✨ So my actual problem with modern isekai isn't even the construction of 'not going home again' because while I think that the idea that older isekai narratives were about the element of 'returning to your home having grown as a person by immersing yourself in another reality and bringing part of it with you when you leave' and were really just bildungsroman with flashier aesthetics is true, I don't think that's the only way that kind of story can be. I think you can describe this without needing to hold up 'tradition' as some kind of Inherent Positive because I just don't buy that.
I think it's closer to say that I object to a majority of modern isekai because the very idea of longing, pressure, or personal growth is severed at the root by the simple construction of 'you not only can't EVER go home, systemically, because you're dead in the real world, but it turns out whatever knowledge you had in your original life is perfectly-suited for your new one to the degree even seemingly-random preferences and choices inevitably become the magical cheat code to success and power.' The issue isn't the idea of needing an escape, or a pressure valve, it's that it's just narrative packing peanuts. There can't be any tension when not only is success guaranteed, but emotional and personal growth is irrelevant to that success. Don't get me wrong, I don't love the And Everybody Went Back Home And Became Boring Normal Children, Then Boring Normal Adults ending and haven't ever since Narnia did Susan dirty. But at least that posits that people have an amount of growing to do.
And I can so easily picture better versions of MOST of these. What about a story where someone grieves for the life they lost when they must mourn for the simple joys of life they'll never see again, while the people around them gild them with their hope and increasingly-empty accolades? What about a story where we see the HOLE left in the community after a disappearance, and the measures bereaved loved ones might take to find them again in the context of the magical otherworld, what lines they might cross to break through into that place? What about a story where someone finds their life on Earth is, in fact, no preparation whatsoever for a life in a land of medieval power structures and wizards? Where is the drama? I don't need it to be perfect, we watch PLENTY of trash. But I need some amount of tension more than 'none.'
