#Isekai Nonsense

[silverchangeling]

"aaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH"

THUNK

The sound was deafening. Like a screaming boulder landed in our backyard.

"Molly!" crooned Grandma, like this was most standard noise in the world "Could you go check on that? I think it came from the backyard."

But I had already paused my stream, slipped into my crocs, and was heading out the backdoor. Or well, fumbling with the blinds. I couldn't believe my eyes. Had an angel literally fallen from heaven?

A young woman- no older girl? She looked like a cross between a Moon Princess and a British one. I rushed to her side. She spoke mostly like a British Princess though.

At first she was incomprehensible. Speaking fast, with too many "thees", "thous", royal "Wes" and- I'm no English major- but I thought her grammer was terrible. At a certain point I think she realized she was speaking gibberish. She calmed down, and spoke in a more comprehensible voice that sounded like an anime girl mimicking old British English.

"We know this'll sound quite absurd." She looked at me to see if I understood, and I nodded "But I'm your Uncle. Something happened to Us- erh, me on Our hiking trip. We were- Uhm, hit by truck."

I blinked. What the hell was she talking about? For one, Uncle Ted stopped by a few hours ago. I whipped out my phone to text that asshole, but the mystery girl stole my phone, pressed an odd button, and called him instead.

Uncle Tom's eternally irritated voice replied "Damn it, Mi- Molly" that asshole couldn't even get my name right "I just started by damn hike- wait WHAT THE HELL IS DRIVING-?"

The phone screamed as some horrible crunching and screeching rubber on dirt noise blared from its speakers. I was too dumbfounded to react.

Grandma's voice broke the silence "Wowee girlie, you look like someone whose been stolen away by the fae and now back again if I've ever seen one."

"No no no no-" The princess girl repeated, seemingly determined to clear up this point "We were isekai'd." ---

After some explaining, reciting of information, and profuse apologizing I could maybe believe this girl was once my uncle. Although now she was apparently "legally adopted" by my grandmother. Or at least according to the documentation that dropped with her. Well, even our records collaborated that she's been here for a while, even though Grandma and I know its different. Very fae-like, according to Grandma.

Anyway, Grandma and I decided that she could stay for the night. The girl was getting more understandable by the hour, and maybe by tomorrow she'd sound somewhat normal.

So tomorrow, I'm in my PJs, making myself some toast with Grandma, when the girl prostrates herself before me. She finally looks a bit more normal- like an extremely photogenic casual weeb girl rather than a "Cosplay beauty pageant winner" weeb girl.

"I wanted to apologize again for mistreating you, Molly!" The girl squeaked out. "The person I was before well- I was very narrow-minded. And not a good person…"

My bread popped from the toaster. I spread some of Grandma's jam on it. Unfortunately, I didn't have it in my heart to stay mad at little Miss Moon Princess, even if she was once my 5th shittiest family member. "Alright, I forgive you."

"Thank you!" She hopped back upright, nervous but slightly more excited. Her eyes shone with puppy-like "I- uhm- Also I go by Summer now!… The title I used to go by, in the other world, is a bit of mouthful and more than embarrassing." she looks sidewise as though she's rehearsed this conversation a dozen times in her head "So yeah! Call me Summer!"

"Very fae-touched name." Grandma muttered to me. The comment did not go unnoticed by Summer.

"Let- let me tell you my story over breakfast!" Summer seemed adamant to set the story straight. Grandma and I sat, armed with toast and fruit, preparing for whatever strange tale lay ahead of us.

Summer began to recount her journey, "So I was walking in the woods and I got hit by a truck- which you heard, Molly. In retrospect, its kind of a weird place to get struck by traffic. Anyway, I thought I died, but instead I woke up in this floaty white space. Some kind of goddess approached me. She said- 'If you reincarnate as a hero and defeat the demon lord, I'll send you home with any loot you find.' And considering I was dead, I had no choice by to accept her offer!"

Grandma looked at me once and stated "Faeries love bargains like this-"

Summer began gesturing wildly to get our attention "SO I get reincarnated as this super cute babe you see before you! And I was like 'weird! I'm a girl now!' and it took some time to get used to but I guess I kinda like it? Like I'm way softer now! You- you know how it is right???" she motioned at her different assets, before realizing what she was doing, stopping, blushing, and continuing her story.

