the more I think about it the more I believe that why waves hands The Modern Isekai Tropes (as exemplified most recently in the dialogue that appears in Forspoken) bother me so much is that they seem to signal a sort of irreverent carelessness of the work's own setting &/or lore.
Like, if the main character, meant to be some sort of newcomer to this place, sees no issue with mocking/goofing on the traditions of the world that they are a newcomer to, why the fuck should I, the audience, care about the world? I feel like I am being told "this does not matter, don't worry about it"
(And see related observations by Austin and JP)
I've got some swirling thoughts around this subject that feel too inchoate to post but are too persistent to not post, so here's just … some half-finished thoughts I guess.
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I watched a few of those Forspoken clips and (while I'm really unsure whether I should be judging a game based on a few 1-minute clips) what frustrated me is that although they didn't land, they felt close to something that did. They were on to something I maybe could have liked.
But what broke it for me was that the world played along. The teenager responds to the English-accent guy (Jonathan Cook?) with mockery, and he responds as if ashamed. He shouldn't even know what a "serial killer" is, that word was invented in 1930. Has he ever met a ten-year-old before? Does he respond to every ten-year-old as if he were himself ten? Has this impacted his job as a sorcerer or whatever? The protagonist not taking the world seriously doesn't seem like a problem to me, but the world should take itself seriously, surely, or I don't believe it's endured for however long it's endured.
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We've been watching "The Magical Revolution of the Reincarnated Princess and the Genius Young Lady", and I wouldn't call it good exactly, but what makes it work is the isekai character is paired with a character who has actual, real emotional investment in the events that are occurring and if anything this second girl is kind of the main character. So the story spends six minutes unblinkingly exploring Non-Isekai Character's legitimate grief at everything she had ever worked for coming to naught and whether she will ever be anything but a failure in the eyes of her father. And then Isekai Character comes charging in excitedly gibbering, look!! I made you a new magic item!! and because of the work put in here the audience is right there with Non-Isekai Character in experiencing this as endearingly cute but also kind of deranged.
The only "modern isekai" I actually like, "So I'm A Spider, So What?", gives itself a similar trapdoor by making it clear that Spider was, pre-reincarnation, kind of not doing okay. Spider engages in escalating acts of Main Character Syndrome that make her appear pathologically unempathetic, and just as this is about to make you lose faith in the story they show you what kind of person she was on Earth and… well, she actually is just a kind of person who struggles to empathize with other humans, not cruel just struggling, to the extent that being trapped in an anime videogame where everything is an optimization problem and she never has to communicate with anyone is sort of the best thing that ever happened to her. That's just her character. And it works.
I'm not saying isekais need to do this!! I'm just saying like… do something?? "This teenager is not taking fantasyland seriously" is an okay joke, but it is one joke. The Forspoken clips I've seen are just that one joke over and over. Forspoken is a twenty-hour game. Does it eventually develop a second joke!?
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I guess the question I get stuck on is: Why are you telling me this story?
Something I say a lot in Media Discussions is that I'm okay with the story following any narrative rules it wants— is it respectful toward its setting, or disrespectful? is it naturalistic, or does it sacrifice naturalism for drama? is it realistic in its portrayal of worlds and systems, or does it follow genre logic, comedy logic, or "you should really just relax" logic?— as long as it picks some sets of rules and sticks with them. I'll accept all kinds of things from art as long as I know what it is I'm supposed to be accepting.
But I guess a second question I ought to be asking is for what reason did you pick these narrative rules?. For some reason Forspoken wants to tell a story where a teenage protagonist quips her way through a stock JRPG narrative. Why? Is it just to ease player self-insertion? Is it to tell a story in which a set of pompous, powerful people are deflated by a trickster/fool character, or to make us imagine by analogy a story where the powerful men of modern America are laughed at by a teenager who does not take the world seriously and thus reveals our own world is nonsensical? Did the writers have anything at all in mind or were they just charged with filling time in a 20 hour RPG and this is the way of doing so they picked? Where do you go with this premise?
"RPG World" was a forgettable-but-fun webcomic from the 00s. It started off as just a flat-out FF7 parody, with an elf thief character who every single second is pointing out the bizarre and incoherent elements of the game world and its mechanics. After a year or three of this, it hit a plotline where the elves recapture the incredulous thief, who turns out to be in fact the Oracle of the Elves, a periodically reincarnating figure who sees the world as it truly is and is therefore able to produce insights that continually lead the elves to being a world superpower. Her ability to see the plot holes in her world was, in fact, a superpower. Her "quips" were, and had been all along, forbidden mind-expanding truths. That's really interesting, and you could link it to any number of things (gnosticism, the psychadelic mind-expansion philosophies of McKenna and Watts, any real-world political satire you like).
Is Square able to make something as interesting as a twenty-year-old parody webcomic making fun of Square? Wasn't Thomas Covenant in, like, 1977 already playing with the idea of "if someone were dropped into a fantasy world who believed it were all fantasy / a hallucination / a joke, and they sincerely proceeded on that assumption… they would do terrible damage"? Aren't the Diogenes of Sinope stories 2300 years old? Is culture getting worse at thinking these things out clearly as time passes?!
