Trope Talk: Magical Otherworlds

Side note "The executioner and her way of life" takes a dark twist on ALL of those isekai tropes by focusing on the point of view of characters ALREADY living in the fantasy world and what they think of all these overpowered but emotionally unstable teenagers popping up randomly in their world. (Namely: Fuck this, we've already had four close brushes with the literal apocalypse, never again.)

This trope was so fascinating to me as a kid, I was like “wow, these people can go to otherworlds. I wish that was me!” and now whenever I look at these shows now, I still think “I wish that was me”.

Then theres the Never Ending Story, where the main character gets so blindsided by his magical escapism he starts becoming the villain without even noticing it.

One day I want to see an isekai where the character just keeps going deeper. He gets hit by a truck, and wakes up in a magical fantasy land. While on his quest to defeat the demon lord, he gets hit by a wagon and wakes up on a spaceship. While on his quest to overthrow the tyrannical emperor, his ship crashes, and he wakes up outside a town in the wild west. While hunting down the notorious outlaw, he gets thrown off his horse, and wakes up in a cyberpunk dystopia, and this cycle continues. You might need a few extra elements to make the show compelling beyond being funny the first few times, like an overarching plot where they actually figure out what's going on and find a way to break the cycle. And maybe they can bring some of their skills/equipment with them to the next world, and while they never have time to get the best stuff, something that's weak in one world can be great in the other, but then weak in the next, so they have to adapt (i.e. the laser they gave him in the sci-fi world is easily the most powerful weapon on the seven seas in the pirate world, but isn't very impressive compared to even some of the basic spells they teach in the wizard world)

Narnia is kind of an interesting blend. The kids don't seem anxious to go home for the most part and are always sad to leave but at the same time Aslan makes it clear the point of Narnia was to help them live in their homeworld. Great video as always, Red!

Fun Fact: Ascendance Of A Bookworm was originally going to be just a fantasy story. But the author realized that in order for the main character to do and have the knowledge she needed, she needed to have the knowledge of someone from our world.

I'm surprised Coraline never came up, because it honestly feels like a great subversive take on this trope.

Gotta say: I love that you have used the word "grounded" rather than "realistic." It's a much more effective word for communicating that the thing is sensible and understandable, relatable in a way like the real world but without having to have the same rules as the real world. Great video!

Honestly, on the never returning home thing, I tend to feel that a lot of portal fantasy tends to kind of neglect *actually giving characters any reason to want to return*. The original world is not only boring, not only does it have nothing going for it - characters straight up have no positive relationships, no family they're actually attached to, no friends in their original world that they miss, nothing. Only bad things happen. At that point, it feels almost mean-spirited to make them go back. It feels like watching someone finally escape a terrible personal situation and move away to a different country to make a completely new start, only for someone to go "no, you should go back and fix your shitty original situation, grab those bootstraps you lazy bum" and punt them back.

Everyone always mentions girls waking up with perfect makeup, but what about the guys waking up perfectly shaved? It's like they can turn their hair off and never deal with razor burn again.

I actually really like stories where the character stays in the otherworld. To me it doesn't neccassarily have to be a bad message as the message doesn't have to be 'Ignore your problems and escape into fantasy forever' but rather 'you don't have to be satisfied with an unfulfilling life. Instead strive to become the person you were meant to be'.

Undertale is one of these stories, and each of the main routes utilize different tropes of the genre. The neutral routes are the "Learn lesson, return home" standard hero's journey. Our protagonist had their adventure and return home with nothing more than their experience and a few keepsakes. The murder route is the power fantasy trope, our protagonist using their power to abuse the world. No lesson is learned. Our hero-turned-villain never goes home. Though, ending with destroying the world is an approach I haven't seen elsewhere. The pacifist route is the "Return home, take new friends" with you resolution. It's considered the "true" ending to the story, and ultimately the most satisfying one.

All this talk about magical otherworlds has left me with one burning question on my mind: Is Futurama an isekai? An ordinary (and, if we're being honest, generally below average) guy is just going about his life, when, at seemingly random, he is launched into a fantastical world he doesn't understand. Now, he has a bunch of new friends and (eventually) starts a relationship with a girl who by any metric seems way out of his league. There's also the fact that Fry, despite being just some guy, is frequently sent out on 'deliveries' (quests) by an eccentric old 'scientist' (wizard) to save the world and/or universe.

I wish someone would bring up A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, cause it’s a classic example of the “normal person gets transported into an otherworld” being used to convey important themes instead of being used for cheap power fantasy or audience projection. The entire book is basically written as a satire of medieval romance novels (romance in the artistic sense, not relationships) and the beliefs/behaviors which Mark Twain believed they engendered in the white southern upper class prior to and during the Civil War. He believed that these stories (especially those written by Sir Walter Scott) with their romanticization of war, glorification of nobility, and positive depictions of caste societies helped validate southern plantation owners’ views of themselves as the heirs to a long, cultured history of chivalrous and heroic white aristocrats, in stark contrast to the greedy, cruel, racist tyrants that they actually were. To that end, Twain decided to write a story where a grimy, low class, “uneducated”, “uncultured”, northern yank gets sent back in time to the kingdom of Camelot and uses his basic 19th century knowledge to show up every other major character, creating “miracles” with science, winning historical battles with modern tactics, etc. Eventually he takes over all of Britain, fully modernizing and industrializing the Isles. In this story, the fact that the main character is someone from the real world being transported into a fantastical otherworld is an important plot element. The whole point of the story was to satirize the antiquated attitudes of rich southerners by portraying a low class northerner (whom these southerners would have looked down on and resented) basically wiping the floor with the chivalric knights that these southerners to some extent drew inspiration and a sense of identity from. This story needed a normal person from the real world to be transported into an otherworld. Had the story been entirely set in the otherworld it would have been indistinguishable from the very medieval romance novels it sought to satirize.

"They can be just stories set in that world" is basically what people have been complaining about the Assassin's Creed series.

Here's some ideas for Trope Talks that I think would be cool: -Found Family -Tragic Backstories -Orphans -Tokenism -Final Battles -Combat Therapy -Symbolic Superpowers -Hated Superpowers (Blessing Turned Curse) -Political Intrigue -Cycles -Sibling Dynamics -Disfunctional Families -Princess in a Tower (sheltered and naive)

"...the audience will run out of story and end up back in the real world" Or they turn to fanfiction and never leave

gosh i remember watching the cat returns and being so mad at the protagonist for wanting to return to the human world. they tried to add stakes by having her slowly turn into a cat but i saw that as a bonus lmaoooo

15:33 We need more stories where the PoV hero is a life-long resident of the Otherworld and the villian is isekai-ed in and tries to take over with the mentality of "With the power of spoilers and a rampant disregard for other people, I'm UNSTOPABLE!"

Honestly a lot of the isekai heroes never returning home have less to do with the literary aspects and more with the fact that almost every one of the stories are unfinished or even outright canceled.