"Anyway! I went on this really wild and long quest. Its WAY too much for one story session. But- OH YEAH I have my sword!" She pulled a flaming sword out of an apparent void located within her chest. With a single dramatic swipe, I think she singed one of my stray hairs.

"And uhm, I also have my inventory in here-" She reached her hand deep within her cleavage. Random junk dropped from her V-neck onto the table. "Here's those elixirs I forgot to use…. Ah yeah, you always need antidotes! Wish I had them before the swamp… Here's the farmer's keys from that quest I forgot I was on, hope he didn't need them… Oh yeah, this baby!" She pulled out a very futuristic-looking rocket "Never got to use the intercontinental missile, but it was plan B if everyone's hopes and dreams weren't enough to slay the demon lord!"

Grandma side-eyed to me "Not many people know this, but the fair-folk love high-grade explosives."

Summer forced a go-getter smile "ANYWAY, we totally rocked that demon lord, the witch and I got married, and we became princesses! It was a really chill 100 years or so, but then the goddess appeared to me in a dream and was all 'you're time is up, you're soul can't stay in this realm any longer.' So she sent me home, and here I am! I was totally isekai'd. Believe me now?"

"Mostly" replied Grandma.

"No." I blurted out.

Summer deflated a little. "O-okay. I know its all a little hard to believe… I just hope you find it in your heart to believe me one day! I was totally isekai'd!" ----

Poor girl. Even with her bombshell body, she had little luck in love. I think Summer's journeys in wherever-the-hell left her a little naïve. She had texted me to pick her up from the bar. I wonder who broke up with her this time- wasn't too soon since her last girlfriend?

When I got to the local pub, Summer was in her favorite quiet spot in the corner. When she saw me, she instantly motioned me towards her. God, she was unreasonably cute, even as a sobbing mess.

"Da Mayor… waz just the farmer with a hat. Da Demon Lord waz just the farmer with a mustache." Summer glumly sniffled at me, like any of this meant something to me.

"Slow down- " I slid into the booth to comfort her, "What's bothering you?"

"The barmaid was the goddess, but wizout the wings and the glowy lights!" Summer complained into her drink

"Uhm… who broke up with you now?" I rubbed her shoulder to try to calm her

"I WAZ ABDUCTED BY FAERIES THE WHOLE TIME!" she slammed her mug for emphasis "Isekai obsessed fairies… The other swordsman on my team…. Waz named Kirito! He WAZ JUST KIRITO."

Summer continued. "Grandma was right." Grandma did have a tendency to be right about these things. "The faeries tricked me… I had tropey-est isekai adventure ever! They made me do BEACH EPISODES! They told me it WAS A YEARLY HOLIDAY. I don't think medieval societies invented bikinis yet…"

I tried to calm her. "Its okay! It doesn't matter what kind of adventure you had! You're back now!" With a few pats, Summer seemed to calm down. Slowly, she seemed to be returning to her natural cheer, a state not unlike an excitable and innocent puppy.

Summer wiped a tear from her eye. "Really?"

"Really."

I helped Summer get up, and slowly moved her to my car.

Maybe another day I'll let her know that she exhibits a number of fae-touched qualities. And at a different time, tell her comical levels of clumsiness, which always leaves her ass-up on the ground on a daily basis, is not normal.

But those are revelations for other days.

[starry-songs-canvas]

Demon Twins, Isekai Edition!

I’m back from vacation with a fun Demon Twins prompt!

Basically, Damian gets shot with a magic artifact which teleports him and his immediate blood-relatives to basically a video game world that is meant to kill the ones teleported there with monsters and stuff.

Basically, Damian, Bruce, and Talia get isekai-ed, where they have to escape the dungeon, but when they get to the “next level” only a few enemies and a ton of corpses are waiting for them, obviously killed by someone, or something, powerful.

Meanwhile, Danny is just happy to be able to let loose, and will deal with whatever ghost started this unoriginal isekai trip when he meets them. And since there’s nobody watching or recording, he can practice some moves outside of his ghost form!

