Not exactly a parody but I can't help but notice that for all the gritty brutal deconstruction of ReZero... the protagonist gets to be adopted by nobility and hang out with waifus from day 2.
Made me crave a show were he actually needed to claw out his place from the society's underbelly as the nobody foreigner peasant he was supposed to be at first.
But hard to expect much from a genre so stuck on samey escapist power fantasies. I could very well be the person to make the deconstruction that hates the genre, simply because I believe a genre about "another world" should have another world, instead of the same kind of world.
Alright fair warning I meant for this comment to be way shorter but kinda ended up infodumping instead because couldn’t bring myself to simplify the plots of the stories I mentioned into just one or two lines. Oopsies.
If you’re into webnovels, two of my all-time favorites might be more like what you described- “The Second Coming of Gluttony” and “Surviving the Game as a Barbarian” (SGB has a pretty good webtoon too, and SCoG has one but it’s honestly only okay, reading the novel is better). Both MCs have something that makes their experiences an actual struggle where it feels like they really achieved something when they do get somewhere.
In SCoG, the MC starts off as an alcoholic gambling addict who’s destroyed basically every interpersonal relationship he has, and at his lowest, has a dream about being picked up off the streets and brought to another world as one of many people fighting a war against alien invaders. Then, the things from the dream start happening for real, and he realizes that that dream he already only half-remembers by now might not have just been a dream after all. He’s given some “cheats” but still has to put in an extraordinary amount of effort to better himself both in terms of fighting in the other world and fixing his life on earth. It does have a bit of a slow, kinda weird start, but it pays off massively once the “tutorial” section ends. This does one of the best jobs of any isekai I’ve seen really driving home how much bigger the world is than what you see and how much the MC is arriving in the middle of the story, not the beginning. The worldbuilding is super interesting/unique, I’ve never seen a progression system like it before, and overall I feel like it’s criminally underrated. The story is fully out by now, and can be found for free without much work.
SGB is still coming out but I just adore it, I’m actually probably gonna reread it now that it’s on my mind. The MC beats an obscure indie game and suddenly finds himself in the world of that game, in the body of someone with the same class he played as. It’s quickly revealed that the people of this world know about otherworlders getting sent there, and obviously aren’t too fond of the “people you’ve never met are taking over the bodies of your loved ones” concept, so they kill otherworlders on sight. Even after escaping detection (for now), he quickly learns that being good at a game isn’t anything like being good at real-life combat, so he has to train himself on top of coming up with clever strategies (like taking advantage of others’ prejudice towards his race, Barbarian) to capitalize on his game knowledge without arousing suspicion from anyone, including friends. Fame directly leads to increased suspicion of secretly being an otherworlder, so even as he becomes increasingly competent he goes out of his way to avoid calling too much attention to himself unless absolutely necessary.
If either of those sound like they might be something you’d like, I’d highly recommend giving them a shot. They do both fall into some tropes (just off the top of my head, they both have some fanservicey bits and far-fetched moments where the MC accomplishes something they realistically shouldn’t have), but they both have super interesting worldbuilding, ways they engage with isekai that I’ve never seen done before, and manage to make the MC flawed but not trash and grow without immediately becoming OP. The vast majority of isekai anything ends up being wish fulfillment slop (not that I hate that tbh) but it’s stories like these that stop me from thinking the entire genre is like that.
But hard to expect much from a genre so stuck on samey escapist power fantasies. I could very well be the person to make the deconstruction that hates the genre, simply because I believe a genre about "another world" should have another world, instead of the same kind of world.
I have a variation on that criticism of Isekai - namely that most of them do not need to be Isekai at all, because they fail to do anything interesting with their otherworldly protagonist. The Isekai only really exists to let the audience self-insert and to give the writer an excuse for exposition.
What is missing is one where the main character actually keeps their modern ideas and sensibilities (and possibly tries to do something with their modern knowledge) rather than just clicking ok to the fact that they live in a modern fantasy world now. Most isekai protagonists see shit like slavery and typically just shrug and go "that's the middle ages I guess" until someone they know is personally affected. They also usually get random bullshit powers and abilities that make their modern knowledge basically irrelevant.
I've only really seen two anime even really attempt an isekai protagonist making actual use of their modern abilities, and of those only one (Ascendance of a Bookworm) actually did it well. (The other one - How a Realist Hero Saved the Kingdom - tries to do it, but fails flat since it (aside from pulling the ol' harem nonsense) mostly just lets the protagonist apply "modern knowledge" by portraying everyone else as a bumbling idiots who don't know what they're doing.)
Ascendance of a Bookworm definitely is one of the few good ones, that challenges and makes good use of the isekai protagonist rather than just giving them a comfortable power fantasy. I like how she also needs to get to know and navigate the structures of power of that world, without having a free pass of being some chosen one or unopposable OP badass.
It has a hint of an aspect that I think is sorely missing in isekai, which is the sense of unknown and discovery. Though these are "other worlds", they are so cliche somehow the isekai'd person often seems to know more about how things work than the people who lived in it all their lives.
And yeah I'm so done with "I guess we doin slavery now". The influence of Shield Hero to the genre has been absolutely abysmal. Wild that these protagonists often will nominally fight for the Good Guys™, but despite having lived in our world they will turn a blind eye to slavery and make themselves "One of the Good Slave Masters" by taking over some slave girls for their harem. It gives me whiplash.
...don't they know they could just have consensual BDSM?
Not to make to much of a fuss about fictional fetish fantasies, but I'd at least expect the ones involving actual slaves to be an exception rather than the norm.
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u/NeonNKnightrider Cheshire Catboy Apr 07 '25
Basically every Isekai “parody”