#i just feel like a lot of villainess isekai don't play enough into that PARTICULARLY with how horrific this is

[metanarrates]

i think about genre and medium ALL the fucking time i think the best fiction is stuff that is extremely aware of its genre and medium and plays with their limits. it doesnt have to even be fourth wall breaking its just GOOD when an artist knows precisely how to use the genre and medium to max effectiveness

[freyalise]

@najbeb1 this is a great question because i can go into a lot of unnecessary detail. my japanese is not amazing so i'm not familiar with teni--and my dictionary just says it means "transfer" 転移 which i'm guessing just means they just end up like that?--but i have thought a lot about tensei/reincarnation and shoukan/summoning (including the translations for everyone else).

i think all of them are fine, but reincarnation allows for the most interesting emotional hooks for an isekai story. here's why:

in terms of japanese isekai, especially those aimed at the shounen demographic, in a lot of cases these are interchangeable. shounen isekai is, for the most part, power fantasy wish fulfillment. it doesn't really matter how the protagonist ends up in the other world because they've cast off all attachments in favor of doing wacky fun adventure times in their new world. that's fine, but when you read enough of them it starts feeling like a cheat code for "i wanted to put this man in a Situation and don't particularly care how it happens." you don't have to figure out a way to force your protagonist to be in an unfamiliar locale when you can just press the isekai button, after all. so it ends up being that the means are irrelevant as long as it happens because the protagonist can happily be op and have a harem or whatever. there are some that play around with it in an interesting way, like how kazuhiro can travel to a fantasy world in his dreams in welcome to japan, ms. elf, but for the most part the how of how they end up in the world could be anything really

reincarnation, however, adds some nuance depending on how attached the protagonist is to their old life. for stories like i spent 300 years killing slimes and accidentally maxed out my level, azusa's death by karoshi at the beginning is more or less irrelevant after the first chapter because she has no real attachment to her previous life and her death via karoshi is mostly an excuse for her to chill out; once that's handled the plot treats her old life as more or less irrelevant. the one i love pointing to as a personal fave is the one within the villainess, when the villainess remilia feels the grief that emi, the japanese girl possessing her body, expresses when she apologizes her family for dying and leaving them alone. that's the good shit right there

if we're thinking of Korean manhwa, reincarnation feels like the most popular approach there. i've seen truck-kun show up more times in manhwa at this point than i have in manga, which is just funny to me. plus, there are some deeply messed up reincarnation scenarios in some of those manhwa, like how you get to see the main character of the golden summoner dying in a fire caused by a car accident (two for one combo!) that manhwa is unfortunately on infinite hiatus, but i recommend reading at least the first few chapters because it is Wild. you do get some decent emotional stake in those ones as well, but the ones i read are by and large "woman gets isekai'd to a book they read" (since isekai manhwa is largely aimed at women)* so the majority of them are focused on untangling the court intrigue of the vaguely european society they've been thrust into.

that being said, it's not completely unheard of that you get some of the other methods in manhwa! the meaning of you is a romance manhwa where the female protagonist gets summoned via saint summoning (just like [insert twenty saint summoning manga]!) but instead of being super cool and awesome she remains a nervous and depressed wreck with extra expectations thrust upon her as a saint. that method just feels less common compared to reincarnation in that country.

that got a bit rambly because it's late and i'm typing this on my phone, but i hope that answered your question adequately

* a lot of fantasy manhwa aimed at young men is more along the tower climbing/dungeon crawling fashion like solo leveling or wuxia manhwa. this might be a bit nitpicky of me, but i don't really consider those, regression stories, or time travel to be "isekai." while there are some that definitely could fit the bill later on such as the frozen player returns, i mostly leave them out just to keep my own sorting system from being overloaded. as for regression, i don't consider that isekai at all because they're not really going to another world but instead returning to their own with more knowledge. sorry, sss rank suicide hunter.

ask me about isekai. the isekai scholar has logged on