[rejectedfables]

demon possession story but the demon is experiencing it as an isekai romcom

[twstunes]

AU where the real reason the Great Seven are interpreted so differently from how they really are is bc they were the result of people getting isekai'd into Twisted Wonderland as those characters. Like in a "they existed as they were in canon before abruptly getting hit w/ memories from a past life" sorta way.

They all keep their original memories that shaped them into the classic villains we know, but gaining a whole extra lifetime worth of memories causes more than a bit of an unavoidable personality shift…and, save for the Queen of Hearts, they all want to avoid their scripted deaths. (Or fate worse than death, in Hades' case.)

Most of them choose to play it safe, simply live out their lives without making the same disastrous power bids as in their canon stories. If they happen to be a little nicer too, well, maybe they just happened to have a change of heart as of late. It's really no big deal if Ursula does some simpler requests pro-bono, or if the Queen of Hearts is just a smidgen less trigger-happy about punishments, right? No one's complaining about the changes, that's for sure. Scar and Jafar are both more ambitious, successfully accomplishing their goals without falling prey to their original characters' flaws; Scar is more present as a political entity, Jafar reigns in his hunger for ultimate power.

This started off as a joke but man. Even with all of them dodging their respective fates, Maleficent and Hades would still outlive the rest by a long shot. Idk what would be worse: watching the few people who remember your old world slowly die off one by one, only learning they had memories of your old world after their deaths, or never knowing you weren't so alone. Personally I'm leaning towards the first one—save for Ursula, they're all political figures who have reason to come into contact with each other at some point. (And for Ursula, well, maybe the Sea Witch misses walking around on land every now and then. Who knew she'd run into an important so-and-so while on a jog one day?)

But yeah I'm just picturing Maleficent hearing about how her grandson has befriended a student from another world and immediately calling up Hades like "homeboy you're not gonna BELIEVE this." Both of them brainstorm how to go meet this kid without drawing unnecessary attention in the process. Yuu winds up with the two remaining members of the Great Seven as quasi-guardian figures bc Yuu is the only one that gets their other-world pop culture references.

Everyone's already shocked to see the Thorn Fairy and King of the Underworld strolling the town streets of Sage's Island, but…who's that kid with them? And what's that cat-like thing the kid is carrying…? (They're having their biweekly hangout. Their schedules simply don't match up well enough to hang out more often, unfortunately. Grim demanded to come with his hench-human, and is having fun even if he doesn't really understand what the other 3 are talking about.)

[hulloitsdani]

Is it time for a modern au? I think it's time for a modern au.

[remythologise]

tv writers will be like ‘I split my main protagonist into two men so they can have dialogue as two halves of the same person’ and pretend it’s a straight thing

[metanarrates]

just caught up on "this isekai maid is forming a union!" continues to be a banger

[booty-uprooter]

the problem with isekai is that they've never fully learned to utilize the Arthur Dent Effect--i.e., the inherent hilarity of taking the most generic motherfucker imaginable and sticking him in places and situations where he is totally out of place and completely out of his depth

[deus-ex-mona]

can’t believe fansa’s number 3 on this anisong karaoke list~~~~~ hooray for mona!!!!!!!!!

[dumbasspirates]

Reading fanfics isn't enough! I need to crush him in the tightest bear hug I can give and kiss him until he's a blushing and flustered mess on the floor!!

[mantisgodsdomain]

Okay we're done getting really mad about bug game worldbuilding. If you are interested in seeing us get extremely mad about Bug Fables' consistently shoddy worldbuilding, then it is below the cut. We'll tag this properly in like a week so it doesn't haunt the main tag for everyone who might not want to read 1.8k words of a random author getting really fucking mad about shoddy worldbuilding.

We've done a lot of stuff with worldbuilding for Bug Fables. Our handling of Bugaria itself is, we will admit, not quite canon-typical. There's a lot going on, and not all is easy to work with. We know from the game itself that Bugaria is surrounded by hostile deadlands, making outside trade difficult and often-lethal - we also know, from being able to observe the in-game map as a human with outside perspective, that Bugaria is contained within a single backyard.

