On the Borders of the Other World: The Isekai-Adjacent

For better or worse, we live in the Isekai Age. My very scientific off-the-cuff guess says that every season somewhere between a half to two-thirds of the new series are isekai. And that’s a double-edged sword.

Not just for the lack of variety and the retreading of the same tired old cliches. At the moment, I’m reading two manga about people who got fired from their adventurer parties and teamed up with bottom-rung noobs, and two manga about adventurers whose only skills are “appraising” things. In both cases, I can’t remember which title goes with which series. It’s that bad. (I’ll still read them though.)

No, the double edge comes from “isekai adjacency”, or stories that lie on the borders of Isekai Land. On the one hand, you have stories that are technically isekai but which might as well not be, such as when a character reincarnates from our world and then that fact is never brought up again. Faraway Paladin is a good (in both senses) example: it’s a fine story, but the fact that the main character is originally from our world has little to do with it (at least in the anime, which is what I’ve seen). So too with one of the “appraisal” manga I mentioned above. Ugh, I suppose I’ll have to look up the title for that one. Hang on… It’s As a Reincarnated Aristocrat, I’ll Use My Appraisal Skill to Rise in the World (available to read for free on K Manga, for sale on Amazon). There. Are you happy? I hope you’re happy.

Anyway, an isekai story is intriguing when the MC has to transition in some conscious way from one world to the other: by making use of her knowledge or resources from our world, for example (Saving 80,000 Gold comes to mind), or by adjusting to the different values and structures of the new world’s society (like Rising of the Shield Hero). Or heck, Sword Art Online, which gets more out of the “other world” trauma of its characters than most series that feature an actual other world. Say what you will about the quality of these stories, they at least benefit from the isekai-ness of their protagonistoi. But if you can’t tell the difference between a given isekai series and a vanilla LitRPG, what even then is the point? Of the four series I mentioned back in paragraph two, only one is an actual isekai; the others are LitRPG mayo-blandness. But the difference doesn’t really matter. At the end of the day, you can hardly tell.

Now, in truth, I’m being unnecessarily harsh on Reincarnated Aristocrat. It’s actually a good story (better than the other three, at least). The whole isekai thing, though, serves no purpose—except one: getting the “isekai” label into the series metadata. You see, in the Age of the Internet, people find books to read by searching for books that are similar to what they’ve enjoyed before, or now by having an algorithm or AI recommend what it thinks are similar books. And how does the person, algorithm, or AI know what’s similar? By looking at the metadata: the labels, tags, keywords, blurbs, and other snippets of data that serve to group “like” stories with each other. Take it from me as an erstwhile publisher: publishers will do anything to slap a hot label onto a title in the hopes that it becomes the next bestseller. And if that means spending two seconds to say Dr. Isekai Jones was hit by a drunk reindeer on Christmas Eve in Tokyo and wound up in Middle-Earth, and then never bringing it up again, that’s a small price to pay.

But it’s a Faustian bargain, in that it dilutes the genre and will probably lead to the collapse of the Isekai Bubble in a few years. And at the same time, it detracts from the other side of the Isekai Borderlands: those stories that actually share a lot of the same qualities that readers enjoy in (good) isekai, but which fail to make it across the border into Isekai Land because there’s no literal crossing between worlds. This is the second edge of the double-edged sword.

Take for instance Rebuild World. (Full disclosure: I edit the English-language manga and light novel translations of RW for J-Novel Club. I don’t get any royalties from them, though.) It has a lot of the things that you find in a standard isekai: adventurers, an adventurers’ guild, dungeons, magic, treasures, and the like. But it gets a thousand times more mileage out of them than your isekai du jour simply by wrapping them in a sci-fi package and calling them hunters, the Hunter Office, ruins, nanotechnology, and relics. Add in a gritty post-apocalyptic setting, a few Mad Max references, and some actually decent worldbuilding, and you’ve got a winner.

Such a dish would probably appeal to quite a few isekai gourmands. (I speak as one myself.) Nevertheless, because it lacks the “isekai” label, those readers are less likely to find it when they go searching for another fix of their favorite addiction. Far less likely.

Another great example is Dr. Stone. Sure, Senku doesn’t technically go to another world, but he might as well have. The world he wakes up in is vastly different from the one he left, even though it’s strictly speaking the same. And he draws on his knowledge of his old world in order to survive and thrive in the new one—far moreso than Isekai Jones. Occasionally you find an isekai that does something similar—Ascendance of a Bookworm comes to mind—and, regardless of the other qualities of the story, this aspect is generally an asset. But it’s rare.

There’s also Astra: Lost in Space, which features the main cast hopping to multiple other worlds. Both the manga and the anime are stellar (hah!), featuring some truly insane plot twists and a lot of healthy shonen shenanigans (“shonenigans”?). But it will forever be listed under “sci-fi” instead of “isekai”—even though, again, the same things that make a good isekai work are present here: the novelty of a new world, the contrast between the old and new worlds that the main cast must navigate, and so on.

I don’t have any great solution to this. I expect that isekai tales will continue to rule the roost for the next few years at least, before the next trend sets in, and in the meantime isekai-adjacent tales from outside the border will continue to by and large go unnoticed, with Dr. Stone being the exception that proves the rule. But there is one thing you can do: if you find a great isekai or isekai-adjacent story, tell your friends! Promote it on social media! And drop it in the comments below! Because at the end of the day, the endorsement of someone you trust is the best way to sell something. And that, too, is something every publisher knows.