They do the isekai thing so then the world building happens naturally as we watch the clueless dork explore the fantasy world and encounter stuff.
Otherwise you have to find ways to explain stuff to the audience when the characters grew up in that world and should already know all about it, so don’t need to discuss things.
One way to do it is to start with a character that is native to the world but new to the social circles and strata of the story. So that the specific contexts of the story are also new to the character.
Maybe start the charachter in a profession that exsists in our world. The farmboy start like in wheel of time. Or the butcher start like in soaring the heavens. After all most pre industrial people wouldnt have traveled far from their place of birth and wouldnt know much about the world at large.
Otherwise you have to find ways to explain stuff to the audience when the characters grew up in that world and should already know all about it, so don’t need to discuss things.
…you mean worldbuild organically like any other story set in a universe that isn’t our own? Countless shows and stories have been doing that for centuries, why should anime get a special little exception?
And for centuries they have been struggling to find good ways to present that newly built world in a natural way. Just because good examples exist doesnt make it an easy thing to accomplish. Bad fantasy stories have also existed for centuries.
You may call it lazy, but you gotta admit that with isekai settings presenting a new world is easy and natural.
And its not like only animes use that. Harry poter, Narnia, Peter Pen, Alice In Wonderland, Tron Legacy etc etc… All have clueless main characters finding themselves in a new world.
Hard to do with the axe hanging over your head. “Sorry, but chapter 3 didn’t score high enough in our magazine poll so we’re killing your serialization.”
I think this is often what amnesia is so common in fiction, too, despite being extremely rare in the real world. It provides a convenient plot device, both to perform exposition and for some inevitable gotcha behind either their identity, how they lost their memory, or some other major revelation from their past (seriously, has there ever been a case of amnesia in fiction where they didn’t conveniently forget some big, plot relevant thing?).
I want to se a story when the mc gets isekaid as a baby. But because they have a baby brain and body they are extreamy limited in movment and agency. So the mc has to spend 1 year in whats esentially a straigth jaket shiting themselves. And this leaves them a little unginged
Then when they are a kid they have a kid brain so they are undergoing neural prunning and forgetting things. So in order to not forget the mc starts neyrotically anallyising, ordering and recording their previous memories with various degrees of succes. They either developed an ordered mental framework or end up a compleat paranoid mess. Or something in between.
The “reborn as babies” thing is a plot twist in that spider isekai, and it makes some of the cast pretty weird. It’s a decent show but I don’t know if I’d recommend it.
spoiler
The element is mostly just used as a plot twist, though. It swaps back and forth between two perspectives which are later revealed to have a ~14 year time gap. Everybody in the show was reincarnated as a baby, but the MC reincarnated as a baby magic spider meaning she was basically fully functional from day 1.
spoiler
the spider girl ends up a bit wierd due to being a spider. But she should be the most normal one since she had agency from the beggining. There is another girl that was an egg for a decade and was somewhat concious of it. She should be absolutley fucked up.
Yeah that’s what I mean by it mostly just ending up as a plot twist and not being explored fully. It’s too bad, really, but it’s still one of the better isekai’s for not just being “generic anime boy in dragon quest land with X special item/skill/mom”.
They have to search for their lost finger painting pictures to retrieve their memories
Well they tried that with arguably the most well known fantasy world in existence, D&D, and it flopped because too many people need their worlds spoon fed to them.
He isn’t, but you might be
Relative to its budget it was considered sort of a box office failure, from what I’ve heard. Maybe I’m mistaken. It was probably my favorite movie of the past few years for what it’s worth, wasn’t trying to bash it.
Checks out
https://movieweb.com/dungeons-and-dragons-sequel-unlikely/
200M box office on a 150M investment, means a net loss after marketing and distribution costs
Turns out it did, financially.
I liked the approach of Tearmoon Empire a lot. Instead of typical isekai, the main character from the same universe time travels to her past right after she dies by guillotine. Everything she does is to avoid dying again, her personality at its core doesn’t change. Would reccomend it on the next anime season.
The main character is mofe relatable if they can reference pop culture etc