For the game proper, this is fine. It lends itself well to the "borrower" type aesthetic that the devs appear to prefer, limits the scope of the in-game map, and allows for them to do significantly less legwork trying to figure out how to design things. We, however, are a man obsessed with semantics, and we know too much about the amount of food and territory generally required for one hive of wasps or bees to buy into one suburban backyard that's... what, 60 square meters of backyard?

IRL honeybees alone will forage up to, on average, 1-6 km away from their hives, potentially going up to 13 km, and though there's been less research done into the habits of other colony bugs, it's fairly safe to assume they'd need similar range - more likely greater range, actually, as any form of what we humans call "higher intelligence" is incredibly demanding, resource-wise. Bugaria has four different kingdoms of social bugs, many of which would have overlapping needs for resources, combined with a whole load of other miscellanous solitary bugs. loaded into the space of a single backyard that likely wouldn't account for the range of a single hive of honeybees, let alone four hives of miscellaneous bugs and venus-knows-how-many solitaries.

In order to survive in any place, you need to fulfil the requirements of life. Food, water, and shelter are basic needs for a reason, and without access to all three, settlements are likely to quickly peter out. In order for The Hive to process nectar into honey, they first need nectar, which would have to come from flowers, which would be the exact same food source that wasps, butterflies, and moths would need, which clearly aren't growing in the needed

Put quite simply, it would be really fucking difficult for a space of this size to support the presented numbers of bugs. Plants are not an infinite resource, and even assuming that there's a density of flowers far beyond what's shown in-game, there's still predatory bugs to consider. Wasps and ants need protein to feed their grubs, dragonflies and damselflies need protein to feed themselves, mantises and mantidflies are obligate carnivores that cannot survive without a steady supply of prey- you can't survive if you never eat, and Bug Fables is incredibly low on lesser bugs that could potentially serve as food for the more predatory bugs.

Canon offers only aphids and cochineals as cattle, and those still wouldn't really serve to feed larger predatory bugs - and that's even without noting the ecological desert that results from only ever having a handful of enemies. We know that there are limits to what you can do in a game, but the second you want to expand on life beyond what's shown, you run straight into the lack of known prey and wildlife like smacking right into a brick wall. Roaches raise scorpions in a wasteland that seems to have only Mystery Berries for food unless they're trying to hunt Deadlanders, which we doubt are particularly edible. The Royal Blade of the Ant kingdom is an obligate carnivore, and there's nowhere he can go if he wants to buy lunch.

Realistically, we know that the answer is "the devs didn't really think about it". This game is built on the work of devs who persistently place "because it looks cool" over doing any of the worldbuilding work to integrate their existing story elements into the world. You only have to look to Yin to see just how many parts of the game are riddled with things added purely because Someone Thought It Might Be Cool, and no one did any further legwork to make it WORK. The Termacade is a living monument to the philosophy, being added A WEEK before release without anyone so much as communicating it was going to happen before it was in active development. 

Unfortunately, we are permanently obsessed with semantics, we can't stand "because magic" as an answer to important worldbuilding questions, and every time we have to do all the legwork to fill massive holes in the setting where no one ever thought that the answers to questions like "how the fuck do these people feed themselves" is relevant, we will be sadly prone to falling into madness.

There is no canon answer to how these bugs feed themselves. There is no indication as to how things that should be basic parts of the setting WORK. The bugs, in the first place, are written persistently as more People With Hats than actual BUGS - there are nods made to biology, sure, but the difference between a wasp and a bee is little more than a set of aesthetics and a silly hat. There are enough elements in the game that are simply thrown in without care of how they interlock that it sometimes becomes genuinely maddening.

Some people, sure, are satisfied with this - there is a madness that we have that we lack, a need for SUBSTANCE that is prone to driving us to inadvisable lengths hunting for a hint - any hint - that there was care put into this detail, rather than a single flippant comment. We have no complaint with things left vague, but we VERY MUCH have a problem when the setting is consigned to being little more than a backdrop decorated with random glittery ideas to act out anime tropes on, rather than something that should be paid attention to all its own.

