious mirror in your eccentric uncle's attic and we were all okay with it. No one's immersion was ruined because the protagonist got hit by a truck in chapter 1.
I do think to paraphrase one of the comments on here the answer is "it's easier to imagine dying in a car accident than quitting your job."
i feel like it says that if you manage to get out you wouldn't care about finding your way back
broke: i died and also nobody loved me and i had no friends or attachments so it's fine that i left everything behind to start in a fantasy world
woke: the people i left behind love me so much they will tear apart time and space to get me back
it's time for the resurgence of final fantasy tactics advance
Counterpoint: Marche's actions were not morally justifiable. He destroyed Ivalice against the specific wishes of all his friends (and his brother who was able to walk again!), potentially killing who knows how many sentient beings, just to go back... for what? Everyone's life was straight up a lot worse in St. Ivalice. In other Final Fantasy narratives, Crystals 'power' the worlds in some way, so the act of destroying them just to fulfill your own desires is A Bad Thing.
I know a lot of this is contradicted by FFTA2 and other Ivalice games, but if you take FFTA as a single text and at face value I think Marche was wrong to do what he did. He also didn't know it would be fine! He gambled a whole reality to just be some sad kid. Couldn't be me.
i cannot believe we're all still arguing about Marche. it has been 20 years
Thank you for bringing this up! I faintly remembered it when I made my post. Back when I played it, I was a sad troubled kid, so my anti-Marche stance came from a very nihilistic, escapist, "fuck real life" point of view. So a lot of the nuance got lost in my memory
i was the same way too ! my young self didn't vibe with marche at all and spent a lot of time thinking about why (never reached an introspective conclusion until much later tho)
Just thought of a half-dozen different Star Trek episodes (complimentary) immediately after reading this.
...
("To my father, who's coming home.")
Maybe it's just an embellishment of reality. Like, they really did visit their eccentric uncles, but instead of seeing the entertaining junk in the attic, the protagonists are in hour-six of a racist and sexist rant about avocado toast and the Federal Reserve Board, texting their friends "Kill Me." Not actual death, just escaping to the new world to avoid pining for death...
I'm not really literary enough to have a super thoughtful take on this (unlike the other cool replies to this post 🙌) but I think CS Lewis' "The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe" is an iconic "stumble upon a thing in your uncle's attic" book and in the final book of the Narnia Chronicles (The Last Battle) everyone dies in a horrific train crash so that they can go live in Narnia forever (because Narnia = heaven I guess).
I have no idea what this says about society or whether it supports or contradicts @mammonmachine's original point. I do think it's fucked up though because at the end the kids who died in the crash are literally like "Yay we died!" because they're stoked about Narnia. Even as a kid I thought that's a messed up response to being in a tragic accident that killed tons of people including most of your family.
I had a thought similar to this posted as a reply last night, before I deleted it after it was posted for 5 minutes, but I think this is closer to it.
Quitting your job and changing things is Hard.
Getting hit by a car or killed by some other outside force and having your life made Better is easy. No fuss, people like you now, even though you fundamentally didn't change. People throw themselves at you, even.
yeah. and i think this goes back to the themes of alienation, etc. people were mentioning above, where the path toward change feels increasingly hard, to the point where there's no possible way out (that people can see) other than this sort of escapist fantasy.
and in that vein, thinking about why people don't return or want to return... i think a common component of pre-isekai 'go to a fantasy world and come back' narratives is the belief that things can Change in some meaningful way. even if nothing obvious changes in a character's life afterward beyond having the spark of knowledge that there's "more" out there, that the fantastical does exist, this change in mindset is treated as having real, transformative power.
but when there's no hope for change, what's the point of going back? even the Knowledge that magic Exists somewhere means (or is assumed to mean) nothing in the face of the impenetrable nature of reality. if anything, it only makes things worse.
Sure. The main thing that also don't agree fully with is the "now I have more agency" thing thats been getting bandied about. It feels like Isekai protags are super passive and things just happen To Them rather than action they take. It feels like a genre where "I'm fundamentally the same and people like my video game skills or smart phone or whatever obsession I have now makes me cool and strong and loved"
I guess it can feel like a genre that is supposed to celebrate who you are by building a world around that rather than one where you grow into it.
Considering I've seen multiple isekai where the main character died by overwork, you don't even need the truck!
