You never see these characters MISSING anyone from their past lives. You never see them revisiting trauma. You never see them pining over the people lost in the world they left behind And you can't tell me this is purely a matter of genre, because it hasn't always been that way!
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Like, back when the isekai genre was still female-driven—I'm looking at Fushugi Yugi and Escaflowne, here—you DID see the protagonists feeling a sense of loss at the world they left behind. Their past experiences WERE a source of pain.
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Honestly, it seems to me like it was when the isekai genre transitioned from a predominantly female-driven one to a primarily male-driven one—and when being the protagonist became more of a power fantasy—that this aspect of loss, longing, and regret was mostly discarded.
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Vapor Weyve Retweeted TrickyC
That's definitely a part of the power fantasy This idea that "someday, the fact that you're a piece of shit who sits in their room playing video games all day and has never done a decent thing for anyone will make you a prince among men"https://twitter.com/trickyc66/status/1261804037097152512 …
Vapor Weyve added,
TrickyC @trickyc66Replying to @Nymphomachyi mean, i always read the prevalence of that trope as specifically reaching out to alienated, self-pitying NEETs: basically presenting the ultimate, "Just wait; *someday* THEY'LL see..." fantasy that appeals to so many overprivileged ppl that see themselves as underappreciated3 replies 0 retweets 32 likesShow this thread -
But I mean, it hasn't always been like that? Hitomi Kanzaki wasn't a NEET. She wasn't an otaku. She was pretty much a bog-standard Bella Swan type character. Sword Art Online seemed to refocus the attention on male gamers specifically.
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Anyway I'm thinking about this in the context of the anime/manga/light novel series I continue to obsess over, MY NEXT LIFE AS A VILLAINESS, and how it kind of reconstructs the classical isekai format and reintroduces femininity into the narrative in a very interesting way
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Like, the series is a kludge of various genres, it's not a "pure" isekai, but that's obviously the genre it most specifically draws from, and the female protagonist is clearly motivated by the trauma of a life ended prematurely and the people she left behind, never to se again
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That is literally the whole point. She died at the age of seventeen and found the experience so traumatizing that she literally dedicates the rest of her life to making sure she never experiences that sense of loss a second time. She's a goofball but she DOES feel that hurt?
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And the narrative specifically doesn't treat her past self as totally disconnected from her world. Like, it is made really clear that when she was died, she was mourned by her loved ones and many of them never completely got over it for the rest of their lives. It's refreshing
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Like it's weird that such a silly and ridiculous series would be the one to unpack these kind of grim realities of the genre conventions but that's kind of why I love it There is something really honest and sincere buried here and it's really such an unusual thing to see
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A subgenre or sibling genre of the isekai is the "second chance" story, the Peggy Sue Got Married plot It's a classic thing people talk about - "If I could start my life over knowing what I know now" - but that movie I think was the first one to make a story out of it
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
And what's interesting about that one is the originator and trope namer also has an ending that subverts the whole wish fulfillment premise the genre revolves around She chooses *not* to change her past, and by so doing closes the time loop and wakes up in the present
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
Because of that thing that you're talking about It doesn't cheat and have her be an antisocial nobody with nothing to lose She has a very strong (and feminine-coded) reason not to pick a different life - she was a mother with children
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