We've said this before, and we'll say it many times again, but worldbuilding is important for a REASON. Your setting will affect your characters just as strongly as it will affect your story - your plot, your setting, and your characters are fundamentally inertwined, and to affect ANY part of the story will have rippling impacts on the rest of it. Your characters are not created in a void! Whatever structures created one person MUST still be present to shape others! You cannot throw shiny ideas on a canvas slapdash and expect it to turn out well! It's a miracle that the character writing in this game turned out as well as it did, considering that massive swathes of the setting are loosely assembled from anime without even taking the time to learn how certain aspects WORK in their home media!

We enjoy writing. We enjoy crafting plots, doing worldbuilding, tinkering with the little pieces of setting that we feel might create something interesting. We wouldn't be writing at all if we didn't enjoy it on some level, though we sometimes wonder if it's more masochism than care for some aspects. This is the trade that we have chosen to work towards working. Perhaps it is this that makes it so violently infuriating when we run into people who don't seem to care for that which we pay attention to.

There are a handful of aspects in this game that are well done. There are far more aspects in this game that are half-baked at best and actively difficult to work into the rest of the world at worst. There is a particular handful of aspects that are so poorly done that they could pass as active malice, towards one group or another. Unfortunately, as with many things, to assume ill will often overlooks the far more pervasive, far more common culprit of simple negligence.

Bug Fables, at its core, is a game made by devs with chronic shiny-object syndrome. There is little care spared to its worldbuilding, to the implications of its setting, to the implications of character actions, because the devs have never cared to think on it. It takes tropes from a hundred and one different animes without caring to learn what makes them work in their home context - just that they're cool, and that the authors want them in their own work.

It's something that we've been guilty of ourself, in previous works, but that only makes it easier for us to spot it here. There is an mirror of mistakes we have made ourself written on the walls, and it echoes with every step. We are the sort of author who learned to build worlds by stealing shards from different worlds and patching them into a new quilt. This is a work that takes does much the same, taking pieces from other works to make a new whole, but it makes the mistake of not spending the time to make sure those pieces FIT.

The mosaic on the floor is made of broken, disparate parts that are only partially fit together. The world falls apart more and more the closer you look at its shards. There are pieces of harm in this painting, pictures of pain, things put together and only barely examined. There is prejudice that could pass for malice woven into the threads of even the more comedic writing, an undercurrent commonly present in society and rarely examined. They've made an entire species of bugs into an incomprehensibly racist trope. Perhaps it's foolish of us to spend so much time and energy on a world that does not love us back, but we care for this setting, and we care for the potential of what it could have been.

The prejudice and shoddiness and pieces of poorly-thought-out and tropey writing in this work are not an act of malice. They are an act of ignorance, left over from a development team that wanted to add the latest shiny thing without stopping to think that their favorite anime tropes might have roots in something rotten.

Anyways, the reason that we wind up putting so many fucking footnotes on our fics is that every time we have to answer basic questions like "how does the wasp kingdom fucking feed itself" we have to rewrite, like, half a dozen tropes ripped off from shitty isekai anime, come up with an entire power structure and system of government that could potentially exist in this universe, write 2000 words of geopolitical bullshit minimum, reinvent animal agriculture, create at least one brand new species of bug, and then battle our conviction to avoid cushioning or avoiding the implied Fucked Up Elements that are Very Much Present In The Base Work if chronically ill-addressed vs the question of if we Want to include this particular brand of Fucked Up Bullshit or if we'd actually rather avoid having to reckon with the aftermath of yet another poorly-thought-out trope ripped from Trapped In Another World With My Smartphone.

[narastories]

If I were in the DF I would play this on repeat for Nicodemus Archleone to lovingly annoy the shit out of him. And then he would murder me.

[houkagokappa]

I finished WataOshi! I was excited to watch it because I've seen so much praise for the LNs. The anime was ...alright, and from what I've gathered not the best adaptation. After a decent introduction I got bored fairly quickly. It was disappointing to have so much focus on their everyday school life with your typical Japanese school tropes and some random competitions. However, I liked Rae as a character and appreciated how she used her knowledge of the game she was reincarnated into a bit more than I’ve seen other isekai protagonists do.

