Why are there so many Isekai? A brief history of modern light novels

If you’ve watched anime at all in the past decade you’re no doubt familiar with the concept of Isekai anime. Or anime in which some normal dude gets whisked away to a magical fantasy land. They have, after all, been literally everywhere. But just why do anime studios keep cranking these shows out one after another. Cynically, I think a lot of people would say that it’s because one, weebs are a bunch of sweaty, lonely losers who crave escapist fantasy and two, that a lot of isekai stories are creatively bankrupt and incredibly easy to write. Many of the lower quality Isekai shows rely heavily on very generic one-dimensional characters and uninspired cookie-cutter fantasy settings. A lot of people have already discussed the stylistic or story driven elements of why Isekai is so popular as a setting. For instance, by having the main character be transplanted into the world, it makes world building a lot easier, allowing the viewer to organically learn about the world rather than have it delivered in some unnatural exposition dump. But understanding why Isekai are so prominent has a lot to do with the nature of the light novel publishing industry and its evolution over the decades.

For those out of the loop, a light novel is kind of the Japanese equivalent of the Young Adult novel in the West. They tend to be these shorter stories that are targeted to people in their teens and early twenties and often feature very fun and colourful illustrations and often use less Kanji. The modern light novel traces its existence to earlier Japanese pulp fiction. Yes, that pulp fiction. This genre of literature gets its name for the low quality wood pulp they were published on. Up until the 2000s, light novels tended to be fairly traditional fantasy or science fiction stories. Some of the most famous light novel series during the 1980s and 1990s are Guin Saga, Slayers and the inexorable Legend of the Galactic Heroes. The first two being fairly traditional fantasy stories while the latter is the preferred science fiction story of snobby, greasy, fedora wearing anime fans everywhere. Most of these early light novels tended to be a lot less Otaku-y if that makes any sense. You could fairly easily picture a story like Legend of the Galactic Heroes being made somewhere that wasn’t Japan in a way that I don’t think anywhere except Japan could have produced “In Another World With my Smart Phone” Aside from the Light Novels that got really big like the aforementioned three, there really weren’t that many anime that adapted light novels.

The change towards light novels that we might scientifically refer to as “weeb shit” really started in earnest in late 1990s and early 2000s with works like Full Metal Panic, Shakugan no Shana and Zero no Tsukaima. Also the .hack franchise, which is sort of symbolic forefather of contemporary trapped in an MMO anime is also released around this time. However, I would argue that the major turning point for the light novel industry really happened with the release of the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya in 2003 and especially when the anime adaptation aired in 2006. Looking back almost 15 years later, it’s kind of hard to understand just how big of a deal Haruhi was during the mid 2000s. I could make an entire video talking just about Haruhi Suzumiya and its effect on the anime industry. Despite being one of the giants of the anime industry today, when Kyoto Animation picked up Haruhi Suzumiya, they were a relatively small and unknown studio. The wild success of Haruhi Suzumiya propelled KyoAni into prominence. The reason why Haruhi was so wildly popular comes down, in large part, to it being in the right place at the right.. Haruh really did come out this incredibly opportune time. The early 2000s was the height of the “moe bubble” , something that Haruhi is very self-aware of. 2006 was also around the time that video sharing sites like Youtube and Niconico Douga started becoming popular. However, the original source material was incredibly good in its own right. Haruhi is reflective of this generation of light novel authors who themselves grew up watching anime, becoming well versed in the conventions of the medium. The characters and story of Haruhi are this self aware play on the tropes of genre. You got the mysterious transfer student. The big tiddy moe character. The quiet girl with glasses. The anime adaptation, on its own merits, was perhaps one of the most innovative and consequence works ever to be produced and it became this central part of Otaku culture for years. Famously the episodes of the anime aired out of order which generated a lot of intrigue. The anime is full of 2000s cultural references like that episode where they solve a muder mystery on an Island and Haruhi makes all the phoenix wright poses. And this isn’t even mentioning the Hare Hare Yukai. Imagine how popular that Chika dance from Love is War was and multiply that by 1000. If you were on Youtube in 2007 you’ve probably seen that dance. The massive success of Haruhi Suzumiya as both a light novel and an anime really pushed the adoption of light novels as a mainstream pillar of Otaku media.