It took until episode 8 for the anime to get interesting for me, and even then the characters and their relationships could’ve been shown more, because I only knew of Lene and had no idea where her brother came from, before needing to care about them. After that, I also enjoyed the last arc with Manaria helping Rae become more honest and open about her feelings.

I feel like there’s a lot more to this series based on the praise it’s gotten and the quick glimpses to the future the anime showed, so it’s a shame the anime came out mediocre.

[spencecreates]

Oh to be swallowed by another world with people I might call family when it spits us out again, bonded by trauma and memories that no one else could understand

[tarkya]

I will not fall into the trap of restarting a fic from scratch, I will not fall into the trap of restarting a fic from scratch...

(I'm totally falling into the trap of restarting a fic from scratch.)

(You know, if I don't cringe into a 1-dimensional point from rereading what I already have...)

[always-a-joyful-note]

Thinking some fandom thoughts and then about ORV's portrayal of an author-character-reader relationship with the story and realising how....lacking at times the whole death of the author perspective on media can be.

(Turned out to be long and rambly so I put it under a cut. If you like death of the author, probably not for your worldview? Also, beware major ORV spoilers if you care about that)

Like, perhaps I'm misinterpreting something here, but in ORV, we had these three characters plus an entire system that gave us a look into the relationship between author/reader/character. And focusing on the Han Sooyoung, Kim Dokja, and Yoo Joonghyuk dynamic, I realise that none of them really died. Pushing asides Joonghyuk and Dokja for the moment (as I am talking about death of the author), we have Han Sooyoung whose consciousness faded after finishing Ways of Survival.

However, I don't know if we can really call that death of the author, really. Because Sooyoung's whole purpose in writing ORV, her authorial intention, was to save Kim Dokja's life...which she DID. And even after the story left her hands, her intentions were imprinted into the story itself. Yes, Dokja realised that the system was lenient to him because of (spoiler alert) his status as the OD. But at the same time, I think that Han Sooyoung's authorial intent to keep Dokja alive with WoS can also be taken as a factor in the system's leniency towards our reader.

And just jumping from that back to my original point, while death of the author IS fun and can be awesome for reinterpreting stories that the author may have intended as problematic (to our modern standards, at least), to separate the actual story itself from its creator seems just....a tad disrespectful to the author.

Or maybe disrespectful isn't the right word. Like, say, even if said author is objectively the worst of humans, there remains the fact that the story in essence has part of them embedded into it. It doesn't make sense, at least to me, to only give "morally okay" writers the allowance of people who put a part of themselves in their works. Any writer, even those who are writing for money imo, can't help but put part of their own selves into their story...and to separate the story from the author just because we hate the author or hate their beliefs seems a bit counter-productive. You can't just say, after all, that this author's vulnerability in their writing is okay because it's Correct but this other guy's vulnerability should be ignored because it's chalk full of Problematic Content.

But again, that's not to justify authors you dislike or the deeply wrong messages implied in their works. Especially those that could easily be shooed away by employing death of the author. But I think I'd consider fanfic or analyses that ignore authorial intent and their message to be something...new entirely? (Best way I can say it is something something death of an author employed to help the reader create their own narrative inspired by someone else's story rather than it being used to ignore author intent and claim our interpretation is what canon actually meant).

I think there's a saying in music as well as writing that you could play the same exact score or write the same story, it's just that things will come out different depending on the player or writer. (That's not a perfect comparison because the player/musician who WROTE the score could be considered a reader/author relationship...the point is more that the same thing will look different in the hands of different people. And that just as the reader will interpret something in their own way when reading/re-reading (another ORV reference), the author also has placed in their own interpretation and intent in that own work...which should at worst be respected because they DID make that content (and then we proceed to brutally revise it to make something we like better xD) or at best be taken as "word of god" for lack of a better term)

Not sure if any of this makes sense, and I definitely don't have any factual evidence to back up this opinion, but it was just something I was thinking of.

TL:dR? Death of the author is FUN and actually pretty cool but I think the things coming out of it are new(ish) things/works entirely, and og author's beliefs/intentions are important to consider for that text they wrote in of itself.