So where does Isekai fit into this picture? As I mentioned earlier, the .hack franchise is probably one of the first “modern” Isekai so to speak. But following in the footsteps of Haruhi, the mid 2000s featured a lot of high school centric light novels. The Japanese scholar Eiji Ōtsuka refers to this as the era of “anime/manga realism”. Works like Toradora, Bakemonogatari and Baka and Test all came out in the mid 2000s.

But the big consequential change during the 2000s was the widescale adoption of the internet and cell phones. This sounds very quaint today, but for all the Zoomers out there, back to the 2000s cell phones and the internet were really these hip and hoppin new technologies. In parallel with the increasing popularity of light novels was the advent of the “keitai’’ or cell phone novel. This was a genre of fiction that was primarily authored by and targeted at young women that rose to prominence during the early 2000s. Chapters of Keitai novels would typically be distributed directly to readers via email or text message. This process of independently writing and distributing your work via the internet also quickly gained popularity among light novel authors. Traditionally, if you had an idea for a light novel, the way you got it published was sending your manuscript to a publisher. Light novel imprints would often host literary competitions to solicit manuscripts for publication. But during the 2000s, it was becoming increasingly popular to just release your light novel onto the internet without getting it formally published. And this is what leads us to the one and only Sword Art Online. For years before SAO was formally published by ASCII media works, it was released by Reki Kawahara as a web novel on his personal website.. As I’m sure you’re all aware, Sword Art Online and its anime adaptation in 2012 have been massive commercial successes. Much like how after the success of the Hunger Games in the West, there was this massive influx of dystopian YA novels, a similar thing happened in Japan where the light novel market continues to be flooded with Isekai in the wake of the continued success of SAO.

This glut of Isekai light novels has been especially fueled by self published webnovels, specifically on the website Shōsetsuka ni Narō or “Let’s become a novelist” in English. Isekai tend to be very popular on this website. Log Horizon, Konosuba, that Time I got Reincarnated as a Slime, Re;Zero and the Rising of the Shield Hero all came out of this website. This creates this sort of positive feedback loop where because Isekai are so popular, that encourages people to write a lot Isekai and the more Isekai that come out the more fans get drawn to the genre and then more people want to write them and the cycle continues ad infinitum. In fact, there’s an entire light novel publishing imprint that exclusively publishes from works on Naro. Because light novel publishers and later on anime studios are a lot more likely to pick up properties that have this built in fan base from when they were webnovels, that’s a large reason why there are so many Isekai anime.

Specifically in the case of anime, what a lot of people don’t understand is that the primary function of anime adaptations is to drive sales to the original written properties. Significantly more money is made from selling volumes of manga and light novels than from selling DVDs and blue rays. The Haruhi light novels have sold somewhere in the ballpark of 10 million copies, there’s literally no way that revenue from the anime can even hold a candle to that. This is why we’re probably never going to get a season 3 of haruhi or of spice and wolf. You’re not going to go out and buy the light novels if you know how the story ends. Because the primary reason for anime adaptions is to act as glorified advertisements and drum up brand awareness, in a lot of cases the actual quality of the adaptation doesn’t really matter, which is why even though there are a lot of good light novel adaptations, there are also a lot more really shitty ones. If you just farm out the animation to some overworked, underpaid chinese sweatshop workers and rely on garbage CGI you can produce a 12 episode anime pretty cheap. This isn’t really a problem intrinsic to Isekai, it’s more of a problem with anime adaptations in general. And since there are a lot of Isekai light novels, then mathematically that means there are going to be a lot of shitty anime adaptations.

So if anyone ever asks you why there’s so much Isekai anime, you can tell them it was an inevitable part of the rise of the Internet and you can blithely tell them that technology is a curse because it gave us Sword art Online.